Angela Davis

Pub­lisher’s Introduction 

With her char­ac­ter­istic bril­liance, grace, and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abo­lition movement in American life: the abo­lition of the prison. As she quite cor­rectly notes, American life is replete with abo­lition move­ments, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For gen­er­a­tions of Amer­icans, the abo­lition of slavery was the sheerest illusion. Sim­i­larly, the entrenched system of racial seg­re­gation seemed to last forever, and gen­er­a­tions lived in the midst of the practice, with few pre­dicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that suc­ceeded formal slavery reaped mil­lions to southern juris­dic­tions (and untold mis­eries for tens of thou­sands of men, and women). Few pre­dicted its passing from the American penal land­scape. Davis expertly argues how social move­ments trans­formed these social, political, and cul­tural insti­tu­tions, and made such prac­tices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Pro­fessor Davis seeks to illus­trate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forth­rightly for “decarcer­ation”, and argues for the trans­for­mation of society as a whole.