[Twenty years after the publication of Are Prisons Obsolete?,
Angela Davis’ case for prison abolitionism continues to provide the
movement with its intellectual underpinnings.]
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REVISITING ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? ANGELA DAVIS’S ENDURING INFLUENCE
 
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Luke Dunne
March 21, 2023
CounterPunch
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_ Twenty years after the publication of Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela
Davis’ case for prison abolitionism continues to provide the
movement with its intellectual underpinnings. _

, Photograph Source: AlbertRA – CC BY-SA 4.0

 

Twenty years after the publication of _Are Prisons Obsolete?_
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Angela Davis’ case for prison abolitionism continues to provide the
movement with its intellectual underpinnings.

It was once seen as inevitable that prisons would be abolished in
America. During the 1950s and 60s, that was the prevailing view among
many lawyers, judges and politicians. Then came the War on Drugs,
being ‘Tough on Crime’ became a political necessity, and by 2008
2.3 million people were incarcerated in the United States – almost
five times as many as in 1970. It seemed that the moment when prisons
might have been gotten rid of had passed, and passed for good. Yet
since the 2000s, prison populations have gradually declined. Just as
prison abolition went from a mainstream view to the fringest of fringe
positions, now it finds itself (slowly) becoming more widely accepted
again. Whilst it remains politically toxic for most elected
politicians to adopt an abolitionist stance outright, some of those
same politicians have appropriated the arguments of abolitionist
intellectuals and activists to call for an end to mass incarceration.
There is no better advertisement for prison abolitionism than _Are
Prisons Obsolete?_, Angela Davis’ definitive statement of the case
for prison abolition, which turns twenty this year. Far from becoming
obsolete itself, Davis’ work seems to become more and more timely
with every passing year. In an American political climate that seems
exceptionally hostile to left-wing ideas, it is worth paying close
attention to a theory which, despite its most prominent advocate (that
is, Davis herself) being a self-described Communist, now suddenly
finds itself being given a fairer hearing. What is appealing about
abolitionism? What are its weaknesses?

_Are Prisons Obsolete? _has a host of obvious charms. It drips with
Davis’ erudition, hard-won from a lifetime of advocacy and
intellectual immersion in the politics of incarceration. It’s hard
to pin down which genre, exactly, _Are Prisons Obsolete? _falls into.
Davis seems to be working in a kind of intellectual mixed-medium, and
the range of disciplines from which she marshals evidence in support
of her arguments is astounding. She is as liable to turn to literary
history as penal history for a well-chosen example. This overt
intellectualism especially striking in a book intended for a mass
audience. She offers a systematic challenge to the widely accepted
view that the driving force behind the creation of the prison system,
and especially behind the period of mass incarceration, was the desire
to control crime. Her measured yet insistent analysis of how various
groups have stood to gain, politically and financially, from the
construction of ever more prisons and the incarceration of ever more
prisoners, reads _not _as a fringe, hard-line stance but as simple
common sense. The absurdity and the hypocrisy of the status quo is
never far from the surface in _Are Prisons Obsolete?, _but Davis
allows them to emerge only as the inescapable conclusion of a
rigorous, well-supported argument. This is very impressive, even when
the arguments themselves have become extremely well-trodden in
left-wing circles.

Moreover, it is difficult not to be struck both by the thorough
rightness of the moral core of this book, as well as Davis’ ability
to convey in it a way that seems pragmatic rather than abstract. After
all, it is curious that the abolitionist movement is so often accused
of wishful thinking, navel-gazing, and utopianism given that it shares
its name and its ethos with one of the most successful social and
political movements of the 19th century – the campaign to free
enslaved people in Europe and the Americas. In the United States, 1.2
million people are currently incarcerated. That’s an unfathomable
number of people, but still less than a third of the 4 million people
who were enslaved immediately before the Emancipation Proclamation. In
fact, the objections so often raised to prison abolition often bear a
striking resemblance to those raised to emancipation (But don’t the
prisoners have to be educated, reformed, altered in some way before
they can be allowed to govern their own lives? But wouldn’t
prisoners pose a threat to the social order if they are released? But
aren’t the prisoners morally defective, and therefore incapable of
living without strict rules?) Davis is first among those prison
abolitionists who rightly hold that, for the vast majority of
prisoners, the logic of emancipation is sufficient to justify their
release.

_Are Prisons Obsolete? _focuses primarily on the ills of the present
system, but turns to alternatives in its last chapter. If prison
abolitionism is to provide the intellectual energy required to
redesign the justice system, then this is undoubtedly the most
important part. Unfortunately, it is probably the least comprehensive
and least persuasive part of this book.  She begins the chapter
entitled ‘Abolitionist Alternatives’ with the tantalizing prospect
of replacing the prison system with an ‘array of alternatives’,
which will consist not just of new institutions but of strengthening
other, existing institutions – namely schools, hospitals and systems
of social support.. Davis advocates a Leninist model of political
change called ‘dual power’, in which one institution outcompetes
another, leaving the latter institution functionally obsolete. Yet
here Davis leaves us with a host of unanswered questions. Davis
herself acknowledges the massive structural problems in schools, in
the healthcare system, and in pretty much every other public
institution. Do we really have to reform those before we can touch the
justice system? That sounds pretty strange to say, but seems a logical
consequence if our theory of abolishing prisons relies on radically
altering the education and healthcare system first. There are other
difficult questions that go unanswered. Here’s one: even if we do
manage to demilitarize the schools, to make healthcare free and
affordable, to expand access to mental healthcare and even eradicate
bigotry at large,  does that guarantee an end to serious, violent
crime?

Davis does spend some time discussing the possibilities of forgiveness
for reforming our carceral institutions and concludes the book by
elaborating a specific example of what she means by that. Davis tells
the story of a white woman, Amy Biehl, who was murdered by a group of
black men in South Africa, just at the time when Apartheid was coming
to an end. These men thoroughly repented of their crime and came to
not only be forgiven by her parents, but several of them ended up
working for the foundation which was established in their daughter’s
name. The closing words of the book are given to Peter Biehl, Amy
Biehl’s father, when describing how he addressed a synagogue a few
days of the September 11 attacks: According to Peter Biehl, “We
tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what
other peo­ple have to say, to ask: ‘Why do these terrible things
hap­pen?’ instead of simply reacting.” Davis’ need to discuss
serious, violent crime at the very end of the book seems to express
her awareness that many are not persuaded by the idea that different,
better social conditions will eliminate all interpersonal violence.
Yet at the same time, the example she chooses is exceptionally
convenient, not just because Amy Biehl’s parents were exceptionally
open to forgiving the men who murdered their daughter (surely no
alternative can rely on that as the rule?), but because the murder is
clearly an effect of its particular historical context. Can we
reliably say the same of every serious, violent crime?  If we
can’t, then what alternative to prison should we prefer in these
cases? Moreover, the men who killed Amy Biehl presumably didn’t feel
immediate remorse and were imprisoned for some period of time before
expressing it. If we wish to abolish prisons, what do we do with
someone who has just committed a terrible crime? These are some of the
most difficult problems facing abolitionism.

Some on the left criticize prison abolitionism for its insufficient
pragmatism, and certainly, some of Davis’ suggested alternatives to
the present system seem to rely on an exceptionally thorough reworking
not only of our political and social institutions but of our
instinctive response towards those who wrong us and those close to us.
But the problem with _Are Prisons Obsolete? _is not so much that
it’s too ambitious, but that it’s not ambitious enough. It might
require more than the improvement to other institutions leaving the
justice system obsolete, but a willingness to tear it down and begin
again. It might require the creation of total practices of justice,
retribution and forgiveness. None of this undermines Davis’
achievement of _Are Prisons Obsolete?_, but rather suggests that it is
time to reevaluate some of the conceptual resources here and elsewhere
in Davis’ work in order to develop a more robust set of abolitionist
alternatives that can answer some of the difficult questions posed
above (and many others facing the abolitionist movement). Abolitionism
is no longer on the defensive. It is time to move beyond critique, and
toward constructing more plausible alternatives.

_Luke Dunne is a journalist, poet and filmmaker based in Leipzig,
Germany._

* Angela Davis; Prison Abolitionism;
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