Trigger warning: sexual assault
In 1970, black revolutionary Angela Yvonne Davis was prosecuted for three capital felonies including first-degree murder, though she was not present when any violence took place. Davis was a professor of philosophy at UCLA just a year before, where she was fired on the grounds of being a communist. President Richard Nixon referred to Davis as a “dangerous terrorist” and she was one of the first women to be put on the FBI’s most-wanted list. When she was arrested and charged, she was held for a year in jail before her trial. Davis, a queer socialist and feminist, held by the State for a crime she was not involved in, sparked unrest across the world and many maintained she was being held as a political prisoner. At trial, she was acquitted of all charges and made it her life’s work to expose the unjust prison system in the United States.
“Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?” writes Davis, ”[The prison] functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities…” Davis’ seminal work “Are Prisons Obsolete?” examines the prison system as a mechanism used to subjugate marginalized communities, punishing and removing them from society instead of addressing the historical racism, lack of education, and poverty that drove them into prison. Davis maintains that there is no justice system in the United States, and only with prison abolition can there be any remedy to the damage that the unjust system has caused.
Slavery and segregation, Davis writes, were previously thought of as being “everlasting as the sun,” and the same is true for prisons. In her work, Davis does not distinguish the three entities as being separate, with prisons serving as a vestige of slavery. The 13th amendment to the US Constitution is a foundation for this idea, allowing “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime.” Involuntary prison labour to this day is a ubiquitous part of incarceration, with the federal minimum wage for prisoners being set at 12 cents an hour. Furthermore, Davis writes of the profit motive as being the backbone of modern penitentiaries. She uses examples of prisoners labouring for corporations such as McDonald’s, Verizon, Walmart, and JCPenney, and cites Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg: “For private business, prison labour is like a pot of gold.” Private companies are involved at every level, with phone companies charging exorbitant rates for inmates to speak to their families, and cheaply produced prison food. Private prisons as an entity, she writes, incentivize the growth of the prison population as a captive labour force, and multi-billion-dollar contractors such as CoreCivic set lockup quotas to fill their occupancy, with a fixed rate of payment for each inmate.
The modern prison, Davis writes, is “more than the sum of its parts,” a “symbiotic” relationship between legislation, transnational corporations, and media conglomerates. As a result, the prison population in the United States has skyrocketed to being the highest in the world, with the number of people incarcerated, awaiting trial, or on parole totalling more than 10,000,000, equivalent to the entire population of Sweden. For every black man, Davis cites, there is a 1 in 3 chance to be incarcerated at some point in their life. ”Many people in Black, Latino, and Native American communities now have a far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent education,” she remarks.
Notably, Angela Davis has been outspoken about the gendered structure of prisons and the intersections of sex, race, and class. The modern “strip search” of women, she maintains, is an institutionalized form of sexual assault, especially due to the unaccountability of prison security. She draws on her own experiences as well as those of Assata Shakur, where refusal to have intimate cavity searches was threatened with solitary confinement; among many developed nations, this is considered a form of torture. The gender division, she writes, makes men more likely to be rendered as violent, and women to be seen as “fallen women.” Mental health, in both sexes, but especially for black women, is more likely to be seen as a “violent instinct” as opposed to something in need of rehabilitation. Davis had a major contention with another feminist scholar, Tekla Miller, who said the gendered treatment in prison should be eliminated, and prison life should be equalized among the sexes. Miller used examples of women being given more lenient punishments than men, and guards in men’s prisons being more likely to be armed with rifles. Davis retorts that the truly feminist solution is not equalizing inhuman punishment but fighting for humane treatment for all, through the abolition of prison, in favour of rehabilitative care.
Still active to this day, Angela Davis continues to speak out against the prison system and has been criticized at all levels of government. Her activism in prison reform has earned her recognition in 2020 Time Magazine’s most influential people in the world and induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Her dream lives on in hopes that one day the people of the United States will be free of the prison-industrial complex, with criminals not being dehumanized and punished, but rehabilitated and treated with dignity.