By Aliya Kahn

Angela Davis’ concise text Are Prisons Obsolete is a tiny book that can be dropped easily into a purse or even slid into a back pocket. Don’t let its diminutive appearance fool you: within the book’s 115 pages, Davis asks her reader to entirely reframe their understanding of the prison industrial complex, and the role it plays in American society. Davis calls for prison abolition rather than prison reform, and asks her readers to really explore the historical and social conditions that have lead us to see the prison industrial complex as “an inevitable fact of life, like birth and death,” but also “to think of prisons as disconnected from our own lives” (15). Davis argues that this is because “the ideological work that the prison does…relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism, and increasingly, global capitalism” (16). Davis believes that “the most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor” (21).

Davis then succinctly explores the connections between slavery and the prison industrial complex, charting the ways in which “the prison reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operate in clandestine ways” (25), and drawing clear connections between slavery and our current “racist labor conditions of penal servitude that are often described by historians as even worse than slavery” (35).       Exploring the gendered dynamics of the prison industrial complex, Davis argues that “the deeply gendered character of punishment both reflects and further entrenches the gendered structure of the larger society” (61), and that in order to gain a deeper understanding of our systems of incarceration, we must understand “the centrality of gender to an understanding of state punishment” (65). Davis closes the chapter by noting ,“the call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices [related to gender] that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society” (83), but also points to the ways in which corporations are invested in continued misogynistic dominance over women, and are “directly implicated in an institution that perpetuates violence against women” (83), not only within the walls of the prisons, but also outside of them.

As geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has stated, “prison is not a building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere.” Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete calls upon us to imagine a different way. Davis extends the concept that Gilmore explores, asking that we “shift our attention from the prison, perceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex” (106), in order to “posit decarceration as [the] overarching strategy” (107) from which we could imagine a variety of alternatives: “demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care of tall, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance” (107).