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bloodygranuaileFor yet another book club, we are reading the inestimable Angela Davis’ 2004 classic (whyyyy are things that were published when I was a teenager “classics” already?) Are Prisons Obsolete?, a short, accessible introduction to the as-of-last-summer hot political topic of prison abolition. As we have been discussing this very thoroughly in book club in small chunks (the book is barely 130 pages, six chapters, and we are doing two chapters at a time), I do not have much in the way of thoughts for this review that I have not already discussed to death, so I will just give a few quick overview thoughts.
One is that it is very readable, which is a thing I really appreciate about Angela Davis’ writing, even when she uses a certain amount of theory-specific terminology it’s usually pretty clear what she means because it’s grounded in a general approach to writing that is very heavy on concretely discussing stuff that actually happens, with the relationships between the various things laid about very clearly. With prison abolition this is extra important because there’s a lot of stuff that happens that people just don’t know about because it is hidden away in prisons, but it’s pretty straightforwardly awful once you start spelling out what it is and who makes money off it and how. Thus, Davis can effectively pack a pretty substantial education on the prison industrial complex into a very small book. She goes back into history to explain the development of the prison system out of the systems that preceded it, such as slavery and public execution, and the way that it has replaced or embedded itself into other institutions of capital flow and social control. The chapter on the prison system’s relationships to gendered and sexual violence is extremely illuminating (and upsetting), and page space is also given to the relationship between the prison industrial complex, deindustrialization, and education systems. While this book doesn’t get much too deep into issues of restorative or transformative justice--i.e., the questions of what to do about people who cause harm--it does an excellent job of challenging the assumption many people carry around that the purpose of the prison system is to keep people who cause harm away from other people so they can’t cause further harm. This is simply not the prison system’s function, and while what to do about people who cause harm is an important social question--and a relevant one to the project of abolishing prisons absolutely--it’s actually not the most important thing to dismantling the prison-industrial complex, because the prison-industrial complex is mainly a set of economic relations. As a work of investigative journalism, Are Prisons Obsolete? obeys the old directive to follow the money, so if you are not already thinking about prisons and policing at least partially in terms of money, this is an excellent reading choice for fixing that real fast.
One is that it is very readable, which is a thing I really appreciate about Angela Davis’ writing, even when she uses a certain amount of theory-specific terminology it’s usually pretty clear what she means because it’s grounded in a general approach to writing that is very heavy on concretely discussing stuff that actually happens, with the relationships between the various things laid about very clearly. With prison abolition this is extra important because there’s a lot of stuff that happens that people just don’t know about because it is hidden away in prisons, but it’s pretty straightforwardly awful once you start spelling out what it is and who makes money off it and how. Thus, Davis can effectively pack a pretty substantial education on the prison industrial complex into a very small book. She goes back into history to explain the development of the prison system out of the systems that preceded it, such as slavery and public execution, and the way that it has replaced or embedded itself into other institutions of capital flow and social control. The chapter on the prison system’s relationships to gendered and sexual violence is extremely illuminating (and upsetting), and page space is also given to the relationship between the prison industrial complex, deindustrialization, and education systems. While this book doesn’t get much too deep into issues of restorative or transformative justice--i.e., the questions of what to do about people who cause harm--it does an excellent job of challenging the assumption many people carry around that the purpose of the prison system is to keep people who cause harm away from other people so they can’t cause further harm. This is simply not the prison system’s function, and while what to do about people who cause harm is an important social question--and a relevant one to the project of abolishing prisons absolutely--it’s actually not the most important thing to dismantling the prison-industrial complex, because the prison-industrial complex is mainly a set of economic relations. As a work of investigative journalism, Are Prisons Obsolete? obeys the old directive to follow the money, so if you are not already thinking about prisons and policing at least partially in terms of money, this is an excellent reading choice for fixing that real fast.