Well, this was my first time reading lit by Angela Davis and I loved her writing! Can’t believe she just pops in and out of events in the Bay Area where I LIVE!!!

This was informational, persuasive, and left me feeling that prisons are indeed obsolete- but this gave me an informed view of what the path to abolition looks like, and relieved me of the reflexive fear when imagining a world with no prisons (does that mean all bad people will run rampant? side note: so many already do LOL we’ve just been taught that poor Black and brown people are the ones we are supposed to fear.)

Some of my key takeaways (not a synopsis, just points that stuck with me)
1. We didn’t always have huge prison populations. That’s pretty recent as of the 80sish. The number of prisons shot up as a result of some anti crime policies of the past. Now California alone has over 80 prisons, camps, correctional facilities.


2. The forces that are incarcerating people are racist and biased against class. The forces MAINTAINING prison populations are profit driven. For the first point, this is something that is increasingly obvious as I participate in defund SFPD efforts- 70% of use of force instances are against Black people in SF even though they’re only ~ 5% of the population. If police are racist, if poverty is criminalized, then the prison population will always be an unjust result that depends on racism and classism.

For the point on MAINTENANCE- wow I learned some STUFF about the private prison industry. Did you know that prisoners are used as a dirt cheap labor source? Companies we know and love (Whole Foods, McDonalds, Victoria’s Secret etc) outsource data entry, manual labor, manufacturing, textile sewing, ETC for almost free. Sound like slavery to you? Yeah. Look up chain gangs after slavery was abolished. quote: “For private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’ compensation to pay. No language barriers...”

3. Abolition doesn’t just mean getting rid of prisons. It means dismantling the forces that make prisons populations so large, so disproportionately Black and brown, so profitable. It means dismantling pieces of the prison industrial complex gradually! We can be on the path to abolition if we fight for restorative justice (ie instead of jailing the teenager who shoplifts and punishing them for their poverty, why not make their remove their situation of poverty or give them educational resources?), if we make the prison labor industry illegal, if we can prevent the expansion of prison populations and if we can bring as many incarcerated folks back into society as possible, etc.

4. Prisons are a way of pushing aside issues in our society. Out of site, out of mind. That doesn’t increase safety truly, that just gives us, the privileged, peace of mind. Davis writes that it takes a “great fear of the imagination to envision life beyond prison.” This was really interesting. Prison is part of our generation’s paradigm of daily life but it doesn’t have to be- there are proven alternatives but we have to work hard to learn about them, fight for them, and help our neighbors imagine public safety in a different away.