Anarchist & Radical Book Club discussion

Join us to discuss, understand, and debate Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Yvonne Davis.

I found this full text online [pdf][pdf].

Here's a "greatest hits list" of the main points of book.

Please post additional resources and your thoughts below!

I just finished tonight, mostly in one sitting. David, I agree with and really appreciate your comments here-- this book didn't spare a word, and yet brought it all in. Thanks for the observation about bell hooks, too; she's my favorite academic author and it's so important to make these connections of style, thought, influence, growth.

I really enjoyed reading this after The New Jim Crow, because I felt like it took that book, already an excellent synthesis, and boiled the concepts down to be even sharper while dropping Alexander's safe focus on nonviolent offenders and the drug war.

Government is obsolete. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind seeing forced-labor as a means of restitution for criminal damages.

@David I generally don't find any kind of liberal argument convincing. Although I'm all for abolishing the prisons and the cops, and I have lots of practical objections to capital punishment (though I don't have a problem with it in principle, presuming the person is some kind of murderer or something) I tend to favor a fairly hard-line on crime. I think that anything beyond petty offenses would tend to be reduced to the fairly loony or stupid in a decently functioning stateless society (and I would include pretty much anything from the anarcho-capitalists to the more realistic AnComs in this) I simply have no sympathy for thugs. There are plenty of people with shitty lives that don't become gang bangers.

Océane wrote: "@David I generally don't find any kind of liberal argument convincing. Although I'm all for abolishing the prisons and the cops, and I have lots of practical objections to capital punishment (thoug..."

Hi Océane!
I agree with you, the typical example would be of some thuggy types terrorizing a free festival where people are too tolerant.
However I read somewhere that 90% of all 'crimes' are drug or property connected.. i.e. they would be obsolete after an anarchist revolution.
The transition would be a problem however, I've illustrated a pñossible way of 'dissolving toxic prison institutions' in a novel 'The Free'.. see here: http://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/20...
all the best. mikegilli

A prison without walls?

As February wraps up, I'm wondering if anyone else is reading this and has any comments or questions?

I thought the analysis and history of prisons was good/interesting, but the suggested programme of action fell really short of what I was anticipating.

In the main it covers the same scope as Alexander's book, linking prisons to slavery and racist social policy. (I have issues with sweeping generalisations made in the book about the racial dynamics outside of the US, but thats not pertinent here). Where New Jim Crow talks about political administrations, she goes into detail about early convicts. I found it interesting to note that Jefferson excluded slaves from penitentiaries on the account that he thought the systems were almost a continuation of each other.

The additions Davies heaps on, are about industrialisation, the intentions of early prison architects and sexual abuse, past and present. I am not sure why I thought female prisons were out of bounds for men, but the points about guards and the treatment given to inmates really struck home. 

In terms of Davies remedy, it's a purely statist strategy. She basically wants a more holistic way of dealing with crime, which includes welfare programmes, de-criminalisation of drugs, non-private prisons. There is nothing wrong with this, in massive terms, but it means activists are then wedded to lobbying/forcing government, local admin into taking on these amenities and have no strategy beyond state dependency.