Excerpted from Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis, 2003
…When the drive to produce more prisons and incarcerate ever larger numbers of people occurred in the 1980s during what is known as the Reagan era, politicians argued that tough on crime stances—including certain imprisonment and longer sentences—would keep communities free of crime. However, the practice of mass incarceration during that period had little or no effect on official crime rates. In fact, the most obvious pattern was that larger prison populations led not to safer communities, but rather, to even larger prison populations. Each new prison spawned yet another new prison. And as the U.S. Prison system expanded, so did corporate involvement in construction, provision of goods and services, and use of prison labor-from the construction industry to food and health care provision-in a way that recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex, we began to reger to a prison industrial complex.
…We live in an era of migrating corporations. In order to escape organized labor in this country-and thus higher wages, benefits, and so on-corporations roam the world in search of nations providing cheap labor pools. This corporate migration thus leaves entire communities in shambles. Huge numbers of people lose jobs and prospects for future jobs. Because the economic base of these communities is destroyed, education and other surviving social services are
profoundly affected. This process turns the men, women and children who live int these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison.
In the meantime, corporations associated with the punishment industry reap profits form the system that manages prisoners and acquire a clear stake in the continued growth of prison populations…The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison…
…The most immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call he free world. How can we move to decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services? How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing
crime and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to prison. 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.