Brisbane, Australia — African-American socialist Angela
Davis called for the abolition of all prisons during a public lecture
at the University of Queensland on Nov. 27.
[...]
In her lecture, attended by 150 people, Davis said there are now
2 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons — 1 percent of the
U.S. population. In California alone, there are 33 prisons, 38
camps, 16 community correctional facilities and five tiny prisoner
mother facilities.
In 2002, there were 158,000 prisoners in the Californian prison
system, of whom 35 percent were Latinos, 30 percent were
African Americans and 29 percent were whites. Thirteen per cent
of inmates were being held for immigration violations. There are
now more women in prison in California than there were in
prison in the entire country in the early 1970s.
Davis recounted the history of the campaign to abolish prisons
in the U.S. In 1925, the first U.S. prison reformers said that
prisons should not be run by warders but by educators; prisons
would become a place for secondary schooling and even
university education. The first reformer was Thomas Osborn who
said prisons should be changed from being human "scrap
heaps" to human "repair shops."
Women are primarily incarcerated for drug offences (80 percent).
But, argued Davis, what can you say about a society where the
massive pharmaceutical industry makes billions of dollars,
pushing the taking of drugs on endless television
advertisements that claim that life will be magically better if you
take a particular drug?
These women can't afford those drugs so they are imprisoned
for stealing money to buy drugs, some of which are illegal.
The prison-industrial complex is much more than the sum of all
the prisons in the country. Davis described it as a set of
symbiotic relationships among correctional communities,
transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards'
associations and legislative and court agendas.
Davis argued that prisons are considered so natural and so
normal that it is extremely hard to imagine life without them. She
argued that we must work to make prisons redundant by
creating a radically more democratic and socially just society
where retribution would no longer be seen as a means of
achieving justice.
