Davis explores in this chapter how women have been left out of public discussions regarding the expansion of the U.S. While a frequent justification to the attention given towards the issues experienced in women's prions is that they only represent a small proportion of incarcerated individuals in the world, Davis points to how women today are the fastest-growing sector in the United States Prison Population. Davis contends that there is something wrong with this picture and, therefore, something wrong with the systems underlying it.Ĭhapter 4: How Gender Structures the Prison System That makes the United States home to 20% of the world's incarcerated people, a number far out of proportion with its percentage of the world population at large. Between 19, the US prison population exploded from 200,000 to over 2,000,000. The mission of Are Prisons Obsolete? is to cause the reader to see the prison system as they likely do the death penalty by exposing how unnecessary, ineffective, and inhuman it is. Unlike the death penalty, prisons are considered 'an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives'. Whereas the average person can quite readily imagine a system of justice in which the death penalty has no place, most people cannot imagine the same concerning prisons. Summary Chapter 1: Introduction: Prison Reform or Prison Abolition? ĭavis begins by comparing attitudes towards advocacy for abolishing the death penalty and advocacy for abolishing prisons. It is a core text in the prison abolition movement. The book explores potential alternatives to the prison system that could transform the justice system from a punitive instrument of control and retribution into a tool capable of changing lives for the better through a combination of autobiography and academic examination.

Davis argues that incarceration fails to reform those it imprisons, instead systematically profiting from the exploitation of prisoners. The book examines the evolution of carceral systems from their earliest incarnation to the all-consuming modern prison industrial complex. Davis is a nonfiction book published in 2003 by Seven Stories Press that advocates for the abolition of the prison system.

( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Īre Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. ( July 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. This article possibly contains original research.

The angela davis reader