This book had been on my shelf for a while, but I was inspired to actually pick it up in the midst of the George Floyd protests in the middle of the tumultuous summer of 2020. This was when calls to defund the police were gaining steam. Prison abolition isn't exactly that, but it's adjacent, and was also present in some pockets of the discourse at the time. This is more of a summary of the main arguments made in the book in support of its provocative question, and some of my reactions to those arguments.

history of prisons

The main framing used in the book is to say that prisons are not inevitable. In fact, they are fairly recent (18th-19th century in most of the west). Weirdly, they were seen as improvements over previous models of punishment (e.g. brutal things like hanging/drawing/quartering).

I was surprised to learn that the 13th amendment abolished slavery and forced servitude, except when it is given as punishment. Davis argues this led to prisons being mostly full of white prisoners before the Civil War to mostly being mostly full of Black prisoners after the war. She traces this development as a continuance of slavery, on to the war on drugs and disproportionate imprisonment of people of color.

There was also a discussion of the rise of novel as a literary form in relation to prison, but I got a bit confused.

prisons and women

The chapter on women's prisons was horrifying, but I felt it mostly served as ammunition against the current incarnation of American prison and the problems therein. The argument used at the end of the chapter was along the lines "we are attempting to abolish things like sexual assault in societal life, yet we have effectively state-sanctioned sexual assaults in prisons, therefore we should get rid of them". This felt kind of weak conceptually against the need for prison, since the pro argument could easily point to a need for reform instead of abolition.

prison industrial complex

The prison industrial complex chapter lays out arguments for private prisons, but also against public prisons, since there are a lot of companies profiting from the supply of goods to prisons. This reminded me of other pieces I have read about the industry surrounding prisons, like having to pay a company to take medicine in prison or the JPay system mentioned in an n+1 article about Covid and Cuomo's response to NY state prisoners.

prison abolition?

The last chapter lays out what she means by abolition. It isn't get rid of prisons and have whatever comes tomorrow. The main project is to deconstruct the whole ecosystem around prison, like the prison industrial complex, the war on drugs, etc. I take the title to really mean obsolete as in, our concept of prisons and their place in our society may be replaced by a whole host of other institutions to play different roles that currently roll up to punishment and incarceration. We can focus on decarceration first; then, end the drug war, decriminalize drug use and sex work, etc; focus on education; focus on providing mental health services; end being able to profit from the incarceration of citizens. This is the main rebuttal to the reform question, and ties back to the framing in the beginning of the book in questioning why most people have come to just accept the existence of prisons today, not even being able to imagine a society without them.

The ending about "what about the rapists and murderers" question and restorative justice felt really open ended, which seemed a bit disappointing at first. But expecting a whole program fully laid out from this book might not be the point, since that's a giant topic that may not even be possible to tackle until we get to the lower hanging fruit that Angela Davis already laid out (e.g. stuff in the last point).