Born in Birmingham, Alabama – also
birth place of the Black Liberation movement – Angela Davis lost a
number of her childhood friends and acquaintances in the 1963 bombing
of the 16th Street Baptist Church and as a result went on to become
an active member of the Black Panthers and a member of the Communist
Party of America. She spent eighteen months in jail and on trial in
the early 1970s in the USA after being placed on the FBI's 'Ten Most
Wanted ' list. After her acquittal, even or maybe especially with a
PhD, finding work was a struggle within the dominant political
culture of the country; however she continued and is still engaged in
radical abolitionist politics, struggling for the freedom of all to
express and gain their own freedoms in all areas of life. She
lectures and writes about such topics as racism, multiculturalism,
the meaning of freedom, democracy, crime, punishment and the
prison-industrial complex. She is particularly concerned with the
general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison
system than to schools and the education system in general. Much of
her energy now goes into engaging her audiences to think more
seriously about the possibility of a world without prisons and to
build an abolitionist movement.
'During the late
sixties, working within movements to free political prisoners,
members of the Black Panther Party, we became aware of larger
structural issues. Political repression was not only directed at
political prisoners. Rather, the prison system as a whole served as
an apparatus of racist and political repression, fixing its sights
not only on those who were incarcerated for unambiguously political
reasons, but on the majority of the incarcerated population. The fact
that everyone behind bars was (and is) poor and that a
disproportionate number of them were black and Latino led us to think
about the more comprehensive impact of punishment on communities of
colour and poor communities in general. How many rich people are in
prison? Perhaps a few here and there, but the vast majority of
prisoners are poor people. A disproportionate number of those poor
people were and continue to be people of colour, people of African
descent, Latinos and Native Americans.'
(Colorado 1997)
'Why do we in this
country find it so difficult to imagine a society in which prisons
are not such a prominent feature of the geographical and social
landscape? Our impoverished popular imagination is responsible for
the lack of or sparsity of conversations on minimizing prisons and
decarceration as opposed to incarceration. Particularly
since resources that could fund services designed to to help prevent
people from engaging in the behavior that leads to prison are being
used instead to build and operate prisons. Precisely the resources we
need in order to prevent people from going to prison are being
devoured by the prison system. This means that prison reproduces the
conditions of its own expansion, creating a syndrome of
self-perpetuation.'
(University of
Wisconsin 1999)
'One of the really
bizarre aspects of the prison system is the way it so easily
assimilates “prison reforms” into processes that strengthen it
and render it even more repressive than before the reforms were
instituted. This is why I always try to disassociate myself and other
prison abolitionists from prison reform. Obviously it is important to
make life better for people who are in prison. We support reforms
that will make life more livable for prisoners, while we call for the
abolition of prisons as the default solution for the social problems
that prison presumes to solve but cannot.'
(Denver, Colorado
2002)
Extracts from 'The Meaning of freedom' 2012 Angela Davis
Particularly since the escalation of neoliberal policies and privatisation of great swathes of the 'prison industrial complex' in countries around the world, it has become more obviously apparent that globalised capital is cashing in not only on the outsourcing of manufacturing but at the same time cashing in on imprisoning large sections of surplus populations impoverished by the policies of the transnational corporations.
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