Are Prisons Obsolete? (Paperback)

Paperback. With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis makes the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of prisons.As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration," and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole. 200 years after the invention of the penitentiary - the question of prison abolition has acquired an unprecedented urgency. Amid rising public concern about the proliferation of prisons, and their promise of enormous profits. Angela Davis argues for the abolition of the prison system as the dominant way of responding to social ills. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…