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noah_hurts's review against another edition
4.0
I picked this up from the library to try and get a little bit of Angela Davis digested before I saw her speak on the 16th and while I did get sidetracked and ended up finishing it the day after I saw Professor Davis speak, I'm still happy I picked this up. Ironically, the book ended up functioning pretty well as an accompaniment to the talk that I saw. Angela Davis has led a really amazing life and she uses that amazing experience to fuel some really interesting talking points in this book. If I found a flaw in it, my only real issue is that (and this is something Davis even addresses at the end of the book) everything is so nebulous. Of course when talking about political revolution and the like, it's hard to find any kind of concrete thing to latch on to sometimes, but she uses some really harsh and concrete language to talk about concepts that she offers no explanation for. Now that said, it's more of a nitpick than anything. I'm reading a political text: I'm not expecting a manual to overthrow the current administration. I did come out of this book (and the speech that she gave) with a new outlook on the prison system and a pretty substantial reading list for further reading on the prison industrial complex.
blackcatkai's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.5
cw: talks about racism, police brutality, colonialism, mentions of homophobia, war, torture, the prison & military industrial complexes.
fascinating on all fronts. this probably shouldn't have been my first angela davis, but it won't be my last.
fascinating on all fronts. this probably shouldn't have been my first angela davis, but it won't be my last.
anna401's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
sotweedfactor's review against another edition
4.0
Very interesting book that further exposes the dark systematic entanglement between prisons and U.S. democracy. It is clear that the U.S. prison-industrial complex (as Davis refers to it) is the de facto arbiter of violence that obfuscates systematic racism and capitalism's suffocating presence. There is also an interesting point that Davis makes on the civil rights movement turning people into abstract subjects to be administered justice i.e. stripping them of their race and class. This play at equality is duplicitous, as people are not abstract subjects, and remain targets of racialized policies that promote inequality and abuse. There was also quite a bit on the Bush presidency and subsequent War of Terror, which was edifying, but felt oddly dated.
cggs's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
honeysgogh's review against another edition
4.5
a very insightful insight into the abolition of prison and the intersectionality of war, racism and capitalism. angela y. davis never disappoints and every book I read by her (whether it is in interviews or a complex discussion of such issues), I always come out of it learning something new.
raluca_p's review against another edition
5.0
"Democratic rights and liberties are defined in relation to what is denied to people in prison. So we might ask, what kind of democracy do we currently inhabit? The kind of democracy that can only invent and develop itself as the affirmative face of the horrors depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs, the physical and mental agonies produced on a daily basis in prisons here and all over the world. This is a flawed conception of democracy.
I want to touch on an example that challenges conventional ideas about the separation of prison and society, one that resituates our shocked responses to the recent images of sexual coercion in Iraq. We acknowledge the fact that women in prisons all over the world are forced, on a regular basis, to undergo strip searches and cavity searches. That is to say their vaginas and rectums are searched. Any woman capable of imagining herself—not the other, but rather herself—searched in such a manner will inexorably experience it as sexual assault. But since it occurs in prison, society assumes that this kind of assault is a normal and routine aspect of women’s imprisonment and is self-justified by the mere fact of imprisonment. Society assumes that this is what happens when a woman goes to prison. That this is what happens to the citizen who is divested of her citizenship rights and that it is therefore right that the prisoner be subjected to sexual coercion.
I want to urge people to think more deeply about the very powerful and profound extent to which such practices inform the kind of democracy we inhabit today. I would like to urge people to think about different versions of democracy, future democracies, democracies grounded in socialism, democracies in which those social problems that have enabled the emergence of the prison-industrial-complex will be, if not completely solved, at least encountered and acknowledged."
I want to touch on an example that challenges conventional ideas about the separation of prison and society, one that resituates our shocked responses to the recent images of sexual coercion in Iraq. We acknowledge the fact that women in prisons all over the world are forced, on a regular basis, to undergo strip searches and cavity searches. That is to say their vaginas and rectums are searched. Any woman capable of imagining herself—not the other, but rather herself—searched in such a manner will inexorably experience it as sexual assault. But since it occurs in prison, society assumes that this kind of assault is a normal and routine aspect of women’s imprisonment and is self-justified by the mere fact of imprisonment. Society assumes that this is what happens when a woman goes to prison. That this is what happens to the citizen who is divested of her citizenship rights and that it is therefore right that the prisoner be subjected to sexual coercion.
I want to urge people to think more deeply about the very powerful and profound extent to which such practices inform the kind of democracy we inhabit today. I would like to urge people to think about different versions of democracy, future democracies, democracies grounded in socialism, democracies in which those social problems that have enabled the emergence of the prison-industrial-complex will be, if not completely solved, at least encountered and acknowledged."