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A review by books_ergo_sum
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire by Angela Y. Davis
reflective
4.0
A good introduction to Angela Davis—it gets 4 stars instead of 5 is because it was a transcribed interview and the interviewer didn’t always ask the best questions. But Angela Davis was awesome.
This was all about shifting your thinking about prisons:
✨ Away from the idea that prisons are the place bad people get sent for their crimes—towards the idea that prisons are the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ place we put the people that government institutions are failing, if not actively undermining.
And of course, who wants to use tax dollars for social programs that would decrease crime rates (by materially improving peoples lives)—when we could use those tax dollars to line the pockets of the private corporations that run prisons 🫠
Reading this, you can’t help but be struck with how… correct Angela Davis is. Just in the way she’s able to predict, in 2004, the problems we’d be dealing with in 2024.
✨ Like, the way she argued that homelessness gets targeted by police instead of dealing with housing. Meanwhile, in the past couple years all US states except two have introduced legislation criminalizing homelessness directly in the midst of a housing affordability crisis.
✨ Or, just last week—Baltimore announcing its most expensive state-funded project in history: a prison.
✨ Or, her worry that George W. Bush’s language was destroying political discourse, which seemed both quaint and poignant. Remember when our biggest problem was Bush talking about “evil doers” at the same time as “extraordinary rendition”?
But she’s right, prisoners are the canary in the coal mine. And you can’t do political activism without advocating for society’s first victims. Because,
“… the prison becomes a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.”
This was all about shifting your thinking about prisons:
✨ Away from the idea that prisons are the place bad people get sent for their crimes—towards the idea that prisons are the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ place we put the people that government institutions are failing, if not actively undermining.
And of course, who wants to use tax dollars for social programs that would decrease crime rates (by materially improving peoples lives)—when we could use those tax dollars to line the pockets of the private corporations that run prisons 🫠
Reading this, you can’t help but be struck with how… correct Angela Davis is. Just in the way she’s able to predict, in 2004, the problems we’d be dealing with in 2024.
✨ Like, the way she argued that homelessness gets targeted by police instead of dealing with housing. Meanwhile, in the past couple years all US states except two have introduced legislation criminalizing homelessness directly in the midst of a housing affordability crisis.
✨ Or, just last week—Baltimore announcing its most expensive state-funded project in history: a prison.
✨ Or, her worry that George W. Bush’s language was destroying political discourse, which seemed both quaint and poignant. Remember when our biggest problem was Bush talking about “evil doers” at the same time as “extraordinary rendition”?
But she’s right, prisoners are the canary in the coal mine. And you can’t do political activism without advocating for society’s first victims. Because,
“… the prison becomes a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.”