A review by sotweedfactor
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire by Angela Y. Davis

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.