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

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.