Scan barcode
A review by raluca_p
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire by Angela Y. Davis
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."