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With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made...

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.

In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

Review

The most radical move Angela Davis makes in Are Prisons Obsolete? is also the quietest. She never quite uses the word "abolition" as a demand her reader is expected to accept on first hearing. Instead, she positions it as a question the book earns the right to ask. By the time the question arrives in full force—some hundred-odd pages into a dense historical genealogy—it feels less like a provocation than a logical terminus. The obviousness of the prison, Davis argues, is its greatest weapon. We do not question what we cannot imagine being without. The book's true subject is not prisons so much as the work that naturalization performs: the way an institution designed less than two centuries ago comes to seem permanent, inevitable, even benevolent. To break that spell, Davis has to show that the prison was made, and remade, and remade again, each time serving interests that have nothing to do with public safety.

This is a book that wagers everything on historical continuity. Davis's central claim is that the contemporary U.S. prison system—two million human beings caged at the time of her writing, a quarter of the world's incarcerated population in a nation with five percent of its people—is not an aberrant policy outcome but the direct institutional descendant of chattel slavery. The legal bridge is the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause: slavery and involuntary servitude abolished "except as a punishment for crime." That single prepositional phrase, Davis contends, did the work that formal emancipation could not. It authorized the Black Codes to criminalize the behavior of freed Black people—vagrancy, "insulting gestures," absence from work—and channel them into a penal system whose labor could be sold to railroads, mines, and plantations. The convict lease system that emerged in the post-Civil War South was, in the historian Matthew Mancini's phrase she quotes approvingly, "worse than slavery": a leased convict worked to death cost nothing to replace, where an enslaved person represented capital whose loss diminished the owner. The continuity Davis traces is not metaphorical. She cites Mary Ellen Curtin's finding that Alabama's prison population shifted from ninety-nine percent white before emancipation to overwhelmingly Black within a decade, and Alex Lichtenstein's documentation that Georgia's railroads and Atlanta's Peachtree Street were built by Black convict labor. When she arrives at contemporary statistics—Black men in their twenties under criminal justice supervision at rates exceeding thirty percent—the argument has already been made. These are not separate phenomena.

The architecture of the book is accordingly genealogical. Chapter 2 excavates the post-emancipation legal apparatus; Chapter 3 turns to the prison's eighteenth-century origins as a reformist project; Chapter 4 examines gender as a structuring logic of the entire carceral system; Chapter 5 elaborates the concept of the prison industrial complex; Chapter 6 sketches abolitionist alternatives. Each chapter is a discrete lens on the same object, and Davis's method is to rotate the object until its seams become visible. She is less interested in proving that prisons are cruel—that she takes as self-evident—than in demonstrating that their cruelty is not a malfunction but a design feature, and that the design has been continuously renovated under the banner of reform.

The reform argument is where the book's theoretical debts are most explicit. The epigraph to Chapter 3 is Foucault: "Prison 'reform' is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme." Davis traces this proposition through the eighteenth-century Quaker reformers who invented solitary confinement as a humane alternative to corporal punishment, through Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, through the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems whose silent, cellular isolation Charles Dickens denounced in 1842 as "a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay." The pivot is devastating. Davis sets Dickens's nineteenth-century descriptions of Eastern State Penitentiary alongside a 1997 Human Rights Watch report on supermax conditions in Indiana, and the language barely needs updating. Sensory deprivation, controlled lighting, meals passed through slots, years without human touch—the supermax is the Pennsylvania system with better electronics and no rehabilitative pretense. The pretense, Davis argues, was always thin. Reform has been the prison's immune system, absorbing critique by promising improvement while preserving the institution intact. She is particularly caustic about the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which eliminated Pell Grants for incarcerated students and thereby dismantled the Marist College program at Greenhaven Prison after twenty-two years of operation. The loss of prison education is rendered as a deliberate foreclosure of the one thing Davis believes the prison occasionally permitted: the prisoner's intellectual self-reconstruction. Malcolm X copying the dictionary by hand in a Norfolk Prison Colony cell—"up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life"—appears as the emblem of what was systematically destroyed. Mumia Abu-Jamal's question echoes through the chapter: "What social benefit is there in ignorance?"

Gender is where Davis's argument departs most starkly from the standard abolitionist script, and the chapter on how gender structures the prison system is among the book's most original contributions. She insists that the question is not merely "what happens to women in prison" but rather that gender organizes the entire carceral apparatus—the architecture of surveillance, the ritual of the strip search, the presumption that women's deviance is sexual deviance requiring domestic rehabilitation. Assata Shakur's autobiography provides the chapter's most searing testimony: a vaginal and rectal cavity search that Davis, quoting the lawyer Amanda George, names for what it is—"without the uniform, without the power of the state, it would be sexual assault." The Human Rights Watch report "All Too Familiar" and the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women's finding that sexual misconduct by prison staff is "widespread in American women's prisons" supply the empirical corroboration. But Davis pushes further, turning her critique against a certain species of liberal feminism. Tekla Miller, the former warden of Huron Valley Women's Prison, fought for parity with men's facilities and won—chain gangs, shoot-to-kill policies, denial of graduation ceremonies. Davis calls this a "bizarre example of feminist demands for equality within the prison system." The logic of equal-opportunity incarceration, she argues, produces more repression for women, not less, and the women it targets are disproportionately women of color. By 2001, the largest women's prison in the world was Valley State Prison for Women in California, and Black women's imprisonment had risen seventy-eight percent in five years. The liberal demand for equal treatment inside a fundamentally unequal institution reproduces the institution's violence under a feminist banner.

The prison industrial complex, as Davis develops it in Chapter 5, is the book's organizing concept and its most contestable. She models it on Eisenhower's military industrial complex and argues the two are symbiotic, not sequential: Westinghouse, 3M, GDE Systems, and Alliant Techsystems pivoted from defense contracting to law enforcement technology in the 1990s, and the 1993 National Institute of Justice conference on "Law Enforcement Technology in the 21st Century" was chaired by the Secretary of Defense. Private prison corporations—Corrections Corporation of America, Wackenhut—have a direct financial stake in the perpetuation of incarceration, and Davis documents their cross-border reach into Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The chapter's most chilling material concerns medical experimentation: Albert Kligman, the University of Pennsylvania dermatologist, surveyed Holmesburg Prison's population and saw "acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time." His research for Johnson & Johnson, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical proceeded on captive bodies that could not refuse. Davis's evidence here, drawn from Allen Hornblum's Acres of Skin, is specific and damning. The broader claim—that the prison industrial complex drives incarceration rates rather than responding to crime—is harder to adjudicate within the book's own terms. She notes that homicide rates fell by half between 1990 and 1998 while prison construction accelerated, but the causal mechanism linking corporate lobbying to sentencing policy is asserted rather than demonstrated. This is a function of the book's genre. Are Prisons Obsolete? is an activist synthesis, not a social-scientific monograph, and its rhetorical force derives from the accumulation of structural parallels rather than from the testing of counterfactuals.

The abolitionist alternatives Davis outlines in the final chapter are deliberately not a blueprint. She refuses to offer a single replacement for the prison, arguing that the demand for a neat substitute is itself a trap—it presumes that incarceration is currently "solving" a problem and that abolitionists must solve it better. Davis's alternative is a constellation: decriminalization of drugs and sex work, community-based mental health and drug treatment free at the point of access, transformed schools that do not mirror prison discipline, dismantled immigrant detention, and restorative justice practices that reframe crime as a harm to be repaired rather than a transgression to be punished. The culminating case study is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's handling of the 1993 killing of Amy Biehl, a white American Fulbright scholar murdered in a township outside Cape Town. Two of her killers, Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni, testified before the Commission, were granted amnesty, and eventually became employees of the Biehl Foundation. Linda Biehl, Amy's mother, told the Commission she had "a lot of love for them." Nofemela asked the Biehls: "I want you to forgive me and take me as your child." Davis presents this not as a saccharine resolution but as evidence that an entirely different logic of justice—one concerned with accountability, repair, and the transformation of conditions rather than with retribution—is materially possible. The chapter's weakness is its brevity. At roughly twenty pages, it sketches possibilities where the preceding chapters built genealogies, and the reader who has been persuaded that prisons are obsolete may finish the book less certain about what comes next than Davis's confident tone suggests.

The book occupies a specific and contested place in its intellectual traditions. It is recognizably Marxist in its insistence that the prison absorbs the surplus populations produced by deindustrialization—Ruth Wilson Gilmore's framework of prisons as a "geographical solution to socio-economic problems" is the book's analytical spine. It is Foucauldian in its argument that reform is constitutive of the prison and that the carceral logic extends far beyond the walls of the penitentiary into schools, hospitals, and the family. It is feminist in its account of gender as a structuring principle of state violence and in its critique of liberal feminism's complicity with carceral expansion. It belongs to what the Black radical tradition has long understood: that the afterlife of slavery is organized through the law, and that the prison is one of its primary instruments. Frederick Douglass's 1883 diagnosis of the "imputation of crime to color" and Cheryl Harris's legal theory of "whiteness as property" are not ornamental citations; they are the intellectual apparatus that makes the historical argument cohere. Davis's engagement with her cross-references is generous but not deferential. She draws on historians—Hirsch, Curtin, Lichtenstein, Mancini, Oshinsky—to establish the empirical record, on Foucault to supply the theoretical architecture, and on prison writers—Jackson, Shakur, Abu-Jamal, Malcolm X—to ground the abstraction in lived experience. The book is a mosaic of borrowed authorities, and its originality lies in the pattern Davis imposes on them.

The book's limitations are inseparable from its ambitions. Davis writes for a movement, and the movement's rhetorical habits sometimes substitute for argument. The claim that felony disenfranchisement cost Al Gore the 2000 election and thereby produced the Iraq War is a chain of causation too long for a single paragraph. The characterization of global capitalism as a unified force generating mass incarceration across national contexts flattens significant variation—the Netherlands, which Davis cites approvingly for decriminalizing marijuana and sex work, is a capitalist democracy, which suggests the relationship between capitalism and incarceration is mediated by politics in ways the book does not fully theorize. And the treatment of restorative justice, while moving, does not address the hardest cases: what does repair look like for crimes of intimate violence in communities where the state's withdrawal has historically meant impunity for abusers? These are not refutations. They are the questions a book of this scope, written at this register, necessarily leaves open. Davis would likely reply that abolition is not a checklist but a horizon, and that the work of specifying alternatives must be done by the communities building them, not by a single author in a manifesto.

Are Prisons Obsolete? was published in 2003, on the far side of the 1998 Critical Resistance conference that gave the contemporary abolitionist movement its name and organizational infrastructure. Two decades later, its central arguments have migrated from the radical margins to mainstream discourse—partially, unevenly, and often stripped of their structural analysis. The book remains the most efficient introduction to the abolitionist case, not because it resolves every tension but because it lays out the historical premise so clearly that the burden of proof shifts. After Davis, the question is not whether prisons can be reformed but whether the person defending them has understood what they are defending. The prison, she writes, "has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited." The metaphor is cosmological: a region of space whose gravity is so intense that no light escapes, whose interior is invisible from the outside, whose existence can only be inferred from the behavior of the bodies that orbit it. The book's achievement is to have made that invisible object visible. What follows from that seeing is not Davis's to determine alone.