Davis Cites American Prison System as Threat to Democracy

In a scathing critique of America’s “prison industrial complex,” activist Angela Davis asked hundreds of students and faculty gathered at Mount Holyoke last Friday to consider the social implications of the country’s “punishment industry.” “We face a vast threat to the democratic future of this country,” she warned, citing as indications the high percentage of convicts from poor and minority communities, prison voting restrictions, and the lack of adequate prison health care. Highlighting the plight of incarcerated women, Davis noted the prison system’s disregard for parent-child relationships and the family unit. Her consciousness-raising talk inspired two standing ovations from the notably diverse college audience. Following her remarks, the former political prisoner, scholar, writer, and teacher entertained questions and signed books.

Introduced by MHC’s Michelle Stephens, assistant professor of English, Davis opened with remarks on the “monopolization” of the country’s two-party political system and criticized presidential candidate George W. Bush for his “machinery of death” policies in the state of Texas. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, she said, had joined Bush in “making appeals to the worst and most masculine militarism.” Expressing little admiration for Democratic candidate Al Gore, Davis suggested that Ralph Nader “was doing much better, but needs to address more specific matters of race.”

Davis, who first came to national attention in 1969 when she “faced off” with then-Governor Ronald Reagan over her political activities and membership in the Black Panther and Communist parties, briefly remarked on her work to free Black Panther political prisoners and her own imprisonment (for sixteen months). Having “lived in several jails” from New York to California, Davis said she began to realize her lack of attentiveness to issues of gender in her work to free political prisoners. “Many of us,” she said of her activist colleagues, “began to think more deeply about prison structures.”

At the time, said Davis, 200,000 people were in United States jails, in contrast to today’s two million in federal and state prisons and county jails, not including undocumented people in Immigration and Naturalization Service detention centers. The fastest growing sector of the prison population, she noted, are women, of which there are currently 115,000, most of whom “are black, Latina, and poor.”

Davis blamed the “de-establishment” of the welfare system for eliminating “the pittance that served as an inadequate safety net” for women, in particular. She additionally criticized welfare-to-work programs, noting that most women participants are barely able to earn minimum wage. The programs, she said, fail to address the needs of women with children, or the high costs of rent, and are among the “forces” causing the prisons to swell in what has become a “vast punishment industry.”

Davis pointed out that the punishment extends to denying prisoners the right to participate in the electoral process and cited an alarming example from her native state. Alabama denies suffrage to anyone convicted of a felony, she said, leaving a mere third of the state’s male population with the right to vote. The irony, said Davis—given Alabama’s history as the site of major civil rights battles and voter registration drives—serves to underscore the current “state of emergency.”

But democracy, she told the audience, “is not primarily about electoral rights.” Established in the eighteenth century, the original penitentiary system was “a place to do penance,” she said, a place of reform to enable the re-made citizen to participate in democracy. The system failed because its inventors assumed that “utter solitude, solitary confinement, taught people how to live in freedom.” After the Civil War, the convict lease system provided labor for planters and industrialists, and the prison system became management for a new labor force.

As for convicted women, the prison rehabilitation system, said Davis, was designed to transform them “into good mothers and good wives.” Ironically, today’s system works to deny women contact with children and families. She characterized the United States system as constituting an “assault” to women, children, and families, and noted that other countries are more progressive in this area.

Ultimately, said Davis, today’s prison industrial complex functions through the deep involvements of corporations that manage a “perpetual prisoner machine.” She cited as an example telephone companies competing for and profiting from prison contracts. She also noted the popularity of large “correction fairs,” and the trend toward privatization, in which prisons are directly controlled by corporations. Forty billion dollars, she said, are spent on punishment each year in the United States.“The prison industrial complex is not an aberration, it’s a very rational response, linked to conditions we assume are for the practice of democracy and globalization. It maintains relations of domination.”

Davis blames the decline of social and economic systems for the poor and minorities for feeding the prison system. It has produced “an intersectional quagmire,” she explained, where issues of class, reproductive rights, economic rights, and race are intertwined in a system of punishment and incarceration. “How do we challenge the ideologies that keep these structures in place?” she asked. She urged the audience to consider “our own complicity.” “We should have a democracy of health care, housing, jobs, a living wage—especially for women and working mothers. This would be the new abolitionism,” she said.
In answer to questions on how individuals can begin to influence change, she called for “ideological work” and the development of “a new vocabulary.” She urged people to vote, to “stop taking these things for granted,” and to stop “thinking of ourselves as powerless.”

The hour-plus lecture also touched on media coverage of the current Olympic games and penal history in Australia.

Photograph by Nancy Palmieri.