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Angela Y. DavisA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The main opposition to abolitionist projects is people’s inability to imagine alternatives to the current prison system because of the dependence on it. Many activists who contemplate abolition seek one alternative to replace the entire prison system, but Davis believes that more progress is possible by looking into smaller alternatives for the many relationships in the system. As the prison industrial complex is so far reaching, Davis sees many potential areas for minor change that could destabilize dependence on the prison. Ideally, alternatives will create a society of equality and empathy that doesn’t push people toward lawbreaking. Davis invites people to imagine various scenarios of a society without corporatization, racial bias, or punitive justice as alternatives to our current system.
Davis proposes that an abolitionist’s main goal is to remove prisons “from the social and ideological landscapes of our society” (107) through a program of decarceration and social welfare. Many societal institutions—like schools and healthcare—work as “conduits to prison” (108) for low-income communities and minority communities when they should offer care and safety to all people. For Davis, a key form of decarceration is to decriminalize drug use and sex work, whereby institutions offer free help instead of punishing people for these behaviors. Decriminalizing these behaviors, Davis believes will spur activists to look at other behaviors that can be decriminalized—like immigrating without documents or fighting back against one’s abuser. By ideologically dismantling the prison, activists can also help dismantle the racism, sexism, and classism that upholds other societal institutions. A key ideological shift, Davis asserts, is to question what makes someone a “criminal” rather than a “lawbreaker.”
For those who do break the law, Davis suggests, justice should focus on restoration, reparation, and reconciliation rather than punishment. Davis ends the book with the story of Amy Biehl’s murder and her family’s acceptance of reconciliatory justice. The South African men who killed Amy during apartheid were released from prison after Amy’s parents supported their Truth and Reconciliation petition. In reparation, the men worked at the Biehl’s charitable foundation, ultimately becoming like family to Amy’s parents. Davis argues that this case exemplifies the importance of understanding why crimes happen—rather than simply reacting to them—and it shows that reconciliatory justice can enrich lives rather than ruin them through punishment.
In her final chapter, Davis promotes alternatives to the current prison system that would at first lead to fewer people in prisons and eventually abolish prisons altogether. The most crucial step, Davis argues, is to create a society of equality and empathy that doesn’t use punishment as its first course of action. This program includes changes to education and healthcare—particularly in predominantly nonwhite communities—as a lack of quality access to these services funnels young people in those communities toward crime. Education and healthcare are particularly underfunded in nonwhite and low-income communities, so Davis advocates that “racial and class disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated” (108). Other potential changes she lists include “job and living wage programs, alternatives to the disestablished welfare program, community-based recreation, and many more” (111). An ideological shift that she suggests would fundamentally benefit society is to deconstruct “criminality” and who is considered a “criminal” versus a “law breaker.” Davis argues that “almost all of us have broken the law at one time or another” (112) but that only a fraction are considered “criminals.” Davis uses the first-person plural word “us” to emphasize that everyone connects directly to the cause of ideological deconstruction. By not viewing any group or person as inherently criminal or prone to criminal behavior, Davis argues, activists can simultaneously deconstruct larger systems of racism and classism.
Although Davis explores the sprawling relationships of the prison industrial complex in Chapter 5, here she explains that such a multitude of relationships needn’t dissuade activists from advocating for total abolition. The many relationships, Davis argues, can offer abolitionists more opportunities to “envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society” (108). Connecting to the theme of reform versus abolition, Davis emphasizes how viewing abolition as a one-for-one switch of systems inhibits activists from imagining alternatives and miss the smaller ways that changing relationships could alter the current prison system. Davis again poses rhetorical questions to prompt thought about potential alternatives:
What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice? (107).
Starting with questions like these can help people critique the major systems that uphold the prison industrial complex—like racism, classism, anti-gay bias, and male dominance—and that also exist in other societal structures.
Davis focuses on decriminalizing drug use as a way to reduce the number of people in prison. She compares the War on Drugs in America to the decriminalization of drugs in the Netherlands to prove that punishing drug users doesn’t make communities any safer—in fact, decriminalizing drugs and offering rehabilitation programs have proven more effective. The War on Drugs was a global program led by the US starting in the 1970s that sought to eradicate drug use and access to drugs through military and police intervention. Those convicted of drug charges almost certainly went to prison for long sentences, even for nonviolent offences. Davis views this program as endangering communities more, as it punished those with drug problems rather than helping people overcome them. Those most affected by these rigid and harsh convictions were Black and minority communities. Centers that do help rehabilitate drug users, like the Better Ford Center, can cost upwards of $19,000 for 30 days of treatment, so only the wealthy can effectively combat these health issues. Davis argues that “proposals to decriminalize drug use should be linked to the development of a constellation of free, community-based programs” (108) so that all people can have access to live-saving care.
Under the abolitionist agenda, the final alternative to prison for those who break core social mores is restorative rather than punitive justice. Davis states that rather than “rehearsing the numerous debates that have emerged over the last decades” (114) about what to do with rapists and murderers, she “will conclude with a story of one of the most dramatic successes of these experiments in reconciliation” (114): The case is Amy Biehl’s murder, which occurred in apartheid South Africa. Amy, a white woman, drove her Black friend home, but on the way, antiwhite protesters attacked her van and killed her. Although four men went to prison, two successfully appealed to the Truth and Reconciliation committee, expressing their remorse for their frustration-fueled actions. Amy’s parents supported their “amnesty petition” (114), and in reparation for the crime the men worked at the Amy Biehl foundation as instructors and administrators, growing close to Amy’s family. Davis celebrates Amy’s parents’ decision to question the crime’s root cause—the South Africa Black community’s anger with their white oppressors—rather than simply punish the men. Davis believes the case has already proved to be exemplary, as the men and Amy’s family now travel to promote the healing path of reconciliation over punishment.
By Angela Y. Davis
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