Are Prisons Obsolete?

Davis argues that prisons perpetuate many outdated beliefs and repressive practices, including racism, that wouldn’t be acceptable anywhere else in modern society. A large part of her criticism rests with prison’s gender-based punishments for female inmates, particularly the normalized sexual assault that women prisoners endure. In Chapter 4, Davis explores how often women inmates undergo strip searches, internal cavity searches, and pat-and-frisks—all procedures permitted under prison rules. She and other activist groups like Sisters Inside see these “routine” procedures as criminal acts, as they infringe on inmates’ personal rights and bodily safety. Prison authorities superficially condemn even outright sexual abuse—like rape and coercion to sex under threat—though they superficially condemn it. As private prison owners and governments don’t punish such behaviours, Davis sees these organizations as responsible for and “directly implicated in an institution that perpetuates violence against women” (83). Prisons doubly victimize women of color, as they receive racially motivated punishments to deny their femininity, like placing them in men’s prisons or in hard labor on chain gangs. Davis argues that these punishments, which women prisoners experience incredibly often, prove that “women’s prisons have held on to oppressive patriarchal practices that are considered obsolete in the ‘free world’” (62).

Modern prisons have adopted and distorted the penitentiary’s early focus on isolation for spiritual awakening as a form of punishment. Protestant and Quaker reformers, as Davis states in Chapter 3, sought to rehabilitate those who broke the law through programs of self-discipline. In modern supermax prisons—where inmates spend up to 23 hours per day in the near-total sensory deprivation of isolation—the program makes “no pretense that rights are respected” (50) and is an explicit means to control and subdue prisoners. The program is especially concerning because it has no safeguards to ensure that supermax inmates really are those most in need of special punishment. As especially damning evidence, Davis reports that even the National Institute of Corrections—a government agency—finds the “overall constitutionality” (51) of supermax prisons doubtful because of the visible denial of human rights. For Davis, programs of extreme isolation are period-specific answers to understandings of human individuality, and prison authorities even considered them torturous in their own time. As society’s understandings of human individuality and human rights have developed, Davis notes, the continuance of these extreme practices is anachronistic and outright brutal by modern standards.

Despite prisons rapidly taking over the American landscape, Davis observes that the truth of prison operations remains invisible in the public consciousness. This invisibility is primarily due to the “ideological function” of prisons, which is to outwardly promote themselves as doing a necessary public good while hiding their true programs of exploitation and targeted punishment. Prisons alleviate the public’s need to think about issues—like racism, class bias, and inadequate healthcare—by claiming to make communities safer through programs of incarceration. Behind rhetoric of taking “evildoers” out of communities, prisons paint themselves as a necessary part of society’s safe development. In Chapter 1, Davis notes that the public—especially the white public—doesn’t care about prison expansion because people don’t view it as a personal issue; if anything, the public is more than happy to have “undesirables” (16) hidden away. Davis argues that Black and minority communities don’t have the luxury of ignoring prison expansion, as they “must regrettably accept prison sentences […] as an ordinary dimension of community life” (15). Davis argues, therefore, that America’s long-engrained racism accounts for the public’s consent to prison infrastructure expansion.

Davis identifies popular media—movies, television, and news outlets—as a main player in upholding the prison’s false visibility in society. The media distorts prison life, which obscures the truth of the institutions for the public. Prison films and television, being their own standardized genre, point to the public’s fascination with the institutions, but Davis views these pieces of media—like Cool Hand Luke and Oz—as promoting the necessity of prisons and of maintaining them as permanent institutions. Rather than looking to literature written by actual prisoners, the public gravitates toward sensationalist and dramatized stories to satiate their curiosity. Like John Bender’s analysis of early novels—which he found ideologically supported the early penitentiary’s ideals of self-actualization—Davis sees modern media as ideologically supporting the prison’s repressive regime—promoting the prison’s outward purpose of housing evildoers. Davis finds that news outlets also distort the public’s perception of crime, as they increasingly report on crime even when crime rates fall. In Chapter 5, Davis shares a statistic that despite homicide rates falling by half, “homicide stories on the three major networks rose almost fourfold” (92), which made the issue seem more prevalent than it was. Consumers of these news items are therefore more likely to believe in the prison’s usefulness.

The invisibility of prisons has also infiltrated activist circles, especially concerning issues in women’s prisons. As women’s prisons make up a small percentage of total prison infrastructure and women are a small percentage of total prison populations, Davis points out, women’s issues receive low priority for activists’ attention. Women’s punishments are also historically invisible in reformist programs, as women are “often punished within the domestic domain” (41) rather than in public. Davis argues, however, that looking at gendered structures of prison won’t only help women but will also benefit men trapped under prison’s cruel patriarchal regimes. Davis notes that “women remain today the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison population” (65), and she hopes that issues of gender will gain traction in activist circles for a more well-rounded view of the prison system’s ideological underpinnings.