For a country that totes itself the ‘land of the free,’ the United States has a vast prison system that holds a quarter of the world’s prisoners despiFor a country that totes itself the ‘land of the free,’ the United States has a vast prison system that holds a quarter of the world’s prisoners despite being only 5% of the global population. For activist and writer Angela Y. Davis, this isn’t a faulty system in need of repair but a broken system to be abolished and reimagined. As highly readable as it is informative, Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? is a seminal work on prison abolition that asks us the very question of its title and calls on us to reimagine the criminal justice system that focuses on addressing the root causes of crime for restorative justice instead of punishment. ‘Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings,’ Davis writes and navigates the book through a look at prison expansions, the conditions that have cemented prisons as seemingly inherent to society, issues of the prison industrial complex and penal labor as an aspect of capitalism as well as gender and racial inequalities. Published in 2003, Are Prisons Obsolete? is still an essential introductory work that addresses many issues disputed today around policing but does an excellent job of showing the systemic relationships between issues for a wider perspective. Davis covers a lot of ground but does so in a sharp, succinct and highly readable manner that gives readers the tools to understand the basics of abolitionist theory and look towards their application for the future.
‘Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings…Prison abolition requires that we challenge our thinking about what constitutes punishment, for whom and why.’
‘Abolition is not a scary word,’ Davis argues, though the term often raises a lot of eyebrows as is dismissed as radical. In her book Women, Culture, and Politics, Davis discusses how the term ‘radical’ comes from the Latin radicalis, radic- meaning ‘root’ and so Davis writes ‘radical simply means “grasping things at the root.” This is the basis of prison abolition, to grasp crime at the root causes instead of applying carceral systems that, Davis argues, not only fails to prevent crime but often perpetuates crime and issues of recidivism.
‘The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.’
‘[A] system that never addresses the why behind a harm never actually contains the harm itself. Cages confine people, not the conditions that facilitated their harms or the mentalities that perpetuate violence.’
Despite this, Davis says that ‘prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives,’ and asks us to consider why that is or why we feel safer when 7% of adults have been incarcerated. A big key to it, she explains, is the link between prison and economy that inevitably sustains the issues:
‘The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.’
The US prison system has been growing and Davis shows how in the 80s and 90s ‘the number of California prisons doubled’ and yet by 2002 they were already overcrowded. Davis shows how economic downturns, exacerbated by issues like corporate migration, is part of the ‘ process [that] turns the men, women, and children who live in these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison.’ Davis cites Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore who describes the expansion of prisons as ‘a geological solution to socio-economic problems’ where the State buys land and promises these ‘small, depressed towns…that the new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry would jump-start local redevelopment.’ However, Gilmore says that the promise of jobs and revitalization rarely occur.
‘Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.’ ― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
As to the solidification of prison in society, Davis also turns to social critic and activist Gina Dent on how Hollywood and the popularity of prison films make prison ‘wedded to our experience of visuality, creating also a sense of its permanence as an institution.’ The prison narrative is pervasive in our arts and culture, and a big hurdle towards abolition is that people cannot fathom a world without prison. Mariame Kaba addresses this in her book as well:
‘Some people may ask, “Does this mean that I can never call the cops if my life is in serious danger?” Abolition does not center that question. Instead, abolition challenges us to ask “Why do we have no other well-resourced options?” and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow, build, and try other avenues to reduce harm.”’
A big misunderstanding around the slogan “defund the police” during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was a refusal to consider that not having police didn’t mean not having any system in place. Such as when my library stopped having security guards or police presence and instead brought in social workers (which has been incredibly beneficial), Davis argues that abolition seeks to offer alternatives to incarceration, we just have to be able to imagine it.
‘Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?’
French Philosopher Michel Foucault argues that ‘punishment is not an act of justice, but an act of power,’ and thereby ‘prison serves as a mechanism of control and exclusion.’ Fear is a powerful tool to control the public, and Davis shows ‘the media…have a vested interest in perpetuating the notion that crime is out of control,’ such as how ‘from 1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half nationwide, but homicide stories on the three major networks rose almost fourfold.’ In our present we see many politicians gearing up to center crime for their 2024 election platform, even having bills passed to increase policing claiming an increase in crime despite a decline in crime nationally at the moment. Yet prisons are overpopulated and since 1970 the US incarcerated population has increased by 700%, outpacing population growth despite FBI data showing violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022 (yes a large percentage of incarcerations are drug charges but, as Dominique DuBois Gilliard argues, ‘We cannot incarcerate ourselves out of addiction. Addiction is a medical crisis that—when it comes to nonviolent offenders—warrants medical interventions, not incarceration.’). Add to this that the US spends on average $80 billion on incarceration a year, and it starts to seem far less about solving problems.
‘ As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.’ ― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Speaking of grasping at the root, Davis unpacks the history of imprisonment and its ties to racism, which continually perpetuate today. Alex Lichtenstein discusses how in a post-slavery US South, Jim Crow laws and policing in general were used to ‘recruit and discipline a convict labor force’ which became a key in Southern industrialization and a focus on policing now-freed Black people brought them back into penal labor programs. Davis examines many ties to racism which leads to more policing of marginalized peoples (think post-9/11 and the massive increase in detainment of Middle Eastern and South Asian peoples by the INS) and links to how Black and other marginalized communities have a higher rate of imprisonment such as Black adults being 10 times more likely to receive prison than a white adult.
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Davis also discusses gender disparities, such as looking at the imprisonment of Assata Shakur or discussing how sexual abuse is a rampant but unacknowledged form of punishment women prisoners are subjected to. ‘Deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane,’ she writes. For those interested in the subject, Davis furthered the topic in Abolition. Feminism. Now. along with Gina Dent ‘because we wanted to encourage people to think about feminism and abolition together.’ In an interview with Harpers, Davis discusses how part of abolition means attempting to ‘criticize carceral feminism that assumes that one can deal gender violence simply by incarcerating the individual perpetrator and not taking into consideration the larger social context that produces violence against women.’
‘I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions…which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.’ —Howard Zinn
In her chapter Prison Industrial Complex, Davis looks at ‘the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world,’ and corporate investment and prison profiteering. ‘Not only do companies extract cheap labor from prisons but have also profited by selling products to correctional facilities and other corporate investments,’ and incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion/year in goods and more than $9 billion/year in services. Yet, on average, inmates are paid between 13 cents and 52 cents per hour nationwide, if at all. States like Texas have no wage for prison labor but the Texas penal labor system was valued at $88.9 million in 2014. This is allowable due as, while the 13th Amendment protects against slavery it excludes those incarcerated due to criminal conviction.
A list of the 4,100 corporations using prison labor can be found HERE
'I think about capitalism as a political and economic system that categorizes groups of people for the purposes of exploiting, excluding, and extracting their labor toward the profit of another group. Those categories can consist of race, gender, disability, sexuality, immigration status, and much more.' ― Derecka Purnell
Finally, in the chapter Abolitionist Alternatives, Davis returns to how ‘we focus myopically on the existing system at the expense of imagining alternatives. She argues we must ‘let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment’ and instead ;imagine a constellation of alternative strategist…with the ultimate aim of removing prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society.’ She looks at efforts in Australia to push back against privatization of prison and community support groups as ideas, pointing out that alternative justice and systems are already available to affluent communities—such as costly drug and alcohol treatments—and asks to imagine ways to make those systems available to the mass public. She offers a few alternative such as the demilitarization of school, accessible education for all, free healthcare, all in an aim to create a justice system based on reconciliation instead of punishment.
Overall, abolition is ideological work in ‘pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punishment’ and overturning the socially couched notions that “criminals” are a lower class of people who’s civil and human rights may be diminished or revoked compared to others. Are Prisons Obsolete? is an effective look at the problems of prison and a well argued approach that says reform is not enough. As Ruth Gilmore says ‘abolition is about making things as much as it is about dismantling.’ A highly recommended read.
5/5
‘Rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.’
Midway through his graphic memoir, Zodiac, Ai Weiwei states that all artists should also be activists lest they simp‘Art is wrestling with yourself.’
Midway through his graphic memoir, Zodiac, Ai Weiwei states that all artists should also be activists lest they simply be a ‘dead artist’ even while living. ‘Metamorphosis is the core of art,’ he explains later and sees the importance of creating and experiencing art not only as a transformation of the self but also society at large. This is certainly the case with Ai Weiwei who one cannot mention in terms of his art—be it his sculptures, photographs, documentaries or other installation pieces—without also discussing his activism, as if the two were simply dual appendages of the same body. His arrest in 2011 became a flashpoint for human rights and other activist organizations and as he was held for 81 days without a charge he quickly became a world renown symbol of artistic resistance and the importance of freedoms of speech and expression. Here Ai Weiwei along with Elettra Stamboulis tells his life story in graphic format with illustrations by Gianluca Costantini being both a memoir and a profound and philosophical musing on art, resistance and the importance of making your voice heard despite the powers that would rather have it be silent. This makes a great companion piece to his previous memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir from 2021. Told in a conversational style between Ai and his son or with interviewers and other artists, interspersed with mythological tales and framed around reflections on the zodiac signs in relation to activism, this is a fascinating and thought provoking look into the life and mind of this great artist.
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‘Art is just the beginning’
I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of Ai Weiwei’s work when several pieces of his collection came to Grand Rapids, Mi in 2017. I’ve long been fascinated with him both as an artist but also as a symbol for the possibilities of art as activism and bold statements of freedom so this was a really engaging and enjoyable look at his life as well as his reflections on his own works. ‘Power is so afraid of art and poets,’ Ai tells us, ‘art has the possibility to defend very essential rights’ and he examines how many pieces of his own work set out to do just that. There are some great commentaries on works like his fairytale project at Documenta 12, the message behind his sunflower seeds, his work on the Birds Nest olympic stadium, or his collection of names of students killed in the Sichuan earthquake about which he says ‘All the silence from the State apparatus cannot erase the persistent memories of the survivors. We have to remember at least their names.’ He reflects upon his imprisonment, the demolition of his studio by the government, his inability to leave China after he was released and more. I also enjoyed that the book was structured around ideas of the zodiac, reflecting his own sculpture piece Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads.
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Photo from when I saw the Ai Weiwei exhibit in Grand Rapids
‘Art is against repetition. It’s about leading us toward more dangerous ways of experiencing ourselves.’
Beyond his own life, Ai Weiwei also discusses the works of other important activists such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiabo or Ai Weiwei’s own father, Ai Qing who faced imprisonment and exile as well. Through it all he discusses how art is always a fight for freedom.
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I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot reading it. It is really well paced and covers a lot of ground, both historically and philosophically. I love his love of poetry and belief in the power of art, it is truly inspiring. The artwork in this collection is wonderful too, often representing famous photographs of Ai Weiwei and his works while also moving into really surreal imagery. This is a great format for this work as it, too, is a work of art but is also very accessible to get the message across to a wide range of readers across a wide age range (this would work great in a high school classroom, for instance).
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Perhaps my favorite moment of the book comes early on, however, in his discussion on why cats are left out of the Chinese zodiac. He explains to his son that he loves cats because they are ‘n animal that cat open doors, but they are different from human beings because they don’t close the doors behind them.’ He sees this as a symbol of great art: ‘The key is to keep the doors open…like the cats, we have to keep the door that we call freedom of speech and thought open.’ So perhaps we should all be more like the cat and keep the door open for art and freedom of expression. Zodiac is a lovely graphic novel.
4/5
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What would a book on Ai Weiwei be without his iconic middle finger?...more
‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ - James Baldwin
It is distressing to hear the constant warn‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ - James Baldwin
It is distressing to hear the constant warnings of scientists speaking on the imminent danger of climate crisis, like a red alert going off in a spaceship, loud and flashing as the crew scrambles for evasive maneuvers. Except often it feels like that crew is sitting there helping the danger instead of pulling off some heroic Han Solo moves to save the ship. That ship is our Earth, and for decades if feels like the crew, us, have been sitting there like the ‘this is fine’ meme of the dog drinking coffee in a burning house while fossil fuel and securities companies have thrown colossal amounts of money into organizations doing everything from distractionary tactics to put the blame on individuals (BP invented the “carbon footprint” for instance) in order to avoid systemic changes, to outright denying the issue exists. Not Too Late, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua offer a different perspective: while there is much work to be done, while the danger is not only coming but already here, climate activists have made positive progress and if we still have hope we can accomplish more. Because we have to or we face a very different future where many will not survive. Collecting essays and interviews from climate activists around the world, this is an empowering and passionate plea for organizing and holding fast to hope while also being a very educational book on the subject of the climate crisis. Dr Jacquelyn Gill asks us to consider ‘What could we accomplish if we stood together and faced the danger?’ and Mary Annaïse Heglar reminds us that this requires people working together when she asks ‘what if your power in this fight lies not in what you can do as an individual but in your ability to be part of a collective?’ This is a wonderful collection that provides hope in the darkness and is accessible to newcomers to the struggle—as gathering more people to climate activism is essential to its success—while being thought provoking, insightful and educational even to those already invested in the crisis.
‘What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and have succeeded. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is the series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.’ - Dr Joëlle Gergis
I’ve always quite enjoyed Rebecca Solnit for approaching rather uncomfortable and dark—but necessary and often urgent—topics in a way that is inspiring and hopeful. She often passes your through the dread but points to a light at the end of the tunnel and reminds you getting there is hopefully possible. Even her discussions on what ‘hope’ means is rather lovely:
’ To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible. To plan and to accept that the unexpected often disrupts plans--for the better and for the worse. To know the powerful have their weaknesses, and we who are supposed to be weak have great power together, power to change the world, have done so before and will again. To know that the future will be what we make of it in the present. To know that joy can appear in the midst of crisis, and that a crisis is a crossroads.’
But we can’t just get caught up in hope, either, as every person in this book reminds us that this is a lot of work, but work that it is imperative we accomplish. ‘This is a message of catastrophe, but it does demand we think transformationally’ Edward R. Carr insists, giving hope that ‘a climate-resilient future is still possible.’ Lutunatabua agrees, adding ‘ The question shouldn't be Will my actions be enough? but Will our actions be enough? This is a communal quest in which everyone can bring their talents…’ Throughout this collection, the theme of community and organizing to work together rings out the loudest. We can’t do this alone, they insist, but offer hope when we work together.
Not Too Late collects organizers from all over the world to present their perspectives, such as the Pacific Climate Warriors who remind us to approach the situation with sensitivity to race and culture as well. ‘We were recipients of a white savior narrative that really painted us as folks who really couldn’t tap into our own agency or…inventiveness,’ Fenton Lutunatabua says in an interview with Thelma. It is a reminder how quickly intentions to help can come across in ‘a very condescending way.’ For the 2020 US election I worked as the campaign finance officer for a US House of Representatives campaign (we did not win) and was only one of two staffers for the beginning when we were basically at the drawing board for our platform along with a group we hired that had worked on several West Michigan campaigns. Our candidate was very versed in climate crisis issues and we were frustrated when advised against making that a major platform, showing us data that while climate issues had been on the rise as an “important” issue for voters, the previous election showed a sudden decline and former candidates saying that platform issue hurt them. The theory was that between 2016 and 2018, climate issues were often discussed by a wonderfully inclusive group with many people of color, women and younger people being the forefront and in rural West Michigan, white voters (particularly men) suddenly grew disinterested or distrustful over the issues (we still ran with climate issues on the platform, but still lost). This is a classic example of misogynoir at work. Though don’t be discouraged, as Solnit cites a study showing that while in the US people estimate only 37-43% of people ‘support major climate change mitigation policies,’ actually a 66-80% of people do. PEW Research center also tracks that this is increasing, though there are party line issues:
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While the aforementioned issue showed how racism, misogyny and agesim can be an issue involved in climate activism it also demonstrates how, as several chapters here mention, fighting against climate crisis is so intertwined with other liberation or equity movements. As author Adrienne Maree Brown in an interview, the growth in learning and fighting for climate issues in the US and UK has appeared to be adjacent to the #MeToo movement, prison abolition, BLM as people are seeing how structural and systemic oppressions are linked. Also that these systems uphold the same powerful people who perpetrate the various crises. It makes some people dismiss climate activism as just something ‘radical leftists’ support. In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, journalist Naomi Klein discusses how many fear climate activism as ‘a trojan horse for socialism’ (a huge issues also discussed in essays on the New Green Deal in her essay collection On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal) and, as you may have guessed from the title, admits that without major change in economic policies there is no hope for a livable future on Earth. She details how oil or securities companies have help fund the climate-denier movements (weapons manufacturers, she argues, stand to gain in a world where chaos ensues as mass migrations and other disasters occur due to climate disasters) and how this has also created a political divide hindering progress. This is a concern shared by Dr Leah Cardamore Stokes in her chapter:
‘When denial became indefensible, the fossil fuel industry started singing a new song: the crisis can’t be solved. Delay paid them in cash. When we hear stories about the harms posed by clean energy technologies, we should take a beat and ask: who profits from telling this story? Too often, the fossil fuel industry is seeding propaganda to make us feel hopeless and defeated. If we delay, they profit.’
This is furthered by Professor Farhana Sultana who states that ‘Colonialism haunts the past, present, and future through climate,’ arguing that climate activism must also focus on global equity and be sensitive to cultural and racial issues towards ‘reparative climate equity.’ The idea that climate activism also means creating a better world overall on a variety of issues is rather reassuring.
‘ The question shouldn't be Will my actions be enough? but Will our actions be enough? This is a communal quest in which everyone can bring their talents…’
Despite a lot of hard truths and discouragement, this book is endlessly optimistic and rather hopeful to read. There is a chapter detailing the chronology of successes in climate movements, such as the Paris Climate Treaty or the stoppage of oil pipelines by water defenders. This book also reminds you that you are not alone in your worries, that there are many opportunities to help (it gives a great resource list for further reading or joining the fight) and reminds us that the future is still uncertain. Sure, it is very likely that there will be more climate disasters and things will in fact get bad, but we also have the opportunity to mitigate disaster and fight against total destruction. For those looking to learn more, to find a way to move forward or simply need some hope in the darkness, Not Too Late is a lovely collection with a lot of brilliant minds.
4/5
‘Change happens gradually, then suddenly. It’s never too late to be part of the social movement that will help heal our world.’...more
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