Are Prisons Obsolete?

Slavery abolitionists were considered fanatics in their time—much like prison abolitionists—because the public viewed the “peculiar institution” as permanent. The legal and extralegal institutions of lynching, Jim Crow laws, and segregation evolved to uphold white supremacy after emancipation, and only radical opposition and calls for total abolition dismantled these other practices. Davis argues that racism is not part of the distant past as many are taught to believe, and she emphasizes that many people alive today are only a few generations removed from those who saw these overtly racist institutions as unchangeable. Davis holds that prisons too are racist institutions—but they operate in “clandestine ways” to obscure their racism. Racism is so entrenched in prison operation that she believes abolishing one will likely involve abolishing the other.

Davis notes that early penitentiaries and slave plantations share many structural and ideological similarities that expose the institutions as equally cruel. Using Adam Jay Hirsch’s analysis of southern penitentiaries, Davis depicts how the regimes and the physical structures both mirror the repression of southern plantations. Hirsch notes that prison punishments looked like Slave Code punishments. Davis finds these similarities striking because many slave states reconfigured their laws post-abolition, using loopholes in the 13th Amendment, to permit slavery as a punishment for committing crimes.