Are Prisons Obsolete?

One of the main reasons Davis argues for the abolition of prisons is the system’s blatant connections to racist ideologies. Behind slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, and segregation are white supremacist beliefs that Black bodies are inferior. Davis believes that prison is the successor and legal continuation of these institutions and their racist beliefs. After emancipation, white society wielded prisons as a new way to control recently freed Black people. White society intentionally altered the legal system through Black Codes—and, later, Jim Crow laws—to make normal behaviors criminal “only when the person charged was black” (28), allowing white society to interpret the vaguely worded Codes as they wished. In Chapter 2, Davis notes that the increase of convictions against Black people after emancipation swapped prison demographics in the South from all-white to all-Black, effectively normalizing the disproportionately Black prison populations that persist today. Although media, governments, and even education systems attempt to relegate American racism to the past, Davis reports that the racist targeting of Black people continues to this day, as police admit to having programs of racial profiling “designed to maximize the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested—even in the absence of probable cause” (31)—to maintain incarceration rates.