BY ROBYN MARSHALL
BRISBANE — African-American socialist Angela Davis called for the abolition of all prisons during a public lecture at the University of Queensland on November 27. Davis was attending the international conference on Women in Prison organised by Debbie Kilroy, convenor of Sisters Inside, an advocacy organisation for the human rights of women prisoners.
Davis, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, came to public prominence in 1969 when she was sacked from her teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party of the USA.
Her long-standing commitment to prisoners' rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free George Jackson and WL Nolen, two African Americans who had established a chapter of the Black Panther Party in California.
In 1970, she was placed on the FBI's "10 most wanted list" on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search before being arrested and put on trial, where she was eventually acquitted.
In her lecture, attended by 150 people, Davis said there are now 2 million people incarcerated in US prisons — 1% of the US population. In California alone, there are 33 prisons, 38 camps and 16 community correctional facilities and five tiny prisoner mother facilities.
In 2002, there were 158,000 prisoners in the Californian prison system, of whom 35% were Latinos, 30% were African Americans and 29% were whites. Thirteen per cent of inmates were being held for immigration violations. There are now more women in prison in California than there were in prison in the entire country in the early 1970s.
Davis recounted the history of the campaign to abolish prisons in the US. In 1925, the first US prison reformers said that prisons should not be run by warders but by educators; prisons would become a place for secondary schooling and even university education. The first reformer was Thomas Osborn who said prisons should be changed from being human "scrap heaps" to human "repair shops".
There have been very few examples of actual reforms of the prison system in the US but a notable case was that of William Boon, whose efforts became known as the "Massachusetts experiment". A state director of prisons, Boon attempted to abolish all the reform schools for youth in Massachusetts in the 1960s. There were massive protests by white citizens and prison guards who called him "Boon the Coon" as he was an African American. The experiment was abandoned.
Davis argued that it is impossible to sustain progressive reforms to the prison system and often they turn into their opposites. As an example she cited the setting up of separate women's prisoners in 19th century England as a result of the reform campaign led by Elizabeth Fry.
One aim of this reform was to end the sexual abuse of women prisoners by male inmates. But women's prisons are now centres of rampant sexual abuse of women prisoners at the hands of their warders and places of state-sanctioned sexual assault through the regular use of the strip searching of women's body cavities, both vaginal and anal, after every visit by family and friends.
Another reform was the abolition of a definite sentencing time. The prisoner was not confined for a definite length of time but the time it took for him or her to be deemed to have been rehabilitated. George Jackson ended up with life for stealing $65 from a service station because he was regarded as "not reformed" and was finally assassinated by the prison guards.
Davis also said the modern US prison industrial system was just another way of continuing black slavery, where corporations pay virtually nothing for long hours of compulsory labour.
Women are primarily incarcerated for drug offences (80%). But, argued Davis, what can you say about a society where the massive pharmaceutical industry makes billions of dollars, pushing the taking of drugs on endless television advertisements that claim that life will be magically better if you take a particular drug?
These women can't afford those drugs so they are imprisoned for stealing money to buy drugs, some of which are illegal.
The prison-industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the prisons in the country. Davis described it as a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards' associations and legislative and court agendas.
Davis argued that prisons are considered so natural and so normal that it is extremely hard to imagine life without them. She argued that we must work to make prisons redundant by creating a radically more democratic and socially just society where retribution would no longer be seen as a means of achieving justice.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, December 10, 2003.
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