Spring 2020 Crim 202 Book Review: Are Prisons Obsolete? Davis

This book review critically analyzes Angela Davis's 'Are Prisons Obsolete?', focusing on the flaws of the current prison system and advocating for its abolition. The review highlights Davis's arguments against imprisonment, the prison industrial complex, and the historical context of incarceration. It examines the book's key themes, including the connections between slavery, civil rights, and abolitionist perspectives, as well as how gender structures the prison system. The review also discusses the need for alternative approaches to justice and explores potential abolitionist alternatives. Furthermore, it presents a clear understanding of Davis's viewpoint on the corporate interests in the progression and advancement of control and confinement. The review also references the importance of recognizing the need for different answers to deal with those who commit harm in society, with compassion and regular responses. The author also mentions the importance of developing awareness of the need for change and the importance of imagining a more just system.

University
Book Review
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Y. Davis
Student Credentials
3/23/2020

Criminology 1
Checklist
S. No Commodities required for the assignment Yes No
1 Book: Are prisons obsolete? By Angela Davis
2 Notepad
3 Pen
4 Computer/Laptop
5 Internet

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Book Review
The book that shall be discussed here is Are Prisons Obsolete? By none
other than Angela Davis, gave an idea as in how this justice system works. The main
theme behind the whole justice system which is punishing the culprits and
imprisoning them for their deeds is what this book talks about. This book also in
some manner also connects with another book by Thomas Mathiesen, The
Unfinished, as according to it, one system cannot be replaced with another just like
that as well as, that the craft in order to taking a stab at fairness and equity is an
advancement of between related and some of the time advantageous procedures.
To summarise the whole concept, it will not be wrong to state that the current system
where punishments such as imprisonment is not effective anymore and is out of
control as well. This system in no way poses as a system that people look forward to
in terms of safety, equality, security or even in any manner free. There is a
presumption in relation with the system as before this system that is out dated,
destructive and totally obsolete and ineffective as well, is replaced policy makers
need to create or imagine an alternative to this system that will be easy to carry out
or regulate for that matter as well as be effective enough (Davis, 2003).
At the present time, and as needs be open, the book by Angela Davis further
support the invalidation dispute and gives some incredibly clear and unquestionable

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inspirations to furthermore dissect the impact of the prison current complex, rather
than continuing with prison change. Undeniably confinement has become the
directing criminal value response and that prison is an irreversible assumption. As
Ms. Davis clearly verbalizes, the inciting of conviction based crazes, fear and
despise mongering is furthermore fundamental to the order and confinement
industry. Those with the power as well as resources, advantage from the continued
reliance on confinement so as to convince not simply the people who make open
system and law, yet the rest of individuals as a rule. But on the off chance that the
experts continue locking people up, the masters will all be in extraordinary peril of
the loss of open's prosperity, security, and general thriving. Without a doubt, Ms.
Davis reveals that it is effectively these proportional sorts of conflicts and a
comparative talk and judgment that started before the cancelation of subjection in
the United States. As she in like manner points out, confinement offices were made
as an inexorably alluring and evidently human choice rather than the past standard
of torment and death.The rising of corporate interests in the progression and
advancement of control and confinement is an indisputable and crucial bit of the
prison mechanical complex. Ms. Davis raises that the impact and bad form -
additionally the destructiveness - of the effect of corporatization of the torment and
control industry are so introduced in the individual and total North American brain,
and dynamically all through the mechanical world, that it has attacked even our

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recreational and "preoccupation" organizations (Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?,
2010).
Ms. Davis furthermore thinks a bit of her discussion right now the activity of
gender based direction in the sorting out of confinement offices. In order to be
argumentative, it would have been a kick to see more discussion of the activity that
the response against violence against women and youths, and sexism with
everything taken into account, has played in adding to the extended mistreatment,
criminalization, and confinement of women, similarly as the most vulnerable male
abusers - poor, radicalized men. In any case, the maker presents a bit of the troubles
that an abolitionist position positions to the people who are participated in their
hankering to stop male brutality and abuse of women and children. Additionally,
against fierceness workers see that control and confinement don't make women or
children safe, except for perhaps for the incredibly obliged time that the individual
may serve in power. Such temporary departure and division of specific individuals
from those to whom they may speak to a danger is a Band Aid response, most ideal
situation (Mitchelson, 2019).
Ms. Davis fights that it is necessary to focus not on sustaining criminal value
responses that just develop the standard, in light of the fact that the situation limits
and exploits the people who are commonly unprotected, such that renders them
bound to be sentenced and bound to fight for their very perseverance. Given the

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rigid associations between cuts to social organizations, prosperity programs, and
informational possibilities, extended amounts of the poor-especially young
radicalized women are progressively helpless against dejection, vagrancy, mental
and other prosperity challenges, and lessened educational and work openings. She
thusly sets up the system for the perspective that these are also comparable people
who are in like manner bound to be the first to be scapegoated, censured, and kept.
Ms. Davis doesn't make a comprehended association between the response against
fierceness against women and the eagerness of organizations and undertakings in
keeping up the standard of force, control, and resources in the hands of the
predominately hetero, male, predominately white, and predominately focus and high
society. It is clear, in any case, that a comparable power for response against
Americans in the United States, Aboriginal society in Canada and Australia, and the
courses of action that are realizing women being the snappiest creating prison
peoples far and wide, all have practically identical roots. Ms. Davis talks about strip
searches of women as a fundamental exemplification of a gendering of order. She is
unequivocally belittling of the usage and maltreatment of strip look in conditions
including confinement and various sorts of social control of women (Laura, 2018).
The realities affirm that people base near sightedly on the present system -
and perhaps this is the issue that prompts the supposition that confinement is the
principle choice as opposed to death - it is uncommonly hard to imagine an in a

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general sense similar structure prepared for dealing with, such serious people such
as offenders. By the day's end, a progressively perplexed structure may yield a more
noteworthy number of options than if we basically try to locate a lone substitute for
the prison system. The underlying advance, by then, is surrendered the hankering to
discover one single elective game plan of control that would have a comparable
impression as the prison system (Levesque, 2019).
Unquestionably, it has been individual’s affiliation based experience that in
each system - even systems that are ordinarily depicted as the most preservationist
and pro -prison, when the ordinary individual is drawn nearer to prescribe the best
strategies for achieving the best possible valuable for all in the system, including the
people who may have executed harm in those systems, prison is never the first or
the most broadly perceived response gave. Or maybe, it has been individual’s
experience that when people are drawn closer to consider choices for uncommon
resources, choices running from improved availability of child care, guidance,
prosperity, social sponsorships, money related progression, pleasant living, and
common undertakings are the supported decisions for human and budgetary
endeavour. There is emphatically a restless yearning in like manner society for
continuously compassionate and regular responses to describe, address, and survey
what harms the public (Ralston, 2019).

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Plus, it is moreover basic to remember that, undoubtedly, no common,
national, or worldwide body has been reasonably picked or picked dependent on in
reverse, remedial, devious social, financial, or political systems. Continually these
sorts of exercises are referenced after the individuals have been picked, assigned, or
favoured. Witness the activities of the current head of the United States, who did not
have an indisputable order to administer, yet dependably and haughtily requests
utilizing the impact of their office in the most undemocratic and risky manner for
Americans and people the globe over, particularly the people who have the episode
of living in oil-rich countries (Cummings & Lamparello, 2016).
Until the mindfulness develops that something different is conceivable, a
significant number of people dread that the punishments such as imprisonments are
not old at all and will proceed as an assumed panacea for all people’s social ills.
Actually, as Ms. Davis calls attention to, detainment facilities as they are essential to
the development of the equivalent corporate interests that at present depend upon
the jail modern just as the military mechanical complex for their proceeded with huge
development. Another region that additionally requires further assessment is what is
really condemned and why. The way that such huge numbers of destructive activities
and exercises are not condemned, and that just those perpetrated by specific
individuals, in specific settings, at specific occasions, are promptly condemned and
rebuffed by detainment, is additionally a fundamental part to this issue. For instance,

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as Ms. Davis calls attention to in the book, preceding the nullification of servitude,
not many dark individuals were detained in American prisons. So also, before the
finish of private schools and different types of isolation of Aboriginal people groups in
Canada, generally barely any Aboriginal individuals were detained. In order to
speculate the equivalent, it is valid in different aspect, for instance, Australia and
New Zealand, where colonizers brought thoughts of detainment, separation,
minimization, and enslavement to the world (Olson, 2016).
Most such methodologies assume that present meanings of damage and bad
behaviour are verifiable. Accordingly, they are well on the way to result for the most
part in a last rendering or end that contrasts just in the idea of the discipline and the
personality of the judges and courts (for instance the individual or people who holds
the power to give out the outcome) of the mischief that is perceived as done. As Ms.
Davis calls attention to in her decision, it will no uncertainty be our quest for options,
which must be libertarian and comprehensive, also women's activist that will at long
last render detainment facilities out of date.

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Bibliography
Cummings, A. D., & Lamparello, A. (2016). Private prisons and the new marketplace
for crime. Wake Forest JL & Pol'y, 407.
Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press .
Davis, A. Y. (2010). Are Prisons Obsolete? Retrieved March 23, 2020, from
Féministes radicales:
https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Angela-
Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf
Laura, C. T. (2018). Against Prisons and the Pipeline to Them. In Toward What
Justice? (pp. 19-28). Routledge.
Levesque, A. (2019). Female Abolitionists. In The Encyclopedia of Women and
Crime (pp. 1-2).
Mitchelson, M. L. (2019). Prisons . Radical Geography: Antipode, 221-226.
Olson, J. C. (2016). Race and punishment in American prisons. Journal of Public
Administration Research and Theory, 758-768.
Ralston, R. (2019). SCHOOLS, PRISONS, AND HIGHER EDUCATION. In Critical
Perspectives on Teaching in Prison: Students and Instructors on Pedagogy
Behind the Wall.