Are Prisons Obsolete?

“Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families.”

Davis describes the difficult task for prison abolitionists to be taken seriously even by other activists. She notes the inability of many people to imagine a society without prisons because they are so normalized in America’s landscape. The second sentence introduces Davis’s deeply negative view of prison’s goals, which she argues destroy lives rather than reforming them.

“The gravity of these numbers becomes even more apparent when we consider that the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world's total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States.”

Davis shares statistics that to her prove America’s overreliance on the prison system. Before this passage, Davis reveals that the US holds more than two million people in its prisons out of the world total of nine million. Davis uses these statistics to raise the question as to why so many people are in prisons when crime rates have not risen to an extent that demands such an explosion in incarceration.

“On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is a reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them.”

Despite prisons being so prominent in society, Davis sees a paradoxical reluctance to look behind the prison walls to uncover the truth of the institutions. A main theme of the text is prison’s simultaneous visibility and invisibility in the social landscape. Throughout the book, Davis exposes the backward and repressive practices within prisons.