Are Prisons Obsolete?

Davis does an admirable job demonstrating that prisons are racist, unjust, and a central component of a system of exploitation that damages American democracy and economic opportunity. But the fact that prisons are terrible, both in their effects on society and at achieving their stated mission of reducing crime and reforming criminals, does not mean that they are obsolete. The strengths of this book, in linking prisons to endemic American racism and a toxic nexus of political-corporate-senesationalist media power, are undermined by its failure to grapple critically with ideas of security, the failures of the court system, and how prisons both reify and ‘correct’ various forms of social and psychological deviance. At least it’s short.