Thread by @agraybee

I'm Doing The Work and reading Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete. It starts with the gobsmacking claim that anti-slavery was a fringe position until the Civil War. This would be a surprise to Pennsylvania, which outlawed slavery in 1780.

She repeatedly claims that "no one could imagine a world without slavery." Not only were Northern states outlawing it mere years after the Revolution, it was being outlawed all over the world. We're not off to a great start here.

There's just an enormous amount of self-flattery here. Before any arguments are made we're told that by being a prison abolitionist you are John Brown's ideological heir, whom she refers to as an "activist." That's like calling Michelangelo an interior decorator.

I'm going to peek ahead at the section called Alternatives to Prison. It starts on page 105. The book is 112 pages long.

Davis acknowledges that the small-minded non-activists wonder what we will do with the murderers and rapists. She doesn't like this question. It "interrupts" all the important conversations abolitionists are having. Nevertheless, she will deign to humor us, just this once.

The answer is that we won't need prisons because we'll improve education and healthcare so there won't be criminals. There are more mentally ill people in prison than psychiatric wards anyway (citation fucking needed on that one.)

The rest of this chapter is more about how prisons are morally indefensible, she seems to have given up on the murderers and rapists question after one paragraph.

I'm really not sure why this chapter exists if it's mostly going to be about drug laws. As an aside, being for drug legalization makes you the ideological heir of anti-prohibition people. It's very important to know that you're important and historic.

It ends with an anecdote about a couple who forgave the men who killed their daughter. And that's it. That's how the foundational text of prison abolition ends. A feel-good story about grieving parents who found an unusual way to deal with loss.

Listen, if someone kills a loved one of mind and gets sentenced to art lessons at a non-profit, I'm just going to kill him and take my own art lessons on the chin. Or maybe I'll blow it off, what are they gonna do, give me more lessons.