Why prison seems inevitable

Thanks to a recommendation from @eveewing on Twitter, I've started reading Angela Davis's slim but meaty volume, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Chapter 1 lays out the cultural and economic reasons why it's difficult even to raise the possibility that we might not need prisons to enjoy a peaceful society.

Prisons, Davis observes, are paradoxically both distant and omnipresent in our lives: we in "the free world" tend to think of them as a place where other people ("evildoers") go:

The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs-it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

The capitalistic system in which "migrating corporations" abandon vulnerable communities for cheaper labor provides the prison industrial complex with a rich source of potential inmates. Citing Ruth Gilmore, Davis points out that it also provides a receptive seedbed of communities eager to reap the promised economic benefits of building more prisons.

In the dramatic expansion of the prison system during the Reagan era, capitalism provided itself with a self-serving solution to the social problems created by its own social irresponsibility, by making them both profitable and invisible.

But even as the prison system, by design, hides itself from view, pervasive media images compel us to experience prison as something necessary and natural:

The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond the prison.

Even though the massive expansion of the prison system in the United States has not delivered on its economic or social promises of kick-starting languishing economies or significantly reducing crime, it has long gone largely unquestioned. There has more recently been a growth in skepticism, but the discussion is dominated by reforms, rather than fundamental changes:

Debates about strategies of decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call lithe free world." How can we move to decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services? How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing "crime" and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.