Angela Y. Davis on Prisons

On a day when civil rights and poor people’s movements should be on all of our minds: 

whatijustread:

“The dividends that accrue from investment in the punishment industry, like those that accrue from investment in weapons production, only amount to social destruction. Taking into account the structural similarities and profitability of business-government linkages in the realm of military production and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterised as a ‘prison industrial complex.’”

and

“This political economy of prisons relies on racialised assumptions of criminality - such as images of Black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children - and on well-documented racist practices in arrest, conviction and sentencing patterns to deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment. Coloured bodies are the main raw material in this vast experiment to disappear the major social problems of our time. Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the imprisonment solution, however, what is revealed is racism, class bias and the parasitic seduction of capitalist profit within a system that materially and morally impoverishes its inhabitants, while it devours the social wealth needed to address the very problems that have led to spiralling numbers of prisoners.”

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   day when civil rights...poor people’s movements should be

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