Editorial commentary
Angela Y. Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) has been read for two decades as a foundational text in the contemporary abolitionist tradition. The discussion circle re-reads the book in the context of the post-2020 movement, considers what Davis got right, and engages where the contemporary abolitionist tradition has had to go beyond Davis's original framework.
Angela Y. Davis emerged as a public political figure in the late 1960s and early 1970s, served as a graduate student of Herbert Marcuse, was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1970, was acquitted of conspiracy and kidnapping charges in 1972, and has since built one of the most productive scholarly careers in contemporary Black studies. Her books — Women, Race & Class (1981), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), the essay collections, the more recent Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022) — constitute the most extensive single-author corpus in the contemporary American prison-abolition tradition.
Davis's specific 2003 framework rested on the documentation of the institutional structure of the U.S. prison-industrial complex, the economic interests organized around the system's continued expansion, the racial-demographic patterns of the system's operation, and the comparative record of penal systems in other countries. The framework was politically ambitious for its time; the analytical move Davis made was to open political space for the more thoroughgoing structural critique the book performed.
The circle's reading engages what Davis's 2003 framework anticipated and what it did not anticipate. The framework anticipated the broader political-economic analysis of the prison system. What the framework did not fully anticipate was the specific institutional question of what abolitionist politics looks like at scale across multiple municipal-level political conversations simultaneously, with the corresponding question of what alternative institutions would have to be constructed.
Preparation for the circle: read the full text of Are Prisons Obsolete? (under one hundred pages). Optional supplementary reading includes Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag (2007), chapters one and five; Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021); and the contemporary scholarship on what is sometimes called 'non-reformist reforms.'
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Editorial commentary
Angela Y. Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) has been read for two decades as a foundational text in the contemporary abolitionist tradition. The discussion circle re-reads the book in the context of the post-2020 movement, considers what Davis got right, and engages where the contemporary abolitionist tradition has had to go beyond Davis's original framework.
Angela Y. Davis emerged as a public political figure in the late 1960s and early 1970s, served as a graduate student of Herbert Marcuse, was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 1970, was acquitted of conspiracy and kidnapping charges in 1972, and has since built one of the most productive scholarly careers in contemporary Black studies. Her books — Women, Race & Class (1981), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), the essay collections, the more recent Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022) — constitute the most extensive single-author corpus in the contemporary American prison-abolition tradition.
Davis's specific 2003 framework rested on the documentation of the institutional structure of the U.S. prison-industrial complex, the economic interests organized around the system's continued expansion, the racial-demographic patterns of the system's operation, and the comparative record of penal systems in other countries. The framework was politically ambitious for its time; the analytical move Davis made was to open political space for the more thoroughgoing structural critique the book performed.
The circle's reading engages what Davis's 2003 framework anticipated and what it did not anticipate. The framework anticipated the broader political-economic analysis of the prison system. What the framework did not fully anticipate was the specific institutional question of what abolitionist politics looks like at scale across multiple municipal-level political conversations simultaneously, with the corresponding question of what alternative institutions would have to be constructed.
Preparation for the circle: read the full text of Are Prisons Obsolete? (under one hundred pages). Optional supplementary reading includes Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag (2007), chapters one and five; Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021); and the contemporary scholarship on what is sometimes called 'non-reformist reforms.'
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.