Are Prisons Obsolete? is, in the literal sense, a pamphlet. The Seven Stories Press edition runs to a hundred pages. The pace is brisk; the tone is conversational; the bibliography in the back is heavy. Davis is doing what a long-time movement intellectual does, which is to translate a developed body of scholarship for a public that has not yet read it.
The argument is genealogical first and tactical second. Davis traces the institution of the prison historically — from its origins in the convict-leasing aftermath of the Thirteenth Amendment, through the twentieth-century expansion of state and federal prison systems, to the mass-incarceration buildup of the 1980s and 1990s — and shows that what looks like a natural and permanent feature of the social landscape is in fact a historically specific institution serving historically specific political and economic interests. Once she has shown that, the abolitionist question becomes the obvious one: if it was built, it can be unbuilt.
The book is not utopian. Davis is careful that abolition is not the instant emptying of prisons; it is the construction of the social institutions — housing, healthcare, education, employment — that make the carceral response to social problems unnecessary. It is a horizon, not a switch.
Read it in one sitting. It is short and the argument compounds.
Editorial commentary
Angela Y. Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) is a short volume — under one hundred pages — that has become one of the foundational documents of the contemporary prison-abolition movement. The volume argues that the U.S. prison system is not reformable in the conventional sense and that the abolitionist tradition provides the more analytically adequate 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 analytical case rests 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 comparative record is particularly significant: Davis documents the substantial reductions in incarceration rates achieved by other industrial democracies.
The 'abolition' the volume advocates is structural rather than immediate. Davis is not arguing for the overnight closure of all U.S. prison facilities; she is arguing for a political-strategic orientation that treats the elimination of the system as the goal toward which incremental policy work should be directed.
The Seven Stories Press paperback edition is the standard contemporary printing. The 2020 emergence of broader abolitionist political language in the United States, following the killing of George Floyd, drew on Davis's framework explicitly. The contemporary scholarship around Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba has continued the analytical line, with Gilmore's Golden Gulag (2007) providing the institutional-economic depth Davis's shorter volume could not.
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.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
Angela Y. Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) is a short volume — under one hundred pages — that has become one of the foundational documents of the contemporary prison-abolition movement. The volume argues that the U.S. prison system is not reformable in the conventional sense and that the abolitionist tradition provides the more analytically adequate 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 analytical case rests 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 comparative record is particularly significant: Davis documents the substantial reductions in incarceration rates achieved by other industrial democracies.
The 'abolition' the volume advocates is structural rather than immediate. Davis is not arguing for the overnight closure of all U.S. prison facilities; she is arguing for a political-strategic orientation that treats the elimination of the system as the goal toward which incremental policy work should be directed.
The Seven Stories Press paperback edition is the standard contemporary printing. The 2020 emergence of broader abolitionist political language in the United States, following the killing of George Floyd, drew on Davis's framework explicitly. The contemporary scholarship around Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba has continued the analytical line, with Gilmore's Golden Gulag (2007) providing the institutional-economic depth Davis's shorter volume could not.
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.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.