Are Prisons Obsolete Analysis

In Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete? she seeks to not only explain the prison industrial complex, but how women, and especially women of color are viewed and treated. Her ideologies are intertwined with theories of feminist criminology which seeks, “ to address this limitation by enhancing our understanding of both male and female offending as well as criminal justice system responses to their crimes.” Women of color in prison are often treated unequally to their white counterparts and receive harsher sentencing, stricter punishment, and an inability to escape the criminalization of their entire race. Davis points out that the tactics are used to instill a sense of fear and helplessness in these women. The helplessness that these women feel

She notes, “the notion that female “deviance” always has a sexual dimension persists in the contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and sexuality continues to be racialized” (Davis 68). Many guards often perform strip searches that include vulgar language and unnecessary touching that the prisoners must obey or get locked up in solitary confinement. During Davis’ talk at Humboldt State University she pointed out that if a regular audience was subjected to watch such actions performed on a women just walking down the street they would be appalled and immediately refer to that as an extreme case of sexual assault. Even if not explicitly sexually assaulted many women of color were locked away during their childbearing years and sterilized during the Eugenics movement and essentially assualted of their basic human right to reproduce. The movement towards sterilization further established the racial bias in the prison system because it made an attempt to extirpate the believed “bad genes” of the time which mainly belonged to women of