Feminist Next System Literature Review

Angela Davis, Mumia Abu Jamal, & Alternatives to Prison

For most of her career, Davis has been working on prison abolition. In this 2014 essay she co-wrote with Mumia Abu Jamal, they offer a critique of mega-incarceration, linking it to histories of enslavement and oppression of people of color and profit-generating capitalism (for-profit prisons). In thinking about solutions they write that “Any serious attempt to arrive at solutions thus has to move beyond both capitalism and its systems of retributive (punishment-based) justice.” They continue to describe the ways in which social structures contain deep biases about crime which is based on historical, economic and social histories of exploitation, racism, hierarchical capitalism and a reaction to attempt to challenge this system. For Davis and Abu Jamal, “for authentic democracy to emerge, “abolition democracy” must be enacted—the abolition of institutions that advance the dominance of any one group over any other. It is the democracy that is possible if we continue the legacy of the great abolition movements in American history, those that opposed slavery, lynching, and segregation...The idea of abolition democracy comes from a reading of U.S. history where the freedom struggle is central to who Americans are and to why we are who we are.”

Continuing, the authors suggest that a socialist alternative could challenge the prison-industrial society, and the many other problems that create it and emanate from it. For their next system model, the authors write:

"The indigenous peoples of this continent, according to some historians, gave far better evidence of democracy, gender equality, and racism-free life and governance than its European invaders did. We might also discover important insights about justice by looking at histories of indigenous people. Among the Native Americans of the Northeast, criminal justice was a communal concern...Establishing community courts (especially, ones composed of non-lawyers) would utilize these insights from traditional societies, and thus mitigate the destructiveness inherent in the present corporate-type, assembly-line system that is breaking state budgets and individuals’ bodies and spirits on the anvil of so-called “criminal justice.” Nor is this idea unthinkable within the current U.S. legal system. In Pennsylvania, both the state constitution and state law provide for the establishment of “community courts,” as a section of what’s termed the minor judiciary. One was opened in Philadelphia in 2002, becoming one of approximately 30 community courts in U.S. cities (and 50 outside the U.S.) Like its counterparts, the Philadelphia Community Court was empowered to use community service and other restorative sanctions to address “quality of life” offenses such as prostitution, drug possession, and theft. When the court closed down in September 2011 due to funding cuts, it had enabled more than 500,000 hours of community service. It also provided offenders with social services such as medical care and drug counseling.

What, systematically, must be changed? If we see the present structure as problematic, then we must consider how to destroy, reconstruct, or ameliorate it. And if history is our guide, we must be vigorous, for else we will see old forms reassert themselves with new masks, protecting the same (or worse) inequalities.

What we decide to do will be open to the decisions of popular, democratic groupings in the future, as they seek greater humanistic and socialistic expressions, but a basic preliminary list would include:It’s also time to end the racist “war on drugs,” which is as illogical as it is ineffective. It has been little more than a mask for massing state power against social movements and lower-class populations.We cannot, at this juncture of history, pussyfoot around. The cynical among us might well ask, “Humph! That’s all fine and dandy. But how do you get there from here?” Fair question. Those of us who have lived in, worked in, and studied history know that social change is no short-term or ready-made process. We know that social movements play a decisive role in that process, for they move nations from one seemingly settled place to quite other places over time. As repression continues, so too must resistance. Abolition democracy is one vision of how to deepen and extend that resistance. A central tenet of it is building (or, perhaps, rebuilding) movements of prisoners and against mass incarceration." 

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