Angela Davis became the nation’s most famous inmate
when she was locked up in the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village
nearly 30 years ago. The FBI had put Davis on its Ten Most Wanted list after a
gun registered to her was used in a fatal courtroom shooting. But Davis’s fight
on behalf of prisoners did not end when a jury acquitted her.
Now Davis is launching a national campaign with an
upcoming conference titled “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial
Complex.” This event, scheduled for September 25 through 27 at the University
of California at Berkeley, is expected to attract 1000 activists and scholars.
It marks a new nationwide effort to organize opposition to the U.S.’s rapidly
expanding prison system. In a recent interview, Davis talked to the Voice
about the upcoming conference, her life as an inmate, and what she wants
Americans to know about crime and punishment.
1.
Village Voice: How do you think
the experience of imprisonment has changed since you were in jail?
2.
Angela Davis:Many of the material
conditions have become better. When I was in jail in New York, the Women’s
House of Detention in the Village was a dungeon. It was teeming with mice and
roaches. I don’t know how many roaches I spit out of the black coffee that I
drank. Feeling the mice crawling over me at night was a nightmare. I’m not
saying that there aren’t mice and rats and roaches anymore, because there are
on Rikers Island. But there has been attention to cleanliness. Since then, the
technologies of the system have really changed. In the new prisons, [guards]
can push a button and they can lock down everyone in the entire prison at the
same time. There is an attempt to create the possibility of controlling [and]
surveilling ever larger numbers of prisoners with ever smaller numbers of
guards. That is very scary. I think that the deprivation of human rights is
even worse today.
3.
What first sparked your interest in the
politics of prisons?
4.
I became interested in prison issues in the late
1960s and early 1970s as a consequence of working in several campaigns to free
political prisoners such as Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and other
members of the Black Panther Party. When I became a member of the Soledad
Brothers Defense Committee, I had the opportunity to correspond with George
Jackson, and it was actually as a result of my own relationship with him that I
began to think more deeply about the role of prisons. He insisted on thinking
not only about political prisoners, but thinking about the political function
of the prison. However, it was not until I was myself imprisoned that I began
to think seriously about the need to include prison issues on any progressive
social agenda. I certainly had not seriously considered issues related to women
in prison prior to my own imprisonment.
5.
You use the term “prison industrial complex”
in the title of your conference. What does that mean?
6.
We have decided to make the prison industrial
complex the main organizing framework of this conference because this phrase
captures the symbiotic connection between the corporate economy and the
punishment industry. Prisons have become an enormous source of corporate profit
while they simultaneously devour social resources needed for education,
housing, health care, and welfare. Corporations that one would not expect to be
involved in punishment--IBM, Motorola--often use or contract with other
companies that directly rely on prison labor.
7.
Why is a “prison industrial complex” emerging
at this point in history?
8.
The industrialization of the economy has
destroyed some of the jobs that working-class people, and especially people of
color, used to be able to rely on. Leaving so many people without jobs
necessarily creates a situation where an underground economy is going to
develop [with] drugs that leads directly into the prison system. So rather than
attempting to address pressing social needs, the people who have these needs
are simply considered an expendable population to be thrown away, to disappear
into an ever increasing and ever repressive network of prisons.
9.
Why do you think women--and especially
African American women--comprise the fastest-growing segment of the prison
population?
10.
[Professor] Beth Richie found that a vast number
of the women she interviewed [at Rikers Island] had histories of violent abuse.
The point that Richie makes is that certain populations of women--poor women,
women of color--are subjected to a double bind. They are targets of violence
within domestic settings, and they are targets of state violence. There are
middle-class white women who are beaten up by their partners, but they aren’t
subjected to the kind of state surveillance that would lead them into prison.
They can go out and do some of the same things that poor women are doing--shoplifting
and so forth--but they are not subject to the same kind of surveillance that
would criminalize them before they’ve ever committed a crime. That combination
of state-inflicted criminalization and patriarchal violence in the home is the
key to understanding this web of punishment which poor women and women of color
are caught in.
11.
Is the public’s attitude about prison issues
today different from its views in the 1960s and 1970s?
12.
The fact that so many of us were political
prisoners--and were designated as common criminals--caused people to think
about the ideological function of criminalization. Of course, that was before
the shift toward conservative consciousness. Now crime is something that every
politician--including the people we call progressives--feels obliged to raise
to guarantee election.
13.
Why do you think crime has become America’s
hottest political issue?
14.
I don’t think anyone in this country escapes the
fear of crime. Studies have indicated that the people who are most afraid of
crime are the people who are least likely to be victims of crime. But I think
that the fear that people experience in relation to crime is often about a
whole range of things. It’s about projection of fear on the criminal rather
than thinking about all of the things that create insecurities. It used to be
that Communism was the enemy. But we don’t have the Communist enemy anymore as
a way to deflect all of those fears. So now there are other enemies. The “criminal”
is the enemy. The “welfare mother” is the enemy. The “immigrant” is the enemy.
15.
In what ways do you hope your campaign
encourages Americans to reevaluate their attitudes about crime?
16.
I think we need to disconnect crime from
punishment. There is a widespread tendency to assume that punishment is a
direct result of crime. In other words, the assumption is that people are
punished because they commit crimes. If we do not succeed in unhooking “crime
and punishment” we will never understand the connection between race and
punishment or crime and punishment. People of color are subject to far more
intense modes of surveillance than white people. Take drugs, for example.
Studies indicate that although the rate of illicit drug use among white people
is actually greater than among black people, black people are arrested and
convicted on drug charges far more frequently. Other studies have demonstrated
that a majority of people have committed a crime at some point in their lives.
But only among those populations that are criminalized--even before
their members commit crimes--can we expect high rates of arrest and
imprisonment.
17.
What do you think the future holds?
18.
It’s scary. We’re looking at the prospect of the
majority of black men being behind bars within the next decade. At the same
time, I think that people are more receptive to critiques of the prison system
than they were five years ago. Even in the established media, like the Times,
the discourse is beginning to rupture. The whole criminalizing discourse is not
as powerful as it might have been five years ago. The reason why we’re
organizing this conference is because we think this is the time to launch a
national movement.
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