An Ever-Expanding Carceral System: Angela Davis on Liberation
When I spoke with renowned professor, activist, scholar and writer Angela Davis for the inaugural episode of Laura Flanders & Friends in 2024, decades of activism were seeing results: support for Palestine was growing, calls for criminal justice reform were growing, and Davis had just released a book of essays discussing the intersections between feminism and prison abolition.
Today we find ourselves in a new era of chaos: AI data megacenters are sucking up resources, immigration police are killing people, rapists are enjoying impunity — and throughout it all the for-profit incarceration system expands.
The number of ICE detention facilities has nearly doubled over the last two years. According to Statista, prisons that were once closed have now reopened, and the Trump administration plans to turn warehouses into detention centers in at least eight states. Popular Information reports that corporations like SpaceX, Home Depot and Walmart are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to members of Congress who have sponsored or co-sponsored pro-ICE legislation.
Many Americans know there is a better way, but abolitionists are up against a mountain of money and power. Angela Davis challenges us:
“If we assume that the state will always be the most perfect mode of human community, then that means that we assume that all of the repressive apparatuses which constitute the state — armies, prisons, police — will always be the foremost in our communities.”
We must not give up on our dreams or our imagining:
“Abolitionists ask us to try to imagine new ways of coming together that do not require violence, that do not require racism, that do not require patriarchy,” said Davis.
Davis and I also spoke about our mutual love for June Jordan, who would have turned 90 this month. Jordan’s writings about becoming Palestinian sit on Davis’ desk; the struggles for Black liberation and Palestinian liberation have been “protracted”, she shares.
Davis recently endorsed a report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective on Israel’s sexualized violence against Palestinians, writing “there can be no true feminist liberation without the dismantlement of prisons, police and military occupation. Freedom for Palestine and all Palestinians is non-negotiable.”
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