Part Three of Angela Davis: An Autobiography describes Davis’ foreign travels as a young adult and their influence on her changing political and social views. Davis recounts her time in Paris as an American, where even in the embassy after Kennedy’s assassination she states, “Nevertheless, I felt out of place at the Embassy, surrounded by crowds of ‘Americans in Paris’ and it was difficult to identify with their weeping” (Davis 132). Even early on in her travels, Davis already identified the feelings of antipathy that she felt for other Americans whilst exploring her own path of communism, and even her connections with Vietnamese hatred for Americans, when in the Vietnamese Tet Celebration, “the brutal realities of their experiences by the
Angela Davis speaks out against people who she considers to be political prisoners and lectures on the Prison Industrial
across various platforms, efforts to ban books have sparked a debate on the impacts and ethics of limiting a person’s scope of knowledge. In Texas, The Dallas Morning News revealed a list of banned books for inmates that overshot 10,000 (Inklebarger 23). Tries at limiting literature have surfaced all across the United States, as ALA writer Timothy Inklebarger covers in his work Restricting Books Behind Bars. Taking statements from organizations dedicated to providing books to prisoners, he describes attempts to subvert them with shoddy, illusive and arbitrary limitations. Prisons, he’s explained, have a tendency to ban books covering specific topics, or books that address their topics in diverse ways.
The “13th” is a documentary about the American system of incarceration and the economic forces behind racism in America especially in people of color. One of the claims that the author mentioned is that today incarceration is an extension of slavery. It is also mentioned that most of the time in society we are defined by race. In the documentary, we can see how African Americans are sentenced for many years since they are too poor to pay their fines or sometimes most of these people plead guilty to get out of jail fast. However, African Americans are separated from their families and also treated inhumanly in prisons just because they are of a particular race.
Angela Davis’ book Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture provides her critique on how today’s democracy is continually weakened by structures of oppression, such as slavery, reconstruction, and lynching. By utilizing her own experience and employing views from historical figures like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois, Davis examines the chain of racism, sexism, and political oppression. She speaks of the hidden moral and ethical issues that bring difference within people’s social situations. In the “Abolition Democracy” chapter, she describes the relationship between the production of law and violation of law demonstrated in the United States.
In the famous Angela Davis book, Freedom is a constant struggle, chapter seven she describes her powerful motivates and aspirations towards freedom in America. She speaks on Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and the countless deaths of other African Americans and how she appreciates the Ferguson activist. Davis’ purpose in this novel is to express her feelings towards racial America, the different positive movements that have formed during the tragic times in America today. She creates connections between the violence in America and the injustice treatment throughout history and as well as around the world. Davis opens the chapter by speaking on the vicious, racism violence that has tainted America for many years.
Her central thesis is that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow,” or the new system of control used by the government to uphold racial class in the U.S. This book will be helpful to my research because it directly discusses the topic of race and the criminal justice system. Amnesty International. (2003). United States of America: Death by discrimination
This preconceived notion could not be farther from the truth. In reality, these reform movements are idiotically placing a bandaid over the tremendous issue that the prison system is. An imbalance of reforms between women and men, unrestrained sexual abuse in women’s prisons, and tyrannical gender roles are just three of countless examples of how prison reform movements only create more misfortune and fail to provide any real solution to worsening prison conditions. Perhaps instead of conjuring up additional ideas on how to reform prisons, America’s so-called democratic society should agree upon abolishing prisons as a whole. This being said, it is crucial to identify ongoing issues in today’s society, understand how they contribute to unlawful behavior, and seek a solution.
Cynthia Keo 12/22/2022 Room 303 Slavery; Is it flawed? ELA “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.” ―
The legal system has played a significant role in perpetuating systematic oppression or control over marginalized group, such as Native people and Black people. Literary works such as Benito Cereno and Zong! exposes the limitations of the legal framework in recognizing, addressing, and acknowledging the brutality, oppression, and murder faced by Black people. The use of law in these works illustrates how enslaved Black people were dehumanized and oppressed “legally” due to the law. Even today, as M.NourbeSe Philip argues in “Defending the Dead,” Black people are often outside the law (and yet trapped by it) in the way the law is used to police and confine black bodies in the new prison industrial complex.
The term "Prison Industrial Complex" (PIC) is used to express the rapid expansion of the United States inmate population. The prison industrial complex (PIC) is an expression used to describe the connection between the interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment the resolution to economic, social and political problems. The P.I.C helps to maintain the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic, social and other privileges. Power is collected and maintained through the PIC in many ways, including creating mass media images that reinforce the stereotypes associated with people of color, less fortunate people, homosexual people, immigrants, youth, elderly and other oppressed communities. These stereotypes imply that those who are associated with these groups of society are criminals, corrupt, delinquent, deviant, etc.
One example of this is, “People who are incarcerated need people from the outside to bear witness to their struggles, remorse, and endless punishment through our justice and social system” (209). In English 115, we often discussed the idea of social and judicial reform. Williams seems to have a similar perspective on this issue, that the incarcerated need their voices to be heard because they are unrepresented by the systems in our country. We focused on male prisoners during that course, and used texts like The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass and the film The Shawshank
For decades, there have been numerous conversations around the issue of the mass incarceration of men of color in the United States. These conversations and others revolving around prisons around the world do not take into consideration the stories of women. This essay will deviate from the current narratives on men and instead focus on the experiences of women in the prison systems and what the role of the intersectionality of their race, class and gender is. Furthermore, this essay will provide a comparative analysis of the United States and South African women’s prisons. The United States has the highest rates of incarceration in the world.
While such transformations of people behind bars can leave a permanent mark such events and daily invasion of privacy contribute to these permanent changes as described in his poem, Its Going To Be A Cold Winter, “They enter my cell: a legal pillow fight begins with my books and papers. Stir crazy madmen, papers sidling down to the cement floor, my mattress turned over, sheets torn away like a mask hiding tons of heroin; but nothing, only cotton, cheap sweaty moldy-smelling cotton, picked by slaves, sewed up by slaves, slaves of the Greater State, that come in all colors.” (Baca, p.6) He amply provides the reader a clear understanding of this loss of privacy and the random acts of invasion, as he is left unable to say anything about these activities by the guards. Baca continues to distinguish the role of forced slavery in its modern form in prisons while subtly indicating the role of racialized discrimination.
“Corrections” some says that the destinations of America's criminal equity framework, completely, are the same as the targets of other organization: it endeavors to sustain itself. Instead of seeking after equity, the jail framework characterizes accomplishment with feelings and absolution. New detainees swindle themselves when they expect equity and decency. Regardless of having manufactured fruitful professions as refined specialists, huge numbers of the men in America's government jail camps strike me as being unimaginably gullible when it came to exploring their way through the convoluted halls of alleged equity. Decades ago, the notable German savant Max Weber composed broadly about hierarchical frameworks and structures.
