Summary Of Are Prisons Obsolete

In her book, Are Prisons Obsolete? Davis dedicates an entire chapter connecting the system of slavery to the current prison system. In order to understand how prisoners are a product of racial ideologies, one must understand that racism is not just an “unfortunate aberration of the past” (Davis 24), but rather it continues to “profoundly influence contemporary structures, attitudes, and behaviors” (Davis 24). When the 13th Amendment was passed, it abolished slavery and Blacks were no longer legal property. However, it did not get rid of the idea that Black people should be harshly governed. Today, Black people are subjected to a criminal justice system where race plays a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality (Davis 28).

“The punishments associated with slavery became further incorporated into the penal system” (Davis 31), which is reflected in the disproportionate rate of Blacks incarcerated. Although Davis primarily focuses on Black people, there are “other racialized histories that have affected the development of the U.S. punishment system as well--the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans” (25). Because of the war on drugs, three-strikes law, the zero-tolerance laws in schools, and other racialized laws, Black people are being arrested and funneled through the system at higher rates than any other race. The reason could be because they suffer “pervasive discrimination, disproportionate poverty, homelessness, participation in street economies, and bias and abuse by law enforcement officers a (quote),” which leads to the higher rates of incarceration. This affects transgender people of color, specifically transgender women, because they are “targeted by police harassment and violence and, consequently, often come to distrust law enforcement” (quote). Not only are they targeted for being Transgender, but also for being a people of

In their essay “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action,” Lambie mentions that transgender, queer, and gender-variant people are more likely to experience “widespread discrimination, harassment, and violence…[which] translates into higher risk of imprisonment” (240). In addition, they mention how queer and transgender people are criminalized because of their gender and sexuality, yet the state will turn around and claim how they will protect them from harm (239). While transgender people are in prison, they experience “human rights abuses, including assault, psychological abuse, rape, harassment, and medical neglect” (Lambie 243). In some instances, they suffer these abuses while within the general population; nonetheless, they are also abused when they are placed in solitary confinement. In the film Cruel and Unusual Punishment, Ophelia is placed in solitary confinement for her “own protection” and that is when she began her pattern of for self-mutilation. Although in Davenport v. DeRoberts, a US Federal Court case in 1988, ruled “...isolating a human being from other human beings year after year or even month after month can cause substantial psychological damage,” still prisons will use solitary confinement as a way to “protect” transgender people from being