Thoughts to melt prison bars: Angela Davis on the shape of liberation

Shaun de Waal interviewed Angela Davis in 2007, when she visited South Africa to speak about her work in prison reform as part of a conference at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser). 

Hers was an image almost as famous as that of Che Guevara — in a poster that graced myriad left-wing walls. She was the beautiful young Black Panther on the FBI’s ’10 most-wanted” list, denounced by none less than the then president of the United States, Richard Nixon, as a ‘terrorist”.

Today Angela Davis is a professor in a programme called History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of several books, including her widely read and acclaimed autobiography (1974), and, more recently, critical studies of the prison system. She visited South Africa this week to attend a conference on punishment and incarceration at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research and to give public lectures on such issues.

Davis was famously imprisoned herself. She spent 16 months in jail before the international campaign to free her resulted in her acquittal in 1972. Her interest in imprisonment, though, goes back to earlier activism (such as the Free Mandela Campaign), and to the influence of Black Panther leader and prison intellectual George Jackson, who was slain while in jail in 1971.

A philosopher who studied in Germany with Herbert Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School, Davis’s thinking and writing range across social and political issues, from race and criminality to blues and jazz, feminism and culture, American foreign policy and the exercise of power in a globalised world.

In a recent book of interviews with Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture, she traces the repressive continuities from slavery to today’s prison system in the US, and notes how ‘capital has moved into the punishment industry in such a way that it is no longer a small niche, but rather a major component of the US economy — all this has global implications. It recapitulates the trajectory through which military production became central to the US economy … So the prisons, their architecture, their technologies, their regimes, the commodities their populations consume and produce, and the rhetoric that legitimates their proliferation, all travel from the US to the rest of the world. Why does a country like South Africa, which is in the process, we hope, of building a just society — a non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic society — need the repressive technologies of the supermaximum prison?”

Why indeed, when it doesn’t seem to stop prisoners escaping anyway? Our prisons are overfull, and often chaotically corrupt — and the minister of correctional services is busy suing for defamation a doctor who commented on the appalling conditions at Pollsmoor prison in support of the whistle-blower who got fired for revealing those conditions. Perhaps it’s natural, then, that our state should aspire to the American model of carceral efficiency, but is building bigger, better prisons the solution?

Given the differences between the US and South Africa, I ask Davis what resonances she sees between her work in what she calls ‘the emergent field” of critical prison studies and her sense of crime and punishment in post-apartheid South Africa.

Talking to people here, she says, ‘I did get a sense of the distance between the most radical discourses around issues of punishment in the States and the search for practical solutions in South Africa today. Some would argue that because we don’t have to address the routine functioning of prisons, and because we don’t identify in any way with those in power, we have the opportunity to engage in more utopian speculation. But it would seem to me that precisely when there is the possibility of change — this [South Africa] is a society in transition — the discussion around decarceration and abolition could play an important role in that transition.”

Davis points out that the rush to build more prisons and the ‘race to incarcerate” in the US, which began under the Reagan administration of the 1980s, coincided with the globalisation of capitalism, with the production of surplus populations – the jobless – and the dismantling of the welfare state. There is surely a lesson for South Africa here.

When poverty is widespread, says Davis, and people have no access to a social safety net, ‘You might argue that it is rational to commit crimes under such circumstances.

‘The problem, it seems, is that for too long the prison has been the only solution not only to crime but to a whole range of issues that swirl around crime — poverty, illiteracy, racism, lack of education, lack of healthcare. Abolitionist ideas allow us to think beyond the box, beyond the prison, to think about other ways of solving the problems of crime, illiteracy, mental health problems, the problems of youth — and as long as we see the prison as the default solution, we are robbed of imaginative solutions.”

It’s too easy to imagine that imprisoning more people (even if, in South Africa, we could catch them and convict them) is the solution to crime. As Davis says: ‘The prison makes us feel comfortable because we think we know what has to happen to people when they commit crimes.”

In South Africa, she says, it is important to remember our history. The way people refer to apartheid here, she says, often makes it sound as though apartheid ‘happened long, long ago – but it’s been barely a decade”. In the carceral regimes of the US, there are ‘traces of slavery, the sedimentations of slavery from 100 years ago”, and if such structures persist in such institutions, why not in South Africa’s penal system?

‘I would say that it would be necessary, in South Africa, to attend to what it means to be in transition, in the aftermath of apartheid, which clearly left an imprint,” she says. ‘You remove the racism from its embodiment in actual individuals, and you think about it as structuring institutions.

‘We have to take into consideration the ghosts that still haunt us today. Repressive institutions often have very long memories, regardless of what the individuals who are their agents know or don’t know. The memory of those institutions is inscribed in its practices and its regimes. The prison functions just like it did before.”