Angela Davis Quotes About Prisons

Quotes about: Prisons

• Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

  Angela Davis

  Zoos, Jail, Prison Population

  Angela Davis: An Autobiography ch. 1 (1974)

• When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

  Angela Davis

  Children, School, Discipline

• Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.

  Angela Davis

  Views, Addiction, Drug

• Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

  Angela Davis

  Firsts, Problem, Prison

• Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

  Angela Davis

  Problem, Prison, Disappear

  Avery Gordon, Angela Davis (2015). “Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People”, p.54, Routledge

• One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents

  Angela Davis

  Jobs, Color, Numbers

• Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

  Angela Davis

  Color, People, Prison

• The de industrialization of the US. economy based on the migration of corporations into third world areas where labor is very cheap and thus more profitable for these companies creates on the one hand conditions in those countries that encourage people to emigrate to the US. in search of a better life. On the other hand, it creates conditions here that send more black people into the alternative economies, the drug economies, women into economies in sexual services, and sends them into the prison industrial complex.

  Angela Davis

  Country, Hands, People

  Frontline Interview, www.pbs.org. 1997.

• Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.

  Angela Davis

  Men, Thinking, Self

• The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence that they could not con­ceive of society without it. Within the history of the United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind.

  Angela Davis

  People, Challenges, Mind

• I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

  Angela Davis

  Prison, Social, Function

• First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

  Angela Davis

  Firsts, Prison, Should

• I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

  Angela Davis

  Rights, Prison, Involved

  "PBS Interview with Angela Davis". PBS: Frontline, www.pbs.org. 1998.

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