The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation

The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation
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The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation
In “The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation,” Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodriguez argue that the prison institution has been unfairly used to punish people of color and has been misrepresented as the only solution to crime. The authors wonder why people of color predominate in the prison population throughout the whole world. The writers wonder why bodies like International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) invite fewer people of color, yet a majority of the individuals disenfranchised are people of color. The authors see prisons as modern-day slavery and need to be abolished.
Theoretically, the authors demonstrate that the prevailing criminal justice system is biased. Instead of looking at crime as isolated, individual instances of misbehavior, Angela and Dylan critique why the same has been used for warehousing many poor, disenfranchised, and displaced people of color (Davis Rodriguez, 2000). They theorize that the current move to send more people of color to prisons is a modern form of slavery. The authors do not call for an immediate overhaul of prisons. Instead, they advocate for a balance between reforms that safeguard the lives of prisoners and the strategies meant to promote the abolishment of prisons as the most dominant mode of punishment.
The authors present several interventions she believes are critical in addressing the problem of prisons. Firstly, they call for abolishing prison as the dominant mode of addressing social challenges that can be addressed through other means and institutions. Further, they believe that the emergence of an interdisciplin...