By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist, 12/04/98
PALO ALTO, Calif. In the 1960s when she thrust her fist skyward against oppression with the firmness of steel and issued critiques of America as volcanic as her Afro, Angela Davis had a tremendous optimism that prisons would become rusted hulks in an America that educated its children.
''When there were only 200,000 people in prison in the country, California had the best public educational system in the country from kindergarden all the way up through postgraduate,'' Davis said in a recent interview with the Trotter Group, a national group of African-American columnists.
''And in a lot of ways, you could say people who wanted to get an education could. In 1968, we had the strike at San Francisco State, University of California-Berkeley. You had the beginning of open admissions. We had an amazing amount of hope for the educational system.'
Her hope has been shattered. The national prison population has zoomed from 200,000 toward 2 million. African-American and Latino men now find admission to jail far easier than college. A Rockefeller-funded study released this fall by the Justice Policy Institute found that there are now five times more African-American men in California prisons than in state universities - 44,617 to 8,767. There are 53,881 Latino prisoners compared with 30,454 in four-year state colleges.
The gulf is now so wide that Davis is on a new crusade. She is calling for the abolition of prisons.
''Oftentimes people think I'm really a provocateur when I talk about prison abolition,'' Davis said. ''But there were those who felt the same way about the abolition of slavery. There were those who assumed that slavery was here to stay, that it was eternal. If you don't have those who are willing to try to imagine a world where the prison doesn't loom so large as it does today, then we'll never get there.
''Most of us can't imagine that. Most of us can't imagine living in a society without prisons.'
Davis's ability to imagine such a thing during this punishment-mad, prison-happy era comes from her own perseverance. She was once labeled so radical in California that Ronald Reagan, then governor, vowed that Davis would never again teach in a state university after UCLA dropped her from the philosophy department in 1969. A member of the Communist Party, she was put on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on false charges and jailed for 16 months before being acquitted.
She now is a tenured professor at University of California-Santa Cruz. She has published six books. When she helped organize a national conference on prisons in the Bay Area in September, she thought that perhaps 500 people would attend. More than 3,000 came.
The attendance, Davis said, was a sign that people are recognizing that prison has become less an institution for truly hardened criminals and more of an instrument of social control of low-income people whom society has decided not to educate.
In the last 10 years, spending on corrections in California has grown 60 percent, while spending on kindergarten through 12th grade went up only 26 percent and higher education declined 3 percent. Though it costs five times more to incarcerate someone in California than to educate them in college ($22,000 to $4,000), California has built 21 new prisons since 1980, and only one new college campus. The top pay for correctional officers - $50,820 a year - easily surpasses the average salary range of $32,000 to $37,000 for university instructors.
Underfunded state colleges in turn unload their burdens on the backs of students, raising tuitions by as much as 485 percent since 1980. For African-American men, the tuitions are a modern poll tax. Between 1990 and 1997, African-American male enrollment in state public universities declined by 217 students while the number of black male prisoners increased by 12,147.
Thus, for every black male eliminated from its state universities in the 1990s, California has added 57 to its prisons. Many of the new inmates are nonviolent offenders who could be more effectively rehabilitated with drug treatment and education.
''We've always known that the war on drugs is really a war on the communities that so often are victimized by the drug trade.'' Davis said. ''Which isn't to say that people don't have responsibility or shouldn't be accountable. But if we don't change things, we'll say perhaps 10 years from now that a black man in California is 10 times more likely to go to prison than to go to college or university.
''It seems to me that with all this discussion about slavery, we ought to bring up the discussions about the vestiges of slavery within the prison system and the fact that it is becoming a system that is increasingly designed to hold black people - black men, black women - behind bars, sometimes for the rest of their lives.''
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.
This story ran on page A31 of the Boston Globe on 12/04/98.
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
___________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]