I am back on old fashion dial-up so I can't listen to Davis on abolition of prisons. Which means only that I can't use her lecture as a way to get into a general discussion.
Try and get to the end. The whole post gets to the foundation of why the abolition of the prison system does not come from the lunatic fringe.
The way to get to understanding how prisons function and their social place is to re-conceptualize crime. And the way to do that is to get back to what defines a crime, which is law. One of the interesting problems in the tradition of law and philosophy was John Locke's concept of rights. He used the metaphor of ownership, as if rights were a form of property. This links up in a very general way with the concept of a crime, the taking away from someone else of their property or their rights.
So you do a crude Foucault style trace, and see that many of our concepts of crimes are the result of defining them through concepts of property. A similar trace gets us back into various religious legal traditions, such as owning wives, children, slaves, and so forth. In a society with no slaves, the crime of stealing a slave is meaningless. You can't steal a wife, if there are no wives... In other words our concept of theft follows from our concept of private property ... that's the socialist-communist link.
This line of thought came up when I was thinking about my landlord Yim, complaining about his bicycle getting stolen, and his statement that, that would never have happened in China, when Mao was president. There might be several reasons. Bicycles were mass produced and readily available, so there was no reason to steal one--- no artificial scarcity. You probably couldn't sell it. All you could do with it was use it---which is what you were supposed to do.
Anyway, so crimes like stealing have to be redefined. Take copyrights. If you publish your work through say a public system like the government or state university, how can you steal the content of a government book?
So, there are thousands of laws like this. If you alter the FDA codes pertaining to drugs, boom illegal drugs disappear, and so do the crimes that depend on those definitions.
This is an incremental abolition, the sort of go-slow legalistic approach, but it would certainly go a long way toward dismantling the prison-industrial complex.
Chris Doss, jokingly brought up Dalmer.
But think it backwards. Were the hell do guys like Dalmer come from? They are constructed through various social forces, just like the rest of us. So obviously there is something seriously broken in our legal and conceptual construction scheme if Dalmers are the product. My choice of candidates are some psycho-social combination of homophobia and homosexuality construction systems operating in conjunction with sicko legal punishments produced that nightmare. What's interesting is he was sentenced to multiple life terms. He was murdered in prison.
I had to look Dalmer up on wiki... It looks like he had early sexual identity problems. So you could make the argument that Dalmer might possibly be a poster boy for abolishing both legal prohibitions of homosexuality and the prison system. I said could make the argument, that in concrete and non-theoretical ways the prison-industrial complex created Dalmer, literally created him.
A more broadly conceived approach could say, the cultural system of the prison-industrial complex mentality produces Dalmers.
But then it gets even more interesting if you think back to Foucault and Genet. They are not too far removed from Dalmer, and they created the discursive methodology to deconstruct the prison industrial complex, as such. They started with their own knowledge and experience and understood the psychodynamics of how such nightmare constructions work.
Anyway, Angela Davis when through related experiences, constantly harassed, spied on, jailed, tried, escaped, underground .... so forth. So her own methods of discussing crime, punishment, legal and philosophical definitions and construction all converge in a closely related domain to Foucault, Genet...
So these theoretical foundations are encapsulated into the political demand to abolish the prison-industrial complex.
CG