>If you run
>around demanding the abolition of prisons, most people will think
>you're either risible or dangerous.
Angela Davis does call for prison abolition, but her position is more complex than "demanding the abolition of prisons." Here's a bit from a long interview:
>The most difficult question for advocates of prison abolition is how
>to establish a balance between reforms that are clearly necessary to
>safeguard the lives of prisoners and those strategies designed to
>promote the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of
>punishment. In other words, I do not think that there is a strict
>dividing line between reform and abolition. For example, it would be
>utterly absurd for a radical prison activist to refuse to support
>the demand for better health care inside Valley State, California's
>largest women's prison, under the pretext that such reforms would
>make the prison a more viable institution. Demands for improved
>health care, including protection from sexual abuse and challenges
>to the myriad ways in which prisons violate prisoners' human rights,
>can be integrated into an abolitionist context that elaborates
>specific decarceration strategies and helps to develop a popular
>discourse on the need to shift resources from punishment to
>education, housing, health care, and other public resources and services.
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisinterview.html