On Apr 6, 2009, at 4:58 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> 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.
This makes a lot more sense than Carrol's rant. Though of course, he's more intelligent and sophisticated than the rest of us cretins.
Doug