[lbo-talk] Angela Davis on Prisons & Police

[Carrol Cox]

It hadn't occurred to me before, but "militant" (or sounding "militant')
isn't a very useful concept. It deflects from both program and intellectual
precision or clarity. She of coursed made no references at all at how it
would work - that would have been silly. I suppose if we made a city more or
less ungovernable until it closed its jails and took the cops off the street
they would work out something. Jails & cops are, after all, a rather recent
phenomenon in human history.

That old demand for "how would you do it" simply kills both thought and
action.

She did make it clear that prisons as we know them are unacceptable even for
the really vicious.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
Sent: Saturday, January 23, 2016 10:37 AM
To: lbo-talk
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Angela Davis on Prisons & Police


> On Jan 22, 2016, at 11:35 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Some years ago when I proposed the slogan, Abolish the Prison System,
among
> the 'rebuttals' was one citing Davis as proposing reforms rather than
> abolishing.
> 
> Well. She spoke here tonight, and her first word on prisons was that they
> could not be reformed; we had to demand their abolition.
> 
> Ditto for Police. 

That sounds very militant. Did she have any more to say about how it would
work? Because she didn't in her book on the topic.
___________________________________
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk