Thinker — Abolition — The Outside Made Permanent

Angela Davis

b. 1944

American philosopher, activist, and scholar, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, in the neighborhood called Dynamite Hill — named for how often the Ku Klux Klan bombed the homes of Black families who moved there. She went to Brandeis on a scholarship, studied in Frankfurt with Adorno and Marcuse, came back to teach at UCLA, was fired by Ronald Reagan's Board of Regents for her political associations, was charged with murder on fabricated evidence, and was acquitted at twenty-eight after an international campaign. She has been building toward the abolitionist argument ever since.

01The outside made permanent

Davis's argument is structural: the prison is not a response to crime. It is an institution for managing the people capitalism has made surplus — the outside made permanent, administered, funded.

02The numbers

In 1971 there were roughly 200,000 people in U.S. state and federal prisons; by 2008 there were 2.3 million — the highest incarceration rate in the world, produced by traceable decisions: mandatory-minimum laws applied with documented racial disparity, the defunding of public mental health care that moved people from hospitals to jails, the destruction of public housing that produced homelessness and then criminalized it. Each decision followed the same logic — instead of addressing the material conditions producing surplus people, enclose them. The prison is cheaper than housing, cheaper than mental health care, cheaper than economic opportunity, if you don't count the people inside it as costs.

03Before the word necropolitics existed

Davis was making this argument decades before Achille Mbembe named the concept of necropolitics — whose life a system decides is worth making productive, and whose can be left exposed. The Black radical tradition had already arrived where the European theoretical tradition was still heading. Mbembe was reading Davis. The lineage was already there.

04Abolition geography

Davis's political conclusion, shared with Sylvia Wynter and Kimberlé Crenshaw stated in material terms: abolition is not the demand to close prisons overnight. It is the demand to build the world that doesn't need them — housing stability, community mental health infrastructure, economic democracy, restorative justice processes that address harm without severing community bonds. Abolition geography: trace the chain of disinvestment decisions that produces incarcerable surplus people, and change the investment decisions at every link. Change the geographic organization of resources, and the prison becomes structurally unnecessary.