Are Prisons Obsolete? was published by Seven Stories Press in 2003 as part of the Open Media series. At fewer than 130 pages, it is Davis’s most concentrated work of argument — a slim book that packs an enormous amount of historical analysis, political critique, and abolitionist vision into a format designed to reach the widest possible audience.
Davis begins by noting that the prison has become so deeply embedded in American consciousness that most people cannot imagine a world without it. The question “Are prisons obsolete?” strikes most readers as absurd — of course they’re not, they think, where would we put the criminals? Davis’s project is to denaturalize this assumption: to show that the prison is not an inevitable feature of human society but a specific historical institution with a specific history, rooted in slavery, racial capitalism, and the need of the state for a system of social control that replaces explicit racial domination with a nominally race-neutral mechanism that produces the same racial outcomes.
She traces the prison’s American genealogy: from slavery (the plantation as proto-prison) through the convict lease system (which re-enslaved Black people through criminalization immediately after emancipation) to the War on Drugs and the explosion of mass incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2003, the United States had over two million people in prison — a disproportionate number of them Black and Latino — making it the most incarcerated nation on Earth.
Davis’s alternative — abolition — does not mean simply opening the prison doors. It means building the institutions (education, healthcare, mental health services, housing, living-wage employment) that would address the social conditions that produce crime, making the prison unnecessary rather than merely absent.
Collecting Are Prisons Obsolete?
First edition (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2003): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $20–$50
- Signed: $75–$200