Buy this album

Recorded at Colorado College in 1997 this lecture on The Prison Industrial Complex comes long after Davis spent some time of her own in the prison system and it would seem that time has not mellowed the self proclaimed revolutionary. Davis makes many irrefutable facts clear to the audience as part of her thesis. First, one third of all black males in the US are currently under some kind of criminal restraint. Second, the term “rehabilitation” has been expunged from the prison equation. Third class as well as race are prime determiners of who is punished and how. And most intriguingly her fourth point stresses how the financial incentive for building and maintaining prisons contributes to the expansion and retention of prison populations by criminalizing things such as drugs and eliminating governmental welfare programs which she claims force people into criminal activity.
As a speaker Davis is certainly convincing and passionate. What Davis fails to mention and what would have given her arguments wider credibility is the fact that people who commit crimes are by definition criminals. Despite ones color, class, status of any kind if you commit a crime you are a criminal and face the repercussions and for the most part the consequences of crime are well known. Black or white, who doesn’t know that if you rob a liquor store you risk going to prison? Accountability for ones self despite class and other particulars never once enters into Davis lexicon.
Sure the prison system is perpetually growing and engulfing the lives of more Americans but are there many there that did not commit the crimes for which they are imprisoned? What Davis could, I think should, have spoke upon is a move by both society and the individual to take responsibility for themselves. Why not speak on decriminalizing activities that have no effect on others and allow people to eat, drink, smoke, shoot, snort and huff what they want at their own peril without having the creepy fingers of religion and government taking from the regular workers pocket so that a neighbor, family member or friend can be removed from “free society” and placed in a cage to no ones benefit? For as many points as Davis makes in explaining the US prison problem she diverts attention from the real evils here, lack of accountability and government overreach. As she mentions several times she is a Socialist and would like more government ostensibly to control and manipulate more activities and relations between the citizenry, which would mean more, not less prisons. In the end my “review” is this, if you like classic sixties rhetoric that is as hollow today as it was then this is an hour made for you but if you get frustrated with the constant whine of societies supposed victims you will not find this too terribly enlightening.

Buy this album