Interview with Angela Davis.

Platt, Tony

Tony Platt (TP): First of all I want to thank you and I appreciate the fact that you made the time to be here. I think you know this is a group of people from several different countries. We have people from graduate programs in law, sociology, social work, and justice studies. We have people coming together for the first time, with state college students and UC students taking the same class and having conversations. So we welcome you to this conversation.

And also on a personal note, I want to thank you for setting a model of being an academic, an intellectual, and also an activist, which is not an easy thing to do. You set that model for many, many people and we appreciate it.

To begin, I noticed that you were fired in 1970 from UCLA for what they called "inflammatory language."

Angela Davis (AD): That was the second time, I think.

TP: But then you came back.

AD: The first time I was fired for being a communist.

TP: Then they rehired you.

AD: Then I took the case up through the California Supreme Court and the case was overturned. The second time was "inflammatory language" and conduct unbecoming of a professor.

TP: All I can say is, congratulations. But here you are a respectable emerita professor from UC Santa Cruz invited back to the university.

AD: I don't know how respectable. I try not to be too respectable.

TP: But you've always been someone who has tried to bring together intellectual work and writing and research with your activism. That has always been an important part of your life.

AD: Yes.

TP: I'd like to start off by asking you something about the earlier part of your life. You grew up in the segregated South, in Birmingham, Alabama, as a young child and a young teen. But you came from an unusual family in that they were politically active. You grew up in that atmosphere. Would you say that obviously race was important to you in that political time and in your family? Was also class and economics an important part of your political training, so to speak, as a teenager?

AD: Absolutely. Because I grew up in what was at that time the most segregated city in the South--Birmingham, Alabama--I couldn't avoid thinking about race. Race was literally everywhere. My mother had become involved before I was born in an organization called the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). It was an organization created by Black communists who had come down from the Northeast, primarily from New York, to organize in the South. Have any of you seen that film called The Great Debaters (2007)? Do you remember the scene when Melvin Tolson, the character played by Denzel Washington, is organizing black and white tenant farmers? Apparently that was based on the work of the SNYC. I found this out because Dorothy Burnham, my mother's best friend (whose daughter is my closest friend), was one of the people who came down to the South. She saw that film and asked me if I knew the history behind it. I said, "Well, not really." She said, "That was our organization. That was the SNYC. That is the work that we did." So class was always involved as well.

TP: So was that unusual among the other young people and teenagers who you knew to take class and economic issues, as well as racial issues, as seriously as you did? We're talking about the 1950s in the South in Alabama.

AD: Probably, but you know, when I think about it I don't think about a discrete position on class and race. I think about them as being connected in a way that makes it impossible to talk about them separately. Of course, years later when we began to talk, write, and organize around the intersectionality of these various categories, I remembered that this is actually what was being done then. But of course, not having the same categories with which to work at that time I did not think about it in the same way.

TP: Did you think of yourself as doing political organizing when you were a teenager?

AD: The first organization I can remember being involved in was an interracial discussion group that took place at the church I attended. I didn't think of myself as an organizer, but I knew there was something very different about doing that work because the church got burned as a result of our meetings.

TP: What year was that?

AD: I was eleven, so ...

TP: Was it 1955?

AD: I guess it was. So you know my age! It was probably in the year before the conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott.

TP: So not just class and race, not just economics and race, but also an interracial politics early on in your life is something you were used to.

AD: Oh, absolutely, yes. I was fortunate because my mother stayed in touch with the Burnham family and other people who had come from New York to Birmingham to organize. Because a number of them were communists, at some point they were forced to leave the city by police commissioner Bull Connor, who is most notorious for violently confronting civil rights activists. My mother actually did her graduate work at NYU during the summers. So she would take all us children to New York and we would stay with the Burnhams, who had an equal number of children in the family. Now when I try to imagine her studying with six and then eight children in the house, it seems impossible. But she got her Master's degree in that way. She also made friends, white friends, who sometimes came to visit us in the South. I remember those as being particularly tense times because it was literally illegal to engage in any kind of interracial intercourse that was not economic in nature. That is to say, a black person could work for a white person, but a black person could not be friends with a white person. I can remember very tense moments when her friends would visit us. She would drive them somewhere and they had to lie down in the back of the car so nobody saw a black woman driving a white woman.

TP: In your junior year, when you got a scholarship from the American Friends Service Committee and you had some choices of places to go, you had already been to New York with your mother. Is that why you chose New York as the place to go?

AD: Yes, I really fell in love with New York when I was six years old.

TP: The Village, right?

AD: Well, it just so happened that Greenwich Village was the location of the Little Red School House/Elisabeth Irwin High School (LREI). This school was a cooperative run by teachers, many of whom had been kicked out of the public school system because of their politics during the McCarthy era. I very much looked forward to going to New York, although I was tempted to go to Fisk. I had it all worked out. At that time I wanted to be a doctor and received early admittance to Fisk University. I'd graduate from Fisk at 19, because I was 15 at the time. Then I would attend medical school, do my specialties, and be a doctor by the time I was 23 [laughter]. But I decided instead to finish high school in New York.

TP: So then, instead of ending up at Fisk, a historically black college, you ended up at a predominantly Jewish college like Brandeis? You must have been one of a handful of African American students on campus when you went there.

AD: Yes. The high school I attended was also predominantly white, with a few black students here and there. I was interested in a school in the northeast and thought about Mt. Holyoke. The choice was between Skidmore, Mt. Holyoke, and Brandeis. Brandeis gave me a really nice scholarship, so that helped.

TP: Then began an extraordinary intellectual period in your life. You were at Brandeis, studied in Paris and Germany, and eventually received a PhD in philosophy in Germany. There you came to know Herbert Marcuse and became one of his graduate students. While this was happening, the movement was erupting and diversifying in the United States. Without going into the long, interesting history of your education, when you finally returned to live in the United States and joined the political movement here, did the black movement view your education and training, as well as the exposure to French, German, and other colleges, as an asset or a deficit? What kind of situation did it create for you?

AD: No one has ever asked me that question before. It's complicated, because I was seen as an anomaly, I guess. When I first attempted to get involved in black movements in San Diego, people thought I was an agent. It took me a while to figure out why no one was responding. They said, "Well, she just came from Europe and she did this and she did that, so she must be an agent."

TP: There was a lot of that in those days.

AD: Yes. I went to the World Youth Festival in Helsinki in 1961, just after my first year in college. Gloria Steinem was there, and other people. It turned out that Gloria Steinem was working for a student organization that had ties to the CIA. So it wasn't unusual. Now I totally understand why people assumed that.

TP: Have you seen your FBI record?

AD: Yes, some of it. It's too long.

TP: Do you know what year they started observing you and reporting on you? Was it that trip to Helsinki that they are reporting on?

AD: Well, that, but actually I think it begins before that, because when I was very young and a number of my parents' friends were underground during the McCarthy era, we would sometimes be followed by the FBI.

TP: Could you explain the McCarthy period and what it meant to be underground? Some people might be unfamiliar with this.

AD: I am referring to people who were fleeing the consequences of the Smith-McCarran Act. According to the McCarran Act (or Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950), a communist is defined as someone who wants to violently overthrow the government. The Smith Act required communists to register. So if you registered under the Smith Act, then immediately you would be charged under the McCarran Act. Quite a number of people went to prison during that period. Some people decided that instead of turning themselves in, they would work underground. A number of my parents' friends were underground--James Jackson, for example. We were often followed by the FBI, which apparently believed that we might be in touch with him. One of the most important lessons I learned as a child was never to talk to the FBI. You didn't talk to them, because you had no idea what kind of information they were actually seeking. They often lured you into a conversation that you assumed was about one thing, but as a matter of fact, you ended up giving them precisely the information that they wanted. So when I was arrested in 1970, I did not say a single word to the FBI. I am very proud of that.

TP: So, talking about communism, you were an active member of the Communist Party from the 1970s?

AD: Actually, from the late 1960s. I had been involved in a number of organizations, including the Los Angeles Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party (BPP). It's very complicated. But for reasons you can research if you want, there were major problems within SNCC, especially around the role of women. The same thing happened with the BPP. It was in that context that I joined the Communist Party, precisely at that time.

TP: Because of gender and sexism and other internal problems going on in these other organizations?

AD: Yes, but also because I felt the need to be a part of an organization that addressed class as well as race and gender.

TP: You were a public member of that organization, ran for national office on the vice presidential ticket, twice I think, and left the party in 1991. So a big part of your life was as an active organizer in the Communist Party and in communist circles. Reflecting back on that training, history, and participation, how do you talk about it now given the collapse of the communist world and the debates going on about what we were fighting for then and how we understand that today.

AD: My relationship is still good with what remains of the Communist Party (CP). In fact, last Friday I spoke at an election rally in Detroit that was organized by the Communist Party, the Democratic Socialists, and a number of church people. When I think back on that era, what I treasure most about my involvement in the Communist Party was the sense of collectivity and the arena the party provided for engaging in discussions about a range of issues. I never belonged solely to the CP, and was never a functionary. I was always involved in other organizations: for example, the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression and the Black Women's Political Caucus, when Shirley Chisholm was in Congress, as well as a number of organizations like that. I've always done my political work primarily in broader organizations.

TP: At that time, a variety of communist and socialist nations existed around the world. We could point to them and ask whether they fit our model or aspirations, what we agreed or disagreed with, and so on. Now we live in a very different world, one lacking real places where such experiments are occurring. Has this profoundly changed your life, as it has those of many other people on the Left? Are you a "recovering communist"?

AD: I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I want to be critical of communist parties while holding on to what was good and important. I look at Cuba now and am still very much a supporter. Look at the healthcare system there. In the United States, we cannot even begin to meet the challenge that a healthcare system like that poses. So, I don't simply assume that because a particular version of communism or socialism did not work because of the failure to incorporate economic and political democracy, then we must completely let go of the prospect of socialism or communism.

TP: Perhaps we can now shift the conversation to criminology and prisons and the work that has occupied you for a long time. First, you were held in detention. While you were awaiting trial and during your trial, for about eighteen months, you were held in a women's detention center in Marin and then in Palo Alto. Is that right?

AD: The first jail was in New York.

TP: When you were arrested for the first time?

AD: I was there from October until December of 1970. Then I was extradited to Marin County and spent about a year in the Marin County Jail.

TP: Were you held in Palo Alto during your trial?

AD: Yes. We obtained a change in venue to San Jose, in Santa Clara County. I was held in a very, very bizarre detention center in Palo Alto. It was a jail that was meant to hold people for a few days, but I was there the entire time.

TP: Did the eighteen months you spent in those three different institutions change your views in any way about the justice system? Did that give you an impetus to start doing political work later on around justice issues and prison issues?

AD: Actually, I was already doing that work. One reason I was arrested was because of the work I was doing to free political prisoners. Among a number of cases were the political prisoners within the Black Panther Party, and especially the Soledad Brothers--George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers. Through my involvement with the Soledad Brothers and George Jackson I began to think about prison repression in a much broader context. Initially, I was thinking only about political prisoners. I was familiar with political prisoners both here in the United States and around the world. As I grew up, people were talking about the Rosenbergs and Sacco and Vanzetti. During high school, I will never forget that Carl Braden and Anne Braden were two of the most courageous white civil rights activists in the South. Carl Braden was sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary because he and his wife Anne bought a house for a black couple in a white neighborhood. He was convicted of having instigated a riot or something like that. I talked with him just before he entered prison, so I had a sense of political imprisonment, but not yet that the prison institution constitutes a mode of racist repression.

TP: During your incarceration, were you able to have conversations with imprisoned people who were not political prisoners?

AD: In New York, I was in solitary confinement almost the entire time. People from the outside could visit me, but I did not have much contact with prisoners. The National Conference of Black Lawyers, W. Hayward Bums, and many others came and filed a suit to get me out of solitary confinement. I managed to live in the main population for three weeks, perhaps a little bit longer.

TP: That experience must make you very knowledgeable about what prisoners in Pelican Bay and other similar places are going through in terms of solitary confinement. Did being in solitary affect you?

AD: It did. Normally I wouldn't joke about something like this, but it occurred to me that having been a graduate student for so long really prepared me [laughter]. Because you spend a lot of time reading and writing, often in a solitary situation, and that is basically what I did. I did a lot of reading and writing. I also exercised. I taught myself how to do yoga and since I had already learned karate, I practiced my katas. I had a way of dealing with solitary confinement that people in other situations probably did not. But I do not mean to minimize the importance of political campaigns against long-term solitary confinement.

TP: So you could get the books you wanted as long as they were sent to you in the right way?

AD: I was my own co-counsel. This is one of the things that law students might be interested in. At the time, I wanted to represent myself, but had not studied the law. Thus, I needed to have lawyers. Apparently, no one had ever claimed the right to represent oneself and the right to counsel simultaneously. So we had to file a special brief that I wrote with the assistance of Margaret Burnham--the daughter of Dorothy Burnham, the woman I mentioned who went down to the South in the 1930s as a communist organizer. Judge Richard Ameson agreed that it didn't have to be either/or. That was the issue. You could either represent yourself, or you had the right to counsel, but not both. So I said, "I want to represent myself and I want counsel with me." We successfully made that argument, so I could get whatever books I wanted since the jail authorities had no right to tell me what would or would not be useful for my case. Interestingly, some of the guards considered paperback books to be storybooks. The rule they wanted to impose was that I could get hardback books, but not paperbacks.

TP: Graduate or law students looking for a paper topic, a research topic, or master's thesis might look at your experience as a co-counsel. It would be very interesting, don't you think? Has it been done?

AD: The problem is that it took place at the trial level. So it is not in any of the books. I think perhaps something has been done on it. Margaret Burnham, my attorney from the beginning and now a professor at Northeastern School of Law, should know.

TP: In 1975, when I conducted the interview with you that this class read, you said that the movement had a tendency to forget the sisters in prison, and that the prison movement focused mainly on men. Not that their struggle was unimportant, but women tended to be neglected. When did your political work begin to emphasize women's issues, gender, and sexuality? Was this from the beginning? When did you first seriously take this on as a political project?

AD: Interestingly, I hadn't really thought about the fact that there might be differences that one could attribute to gender. It hadn't occurred to me.

TP: Are we talking about 1975 or 1970?

AD: I'm talking about 1970, which marks the beginning of the women's liberation movement. At that time, we didn't even use the term "gender." It was a process. After I had been in jail a few days, it occurred to me that we were missing so much by focusing only or primarily on political prisoners, and then primarily on male political prisoners. Ericka Huggins was one of the few women political prisoners of that era.

During the few weeks that I was in jail in New York, I was in the main population. We actually did some organizing that corresponded to work that was being done on the outside--a bail fund for women in prison. At that time, many women, if they had had access to a hundred dollars, would not have had to spend so many months behind bars. People were on the outside raising money and on the inside we would decide who would benefit from those funds. Women released on bail in this way had to make a commitment to work with the organization to raise more money so that more women could get out on bail. Most likely, that is the first organizing around prisons I did that specifically focused on women.

TP: For the last thirty years, this has been a central part of what you write about, do research on, and talk about: issues of sexuality, sexism, and gender differences. This has been a central concern for a large part of your life.

AD: Yes. And here we are today addressing what Michelle Alexander has called mass incarceration and what many of us have called the consequences of the prison-industrial complex. Because of the number of people behind bars, almost 2.5 millions, we tend to assume that given the relatively small percentage of women in prison, it is a male issue. Beyond the question of forgetting those who don't correspond to the male gender, a feminist approach offers a deeper and more productive understanding of the system as a whole. Many of us have argued that if we look very specifically at the situation of women in jails and prisons, we understand the workings of the system in a much more complicated way. We must address issues that otherwise might not come up, such as the link between intimate violence and institutional violence. Of course, we can see that connection with respect to men, but if we look at the relationship between the kind of violence women suffer from in the world, we get a deeper sense of how the punishment system works and of the connections--or what I often call the circuits of violence--that move from intimate settings to institutional settings. For me, that is the question, rather than simply a focus on women. It is important to focus on women, but it goes beyond that.

Student: Could you elaborate on the connection between violence against women and institutional violence in the prison-industrial complex and how the feminist movement relates to those two issues?

AD: An organization emerged out of the work Critical Resistance and others were doing. It is called Incite!

TP: They have read the dialogue with Critical Resistance.

AD: If you look at Incite!'s website, you see how their work attempts to address intimate violence without relying on law enforcement and imprisonment. If we are serious about prison abolition, we have to ask what criminalization of the perpetration of violence against women has accomplished. It is very interesting that vast numbers of men and others who have engaged in violence against women over the last 30 years or so have been arrested. It used to be that domestic violence was not a matter for law enforcement. Invariably, their response was, "This is a domestic matter." I take that to mean that the state delegated the authority to punish women to the men in their lives, whether their husbands or fathers. But what I want to emphasize now is that with all the work that has been dedicated to the ending of violence against women over the last three decades, the incidence of violence against women has remained the same. All the people arrested, all the organizations and crisis lines around the world have not had an impact on the pandemic of violence that is suffered by women. That means that we must think beyond imprisonment as the solution to violence against women. I am trying to restrain myself, because I could speak about these topics for several hours.

Student: Does the institutional violence people experience in prison affect the way they treat women when they leave prison?

AD: Are you referring to male prisoners?

TP: Prisoners are victimized or learn how to victimize others in prison, then in a sense come out and re-victimize women they have relationships with.

AD: Yes, I think so. It is a question of how we might eventually eradicate violence against women and children. Where do people who engage in that conduct learn that women can be targeted in that way? For those of you who are law students, it is important to learn the law well. Simultaneously, you must be critical of the law and recognize that it compels us to think about these issues as individualized. The subject of the law is an individual, a rights-bearing individual. How do we move beyond the notions of individual culpability and individual responsibility? Where do people learn this conduct? Where does it come from? Certainly, since we live in a violence-saturated society, there is a connection between violence occurring in intimate relationships and violence in the military, in war, on the street, and by police and vigilantes. In this context, last year's discussion about Trayvon Martin was really instructive. For a few months, newspaper articles, television programs, and everyone talked about him so long as George Zimmerman remained at large. As soon as Zimmerman was arrested, it all died down as if the arrest of one individual were sufficient to address an issue that affects individuals, but has an historical dimension and certainly concerns entire communities, not just individuals.

Student: I am taking a constitutional litigation class and would like to add to what you are saying. To have standing in front of the court, you must show injury in a way that is highly individualized. For example, third parties cannot bring a suit simply because they have seen injury, the issue really touches home for them, or affects their neighborhoods. Causality must be very direct and the injury must be to the plaintiff. It is all about the individual. Barriers exist in cases where plaintiffs are trying to change larger schemes, or the way the law is applied, as being unlawful. We cannot even make those cases in front of the court. This I find to be incredibly frustrating. As you are saying, it is a man-made phenomenon, but that is how we are allowed to litigate, and only in that way.

TP: Now that we are discussing more recent issues around prisons and violence, I want to note that in the 1970s you were very active in the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and were focused on political prisoners. About 11 or 12 years ago, you were among the founders of Critical Resistance and started being very active, talking and writing about as well as organizing around issues concerning the long-range abolition--or hopefully the short-range abolition--of prisons, making prison abolition an important part of your political life and being. I will ask Jonathan Simon for specific questions on this.

Jonathan Simon (JS): One theme that has engaged us here is the relationship between grassroots movements and elite opportunities for change, such as Supreme Court decisions or the recent national crisis. I would like to call on your remarkable experiences and observations to consider two moments in time. The first is the relationship between the radical prison movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which failed in some ways, and what some have called the mass incarceration that followed. The second seems to be perhaps the line of success between reopening a grassroots struggle in the mid-1990s around this and what seems to be a gradual turn away from mass incarceration at the elite and popular levels today.

Among the letters George Jackson wrote to the New York Review of Books in 1970 before the publication of Soledad Brothers, one, dated June 10, 1970, stated that "black men born in the US and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison." It is remarkable to read that now, knowing that according to Bruce Western's research in Punishment and Inequality in America, of the black men of George Jackson's generation who did not finish high school, approximately 18 percent went to prison, or nearly one out of five, which nobody is talking about. For that same cohort in 1975, two-thirds of them went to prison, representing a shocking escalation. This represents a remarkable regression in racial justice during these years. Michelle Alexander and others have written about this.

Against that background, I would like you to reflect on two things as an activist and one of our most observant scholars of social change and social movements. First, from a critical perspective, do you see flaws in the direction of the movement around prisoner rights in the early 1970s? Did a combination of the demonization of George Jackson after his death and the state-produced imagery after Attica help to persuade white America that lockdown was necessary to bring peace to the country? In rethinking the strategies of that period, would another approach have been more effective? Second, by 1996 why did you believe it was an opportune time to start a grassroots movement again centered around prisons?

AD: First of all, whenever we attempt to organize radical movements, we must recognize that in a sense we can never predict the outcome of our work. As Stuart Hall said, "There are never any guarantees." At the same time, you have to act as if it were possible to change the world', I am rewriting the Kantian categorical imperative here. I don't know whether I would say that the radical prison movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was a failure. New conditions had emerged. For example, we were involved in the campaign against indeterminate sentencing--George Jackson was sentenced to from one year to life for his involvement in a gas station robbery, in which $70 was taken. He was 18. We thought that by organizing against indeterminate sentencing we could arrive at something more just. We all assumed that. We could not imagine mandatory minimums. We could not imagine Three Strikes. That was not the fault of the activists. Perhaps we as activists could have recognized more rapidly what was going on. Often, when we are involved in movements, we have a goal and we assume that we will know when we get there, right? Often, the changes we make are not necessarily the changes we thought we were going to make. So how do we recognize that fact and that we have also reconfigured the whole terrain of struggle? The way in which the movement brought about unexpected changes became very helpful because it made it possible to think about issues today in a way that would have been previously impossible.

Over the last few years, I have thought extensively about past union organizing and the legal efforts to legitimize union organizing among prisoners. In an amazing 1977 case, Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners Union, what was at issue was the right of the prisoners union to organize. The warden of one of the main institutions refused to allow recruiting and organizing to take place and was ordered by a lower court to allow the organizing to proceed. Then the North Carolina department of corrections appealed to the Supreme Court, which overturned the lower court decision. One of the most interesting dissents was by Thurgood Marshall, who strongly favored the right of prisoners to organize unions. In California, the United Prisoners Union called for all of the rights union members enjoy, including vacation pay. If you look up United Prisoners Union Bill of Rights online, a manifesto outlines all the rights for which they fought. So, here we are, 40 years later, and the labor movement writ large has suffered enormous assaults within the context of the globalization of capital. Today, it would be very interesting if some of the major unions were to take up the demand to organize prisoners and prisons. Prisoners continue to do work, are paid practically nothing, and have no rights. This situation seems analogous to the position of labor unions toward black people early in the 1920s and 1930s, when white labor unions refused to allow black people to join, while treating them as if they were all potential scabs. A similar situation exists with prison labor. The labor movement totally opposes prison labor, but only because of its effect on labor in the free world. If they were to take up the call to organize--and I have held discussions with some unions on this--it would be amazing. It could begin to address some problems the labor movement faces given the erosion of the unions in context of deindustrialization.

Questions and Comments

JS: Looking back on the history of Critical Resistance, 1996 does not look like a promising moment to start a movement for prisoners who are in some ways at a high-water mark, the high noon in the arc of penal severity that began in the 1970s. This is the moment of Three Strikes, the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (Eastern District of Pennsylvania), with the state and federal governments becoming just as comfortable as they can be with severely punishing people. It does not look like a promising moment for a grassroots movement about prisons.

AD: Why wouldn't it be promising?

JS: The whole country appears to be mobilized to think about the war on crime as a patriotic duty. Perhaps the best thing the Left could do would be to forget prisons or that we ever talked about prisons. A cynical perspective on that moment would be to move on to a different topic.

AD: Yes. Precisely because of what you articulated, we decided to attempt to bring together people who were doing this work. In 1996, it was very difficult to talk about prison issues. We did not have a public discourse that allowed us to talk about anything except crime in relation to prisons. Those of us who tried found ourselves to be constantly under attack. So a number of us decided to see what we could do to create a new discursive framework. We thought that a few hundred people were doing the work across the country. In Santa Cruz and in the Bay Area, we formed an organizing committee of about twenty-five to thirty people. We decided to hold a conference in the fall of 1998 on the UC Berkeley campus. Since Mike Davis had written an article in The Nation on the California prison-industrial complex, on the transformation of agribusiness into prison business, we thought we should try to popularize the term "prison-industrial complex." That would at least help people think about the soaring numbers of people being imprisoned in a context that is different from crime. You know, "Do the crime, do the time." We consciously took up the term to transform popular thinking about prisons. We had no idea that we would succeed, relatively speaking--that it would catch on.

JS: Is it accurate to say that 5,000 people showed up to that conference? It was much bigger than you expected.

AD: Yes, we were expecting about 500 people. That was going to be an amazing conference. We had no paid staff; it was volunteer work. We did it all, including typesetting the program. We initially hoped that 300 people would show up. When more interest was shown, we revised that number to 500 people. Yet some 3,500 people registered and many more people came. It was an eye-opener that people from all across the country and other parts of the world wanted to experience community in doing this work. Many people were working in their own communities, in their towns. People from Europe and Australia came.

TP: Quite a few ex-prisoners came to the conference?

AD: A lot of ex-prisoners came. It was an amazing organizing experience. We wanted to undo the hierarchy that normally asserts itself when prisoners work together with people in the so-called free world.

TP: Could you explain that further?

AD: We wanted prisoners to play an equal role. We wanted to attempt to create an egalitarian relationship between people who were doing the work in the "free world" and people who were imprisoned, so as to address the "missionary problem"--e.g., we're going to help these poor, poor, prisoners. So at the conference we set up telephone numbers that prisoners could use to make collect calls. We amplified that system so that prisoners could talk in the sessions we held. We also looked very carefully at each of the nearly 250 panels and workshops. We sought to avoid all academic panels or all lawyer panels, instead attempting to assure that we had a mix and diversity that could create conversations. We especially encouraged people to move beyond their own language boundaries. Some said that academics like to use big words and so forth, but we pointed out that even organizers often speak a specialized language. If you have never been involved in the movement and hear the word "struggle," what does it mean to you? We therefore asked everybody to be self-reflexive about their manner of expressing themselves. As a result, there were quite amazing cross-talks in the panels.

TP: Did you take on homophobia from the early days of Critical Resistance or was that later?

AD: It began in the early days.

TP: So that was a remarkable change for the movement around prison issues.

AD: Yes, and later transgender issues were addressed, beyond homophobia and issues of gender within a binary framework. Trans people have a greater likelihood of going to jail or prison than is the case for any other group in the country. You must look at the reflections in the institutional framework. How does the prison system itself consolidate a binary notion of gender? How does the prison system contribute to all of the prejudices that people have about those who do not correspond to this binary construction of gender?

Student: You are the first person to speak to us from the perspective of a self-identified abolitionist. What does an abolitionist vision look like today? Would prisons vanish completely or have a greatly reduced role? Also, what is an appropriate response to crime, even if its definition were to change dramatically?

AD: I first encountered the possibility of prison abolition in the 1970s, or perhaps it was in the late 1960s. During the Attica rebellion, which you have discussed, the prisoners in the leadership self-identified as abolitionists. Not long afterwards, a book entitled Instead of Prisons: An Abolitionist Handbook appeared. (Critical Resistance republished it, so it is available today.) That book was largely produced by Quakers, who, interestingly, were partly responsible for the emergence of the prison in the United States. The move from capital punishment to imprisonment was supposed to be a humane alternative.

TP: Next week, we are reading Struggle for Justice: A Report on Crime and Punishment in America, which was also published by the Friends.

AD: Good. It is interesting that the Quakers introduced this new mode of punishment, which was supposed to allow people to engage in reflection on themselves and establish a relationship with God. Imprisonment and solitary confinement were based on that concept. When it became clear that it did not work, they introduced the notion of the abolition of imprisonment.

There are several ways to talk about this. First, it is helpful to acknowledge the degree to which imprisonment has become naturalized in and through ideological processes. We assume that punishment can only be addressed by imprisonment, forgetting that other forms, such as transportation and the various corporal punishments, preceded it. The history of this institution has been characterized by pendulum swings in terms of reforms. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, of which you have read excerpts, points out that reform is at the heart of the history of the prison. We think about calls for reform once the prison had emerged, but actually the prison itself was a call for reform. Throughout its history, calls for prison reform have helped to consolidate the prison, which is not conceivable outside the context of these reforms and calls for reform. Unfortunately, over the years many people assumed that reforms would make the prison better. In actuality, attempts to improve prisons have so thoroughly entrenched them in our institutions and our ways of thinking that they become the only possible approach to addressing crime. Boundaries are erected and you cannot go beyond the boundaries of the prison. For instance, it does not matter whether rehabilitation works or not within the context of prison. You still must observe those boundaries and talk about rehabilitation. Rehabilitation may be perceived to work in one moment, but then there are calls for more repressive modes of punishment. The pendulum swings back and forth from rehabilitation to repression. In the past few years, we have seen this pendulum effect in California. Nothing changes; it just becomes worse. So how do you imagine ways of addressing harm that do not rely on imprisonment and, in the United States, on the death penalty--for the two are inexorably linked here?

We must imagine solutions that do not respect the boundaries of the prison. If we think that crime or harm should be eradicated, how do we go about doing that? We can't just throw people in prison, since that often reproduces the very problem that you think you are solving. I believe the prison serves as a material institution that hides the real problems, while allowing us to conceptually render those problems invisible. With respect to violence against women, by imprisoning those who commit such violence, you don't have to deal with the problem anymore. In the meantime, it reproduces itself. After being released, as was noted earlier in this conversation, a person will probably be even more inclined to commit violence against others.

How do we find solutions that are not prison based? In Critical Resistance we often talk about moving beyond the footprint of the prison. That institution is so powerful that even the alternatives we propose arise within a context created by the prison itself. Thus we try to talk about education or health care as alternatives--especially those services that should be available to people but have been removed during the era of the dismantling of the welfare state and the rise of the carceral state.

The value of abolitionist approaches are most clearly visible in the global South, which has suffered structural adjustment. Have you seen that amazing film, Bamako, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako? The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are placed on trial in a compound in Mali. The film reveals the costs to people's lives when pressure from the IMF and the World Bank led to the forcible removal of capital from human services and redirected it into profitable arenas. More prisons are being built to catch the lives disrupted by this movement of capital. People who cannot find a place for themselves in this new society governed by capital end up going to prison. In many countries, such as South Africa and Colombia (which I visited last year), deterritorialization is underway to allow agribusiness to expand, thus producing surplus populations. In Colombia, people have been removed from their land to make way for sugarcane production for the biofuel consumed by us in the West who wish to minimize our carbon footprint. All the people ejected from that land, who had protected its biodiversity, are being pushed into slums. It is most intense near Cali, in the western part of Colombia, where they are building the largest prison in South America--in part to catch those people who have been deprived of their land and have no source of cash. Thus, the value of abolition is clear in places now acquiring US-style prisons due to shifts in the economy.

Student: At a personal level, I have a political soul fueled by outrage, which often prevents me from living the life I want to and seeing the humanity in everyone--the brotherhood and sisterhood of everyone. Has your political self ever taken over your life, making it difficult to balance the two? That is, to be the person who sees the connection and is hopeful for a difference or change in our society versus the person who is outraged and propelled by that outrage?

AD: Outrage is not the only emotion that political people should experience. Joy is a political emotion as well. Because I grew up the way I did--and I'm just realizing this now--I have never felt that I could engage in the process of severing the political person from whatever else is left of the self. Of course, I have different desires at different times. I also become exhausted, but I think that imagination is a political process. I don't express my political aspirations through rage. Perhaps sometimes it is important. For instance, the general elections tomorrow [laughter]. Make sure you vote for the right candidate!

If one is going to engage in this collective struggle over a period of years and decades, one must find ways to imagine a much more capacious political self--in which you experience rage, as well as profound community and connections with other people. The humanity you mentioned is something we often lack because we have been persuaded that we are first and foremost individuals. We are in community and we are, I hope, connected with people across various racial, gender, or national boundaries. I don't have that problem. Sometimes I have to do other things; for instance, before coming to speak to you, I had to figure out a way to meditate and breathe in my yoga class as well.

JS: Is hope one of those political emotions? How hopeful are you? You talked about the elections tomorrow. A proposition on the ballot to repeal the death penalty has been leading in some polls. Another proposition would reform Three Strikes, though it is inadequate. For the first time in decades, populist movements may be moving the other way. Is this a time of hope for you, either in terms of prisons or more broadly?

AD: I think it is a time of hope. But I keep having a nightmare. You might be too young to remember when Al Gore was running against George W. Bush. We went to bed thinking that Gore had won the presidency and discovered the next morning that he hadn't. So, I'm not going to go to sleep tonight [laughter].

It is a hopeful period, but we should be wary of why some people are coming toward the anti-prison movement. We must always be prepared to move one step further. In April 2011, the NAACP released a remarkable report, Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate. It draws upon Michelle Alexander's book, which shows that more black men are in prison, on parole, and under the control of correction agencies today than there were enslaved in 1850. Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist supported the report. Their belated opposition to mass incarceration is based on their opposition to big government, and, by extension, its big prisons. You have to stop and think: Do you really want them as allies?

If we wish to address the crisis of mass incarceration, the government will have to play a much larger role in creating programs and helping to develop the educational system, recreation, and mental health care. This is definitely not what conservative opponents of mass incarceration are seeking.

TP: That's why you chose the name Critical Resistance, which is a fairly unusual name, right? Resistance we understand; but it is critically minded and wary of different kinds of coalitions and political traps.

AD: We mean critical in two senses: it is critical that we resist; we must be engaged and understand the implications of our resistance. We must be critical in our resistance.

TP: We very much appreciate your critical resistance. [Applause]

Tony Platt, interviewer *

* ANGELA DAVIS is a well-known author, activist, professor emerita at Santa Cruz, and proponent of prison abolition. Tony Platt is the author of Grave Matters: Excavating California's Buried Past and a member of the Social Justice editorial board. This interview was conducted on the UC Berkeley campus on November 5, 2012, as part of a joint class between the Department of Justice Studies at San Jose State University and the UC Berkeley Law School. We thank Judy Rosenfeld for transcribing this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.