Angela Davis

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Angela Yvonne Davis (1944–) is a distinguished professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz, philosopher, and political activist known for her work in African American studies and feminist theory.

She is primarily known for her work on the intersections between race and gender, Marxist political analysis, and advocacy for prison abolition.

In the 1970s, she became the third woman ever to be featured on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List, and the subsequent trial in 1972 acquitted her of all charges relevant to her arrest in October of 1970.

She is a member of the Communist Party USA.

FBI’s most wanted

The FBI's wanted poster from 1970

Davis was arrested on 4 October 1970 by the FBI following an investigation of her alleged involvement in Marin County Courthouse seizure. She was imprisoned for sixteen months then eventually was released on bail. She was listed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List just two months prior. The courthouse seizure was a high profile case due to the death of four people including a judge.

Davis was tied to the attacks by the FBI due to the weapons being used in the attack being owned by Davis, and her previous connections with the attackers. She was working as an assistant professor in philosophy at UCLA at the time of her arrest. Davis maintained she didn't have any knowledge of the attacks prior to the event, or that the weapons she bought were going to be used in an attack.

Upon her arrest then-president Richard Nixon praised law enforcement for their capture of a "dangerous terrorist". She maintained her innocence and inspired a public campaign among her supporters to "Free Angela Davis", even inspiring John Lennon and Yoko Ono to write a song in her honor.

An all-white jury deemed her "not-guilty" on the charges of kidnapping, murder, and criminal conspiracy in 1972.

Activism: Before and after

Davis has been a political activist her entire life. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama which had one of the most segregated communities in the United States. Davis grew up in a neighbourhood that was dubbed "dynamite hill" due to the frequent bombings carried out by the Ku Klux Klan. Davis was particularly active in the civil rights movement, something her parents were often involved with when she was younger. Davis is a self-identified Marxist, and in the time prior to her arrest she was particularly vocal about her support of the Soledad Brothers, the brothers being unrelated inmates who were charged for the killing of a prison guard. One of these inmates was the infamous George Jackson who was a radical activist popular within black leftist circles at the time, who also has a fascinating story of being subject to injustice himself. It was this support of the Soledad Brothers that would eventually lead to the association between Davis and the Marin County Courthouse attacks, which were carried out in part by George Jackson's brother Jonathan P. Jackson who died during the court seizure. He was only 17 years old.

She was particularly interested in the politics of the Black Panthers but was critical of its seemingly sexist elements. She was also particularly involved in the second wave feminism movement.

In the late 1960s, then-governor of California Ronald Reagan pressured UCLA to have Davis fired for her communist sympathies.

After her arrest Davis became increasingly critical of the prison-industrial complex which she had already been critical of, spending the decades following with open advocacy for prison abolition.

She published multiple scholarly works, the most famous of which were Women, Race, and Class in 1981, and Are Prisons Obsolete? in 2003.

In 1997, Davis became a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a non-profit organization focused on abolitionism.

Notable scholarly work

At the University of California Santa Cruz, Angela Davis researches and teaches about black feminism, black history and pop culture, the history of social consciousness, critical theory, and the philosophy of punishment. She wrote an autobiography about her life and experience in prison, in addition to various books and publications related to gender, race, and Marxism.

Women, Race, and Class

One of her most famous works is Women, Race, and Class, which was published in 1981. The book explores slavery within the United States and how it impacted the gender dynamics of chattel slaves; the book also explores the rise of the anti-slavery movement, racism within the women's suffrage movement, and white suffragette's general opposition to the 15th Amendment. The book gives special attention to various black women within the women's suffrage movement who challenged the exclusion of black women from the wider movement, the most renowned example being Sojourner Truth. The book spends a considerable time exploring the individual roles of various other black suffragette figures throughout, and the hostility they often faced from their white counterparts.

The work also touches briefly on the history of racism and eugenics within the early birth control movement, and how white women in the fight for reproductive rights had been generally negligent and unsympathetic to the concerns of black women. The book also explores the "myth of the black rapist" and how it functioned as propaganda to inspire lynchings, while also being readily perpetuated historically by white women.

The major theme and thesis of the book is the degree to which the women's liberation movement had centred the needs of upper-class white women, or more specifically bourgeois white women. All being done at the continued marginalization and silencing of the voices of working-class black women and the working class broadly For Davis, race is analyzed under the context of Class and the exploitation of labour to which many systems of oppression on the grounds of race operate. This ties systems of white supremacy and capitalism together.

For this broader idea that focuses on the interaction between racism and capitalism, Women, Race and Class is credited as a pioneering work in intersectional feminism.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Arguably a more contemporary work being published in 2003, Are Prisons Obsolete? focuses in particular on the subject of prison abolition. The book focuses on prisons as being ineffective systems that perpetuate various systems of injustice and oppression, while also forwarding possible alternatives.

Davis opens the book with the understanding that for many people the idea of abolishing prisons is unimaginable, but builds the case that prisons do not work as deterrents to crime, or as "correctional facilities" to individuals dubbed as criminals. The disruptive effects on communities, families, and individuals who have their entire lives uprooted and are unable to integrate into non-criminal employment may lead one to conclude that the costs of prisons far outweigh the benefits. Davis is particularly alarmed at the fact that the U.S. holds approximately 20% of the world's prison population (a fact that is still true even 20 years after the publication of Are Prisons Obsolete?) and believes that suggests that the system itself is deeply flawed.

It is no secret that prisons facilitate organized crime by the creation of prison gangs, and it is a well-acknowledged fact that the United States in particular has a high rate of criminal recidivism. This calls into question the idea that the purpose of prisons is to reduce crime, or that the purpose is to reform prisoners so as to make them productive members of society. Half of all prisoners after release are re-incarcerated, and part of this is credited to the near impossibility for the ex-incarcerated to secure housing and employment outside the prison system.

The NAACP claims that African Americans only make up about 5% of illicit drug users in the United States, and yet make up approximately 33% of those who are incarcerated for drug-related offences, and that the imprisonment rate for African Americans for drug-related charges is six times that of white Americans. They also report that a black man is five times more likely to be stopped by police without just cause when compared to a white man. Racial bias in the criminal justice system is particularly relevant to the abolitionist stance and is especially relevant for Davis' case.

Davis having experienced the realities of prisons firsthand, also possesses insight into the uncomfortable realities of correctional facilities for women. Davis argues that prisons facilitate the normalization and institutionalization of rape and rape culture by allowing prison guards to do full cavity searches on inmates. From her perspective prisons reflect and reinforce systems of domination based in misogyny, especially so for women’s correctional facilities.

A significant amount of the book is spent examining the prison-industrial complex from Davis's signature Marxist analysis. Davis argues that prisons function in service to the capitalist class in many ways as with the police, that is in the service of the legal protection of private property, but prisons in particular function as a means to provide free bodies of labour to various industries with little if no concern to the cost of providing wages in the form of uncompensated prison labour. This essentially amounts to a kind of contemporary slavery to which the Thirteenth Amendment explicitly allows provided it is as criminal punishment. From the Marxist perspective this can be viewed as an institution that serves to provide a maximization of the exploitation of labour for a subset of the population so as to be sustainable to capitalism as a whole. Even if the majority of prisoners are white, the disproportionate representation of black bodies within the prison system suggests racism is built into the system institutionally. From Davis's perspective prisons cannot exist and function as is without racism.

With all that, the natural question is what is the alternative? How else does society deal with the individuals who act in ways that are violent and harmful towards others? Especially in ways that are genuine threats to one's life or bodily autonomy? Davis has an answer to that question, though your mileage may vary in how satisfying that answer really is. Davis keeps a section of the book particularly focused on restorative justice appealing to anecdotes and case studies where it was seemingly effective. If one is skeptical of that suggestion and deems the evidence in its favour as weak, it should be noted that alternative models of justice are not limited solely to what Davis herself advocates.

Relevant evidence to consider about restorative justice independent of Davis's work

There are difficulties within relevant social scientific research on what restorative justice can even be said to be, but a meta-analysis published a few years after the publication of Are Prisons Obsolete? suggested positive effects in regard to, victim satisfaction, offender satisfaction, and recidivism rates with respect to restorative justice policies compared to traditional policies. Even under that seemingly positive review, the authors noted a presence of self-selecting bias within the literature possibly skewing the overall data used in the analysis.

A systematic-review published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2013 found the effects of restorative justice conferencing over traditional court proceedings to be insignificant; finding that overall such conferencing did not impact recidivism rates, offender’s sense of wrong-doing, sense of remorse, or likelihood to re-offend. It was also noted by the authors that many of studies on such effects were of particularly low quality.

A 2017 federal funded meta-analysis conducted by researchers from George Mason University looked at the efficacy of restorative justice under the context of juvenile justice, and found that across various studies the effects on reducing future delinquent behaviour was moderate compared to the traditional court system. The robustness of the results are questionable according to the authors of the study, given the more rigorously conducted studies with randomized assignment found much smaller effect sizes compared to the studies with weaker controls.