Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis

Author:Angela Davis [Davis, Angela]
Language: spa
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

determined how long and how fast they should work. In the

slave narrative of Moses Grandy, an especially brutal form of

whipping is described in which the woman was required to

lie on the ground with her stomach positioned in a hole,

whose purpose was to safeguard the fetus (conceived as

future slave labor). If we expand our definition of punishment under slavery, we can say that the coerced sexual relations between slave and master constituted a penalty exacted on women, if only for the sole reason that they were slaves. In other words, the deviance of the slave master was

transferred to the slave woman, whom he victimized.

Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into

hypersexuality of women prisoners. The notion that female

"deviance" always has a sexual dimension persists in the

contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and

sexuality continues to be racialized. Thus, white women

labeled as "criminals" are more closely associated with

blackness than their "normal" counterparts*

Prior to the emergence of the prison as the major form of

public punishment, it was taken for granted that violators of

the law would be subjected to coiporal and frequently capital

penalties. What is not generally recognized is the connection

between state-inflicted corporal punishment and the physical assaults on women in domestic spaces. This form of bodily discipline has continued to be routinely meted out to women in the context of intimate relationships, but it is

rarely understood to be related to state punishment.

Quaker reformers in the United States—especially the

Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public

Prisons, founded in 1787—played a pivotal role in campaigns

to substitute imprisonment for corporal punishment.

Following in the tradition established by Elizabeth Fry in

England, Quakers were also responsible for extended crusades

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