# Quote — Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

> The most immediate question today is how to prevent as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call "the free world." How can we move to decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services? How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than elusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing "crime" and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring the new terrain of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.

- Author: [Angela Y. Davis](https://www.leafyquotes.com/angela-y-davis.md)
- Book: [Are Prisons Obsolete?](https://www.leafyquotes.com/angela-y-davis/are-prisons-obsolete.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Angela_Davis#Are_Prisons_Obsolete%3F_(2003)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/angela-y-davis/are-prisons-obsolete/the-most-immediate

## More from this book

> The prison has become a black hole inti which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/angela-y-davis/are-prisons-obsolete/the-prison-has-become.md)

> Many people are familiar with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fact, it has already been abolished in most countries. Even the staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/angela-y-davis/are-prisons-obsolete/many-people-are.md)

> The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In the meantime, elected officials and the dominant media justified the new draconian sentencing practices, sending more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more and more prisons by arguing that this was the only way to make our communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/angela-y-davis/are-prisons-obsolete/the-massive-prison-building.md)