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

> To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.

- 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/to-reiterate-rather

## 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)