Former Black power movement
 leader Angela Davis spoke
in Madison April 27

Professor Angela Davis visited the University of Wisconsin- Madison campus April 27 to lecture on the prison industrial complex in the United States. Davis is well-known for her role in the Black power movement as a member of the Black Panther and Communist parties. More recently, Davis has worked tirelessly to educate the general public on the injustice surrounding the prison system in the United States. As she informed us, this topic is particularly relevant for residents of Wisconsin, because more minorities are incar- cerated in this state than in any other.

Davis' remarks can be summarized into three basic themes: First, a brief history and definition of the "prison industrial complex;"

second, the role of racism and sexism in the current U.S. prison system, and third, imprisonment should not be the primary mode of punishment.

History and definition of "the prison industrial complex"

Davis began her lecture by pointing out a little known fact: Prisons were not used as primary modes of punishment until the American Revolution. That is when imprisonment began to be used to deprive the "criminals" of rights and liberties, the very rights and liberties granted in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Therefore, it can be said that there is a direct relationship between democracy, which grants the rights, and imprisonment, which takes those rights away. But the prisons did not become an "industrial complex" until the weakening of the communist states and the beginning of globalization — the 1980s — the Reagan-Bush years. This decade marks the beginning of a prison expansion that more than quadrupled the number of prisoners in the United States: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were around 350,000 inmates in 1980; by 2003, the number was around 1,470,000. Davis estimates that there are about 2 million prisoners in the U.S. today.

From what I could gather from the lecture, the prison system is now considered an "industrial complex" because it has become lucrative to businesses all over the world. It has become part of the global economy and has proved itself extremely profitable. As Davis points out, many companies have benefited from the rise in inmate populations: Among them are the construction companies that build all the new prisons; the food companies that provide meals to the inmates; and the electronic, soap, and telephone companies that provide services inside the prisons, to mention only a few. Also benefiting from this great expansion are the companies doing business inside prison walls, and there are many of those, because they can pay their employees — the prisoners — way below the minimum wage.

In simplest terms, the rise in prison inmate populations and the lucrative nature of the prison industrial complex are fueled by an ever growing capitalistic global economy.

So how can we stop the numbers of prisoners from going up? "Come up with an alternative to capitalism," Davis says.