Are Prisons Obsolete?

I should not be listed as the sole author of this book, for its ideas reflect various forms of collaboration over the last six years with activists, scholars, prisoners, and cultural workers who have tried to reveal and contest the impact of the prison industrial complex on the lives of people—within and outside prisons—throughout the world. The organizing committee for the 1998 Berkeley conference, Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, included Bo (rita d. brown), Ellen Barry, Jennifer Beach, Rose Braz, Julie Browne, Cynthia Chandler, Kamari Clarke, Leslie DiBenedetto Skopek, Gita Drury, Rayne Galbraith, Ruthie Gilmore, Naneen Karraker, Terry Kupers, Rachel Lederman, Joyce Miller, Dorsey Nunn, Dylan Rodriguez, Eli Rosenblatt, Jane Segal, Cassandra Shaylor, Andrea Smith, Nancy Stoller, Julia Sudbury, Robin Templeton, and Suran Thrift. In the long process of coordinating plans for this conference, which attracted over three thousand people, we worked through a number of the questions that I raise in this book. I thank the members of that committee, including those who used the conference as a foundation to build the organization Critical Resistance. In 2000, I was a member of a University of California Humanities Research Institute Resident Research Group and had the opportunity to participate in regular discussions on many of these issues. I thank the members of the group—Gina Dent, Ruth Gilmore, Avery Gordon, David Goldberg, Nancy Schepper Hughes, and Sandy Barringer—for their invaluable insights. Cassandra Shaylor and I coauthored a report to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism on women of color and the prison industrial complex—a number of whose ideas have made their way into this book. I have also drawn from a number of other recent articles I have published in various collections. Over the last five years Gina Dent and I have made numerous presentations together, published together, and engaged in protracted conversations on what it means to do scholarly and activist work that can encourage us all to imagine a world without prisons. I thank her for reading the manuscript and I am deeply appreciative of her intellectual and emotional support. Finally, I thank Greg Ruggiero, the editor of this series, for his patience and encouragement.