Doing Time: The Black Experience of Prisons in Are Prisons Obsolete?

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the political, social, legal and metaphysical aspects of the “black experience of incarceration” through Angela Davis’s controversial work, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2010). By concentrating on the ‘nature of experience' within and ‘the will behind' the American prison system I explore the complex networks of power and intent that define the American justice system. I attempt to make sense of the historical and contemporary experience of black people as a community within American prisons, using the three Marxian corollaries of space, time, and labor. Each category has to be placed both as a cornerstone of the justice system in particular and also as features of the class and racial politics of America as a whole. By looking at the nexuses of the physical world that is space and time, with the cultural, like labor and power, this thesis attempts to bridge the hidden philosophical impetus of the present times with subtle historical influences of yesterday.