NAKED CITY . Fine Print

Freedom Fighting

Angela Davis and Sister Helen Prejean spoke on war, crime and prisons.


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Published: Apr 4, 2007

I t seems you can't open a paper or turn on the radio without hearing about one more violent death. But the people who filled the Broad Street Ministry Saturday afternoon were not there to lament violence on the streets. Their concern was a more institutionalized form of violence: the rapidly growing rates of incarceration in America.

"Locked Up: Keys to Prison Change" was the final lecture in a monthlong series of local events marking "Justice Month." The principal speakers, Angela Davis and Sister Helen Prejean, both view the criminal justice system as emblematic of the failure of the American political system. "Why is it that we consent to living with these institutions that disappear people?" asked Davis. Her answer: "So we don't have to think about the systems that put people there."

The United States has a higher percentage of incarcerated people than any other country, according to Human Rights Watch.

Failing schools, unaffordable health care and an unlivable minimum wage are just a few of the systemic failures prison activists cite. "We have prisons because we don't have community justice," said Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, "and we don't have that because we're not connected to each other."

That lack of connection, both speakers agreed, is often the result of racism. This has been Davis' struggle, as a former Black Panther and longtime civil rights activist. She frequently spoke of prison "abolition," a term that suggested similarities between prison and slavery. Given t he disproportionate number of blacks who are incarcerated, her comparison was not without merit.

"Just look at what happened after Katrina," she said. "There are still people [in prison] who were arrested for 'looting' in New Orleans. Remember Kanye West, and the distinction he made?" That distinction, between white people taking food (whom the media referred to as "foragers") and black people doing the same (labeled "looters") is just one example, said Davis, of "the way terms get racialized, so we don't have to acknowledge that we're talking about race."

Both speakers pointed out that we are a country at war: in Baghdad, in our streets and in our minds. And it's hard to separate fear and anger from the misguided notion that, if only more people got arrested, we would somehow all be safe. "I heard that crime is war in slow motion," said Prejean. Perhaps we should use those few extra seconds to build a society where prevention, rather than prisons, is the war cry.