Activist, professor, philosopher and author Angela Davis began her weeklong residency at UVA today. Davis will be the keynote speaker for a multidisciplinary symposium, "The Problem of Punishment: Race, Inequality and Justice," presented this week by the UVA Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.
Davis, a professor at University of California-Santa Cruz, is a prolific writer on women’s issues and on racial justice. Her life-long work on the social implications of imprisonment has led her to advocate for the possibility of a modern world without prisons.
Today, more than 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States, Davis told members of the local press this afternoon. One in 100 adults is actually behind bars, she added, and one in 31 adults is under the direct control of a correctional agency.
“The most important element of abolition is to create the kinds of institutions that make imprisonment unnecessary,” she said. Davis urged that the abolition of prisons involve the improvement of health care institutions and a renewed commitment to education.
More after the photo.
Angela Davis began her week in residence today with a press conference.
“On the other hand, it involves envisioning, imagining and creating a very different kind of justice,” she said. “A justice that is based on healing and the restoration of social relations.”
Davis said she sees the current political climate and the new administration as an "auspicious" moment to have such a symposium. “We have a new administration that is dedicated to undoing all the damage, the cumulative damage of at least the last eight years,” she said.
Davis intends to understand “why there is such a dramatic disparity between people of color and white people in terms of imprisonment rates,” she said, and stressed the need to ask questions about law enforcement and surveillance.
According to Davis, the scope of the imprisonment reforms she is advocating is a global one. “The United States of America is pretty much responsible for offering the penitentiary or prison as punishment to the rest of the world,” she said.
Davis’ keynote address, "Surveillance, Imprisonment and the Quotidian Work of Race," is scheduled for Thursday, April 16 at 7:30pm in UVA’s Newcomb Hall Ballroom.