Angela Davis’ “The Prison Industrial Complex” is a live recording of 
Davis speaking at Colorado College on May 5, 1997.
The adjunct 
professor and social activist outlines the understated impacts that 
the growing prison population has on America, especially in 
communities of color.  Davis believes that the modern prison culture 
is a symptom of social ills which include substance abuse, racism, 
xenophobia and globalization.
Davis, who began her career as an assistant professor at UCLA in 1969, 
was unceremoniously fired by the University of California Board of 
Regents after only a year at the urging of then Governor Ronald Reagan 
due to her alleged communist activities.  A year later she became 
embroiled with controversy after firearms that she had purchased were 
used in a Marin County prison escape which resulted in the death of a 
Superior Court Judge.
Although Davis was acquitted of all charges, many people still see her 
as a symbol of the more radical social movements of the 1960s and 
1970s, including the Black Panthers.  Davis claims that she has always 
been conscious of social activism stating that her, “parents basically 
taught us that we had to be critical of the way things were; otherwise 
we could not affirm our own humanity.”
This acute sense of awareness has led her to question what she calls 
“the prison industrial complex,” a term which is a spin-off of what 
President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined was “the industrial military 
complex.”  During her legal troubles in the 1970s, Davis believes she 
witnessed firsthand that the “prison system as a whole served as a 
weapon as political repression, racist repression.”
Of the almost two-and-a-half million Americans who are presently 
incarcerated, it is estimated that 44 percent are African American even 
though they only represent 12 percent of the total population.
Davis does 
not believe that this shocking statistic is a coincidence.  She 
asserts that within the “prison industrial complex, there is also an 
ideological campaign to persuade people that criminals can be 
recognized by virtue of their race.”
Therefore, prisons not only 
perpetuate the circle of violence and crime which traps many 
minorities in this country, they perpetuate the vilification of young 
men of color.  This is how, as Davis points out, the American populous, 
including African Americans, have begun to erroneously associate all 
young African American men with criminal activity.
With so many men and an increasing number of women spending time 
behind the walls of America’s jails and prisons, Davis contends that 
it is surprising that others refuse to recognize them, stating, “we 
have learned how to forget about prisons.”  Even when people have 
friends and family members who are incarcerated, they disassociate 
themselves and do not act as a link between the prisoners and the 
outside world.
Most people are comfortable with the belief that prisoners are violent 
people who deserve to be punished; however, over 50 percent of sentenced 
inmates are non-violent offenders.  Many are drug addicts suffering 
from chemical dependency.  Davis proposes that the system should focus 
on education and rehabilitation.
In the second half of her talk, Davis ventures into other social 
issues, which she is able to only loosely tie back to her original 
topic.  The litany of causes which she attributes to the bloated 
“prison industrial complex” include the “demonization of the 
immigrant,” and the “vacuum that has been left by these trans-national corporations that have moved into the third world.”
Davis also asserts that pharmaceutical companies are no better than drug 
dealers and that there should be a worldwide boycott on Nike.
 Although these issues are interesting food for thought, they 
inevitably detract from her initial thesis and hurt the academic 
integrity of her argument.
It is refreshing that Davis not only points out the many problems, but she 
also offers solutions.  During her time as a professor at San 
Francisco State, she brought her class of college students into the 
county jail to learn from the inmates, thus creating a dialogue between 
the “free” and the “unfree” worlds.  This underscores her belief that 
education can be used to break the cyclical nature of crime and 
incarceration.  It costs around $45,000 to keep someone in 
prison for a year. Davis notes, “it costs much more to send someone to 
prison then it does to college.”
Despite some grandiose claims that are somewhat unsubstantiated, the 
majority of Davis’s argument is correct and more relevant than ever. 
Even as crime rates in America drop, the prison population is on the 
rise.  Of the new prisons that are sprouting up across America, many 
of them are privately operated by for-profit companies like the 
Corrections Corporation of America which trades on the New York Stock 
Exchange as CXW.  Davis rightly believes that if America does not 
quickly reform its prison system, “we will be an increasingly 
incarcerated society.”