KEEPING UP FIGHT AGAINST PRISON SYSTEM

ANGELA Davis, writing in 1971 from the Marin County Jail, had this to say
about prisons: ``Disengaged from normal social life, its revelations and
influences, they must finally be robbed of their humanity.

``Yet human beings cannot be willed or molded into non-existence. . . .Even
the most drastic repressive measures have not obstructed the progressive
ascent of captive men and women to new heights of social consciousness.''

That is from her 1971 book, ``If They Come in the Morning.'' Nearly three
decades later, she has not silenced her battle cry against the prison
system.

It is common to hear freed prisoners pledge their dedication to prison
reform. But we have seen few who have persisted like Davis, a 1965 magna cum
laude Brandeis graduate who has a master's degree and who became one of this
country's most famous political prisoners.

Some, of course, will dispute the term, ``political.'' Davis, a civil rights
activist and communist, was accused of planning and supplying the gun for a
courthouse shootout in Marin County Civic Center.

46our people were killed, and Davis was acquitted after spending16 months
in jail.

This week at Stanford University, Davis, a tall woman to whom time has been
gentle since her youthful face showed up on an FBI Most Wanted poster, spoke
with perfect diction and calm, dead-on delivery.

She talked about her prison reform mission at a gathering of a national
African-American columnists organization called the Trotter Group.

With nearly 2 million people in jail -- eight times as many as when she went
to prison -- it is time people took a look at ``the prison industrial
complex,'' she said.

In California, where the number of women in prison is nearly double the
combined female prison population of the other states, it is time we looked
at why women go to prison. In fact, we should consider whether most of them
should be in prison at all as opposed to say, a halfway house.

Walk into any federal prison, she said, and you will see women locked up for
very long periods -- even 40, 50, 60 years -- because of the men in their
lives.

``The assumption is that if they are involved with a man, they know about
the crime,'' Davis said. ``Therefore it's conspiracy, and so they often do
more time than their men.''

These are women who have children at home who are suddenly thrust into the
care of anyone who will look after them. It is time to find different ways
to talk about crime, Davis says.

It is her constant and pressing point. People are in prison whose punishment
has nothing to do with the severity of their crime.

``When I went to jail in 1970, I realized that nobody was looking at the way
women were imprisoned,'' she said. ``The invisibility of imprisoned women
was a very serious problem.''

And with people of color making up 70 percent of those incarcerated and the
greatest number of them African-Americans, it is time to look at the
societal ills that lead them there.

Today, privatization of prisons is a hot topic. It is a trend that worries
Davis -- the fact that a corporation could have a stake in the expansion of
the prison system.

Private corrections companies have been a boon for investors, and revenues
are climbing steeply.

``We have to be careful about the incorporation of the corporate structure
into the punishment system,'' she warned, noting that in addition, many
companies are involved in goods and services to prisons. Still others, such
as IBM, Victoria's Secret, Boeing, Compaq and Microsoft use prison labor,
she said.

The argument could be made that doing so provides meaningful employment for
prisoners. It could be argued that prisoners in Maryland inspecting Revlon's
glass bottles have the dignity of real jobs.

But Davis makes the argument that corporations and investors profiting from
the prison system is dangerous because there will be less incentive to stop
locking people up. Further, she says, prisons could but do not use the
resources they gain to attack society's ills that contribute to
incarceration.

Why not use it to open free drug rehabilitation centers, subsidize housing
for homeless people or fight HIV, she asks?

Meanwhile, during the past 13 years, 20 new prisons have opened in
California.

This growing emphasis of the penal system and not on the causes of pathology
should not be allowed to continue to be a matter of ``them'' and ``us.'' We
are in it together.

The words of writer James Baldwin are appropriate today. He wrote an open
letter to ``My Sister Angela Y. Davis'' during her incarceration, praising
her fight ``to bring a new consciousness.''

``We must fight for your life as though it were our own -- which it is --
and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber,'' he
wrote. ``For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us
that night.''

Write Loretta Green at the Mercury News, 310 University Ave., Palo Alto,
Calif. 94301; fax (650) 688-7555; e-mail LGreen@sjmercury.com

Checked-by: Don Beck