Activist, educator, author and former SF State professor, Angela Davis, was on campus Monday, September 20 to discuss the prison industrial complex in the United States. Students, faculty, graduates and guests trickled in to Jack Adams Hall for the one o’clock event. At 15 minutes past the hour when Davis walked on to the stage there was standing room only and the audience erupted in applause.

Veronica Melton, a junior studying psychology, sat in the second row holding two books, “Are Prisons Obsolete?” by Angela Davis and “The House that Race Built” a compilation of work from various authors, intellectuals and activists, including Davis. Melton had seen Davis speak twice before and has been inspired by her words and her work.

“She is a dynamic speaker,” said Melton, who finds inspiration in people like Davis, who inspire young people. Melton spoke of what she saw as a disconnect between individuals and the community, especially in communities of color.

“It is important that we have forums like this, to help people realize they need to rise to a higher level of consciousness to get rid of ignorance – that to me is a disease, as bad as Syphilis and AIDS.” Melton said that attending events like this one can serve as a glimmer of hope. “It keeps me strong."

Davis spoke for an hour and a half, commenting on the current state of the US prison system. She called the sexual, physical, and mental abuse inflicted on Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American female soldiers an example of the United States military’s idea of female equality. She also spoke about routine cavity searches performed on American prisoners, in particular women, in the context of sexual assault.

Davis vividly painted a picture of prisoners in [super] maximum-security prisons throwing their own feces on guards, “because it is all they have left.”

The prison industrial complex, as Davis calls it, is made up of several corporations who profit from the prison system in the United States. These corporations benefit in various ways from using labor from incarcerated men and women to produce various products, to being contracted to carry the collect calls made from prison phones.

The solution Davis posed to prison abuse and the prison industrial complex is simple, not easy, but simple: abolish the entire prison system, as we know it. “It sounds scary,” acknowledged Davis, “but think about who these prisoners are. Some of them are your family members. It’s amazing what ideology can do, that it creates these images that cause you to ignore your own experiences.”

Davis suggested that the United States create new institutions that would make the prison system, as we know it obsolete.

Davis spoke of the public school system, which she said tracks students from poor neighborhoods, not toward college, but toward prison. The only alternative for many of these students, she said, is the military.

While Davis said that she does not subscribe to the cynical attitude that nothing has changed for people of color in the United States, she does say that the effects of slavery are more evident in the black community today, than ever before.

Davis said that education needs to be presented to children in a different light to inspire them to learn and improve on the condition of their communities.

“I would like to suggest that education is about more than just making money,” Davis said. She added that if the joy of learning was expressed to children that maybe they would choose education over “conflicting stepping stones to monetary gain, such as sports, music and drug trafficking.”

Davis expressed concern with the lack of importance placed on education today, in particular in communities of color and said that while individual responsibility is a big part of the problem, it cannot fix an entire system.

“Justice is blind, right?” asked Davis. Students responded to this question with laughter. “Well, the law cannot grasp the profound differences among us – differences that shape us before we face the law in its neutral domain.”

Davis herself is more than qualified to discuss the prison system in the United States, having served time in prison herself after being placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List as a result of her activism work with groups such as The Black Panther Party. Davis, who spent nearly 13 years teaching at SF State, said she hopes that it is still a place for “radical social transformation” and encouraged all students to support Project Rebound, a special admissions program at SF State for men and women in and from the prison system.