BY SUSAN VELA
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HIGHLAND HEIGHTS - Angela Davis, best known for the trails she blazed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, criticized today's prison system Friday night before a packed auditorium at Northern Kentucky University.
Businesses profit from more people going to prison and more prisons having to be built, Ms. Davis said.
But prisons don't rehabilitate people, she added, saying there are better ways of holding people accountable for committing crimes. Most often, she said, blacks and Latinos, the illiterate, the homeless and the mentally deranged are filling the jail cells. Ms. Davis spoke passionately, letting her voice dip from high to low and using her hands to emphasize her long-standing support for political prisoners and this country's booming prison population.
Ms. Davis pointed to two celebrated cases:
- Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row in Pennsylvania for what some believe is a wrongful conviction for murdering a police officer in 1982.
- Leonard Peltier, an American Indian who is jailed for murdering two FBI agents in South Dakota more than 20 years ago.
She urged the crowd to think, know their history and do something about the racial and social injustices inherent in today's the prison system.
"I think we're on the verge of a new era of activism, I really do," she told the crowd. "People want to bring about a change. I ask all of you to think very deeply about ways you can get involved." Ms. Davis was in the national spotlight in 1969, when she was removed from her teaching job at UCLA's philosophy department for being a member of the Communist Party.
She also became a voice for the Black Liberation Movement and, in 1970, her efforts to free prisoners the Soledad brotherssparked a heated trial and led to her own arrest and imprisonment. She was accused of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy in a hostage situation at which she was not present. She was acquitted in 1972.
A year later, she founded the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression. Ms. Davis now is a tenured professor in the history of consciousness department at University of California-Santa Cruz.
While speaking Friday, she noted that many people her age often introduce themselves to her by saying, "I'm from the '60s." She finds it odd that some people use the decade as they would the name of a hometown.
She noted said that these people often romanticize the era and forget about the horrors that sparked many of its movements. She admitted her own naivete then in regards to the the nation's prisons. She never thought so many would be built to house so many prisoners.
In the '60s, fewer less than 200,000 people were in prison. She remembers contending that some foreign nations were less populous. But, now, there are almost 2 million people behind bars. And between 1852 and 1965, 12 prisons were built. At least 20 have been constructed built since 1984, she said.
"I think we should ask ourselves how this happened," she said. PH:By Steve Shaffer for The Enquirer
