There is this freedom movement and then there is an attempt to narrow the freedom movement so that it fits into a much smaller frame, the frame of ci… - Angela Davis

Particularly in the United States, race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality.

Paradoxically, demands for parity with men's prisons, instead of creating greater educational, vocational, and health opportunities for women prisoners, often have led to more repressive conditions for women. This is not only a consequence of deploying liberal - that is, formalistic - notions of equality, but of, more dangerous, allowing male prisons to function as the punishment norm.

As a rule, white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no conscious class loyalty at all. This unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist economic system was evident in the program of the women’s rights movement as well. If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish which needed to be eliminated, most women’s righters viewed male supremacy in a similar manner—as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related.