Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that t… - Angela Davis

While jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.

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

The prison has become a black hole inti which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison