I read this as part of the #PoliceFreePenn book club. I randomly signed up on Twitter and I'm really glad I did because I enjoyed both reading the book and talking to the people I met there. I think the book club was a success in terms of outreach and education.

This book is pretty non-linear. Even within the chapters the information is not very systematic. One of my discussion group members said they wish there was a timeline for the history of prisons, and someone else did the homework and found two:
1. https://projectsouth.org/education/timelines/
2. https://chicagopiccollective.wordpress.com/resources/policing-timeline/

I had never heard of the history of the contemporary prison industrial complex before reading this book. After touring the Tower of London I remember wondering when and why people stopped being sentenced to torture. Short answer: Enlightenment ideals gave people the idea that they had individual rights to participate in society; rights which could be taken away from the individual as punishment, along with the idea that a monastic setting would cause someone to "pay penitence" hence the term penitentiary. Before that, prison for prison's sake didn't really exist. (Side note: Since women didn't have rights to begin with, they couldn't be sentenced to penitentiary and continued to receive torture punishment at home, yay.) So if our current system did not always exist, and it was in fact an improvement of the then-system at the time, it follows that we can re-imagine and create a different type of system that is more appropriate for our day and age.

Davis then goes into aspects needed to take into consideration: gender-specific issues of punishment, the capitalist system that is propping the entire prison industrial complex up, how race so often determines punishment and the history of prisoner leasing during the Reconstruction era. It's a short book so each of these topics are very brief.

The final chapter was what everyone wanted to skip ahead to talk about: What does an alternative look like, then? It will certainly not be a 1:1 substitution for the current system. "Put ankle bracelets on everyone and put them under house arrest" is a substitution, not a solution. Davis's idea is to address all the different aspects that lead people to commit crimes—poverty, mental/emotional illness, abuse, substance use, inequality, sheer greed, etc—and build robust support systems around those things. Also, decriminalizing things like drug use and sex work can start to dry up the system from the inside out. She also briefly touches on the need for restorative justice vs retributive justice.

Unfortunately Davis gives just a single extraordinary example of what restorative justice might be like, but my group found it kind of hard to believe that example could be applied to most offender-victim relationships. It's hard to imagine. (Imagination was something that came up repeatedly as vital to the work of social justice, btw. Creatives are desperately needed in this area to help people see a future.) We decided that restorative justice is the next thing we need to learn about because not a single one of us could give an example in practice outside of a school setting, and even then the ideas were vague. I realized that as a Christian, I should have an arm-length list of examples and ideas, but the fact is that it's a big blind spot for me. How sad is that I read a book that talks about this concept nearly every day of my life, know hundreds of other people who also read the Bible nearly every day, and I wasn't paying enough attention to be able to think of a way this could work at scale in society. "He who has eyes to see, let him see" indeed. Particularly apt now that we as a country are discussing that there can be no healing without justice.

Another thing that was brought to mind was the documentary The Act of Killing. In it, Indonesian death squad leaders are asked to play-act their war crimes in different Hollywood genres. In the beginning, it appears that they think it is all a game, that what they did wasn't really a crime, and they find it easy to re-enact the killings, until the main guy is asked to play a victim. It's like he literally never thought about what he did before. He did those terrible things and then tucked it away and went on with life. But when finally the deeds strike his conscious memory, the physical response his body has is visceral. I don't know. There's something there.