Teach and Defend the right to learn.
- Angela Davis

Professor Angela Davis gave the following talk at the July 5, 2004 NEA National Convention pre-conference meeting titled "Education, Not Incarceration" hosted by the NEA's Peace and Justice Caucus.

She is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an internationally known scholar, activist and advocate fo prison abolition. Davis has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. Her latest book is title, "Are Prisons Obsolete?"

It is a great honor to have the opportunity to address an audience that is made of dedicated people who work hard to make a difference in the lives of young people today. I am especially pleased to have been invited to speak today by the Peace and Justice Caucus of the National Education Association, which is hosting this meeting for the Education Not Incarceration Coalition. This meeting takes place in conjunction with the Pre-Conference last Thursday bearing the same theme.

Teaching is an honorable profession and it entails major responsibilities to generations of youth who, based on the skills they acquire and the relationship to knowledge they develop under your tutelage, will, for better or worse, remake the future. As we now celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, we are compelled to recognize that the promise of educational equality - indeed the promise of racial equality in the broader social sense - has not been fulfilled. Today northern schools are even more segregated than southern schools. However, having attended segregated schools during the middle of the twentieth century in Birmingham, Alabama, which was considered to be the most segregated city in the South, I don't support the cynical position that this historical signpost is meaningless, for if we argued that nothing has changed as a consequence of the struggles - by students, teachers and antiracist communities - this would imply that is unlikely that we can change our future. This is what this meeting is about - radical change for the future. Education Not Incarceration.

I want us to recall that this year is also another major anniversary - the fortieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many of the young people who participated in the movements that demanded and enabled the passage of this act were educated in such a way that produced a profound dissatisfaction with the world as it was then. We were persuaded that it was possible to tear down a social system was based on white supremacy. What we did not know at that time was that the production of racial equality would require a great deal more than the passage of legislation or the production of Supreme Court decisions. Equality before the law does not by itself produce social equality. In the frequently quoted words of French writer Anatole France. "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge." We might add that the people sentenced to jail or prison may be equal before the law - they are all subjects who have the right to an attorney, the right to due process, etc. Justice is blind, which also means that the law cannot grasp the profound differences - racial, sexual, economic differences for example - that shape subjects before they appear in its domain.

There are more than 2 million people who at this moment live in some form of confinement under the authority of state and federal governments - this includes state and federal prisons, county jails, jails in Indian Country, youth detention centers, immigration detention centers under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, routine military prisons and the notorious outlaw military prisons in Iraq, Cuba, and other countries.

Prisons disappear entire populations, entire communities, especially black and Latino communities. "The disappeared" - or desaparecidos - is a term we associate with the practices of the military junta that seized power in Argentina in 1976. Thousands of people suspected of involvement with what the dictatorship labeled "left terrorism" - including opposition party members, labor activists, journalists, engaged artists, and, yes, teachers - vanished without a trace. It has been determined that many of them were held captive in a network of secret detention centers, where they became anonymous hooded prisoners, subject to humiliation, torture, and murder.

A quarter of a century later, photographs taken in a military detention center outside Badgad, Iraq are placed in global circulation, thus revealing the ugly details of what may well have been the fate of the desaparacidos in Argentina. The victims today, who are also purported to be "terrorists," probably include labor activists, journalists, cultural workers, and teachers, as well as opposition party members. Only the families, colleagues and friends of these twenty-first century disappeared can tell us who they really are. But this time it is not a South American military dictatorship utilizing the well-preserved techniques of torture, but rather the military arm of a government that claims to represent the most advanced democracy in the world.

Camp X-Ray in the U.S. military base located in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq are only two of the prisons that comprise a secret network of U.S. military detention facilities outside the territories directly controlled by the U.S. government. It is also suspected that such facilities may exist on board ships and in such countries as Diego Garcia, Jordan, and Pakistan. Many thousands of purported terrorists are held captive in these places, where they have probably been subjected to the psychological, physical, and sexual pain we know has been inflicted on prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are imaginary and real social environments that correspond to the rhetorical violence associated with the Bush administration's "war on terror." In the rhetorical universe of the war on terror, whoever is labeled "terrorist" or "unlawful combatant" - a process, whose racial dimension is unambiguous - deserves treatment that is in violation of the Geneva Convention and acknowledged international human rights standards.

But if Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo recall the fate of the desaparicidos in Argentina, they have also been enabled by techniques of incarceration that characterize normal operations in the vast network of U.S. domestic prisons. Both military detention facilities and domestic prisons constitute extreme sites where democracy has lost its claims. As traumatized as many people may have been by the release of photographs depicting physical, psychological, and sexual torture of prisoners in Iraq, there has been a general reluctance to explore the links between torture in the outfield and torture at home. What would it mean to consider the relationship between the disappeared who inhabit secret detention facilities and the disappeared who inhabit state and federal prisons, paying special attention to the relatively new supermaximum security regimes? Lack of human contact, sensory deprivation, and conditions that so completely deprive prisoners of agency that they are compelled to express themselves by throwing their own feces at the agents of control. These regimes of incarceration have been seemingly self-generated - in order to manage what are considered the "worst of the worse." Minimum security used to imply medium and maximum security. Now the minimum implies the supermaximum - and who knows what lies beyond the supermaximum. These regimes have enormous staying power, for they appear to have been self-generated by the process of classification, which adheres to the rule of democracy.

When Iraqi prisoners ask whether the recent evidence of torture furnishes material proof of the kind of democracy the United States is determined to bring to the Middle East, this is a question that deserves to be taken seriously. For the rest of the world, the economy of images of U.S. democracy has shifted toward representations of hooded figures - recapitulating the practices of the early penitentiary, as well as contemporary sexual coercion that saturates women's and men's prisons. However, young white women apparently taking pleasure in forcing nude Iraqi men to masturbate is a strange but meaningful representation of the military as site for the production of gender equality. Now women can participate in torture on a basis of equality with men.

In the immediate aftermath of the release of the first images of Abu Ghraib, the French daily Le Monde published a cartoon depicting an enormous boot crushing the head of an Iraqi prisoner accompanied by the words, "Repetez: DE-MO-CRA-TIE." If we feel certain that Argentina's "dirty war" must never happen again, not here, there, or anywhere, precisely because it was fundamentally anti-democratic, what does it mean to acknowledge the repression, torture, and sexual coercion that constitute the underbelly of a particular version of democracy, which has achieved dominance in the world? But more importantly, what version of democracy do we want for the future and how can we guarantee that technologies of disappearance will cease to exist?

This is the context in which I would urge us to think about education as a radical alternative to imprisonment. Education not as the infliction of certain knowledges on growing minds, but education as the practice of freedom. If imprisonment is that state in which basic civil rights are taken away - and in this country, imprisonment also deprives children, women, men, immigrants and detainees of the war on terror of basic human rights. This is contrary to international human rights standards. This is the context within which we say "Education Not Incarceration."

As we focus on campaigns to shift resources away from prisons and toward the revitalization of educational institutions, let us keep in mind the relationship between education and democracy. We need a substantive idea of what education is capable of accomplishing in order for it to be a meaningful alternative to incarceration.

Some of you may be familiar with the campaign to abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment. This notion of abolition is linked to the abolition of the death penalty and the historical effort to abolish slavery. Almost a century and a half after the formal abolition of slavery - the abolition by law - we are still attempting to abolish the persisting social relations that are rooted in slavery. Thus the reparations campaign. W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his monumental work Black Reconstruction that the abolition of slavery was not truly possible unless it was supplanted by a democratic order. Thus he wrote about abolition-democracy.

The kind of prison abolition which makes most sense - particularly at this moment when the rhetorical defense of democracy by the leaders of the U.S. government often amounts to a defense of torture, repression and the wholesale denial of human rights - is an abolition-democracy. Education plays a central role here - that is if we think about education not as the imposition of multitudinous facts about the world on supple minds, but rather education as the ability to raise questions about those facts, to develop analyses, to ask why injustice still prevails, and to develop creative strategies to transform the universe.

As Paolo Freire says:

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

As teachers, students, parents, and education activists, it is your responsibility to help create new versions of democracy, versions of democracy in which a youthful mistake cannot condemn a child to a life of confinement in juvenile facilities, jails and prisons. Versions of democracy in which the practice of Islam cannot serve as a pretext for incarceration in an immigration detention facility or in a military prison, where torture and sexual coercion are considered appropriate treatment.

As we think about the particular problems we face with jails and prisons siphoning off resources that ought to belong to schools, let us keep in mind that we are dealing with a larger complex of issues related to the future of democracy in this country and the world. For the past quarter century, a generation of mostly poor, mostly black and Latino children and young adults has come under an attack unprecedented in our history. America's prison population grew from under 500,000 to over 2 million. In California, where I live, it grew more than 6 times -- from 25,000 to 160,000 people.

Such an enormous population of prisoners - the largest in the world - has required a growing system of prisons and jails, police and courts, in which increasing numbers of corporations have a major stake. We refer to these connections between prisons, corporations, government, media as the Prison Industrial Complex. The Prison Industrial Complex has become so big and powerful that it works to perpetuate itself, to continue its growth. The raw materials needed for growth of the Prison Industrial Complex are this country's youth.

The passage at last year's NEA convention of Business Item # 35, which endorsed the idea of Education Not Incarceration indicates that the National Education Association is prepared to challenge these inverted priorities. President Reg Weaver also asked delegates last year "Does it rile you up that our nation would rather incarcerate than educate? That in many states, prison guards make more money than you?"

Why is the Education not Incarceration campaign so important? It is self-evident that more education, quality education, critical education goes a long way toward reducing a person's changes of going to prison. Our prisons are filled with women and men who, for whatever reason, left school early.

Those inside who participate in education programs are among the least likely to return to prison. Students in many poor neighborhoods, who have been grossly neglected by educational institutions, discover that the very schools they attend track them not toward college, but rather toward prison. If they don't get education, they get incarceration. Education OR Incarceration. Education not Incarceration understands that the choices made by individuals, whether students, parents, teachers or administrators are limited by larger social and political forces.

In the 1950s and 60s California ranked first in the county in terms of per capital spending on public education. Now that state ranks near the bottom, which may partially explain why California has the largest public prison system in the country.

In the early 60s California's Master Plan for Public Education promised all state high school graduates access to community colleges, state colleges and University of California tuition-free. These institutions are now inaccessible to poor students because even without tuition, there have been consistent fee hikes. Governor Schwarzenegger's budget now calls for a 20% hike for undergraduates in the U.S. system and a 40% hike for graduate students. The state's community colleges saw 110,000 students forced out by a 66% fee increase. That same year California's Corrections department overspent their budget by over half a billion dollars.

California has built 23 new prisons since 1983. The state hasn't opened a new University of California campus since 1968. The opening of the next campus, UC Merced, has been repeatedly delayed. California builds more prisons, bigger jails, new immigrant detention centers and has no problem finding the staff to hire for those facilities. And then we wonder why there is no money for education.

How many new prison guards would have chosen to become educators if they had been told that this is our state's priority, the education of our youth? How many prison guards would have become teachers if teachers received the salaries they know they can earn by becoming keepers of the confined?

The cost of imprisoning the 161,000 men and women who are in California correctional facilities is $5.3 billion. With this amount of money it would have been possible to restore $2 Billion in Cuts to K-12 Education, restore $1.2 billion in deferred spending for K-12 Education, restore $372 million in cuts to the University of California system, rescind fee increases at Community Colleges ($91 million), CSU'S ($101 million) and UC's ($196 million), restore $3.5 million cut to food stamps benefits, and restore $164.8 million in cuts to childcare.

This is our situation in California. I have chosen to discuss this state because I live and work there and as Chair of the Women's Studies Department, have been reluctantly involved in the implementation of budget cuts. Education is under siege

But I have also taught in the San Francisco County Jail system and have heard prisoners wonder aloud why they could not get the kind of education I tried to impart to them when they lived in the free world. Maybe, they said, just maybe, they would have ended up as teachers or lawyers or autoworkers or construction workers - not as prisoners . disappeared from society, relegated to the status of civil death.

Our responsibility as teachers is to fight for equal access to education. When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate education was inherently unequal, they referred to racial segregation by law. Although racial segregation by law has been abolished, the practice of racial and class segregation persists. This segregation can be most clearly perceived in the fact that race and class matter when it comes to determining who gets to go to quality schools, where the love of knowledge is encouraged, and who gets to go to schools where the priority is what is called safety and security, i.e. metal detectors instead of computers; armed guards patrolling the hallways instead of committed mentors. These schools prepare children for juvenile detention, jails, and prisons.

As teachers you can begin to change this dismal situation. You can deepen the legacy of Brown. You can defend the civil rights of those whose punishment consists of the deprivation of rights, and thus of conditions that can never prepare a person to engage in the practice of freedom. You can teach and defend the right to learn. You can make the clarion call for Education Not Incarceration.

Thank you very much.

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