Abolition Democracy

Summary, part 2

The Prison- and Military Industrial Complexes in the Modern Context

Davis argues that the prison-industrial complex has duplicated itself in the American-led global war on terror that occurred after 9/11 to “divert attention from the everyday domestic reality of torture and sexual coercion.” 

Torture.

One way both complexes feed into each other can be seen with the prevalence of torture in the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib detention centers, which housed foreign prisoners believed to be part of what the President George H. W. Bush administration dubbed the ‘war on terror’. The abusive acts of torture and sexual coercion that the public is horrified by in these detention centers come from punishment techniques "deeply embedded in the history of the institution of prison."

Around the time of the book’s publication, pictures of the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay had been released. Davis spends some time articulating the relationship between the pictures from Abu Ghraib to the pictures of lynching in American history.

Lynching pictures, Davis states, were items that commemorated gatherings that celebrated Jim Crow, capital punishment, and the oppression of the Black body. This was done in public, whereas torture today is hidden behind prison walls.

Torture and executions have moved from the public eye to the private eye. 

Davis also argues that because the Bush administration has othered prisoners as terrorists in response to 9/11, they have put citizens in a position of having to sever themselves from the pain of others. The way the public engages with torture reaffirms, defends, and reinforces the idea that American democracy is here to protect the nation from external threats to democracy.

Sexual coercion.

Another way the prison- and military-industrial complexes manifest in the modern context is through sexual coercion. Davis argues that sexual coercion (i.e., sexualized abuse for social control) is assumed to be a normal and routine aspect of women’s punishment–both in domestic prisons and in wartime.

That said, in the modern context of the American-led war on terror, sexual coercion was used in a racist way to punish Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim prisoners. Female torturers in detention centers were documented, for example, dressing as dominatrixes smearing menstrual blood on prisoners under the assumption that prisoners from Islamic cultures are more sexist than so-called western cultures. 

Davis also makes the point that the presence of female torturers says nothing about feminism and gender equality. Although women may now be in places they were not usually in before, the places they are in (e.g., the military) are institutions that rely on ideologies of male dominance.

Simply adding more women to flawed institutions does not achieve gender equality, but rather the "equal opportunity to kill, to torture, to engage in sexual coercion." This brings us, Davis argues, no closer to democracy and justice. Instead, Davis states that a more productive approach to feminism must consider the "socialization and institutionalization of misogynist strategies and modes of violence for men and women."