Quote by Angela Davis: “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.”

Locking people away does not solve the poverty, trauma, or inequality that leads to crime — it simply makes those people invisible. Davis is arguing that incarceration is a form of erasure: it removes human beings from sight rather than addressing what put them at risk in the first place.

Davis wrote this in a 1998 essay as the United States prison population was exploding due to mandatory minimum sentencing and the War on Drugs. The incarceration rate had quadrupled since the 1970s, disproportionately impacting Black communities, and Davis was among the most prominent voices calling for abolition rather than reform.

American political activist, philosopher, and academic whose work addresses prison abolition, feminism, and Black liberation. A member of the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party in the 1970s, she became an international symbol of resistance after her 1972 acquittal following a high-profile political trial.