While author Angela Davis sets herself apart with her extensive knowledge on the prison-industrial complex, Davis clearly reflects various commonalities with readers. For instance, it soon becomes clear that both author and readers are enlightened with at least some knowledge on prisons. In a culture that places a heavy emphasis on media and recording events, prisons and their accompanying drama have progressively become publicized; Davis herself states, “Over the last five years, the prison system has received far more attention by the media than at any time since the period following the 1971 Attica Rebellion” (Davis 60). Additionally, both parties undoubtedly contain knowledge that prison practices are inevitably gendered as women and men’s prisons contain reform programs guided by gender stereotypes, “certainly women's prison practices are gendered, but so, too, are men's prison practices” (61).
Alongside commonalities, Angela Davis includes several assumptions throughout…show more content… The most compelling assumption is made as Davis assumes that when individuals visualize an image of a prison, the first set of images usually do not include women. Due to this lack of visualization, Davis thus assumes that the public, specifically prison activists, are more consumed with the issues of male prisoners. Despite the fact that the general public is aware that populations of both women and men are found in their respective prisons, Davis theorizes that the initial “small proportion of women among incarcerated populations throughout the world” (65) is the underlying truth surrounding the inattention to women prisoners. While Davis credits “the economic context that produced the prison industrial complex” (65) as the cause of women imprisonment rates rising, the question of why the population of women prisoners was so initially
