Angela Davis is speaking at Santa Barbara in the above YouTube clip. And soon she’ll be speaking at Babson College for students, faculty and staff — an unlikely place, one might say, considering that it is a business school — but that would be unfair.  Today everyone is beginning to see that mass incarceration is one of the greatest problems facing our country.

I first met Angela Davis a few years after my book Shakespeare Behind Bars had come out. I went to a wonderful conference ” on women in prison in Brisbane, Australia, put on by a group called “Sisters Inside,” which works along side incarcerated women to create change in the system.Davis talked about “prison abolition,” which at the time was a new concept to me. As Sisters Inside advocates in their upcoming conference, “Is Prison Obsolete,”

Davis asked questions about building the kind of society that would not need prisons, the kind of society that redistributed of power and income, with a sense of community to support every member.In an age where mass incarceration costs so much in terms of money and spirit, the answer for many who come in conflict with the law should be effective and swift punishment and perhaps that can best be achieved with alternatives to prison.

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