Angela Davis (via Romerito Pontes’s Flickrstream)
“The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited,” writes Angela Davis in Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), a book in which she argues firmly for the abolition of prisons. “Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.”
Davis’s fundamental book is the first selection of a new monthly Abolitionist Book Club starting this month at Bluestockings Bookstore, Café, & Activist Center in Manhattan.
The Abolitionist Book Club is organized by Colin Weyman. Weyman invites people who are looking to improve their literacy around issues of the carceral state, and ways to organize against it, to join the book club. Future books will be decided through recommendations and volunteer facilitators, depending on the turnout at the first meeting.
“This book club is an extension of my abolitionist practice,” Weyman told Hyperallergic in an email. “As an abolitionist, I feel it’s important to build community, hone my organizing strategies, and educate myself about the history of the movement (and of injustice and oppression generally). Two of those things I can’t do alone, so why not use the third as a means to the others?”
When: January 26, 5-7pm
Where: Bluestockings Bookstore, Café, & Activist Center (172 Allen Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan)
For more info, email colinweyman@gmail.com
