Angela Y. Davis, one-time '60s radical and longtime prison abolitionist and scholar, continued to inspire a new generation of activists during her visit to Cornell Sept. 17-18. Speaking to a capacity crowd Tuesday evening in Sage Chapel, she explained that imprisonment provides a negative definition of American freedom and democracy, and is a system that only hurts society.

"Prisons thrive on racial and class inequality," Davis said. "They produce and reproduce those inequalities ... and the solution reproduces the very problem it purports to solve."

Davis' visit and her public lecture, "The Prison: A Sign of U.S. Democracy?" were sponsored by the Africana Studies and Research Center. She also visited classes, signed books at a reception at the Africana Center, and met with students at Carl Becker House.

"How many times do you get the opportunity to meet an icon in the African-American community?" said Michael Hall, a graduate student in African-American literature and visual studies.

Davis, a faculty member at the University of California-Santa Cruz, believes prisons should and can be abolished. "I think they'll have to be, if we want to solve the major socio-economic problems in this country" -- among them, unemployment, illiteracy, education, mental illness, and lack of housing and health care -- she said during an interview Tuesday afternoon.

By taking away the rights and liberties of individuals, she said, prisons only punish and do not reform or rehabilitate.

"During slavery, many people gauged their own freedom by the un-freedom of the slaves," said Davis. "In those early days, you didn't find that many black people in prisons, because black people didn't have that many rights and freedoms to begin with."

Davis' lecture touched on her recent research into prisons and American history, and her experience with the American penal system, which goes well beyond the 16 months she spent in prison in New York and California while awaiting trial on charges of being an accomplice to armed robbery. (She was acquitted on all counts in 1972.)

"I can now find so many different instances in which I personally came in contact with this system," Davis said at a luncheon with students at Becker House. "It took a long time to come up with the distance to consider the prison system as an object of scholarly analysis."

Growing up in segregated Birmingham, Ala., she said, "I can remember ... how this issue loomed large in the black community, [and] also how it worked to maintain a system of segregation."

Incarceration is a growing global trend, she said in her talk -- and a profitable one -- noting that women are the fastest-growing sector of prison populations worldwide.

"In the immediate aftermath of the Attica rebellion in 1971, prison abolition had a legitimacy that was quite astonishing, much more so than today," she said. "There were many judges who came out in favor of it."

She also spoke out against the disenfranchisement and ongoing "civil death" of felons, who are denied the right to vote and often the opportunity to find employment long after their release.

"Some people think I'm absolutely out of my mind," she said. "Even prisoners -- 'Get rid of prisons? What kind of society would we have if you set us all free?'" she said.