Angela Yvonne Davis is the author of Are Prisons Obsolete? as well as several other nonfiction publications, like Women, Race & Class and Freedom is a Constant Struggle. Davis’s lifelong work as a scholar and activist focuses on civil rights, gender equity, the end of racism, and prison abolition. Davis was (and is) a member of several radical political groups, including the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party’s all-Black Che-Lumumba Club. Davis, alongside others, created Critical Resistance, an antiprison activist group fighting for prison abolition through education and grassroots programs of resistance. Davis is a professor at various post-secondary institutions, where her staunch leftist politics have occasionally been the source of conflict.

Davis wrote Are Prisons Obsolete? in the wake of the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, when incarceration rates were staggering, and after having experienced prison life herself in the 1970s. Throughout the book, Davis references her time in prison, enhancing the veracity of her claims by sharing firsthand experiences of racist and sexist punishments. In Chapter 4, she adds herself to the list of women who have endured the invasive strip search, and in Chapter 5, she reveals how the legacy of convict labor affected her group of close childhood friends.