“The most difficult and urgent challenge of today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.” –Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 2003 February 25, 2021, Spring Core Convocation Are Prisons Obsolete? A Conversation with Angela Davis. Angela Davis – activist, author, scholar, public intellectual – has made innumerable contributions to the struggles for race, class, and gender justice. Known widely for her critique of the prison industrial complex, Davis urges us to consider a 21st-century abolitionist movement and the future possibility of a world without prisons.