In 1971 the civil rights activist Angela Davis was a prisoner in the Marin County, California, jail. There she wrote “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” published that year in a collection she edited, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. The essay marks Davis’s early commitment to prison reform and the liberation of black prisoners. She was in jail at the time because of the death of California Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, who was shot with a gun registered in Davis’s name during a botched effort to free a prisoner from a California courtroom. Davis’s incarceration drew international attention, and she was eventually acquitted of all charges, but her life was forever marked by this incident. Not only did it influence her career as an activist, it also informed and directed her efforts for prison reform. Davis, a prolific writer and lecturer, focused throughout her life on issues of social inequality. Outlining the sociopolitical mechanisms underlying gender, race, sex, and class divisions and disparities, Davis’s writings analyze a variety of cultural and artistic trends. “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation” typifies the kind of social analysis Davis pursued in her early activist days and in her long academic career.