However Angela Davis never quite grapples with the thorny issue of what to do with violent offenders and how to prevent them committing further violent offences. She discusses it a bit at the very end of the book but it's just not good enough:
I agree that some of the answers I've seen from the prison abolitionist movement about how to deal with serial rapist sor murderers, just as an example, are unsatisfactory. But I think it's important to recognise where Davis is coming from. Prior to the birth of the GC movement feminists of all stripes were pretty much united that male violence was not inevitable - biology isn't destiny cuts both ways - and so was feminism to be successful and overthrow patriarchy then male violence against women, in it's current endemic form, would disappear.
It's hard to imagine what such a world would look like. But if boys were not constantly given the message that they have a sexual right to women's bodies and that successful men use violence to get what they want then society would very likely develop along different lines. So much of masculinity is tied up with being really hard and shagging loads of women and I don't think that is the natural state of being male - I don't think there is a natural state of being male.
And if such a society were also to end the drug war and the vast criminal empire it creates, create economic and racial equality to the point that everyone's needs were met, and organise our lives in a very different way to the current capitalist economy then I suspect a large amount of crime would disappear as would the culture surrounding it. Davis is a committed anti-capitalist after all, she is talking about revolutionary change
Whilst it might sound utopian, for many men and women of colour, and many who are just poor in the US, and elsewhere, the current system is a horror show that demolishes people and so a bit of utopian thinking on how to get out of that is a good thing.
The question is would that be enough to end male violence. Firstly her position isn't that getting rid of prisons means getting rid of all forms of justice. Imagine if the first time a man raised his hand to a woman or behaved sexually inappropriately she felt empowered to report it and immediately a system of education, rehabilitation, and potentially reparative justice kicked in. That would seem preferable to me than waiting until he's done it enough times that society thinks it's a problem and locks him up in a system he is likely to come out of twice as violent as before with little recourse to even find a decent job and learn to become a different type of person.
I think if these kinds of social changes were brought about, then it's at the very least arguable that 99% of prison places would no longer be necessary. My feeling is even then the Peter Sutcliffe's of the world may well still exist, but could they be dealt with by a mental health system - which he actually currently is - or some form of home confinement? Or something else? Once you're only dealing with a very small number of people all kinds of different possibilities open up. So I think her ideas have a lot of merit, but they do depend on the kind of revolutionary change that most feminists of her era were fighting for, and some still are.