Does locking people away make the streets safer? Or does it simply allow society to identify "boogeymen" and ignore larger issues?

Angela Davis, the 1960s radical political activist who is speaking tonight in Miami, has long thought the answers to be "no" and "yes."

Davis said the locking up of prisoners in cells "relieves us of our responsibilities of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism."

"The dividends that accrue from investment in the punishment industry, like those that accrue from investment in weapons productions, only amount to social destruction," Davis wrote in a 1998 article published in Color Lines, a quarterly magazine devoted to race, culture and social action.

"Criminality and deviances are racialized. Surveillance is thus focused on communities of color, immigrants, the unemployed, the undereducated, the homeless and in general on those who have a diminishing claim to social resources."

The U.S. prison population is more than 70 percent black and Hispanic, according to government statistics. Black prisoners in state institutions make up 57 percent of those incarcerated while Hispanics were 19 percent. Forty percent in federal institutions are black and 32 percent are identified as Hispanic.