Angela Y. Davis, who had campaigned as a student for the release of South African political prisoners including Ruth First, first met her in exile shortly after Davis's own release from prison in 1972, ‘when I travelled to London during the mid-seventies to participate in an antiapartheid solidarity event. At the time I remember thinking that she seemed to possess the very best qualities of the most brilliant and driven scholars/activists/organisers I had encountered in my then relatively young political life.’ This close contact secures a vital link in an increasingly integrated story about the transformation of political imprisonment across the arc of the twentieth century. For Davis, a cosmopolitan communist and antiapartheid intellectual, the solidarity with First was a realisation about the spreading universality of a new social form in which she herself was ineluctably enmeshed. As First had already made clear in her memoir, the South African apartheid prison system had open affinities with the National Socialist carceral regime, on which various of its aspects (the psychology of the prison staff, the use of torture, the racialisation of the prison population) had been modelled. During her eighteen months held in the Women's Detention Center, New York, and the Marin County Jail in California, Davis would conduct research and write trenchantly about what she saw as the fascist tendencies in contemporary America. Considering the Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform as a lucid account of the structures of oppression within the US prison system, Davis notes, ‘Their contention that prisons are being transformed into the “fascist concentration camps of modern America”, should not be taken lightly.’ She writes: ‘The government is not hesitating to utilize an entire network of fascist tactics […], a system of “preventive fascism”, as Marcuse has termed it, in which the role of the judicial and penal systems loom large’ (30). Written in prison, this incendiary account of ‘the world's greatest democracy’ sought to extend the lessons of what happens in the jailhouse to the broader citizenry: