Former '60s-era activist Angela Davis, now a California professor, spoke to a crowd of 1,000 Friday at a Florida university. Another 1,000 were turned away due to space limitations. She called for an end to the American prison system, saying it is a vestige of slavery. Davis says reform isn't enough, abolition of the system is the only answer.

''Slavery has not yet been completely abolished,'' she said. Prisons, she said, are ``one of the institutions in whose structure racism has learned to hide.'' Davis said that capital punishment and imprisonment were practices of the slave era that endured even after slavery itself was abolished.

''Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America,'' she said. ``Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.'' She pointed out that in Virginia, before the end of slavery, there was only one crime for which a white person could be executed. But there were 66 crimes for which a slave could be executed.

What should take the place of the prison system? Davis says the answer is education.

Davis said the path into prisons begins for many black and Latino youths in the violence that still permeates many inner-city schools, and she said that's where reform needs to begin. ''Education can be seen as the most compelling alternative to imprisonment. Unless current structures of violence are eliminated from poor schools, these schools will remain the major conduits to youth prison and then to adult prison,'' she said.

Davis is a tenured professor and chair of the Women's Studies Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. For those of you too young to remember her history, read on: