In the 1990s, she left the Communist Party and began to focus her activism on prisons. She gave a speech in 1997 called "The Prison Industrial Complex". In it she said "prisons are becoming an integral part of the US economy." She said that fear of young people of color was being exploited to create a fast-growing industry, the prison-industrial complex (PIC). She created a prison abolitionist group called Critical Resistance in the same year. She wants there to be no prisons or police because she believes that the US prison system is more like a new form of slavery than a criminal justice system.