Forty-six years ago radical feminist and Black Panther Party associate Angela Davis was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and then served 16 months behind bars.

Times have definitely changed.

Today the distinguished professor emerita of history and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the Spring 2016 Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Once reviled by Ronald Reagan and condemned by Richard Nixon, Davis will give a speech today at 7 p.m. at UH Manoa’s Kennedy Theatre. The topic is “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” which is also the title of her new book.

While the national headlines of the early 1970s are firmly in the rearview mirror, Davis, 72, remains a passionate advocate for justice, equality and civil rights as a scholar, lecturer and author, having many times traveled around the world to lend her support to oppressed minorities and the disadvantaged.

This is her sixth visit to the islands, none of which was arranged as a vacation. Rather, each visit was for either academic or political reasons, including the time in the 1980s when she was campaigning as the vice presidential nominee on the Communist Party USA ticket.

The first time she came to the islands was back in the ’70s, when she met with Native Hawaiian activist Haunani-Kay Trask, UH professor of Hawaiian studies, and discussed the sovereignty movement.

“I’m excited to be here now,” Davis said Thursday, noting a recent resurgence in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. “I hope to learn a great deal more on the ground.”

Davis burst onto the national scene in 1969, when she was removed from her UCLA teaching post due to her social activism and membership in the Communist Party.

A year later she was the subject of a massive police hunt that culminated in a high-profile criminal trial. She was acquitted in 1972 of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges. During her incarceration before and during the trial, supporters organized a far-reaching Free Angela Davis campaign and paid for her defense.

Since then much of Davis’ scholarship and advocacy has been devoted to the dismantling of what she describes as the prison industrial complex.

“When I first got involved, there were a couple of hundred thousand people incarcerated in America. We assumed that was a large number. Today there are more than 2 million in prison.”

Many others fall under the surveillance of the prison system, including being on parole. Adding them together, she said, shows there are more black men under the control of the prison system than were enslaved in America in 1850.

The U.S. holds 25 percent of all people in prison in the world, and one-third of all women in prison across the planet, she said.

Davis said the prison industrial complex is much more than the institutions or the punishment that is doled out. It also includes the racist institutions that allow employers to move to other parts of the world for cheap labor, the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization of health care.

“Prison becomes only a place to deposit those who no longer can participate in a productive way in society,” she said.

Many are under the mistaken belief that more prisons make a community safer, Davis said.

“What will make society more secure is purging society of racism and making economic and educational opportunities.”

Over the years Davis has been a strong advocate of prison abolition and for alternatives that include restorative justice and transformative justice — systems that focus on the rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims and the community at large.

Fewer prisons, she said, is an idea that should resonate in Hawaii, where the prisons and jails are so overcrowded that inmates are shipped to the mainland to serve out their time and where lawmakers are trying to find millions to expand existing prisons.

Fortunately, a growing number of people are speaking out against prisons, she said. Even President Barack Obama has called for prison reform, having visited an Oklahoma prison last year and becoming the first president to do so.

But her concern, Davis said, is that the question of prison reform will be twisted into a debate about what can be done about creating better prisons.

“It’s inevitable that when you try to create a better prison, you create something that is more repressive, more embedded, more entrenched,” she said.

While she’s in Hawaii over the next month, Davis will be guest-teaching a graduate course on American punishment alongside American-studies professor Robert Perkinson, who has also studied and written about the U.S. prison system. The course will look at the history of criminal punishment in America, “from the birth of the penitentiary to the rise of the prison industrial complex.”

Davis, who still sports her signature afro hairdo, only with much looser curls, said her time in jail helped to bolster her teaching.

“As I look back, even though it was not a pleasurable experience to endure two years behind bars, I’m thankful I got to directly experience the conditions myself,” she said.

Tonight’s speech will be video-streamed at hawaii.edu/itunesu/video-op-live/?angeladavis.sdp.

In another public event, Davis and former Gov. John Waihee will join for a community dialogue on civic engagement, 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Mission Memorial Auditorium, near Honolulu Hale.

As for this year’s presidential campaign, Davis said she’s dismayed by what’s going on, and although she’s happy Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is putting a spotlight on socialism and economic justice, she remains hesitant to make an endorsement.

“I’ve always been in favor of creating a new independent party, one grounded in labor, anti-racism and international solidarity.”