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Title: Are Prisons Obsolete? Author: Angela Y. Davis Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: prisons, system, abolition, not anarchist
In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that whoever is
convicted of a serious crime will be sent to prison. In some
countries-including the United States-where capital punishment has not
yet been abolished, a small but significant number of people are
sentenced to death for what are considered especially grave crimes. Many
people are familiar with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In
fact, it has already been abolished in most countries. Even the
staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the fact that the
death penalty faces serious challenges. Few people find life without the
death penalty difficult to imagine.
On the other hand, the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent
feature of our social lives. Most people are quite surprised to hear
that the prison abolition movement also has a long history-one that
dates back to the historical appearance of the prison as the main form
of punishment. In fact, the most natural reaction is to assume that
prison activists-even those who consciously refer to themselves as
"anti-prison activists"- are simply trying to ameliorate prison
conditions or perhaps to reform the prison in more fundamental ways. In
most circles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible.
Prison abolitionists are dis-missed as utopians and idealists whose
ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst,
mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to
envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering
people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their
communities and families. The prison is considered so "natural" that it
is extremely hard to imagine life without it.
It is my hope that this book will encourage readers to question their
own assumptions about the prison. Many people have already reached the
conclusion that the death penalty is an outmoded form of punishment that
violates basic principles of human rights. It is time, I believe, to
encourage similar conversations about the prison. During my own career
as an anti-prison activist I have seen the population of U.S. prisons
increase with such rapidity that many people in black, Latino, and
Native American communities now have a far greater chance of going to
prison than of getting a decent education. When many young people decide
to join the military service in order to avoid the inevitability of a
stint in prison, it should cause us to wonder whether we should not try
to introduce better alternatives.
The question of whether the prison has become an obsolete institution
has become especially urgent in light of the fact that more than two
million people (out of a world total of nine million) now inhabit U.S.
prisons, jails, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers. Are
we willing to relegate ever larger numbers of people from racially
oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian
regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion that produce
severe mental instability? According to a recent study, there may be
twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and
prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States
combined.
When I first became involved in antiprison activism during the late
1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were then close to two
hundred thousand people in prison. Had anyone told me that in three
decades ten times as many people would be locked away in cages, I would
have been absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded
something like this: "As racist and undemocratic as this country may be
[remember, during that period, the demands of the Civil Rights movement
had not yet been consolidated], I do not believe that the U.S.
government will be able to lock up so many people without producing
powerful public resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this
country plunges into fascism." That might have been my reaction thirty
years ago. The reality is that we were called upon to inaugurate the
twenty-first century by accepting the fact that two million group larger
than the population of many countries-are living their lives in places
like Sing Sing, Leavenworth, San Quentin, and Alderson Federal
Reformatory for Women. The gravity of these numbers becomes even more
apparent when we consider that the U.S. population in general is less
than five percent of the world's total, whereas more than twenty percent
of the world's combined prison population can be claimed by the United
States. In Elliott Currie's words, "[t]he prison has become a looming
presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history or that
of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass
incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social
program of our time.
In thinking about the possible obsolescence of the prison, we should ask
how it is that so many people could end up in prison without major
debates regarding the efficacy of incarceration. When the drive to
produce more prisons and incarcerate ever larger numbers of people
occurred in the 1980s during what is known as the Reagan era,
politicians argued that "tough on crime" stances-including certain
imprisonment and longer sentences-would keep communities free of crime.
However, the of mass incarceration during that period had little or no
effect on official crime rates. In fact, the most obvious pattern was
that larger prison populations led not to safer communities, but,
rather, to even larger prison populations. Each new prison spawned yet
another new prison. And as the U.S. prison system expanded, so did
corporate involvement in construction, provision of goods and services,
and use of labor. Because of the extent to which prison building and
operation began to attract vast amounts of capital-from the construction
industry to food and health care provision-in a way that recalled the
emergence of the military industrial complex, we began to refer to a
"prison industrial complex". Consider the case of California, whose
landscape has been thoroughly prisonized over the last twenty years. The
first state prison in California was San Quentin, which opened in 1852.4
Folsom, another well-known institution, opened in 1880. Between 1880 and
1933, when a facility for women was opened in Tehachapi, there was not a
single new prison constructed. In 1952, the California Institution for
Women opened and Tehachapi became a new prison for men. In all, between
1852 and 1955, nine prisons were constructed in California. Between 1962
and 1965, two camps were established, along with the California
Rehabilitation Center. Not a single prison opened during the second half
of the sixties, nor during the entire decade of the 1970s.
However, a massive project of prison construction was initiated during
the 1980s-that is, during the years of the Reagan presidency. Nine
prisons, including the Northern California Facility for Women, were
opened between 1984 and 1989. Recall that it had taken more than a
hundred years to build the first nine California prisons. In less than a
single decade, the number of California prisons doubled. And during the
1990s, twelve new prisons were opened, including two more for women. In
1995 the Valley State Prison for Women was opened. According to its
mission statement, it "provides 1,980 women's beds for California's
overcrowded prison system." However, in 2002, there were 3,570 prisoners
and the other two women's prisons were equally overcrowded. There are
now thirty-three prisons, thirty-eight camps, sixteen community
correctional facilities, and five tiny prisoner mother facilities in
California. In 2002 there were 157,979 people incarcerated in these
institutions, including approximately twenty thousand people whom the
state holds for immigration violations. The racial composition of this
prison population is revealing. Latinos, who are now in the majority,
account for 35.2 percent African-Americans 30 percent; and white
prisoners 29.2 percent.6 There are now more women in prison in the state
of California than there were in the entire country in the early 1970s.
In fact, California can claim the largest women's prison in the world,
Valley State Prison for Women, with its more than thirty-five hundred
inhabitants. Located in the same town as Valley State and literally
across the street is the second-largest women's prison in the world
Central California Women's Facility-whose population in 2002 also
hovered around thirty-five hundred. If you look at a map of California
depicting the location of the thirty-three state prisons, you will see
that the only area that is not heavily populated by prisons is the area
north of Sacramento. Still, there are two prisons in the town of
Susanville, and Pelican Bay, one of the state's notorious super-maximum
security prisons, is near the Oregon border. California artist Sandow
Birle was inspired by the colonizing of the landscape by prisons to
produce a series of thirty-three landscape paintings of these
institutions and their surroundings. They are collected in his book
Incarcerated: Visions of California in the Twenty-first Century.
I present this brief narrative of the prisonization of the California
landscape in order to allow readers to grasp how easy it was to produce
a massive system of incarceration with the implicit consent of the
public. Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an
increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those
who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can
be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people
think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they
would be if prisons did not exist? What other reasons might there have
been for the rapidity with which prisons began to colonize the
California landscape?
Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of prisons in California
as "a geographical solution to socio-economic problems."9 Her analysis
of the prison industrial complex in California describes these
developments as a response to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and
state capacity. California's new prisons are sited on devalued rural
land, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultural acres . . . The
State bought land sold by big landowners. And the State assured the
small, depressed towns now shadowed by prisons that the new,
recession-proof, non-polluting industry would jump-start local
redevelopment. But, as Gilmore points out, neither the jobs nor the more
general economic revitalization promised by prisons has occurred. At the
same time, this promise of progress helps us to understand why the
legislature and California's voters decided to approve the construction
of all these new prisons. People wanted to believe that prisons would
not only reduce crime, they would also provide jobs and stimulate
economic development in out-of-the-way places.
At bottom, there is one fundamental question: Why do we take prison for
granted? While a relatively small proportion of the population has ever
directly experienced life inside prison, this is not true in poor black
and Latino communities. Neither is it true for Native Americans or for
certain Asian-American communities. But even among those people who must
regrettably accept prison sentences-especially young people-as an
ordinary dimension of community life, it is hardly acceptable to engage
in serious public discussions about prison life or radical alternatives
to prison. It is as if prison were an inevitable fact of life, like
birth and death.
On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult
to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is reluctance to
face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what
happens inside them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at
the same time, it is absent from our lives. To think about this
simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part
played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social
surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face
the realities they produce. After all, no one wants to go to prison.
Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that
anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think
of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for
some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced
imprisonment. We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for
others, a fate reserved for the "evildoers," to use a term recently
popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of
racism, "criminals" and "evildoers" are, in the collective imagination,
fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions
ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited,
relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues
afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such
disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison
performs-it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with
the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and,
increasingly, global capitalism. What, for example, do we miss if we try
to think about prison expansion without addressing larger economic
developments? We live in an era of migrating corporations. In order to
escape organized labor in this country-and thus higher wages, benefits,
and so on-corporations roam the world in search of nations providing
cheap labor pools. This corporate migration thus leaves entire
communities in shambles. Huge numbers of people lose jobs and prospects
for future jobs. Because the economic base of these communities is
destroyed, education and other surviving social services are profoundly
affected. This process turns the men, women, and children who live in
these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison. In the
meantime, corporations associated with the punishment industry reap
profits from the system that manages prisoners and acquire a clear stake
in the continued growth of prison populations. Put simply, this is the
era of the prison industrial complex. The prison has become a black hole
into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass
imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it
tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There
are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the
de-industrialization of the economy-a process that reached its peak
during the 1980s-and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to
spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons
was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were
needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated
that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime
statistics were already falling. Moreover, draconian drug laws were
being enacted, and "three-strikes" provisions were on the agendas of
many states.
In order to understand the proliferation of prisons and the rise of the
prison industrial complex, it might be helpful to think further about
the reasons we so easily take prisons for granted. In California, as we
have seen, almost two-thirds of existing prisons were opened during the
eighties and nineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was there such
an obvious level of comfort with the prospect of many new prisons? A
partial answer to this question has to do with the way we consume media
images of the prison, even as the realities of imprisonment are hidden
from almost all who have not had the misfortune of doing time. Cultural
critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiarity with the
prison comes in part from representations of prisons in film and other
visual media. The history of visuality linked to the prison is also a
main reinforcement of the institution of the prison as a naturalized
part of our social landscape. The history of film has always been wedded
to the representation of incarceration. Thomas Edison's first films
(dating back to the 1901 reenactment presented as newsreel, Execution of
Czolgosz with included footage of the darkest recesses of the prison).
Thus, the prison is wedded to our experience of visuality, creating also
a sense of its permanence as an institution. We also have a constant
flow of Hollywood prison films. Some of the most well known prison films
are: I Live, Papillon, Cool Hand Luke, and Escape from Alcatraz. It also
bears mentioning that television programming has become increasingly
saturated with images of prisons. Some recent documentaries include the
A&E series The Big House, which consists of programs on San Quentin,
Alcatraz, Leavenworth, and Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women. The
long-running HBO program Oz has managed to persuade many viewers that
they know exactly what goes on in male maximum-security prisons. But
even those who do not consciously decide to watch a documentary or
dramatic program on the topic of prisons inevitably consume prison
images, whether they choose to or not, by the simple fact of watching
movies or TV. It is virtually impossible to avoid consuming images of
prison. In 1997, I was myself quite astonished to find, when I
interviewed women in three Cuban prisons, that most of them narrated
their prior awareness of prisons-that is, before they were actually
incarcerated-as coming from the many Hollywood films they had seen. The
prison is one of the most important features of our image environment.
This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The
prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all
around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so
much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of the
imagination to envision life beyond the prison.
This is not to dismiss the profound changes that have occurred in the
way public conversations about the prison are conducted. Ten years ago,
even as the drive to expand the prison system reached its zenith, there
were very few critiques of this process available to the public. In fact
I most people had no idea about the immensity of this expansion. This
was the period during which internal changes-in part through the
application of new technologies-led the U.S. prison system in a much
more repressive direction. Whereas previous classifications had been
confined to low, medium, and maximum security, a new category was
invented-that of the super-maximum security prison, or the supermax. The
turn toward increased repression in a prison system, distinguished from
the beginning of its history by its repressive regimes, caused some
journalists public intellectuals and progressive agencies to oppose the
growing reliance on prisons to solve social problems that are actually
exacerbated by mass incarceration.
In 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project published a study of
U.S. populations in prison and jail, and on parole and probation, which
concluded that one in four black men between the ages of twenty and
twenty-nine were among these numbers.12 Five years later, a second study
revealed that this percentage had soared to almost one in three (32.2
percent). Moreover, more than one in ten Latino men in this same age
range were in jail or prison, or on probation or parole. The second
study also revealed that the group experiencing the greatest increase
was black women, whose imprisonment increased by seventy-eight
percent.13 According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
African-Americans as a whole now represent the majority of state and
federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400 black inmates-118,600 more
than the total number of white inmates.14 During the late 1990s major
articles on prison expansion appeared in Newsweek, Harper's, Emerge, and
Atlantic Monthly. Even Colin Powell raised the question of the rising
number of black men in prison when he spoke at the 2000 Republican
National Convention, which declared George W. Bush its presidential
candidate.
Over the last few years the previous absence of critical positions on
prison expansion in the political arena has given way to proposals for
prison reform. While public discourse has become more flexible, the
emphasis is almost inevitably on generating the changes that will
produce a better prison system. In other words, the increased
flexibility that has allowed for critical discussion of the problems
associated with the expansion of prisons also restricts this discussion
to the question of prison reform.
As important as some reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and
medical neglect in women's prison, for example-frameworks that rely
exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing
lies beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, which
should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis,
tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most
immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of
prison populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as
possible back into what prisoners call lithe free world." How can we
move to decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services? How can
we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively
punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of
the techniques for addressing "crime" and of the social and economic
conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and
especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to
prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of
creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer
serves as our major anchor.
Toward Prison
"Advocates of incarceration.. . hoped that the penitentiary would
rehabilitate its inmates. Whereas philosophers perceived a ceaseless
state of war between chattel slaves and their masters, criminologists
hoped to negotiate a peace treaty of sorts within the prison walls. Yet
herein lurked a paradox: if the penitentiary's internal regime resembled
that of the plantation so closely that the two were often loosely
equated, how could the prison possibly function to rehabilitate
criminals?" - Adam Jay Hirsch
The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges
to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its
presence that they could not conceive of society without it. Within the
history of the United States the system of slavery immediately comes to
mind. Although as early as the American Revolution antislavery advocates
promoted the elimination of African bondage, it took almost a century to
achieve the abolition of the "peculiar institution." White antislavery
abolitionists such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were
represented in the dominant media of the period as extremists and
fanatics. When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an
antislavery orator, white people-even those who were passionate
abolitionists-refused to believe that a black slave could display such
intelligence. The belief in the permanence of slavery was so widespread
that even white abolitionists found it difficult to imagine black people
as equals.
It took a long and violent civil war in order to legally disestablish
the "peculiar institution. Even though the Thirteenth Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution outlawed involuntary servitude, white supremacy
continued to be embraced by vast numbers of people and became deeply
inscribed in new institutions. One of these post-slavery institutions
was lynching, which was widely accepted for many decades thereafter.
Thanks to the work of figures such as Ida B. Wells, an antilynching
campaign was gradually legitimized during the first half of the
twentieth century. The NAACP, an organization that continues to conduct
legal challenges against discrimination, evolved from these efforts to
abolish lynching.
Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a century after the
abolition of slavery. Many people who lived under Jim Crow could not
envision a legal system defined by racial equality. When the governor of
Alabama personally attempted to prevent Arthurine Lucy from enrolling in
the University of Alabama, his stance represented the inability to
imagine black and white people ever peaceably living and studying
together. "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever"
are the most well known words of this politician, who was forced to
repudiate them some years later when segregation had proved far more
vulnerable than he could have imagined.
Although government, corporations, and the dominant media try to
represent racism as an unfortunate aberration of the past that has been
relegated to the graveyard of U.S. history, it continues to profoundly
influence contemporary structures, attitudes, and behaviors.
Nevertheless, anyone who would dare to call for the reintroduction of
slavery, the organization of lynch mobs, or the reestablishment of legal
segregation would be summarily dismissed. But it should be remembered
that the ancestors of many of today's most ardent liberals could not
have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life
without segregation. The 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances held in Durban,
South Africa, divulged the immensity of the global task of eliminating
racism. There may be many disagreements regarding what counts as racism
and what are the most effective strategies to eliminate it. However,
especially with the downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa,
there is a global consensus that racism should not define the future of
the planet.
I have referred to these historical examples of efforts to dismantle
racist institutions because they have considerable relevance to our
discussion of prisons and prison abolition. It is true that slavery,
lynching, and segregation acquired such a stalwart ideological quality
that many, if not most, could not foresee their decline and collapse.
Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of
social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as
everlasting as the sun. Yet, in the case of all three examples, we can
point to movements that assumed the radical stance of announcing the
obsolescence of these institutions. It may help us gain perspective on
the prison if we try to imagine how strange and discomforting the
debates about the obsolescence of slavery must have been to those who
took the "peculiar institution" for granted-and especially to those who
reaped direct benefits from this dreadful system of racist exploitation.
And even though there was widespread resistance among black slaves,
there were even some among them who assumed that they and their progeny
would be always subjected to the tyranny of slavery.
I have introduced three abolition campaigns that were eventually more or
less successful to make the point that social circumstances transform
and popular attitudes shift, in part in response to organized social
movements. But I have also evoked these historical campaigns because
they all targeted some expression of racism. U. S. chattel slavery was a
system of forced labor that relied on racist ideas and beliefs to
justify the relegation of people of African descent to the legal status
of property. Lynching was an extralegal institution that surrendered
thousands of African-American lives to the violence of ruthless racist
mobs. Under segregation, black people were legally declared second-class
citizens, for whom voting, job, education, and housing rights were
drastically curtailed, if they were available at all.
What is the relationship between these historical expressions of racism
and the role of the prison system today? Exploring such connections may
offer us a different perspective on the current state of the punishment
industry. If we are already persuaded that racism should not be allowed
to define the planet's future and if we can successfully argue that
prisons are racist institutions, this may lead us to take seriously the
prospect of declaring prisons obsolete.
For the moment I am concentrating on the history of antiblack racism in
order to make the point that the prison reveals congealed forms of
antiblack racism that operate in clandestine ways. In other words, they
are rarely recognized as racist. But there are other racialized
histories that have affected the development of the U. S. punishment
system as well-the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, and
Asian-Americans. These racisms also congeal and combine in the prison.
Because we are so accustomed to talking about race in terms of black and
white, we often fail to recognize and contest expressions of racism that
target people of color who are not black. Consider the mass arrests and
detention of people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Muslim heritage
in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and
World Trade Center.
This leads us to two important questions: Are prisons racist
institutions? Is racism so deeply entrenched in the institution of the
prison that it is not possible to eliminate one without eliminating the
other? These are questions that we should keep in mind as we examine the
historical links between U.S. slavery and the early penitentiary system.
The penitentiary as an institution that simultaneously punished and
rehabilitated its inhabitants was a new system of punishment that first
made its appearance in the United States around the time of the American
Revolution. This new system was based on the replacement of capital and
corporal punishment by incarceration.
Imprisonment itself was new neither to the United States nor to the
world, but until the creation of this new institution called the
penitentiary, it served as a prelude to punishment. People who were to
be subjected to some form of corporal punishment were detained in prison
until the execution of the punishment. With the penitentiary,
incarceration became the punishment itself. As is indicated in the
designation "penitentiary," imprisonment was regarded as rehabilitative
and the penitentiary prison was devised to provide convicts with the
conditions for reflecting on their crimes and, through penitence, for
reshaping their habits and even their souls. Although some antislavery
advocates spoke out against this new system of punishment during the
revolutionary period, the penitentiary was generally viewed as a
progressive reform, linked to the larger campaign for the rights of
citizens.
In many ways, the penitentiary was a vast improvement over the many
forms of capital and corporal punishment inherited from the English.
However, the contention that prisoners would refashion themselves if
only given the opportunity to reflect and labor in solitude and silence
disregarded the impact of authoritarian regimes of living and work.
Indeed, there were significant similarities between slavery and the
penitentiary prison. Historian Adam Jay Hirsch has pointed out:
One may perceive in the penitentiary many reflections of chattel slavery
as it was practiced in the South. Both institutions subordinated their
subjects to the will of others. Like Southern slaves, prison inmates
followed a daily routine specified by their superiors. Both institutions
reduced their subjects to dependence on others for the supply of basic
human services such as food and shelter. Both isolated their subjects
from the general population by confining them to a fixed habitat. And
both frequently coerced their subjects to work, often for longer hours
and for less compensation than free laborers.
As Hirsch has observed, both institutions deployed similar forms of
punishment, and prison regulations were, in fact, very similar to the
Slave Codes-the laws that deprived enslaved human beings of virtually
all rights. Moreover, both prisoners and slaves were considered to have
pronounced proclivities to crime. People sentenced to the penitentiary
in the North, white and black alike, were popularly represented as
having a strong kinship to enslaved black people.
The ideologies governing slavery and those governing punishment were
profoundly linked during the earliest period of U.S. history. While free
people could be legally sentenced to punishment by hard labor, such a
sentence would in no way change the conditions of existence already
experienced by slaves. Thus, as Hirsch further reveals, Thomas
Jefferson, who supported the sentencing of convicted people to hard
labor on road and water projects, also pointed out that he would exclude
slaves from this sort of punishment. Since slaves already hard labor,
sentencing them to penal labor would not mark a difference in their
condition. Jefferson suggested banishment to other countries instead.
Particularly in the United States, race has always played a central role
in constructing presumptions of criminality. After the abolition of
slavery, former slave states passed new legislation revising the Slave
Codes in order to regulate the behavior of free blacks in ways similar
to those that had existed during slavery. The new Black Codes proscribed
a range of actions-such as vagrancy, absence from work, breach of job
contracts, the possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or
acts-that were criminalized only when the person charged was black. With
the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, slavery and
involuntary servitude were putatively abolished. However, there was a
significant exception. In the wording of the amendment, slavery and
involuntary servitude were abolished "except as a punishment for crime,
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." According to the
Black Codes, there were crimes defined by state law for which only black
people could be "duly convicted." Thus, former slaves, who had recently
been extricated from a condition of hard labor for life, could be
legally sentenced to penal servitude.
In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to
develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the
possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves. Black people became
the prime targets of a developing convict lease system, referred to by
many as a reincarnation of slavery. The Mississippi Black Codes, for
example, declared vagrant anyone who was guilty of theft, had run away
[from a job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech,
had neglected job or family, handled money carelessly, and . . . all
other idle and disorderly persons. "19 Thus, vagrancy was coded as a
black crime, one punishable by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes
on the very plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.
Mary Ellen Curtin's study of Alabama prisoners during the decades
following emancipation discloses that before the four hundred thousand
black slaves in that state were set free, ninety-nine percent of
prisoners in Alabama's penitentiaries were white. As a consequence of
the shifts provoked by the institution of the Black Codes, within a
short period of time, the overwhelming majority of Alabama's convicts
were black. [20] She further observes:
Although the vast majority of Alabama's antebellum prisoners were white,
the popular perception was that the South's true criminals were its
black slaves. In the 1870s the growing number of black prisoners in the
South further buttressed the belief that African Americans were
inherently criminal and, in particular, prone to larceny.
In 1883, Frederick Douglass had already written about the South's
tendency to "impute crime to color."22 When a particularly egregious
crime was committed, he noted, not only was guilt frequently assigned to
a black person regardless of the perpetrator's race, but white men
sometimes sought to escape punishment by disguising themselves as black.
Douglass would later recount one such incident that took place in
Granger County, Tennessee, in which a man who appeared to be black was
shot while committing a robbery. The wounded man, however, was
discovered to be a respectable white citizen who had colored his face
black. The above example from Douglass demonstrates how whiteness, in
the words of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, operates as property.23
According to Harris, the fact that white identity was possessed as
property meant that rights, liberties and self-identity were affirmed
for white people, while being denied to black people. The latter's only
access to whiteness was through "passing." Douglass's comments indicate
how this property interest in whiteness was easily reversed in schemes
to deny black people their rights to due process. Interestingly, cases
similar to the one Douglass discusses above emerged in the United States
during the 1990s: in Boston, Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife
and attempted to blame an anonymous black man, and in Union, South
Carolina, Susan Smith killed her children and claimed they had been
abducted by a black carjacker. The racialization of crime-the tendency
to "impute crime to color," to use Frederick Douglass's words-did not
wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery.
Proof that crime continues to be imputed to color resides in the many
evocations of "racial profiling" in our time. That it is possible to be
targeted by the police for no other reason than the color of one's skin
is not mere speculation. Police departments in major urban areas have
admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the
numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested even in the absence of
probable cause. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, vast
numbers of people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage were
arrested and detained by the police agency known as Immigration and
Naturalization Services (INS). The INS is the federal agency that claims
the largest number of armed agents, even more than the FBI. During the
post-slavery era, as black people were integrated into southern penal
systems--and as the penal system became a system of penal servitude-the
punishments associated with slavery became further incorporated into the
penal system. "Whipping," as Matthew Mancini has observed, "was the
preeminent form of punishment under slavery and the lash, along with the
chain, became the very emblem of servitude for slaves and prisoners. As
indicated above, black people were imprisoned under the laws assembled
in the various Black Codes of the southern states, which, because they
were re-articulations of the Slave Codes, tended to racialize penality
and link it closely with previous regimes of slavery. The expansion of
the convict lease system and the county chain gang meant that the
antebellum criminal justice system, which focused far more intensely on
black people than on whites, defined southern criminal justice largely
as a means of controlling black labor. According to Mancini: Among the
multifarious debilitating legacies of slavery was the conviction that
blacks could only labor in a certain way-the way experience had shown
them to have labored in the past: in gangs, subjected to constant
supervision, and under the discipline of the lash. Since these were the
requisites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks, Southern whites
almost universally concluded that blacks could not work unless subjected
to such intense surveillance and discipline.
Scholars who have studied the convict lease system point out that in
many important respects, convict leasing was far worse than slavery, an
insight that can be gleaned from titles such as One Dies, Get Another
(by Mancini), Worse Than Slavery (David Oshinsky's work on Parchman
Prison),27 and Twice the Work of Free Labor (Alex Lichtenstein's
examination of the political economy of convict leasing).28 Slave owners
may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who,
after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other
hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be
worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a
convict crew.
According to descriptions by contemporaries, the conditions under which
leased convicts and county chain gangs lived were far worse than those
under which black people had lived as slaves. The records of Mississippi
plantations in the Yazoo Delta during the late 1880s indicate that
the prisoners ate and slept on bare ground, without blankets or
mattresses, and often without clothes. They were punished for "slow
hoeing" (ten lashes), "sorry planting" (five lashes), and "being light
with cotton" (five lashes). Some who attempted to escape were whipped
"till the blood ran down their legs"; others had a metal spur riveted to
their feet. Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria,
frostbite, consumption, sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds, and
"shackle poisoning" (the constant rubbing of chains and leg irons
against bare flesh).
The appalling treatment to which convicts were subjected under the lease
system recapitulated and further extended the regimes of slavery. If, as
Adam Tay Hirsch contends, the early incarnations of the U.S.
penitentiary in the North tended to mirror the institution of slavery in
many important respects, the post-Civil War evolution of the punishment
system was in very literal ways the continuation of a slave system,
which was no longer legal in the "free" world. The population of
convicts, whose racial composition was dramatically transformed by the
abolition of slavery, could be subjected to such intense exploitation
and to such horrendous modes of punishment precisely because they
continued to be perceived as slaves.
Historian Mary Ann Curtin has observed that many scholars who have
acknowledged the deeply entrenched racism of the post-Civil War
structures of punishment in the South have failed to identify the extent
to which racism colored commonsense understandings of the circumstances
surrounding the wholesale criminalization of black communities. Even
antiracist historians, she contends, do not go far enough in examining
the ways in which black people were made into criminals. They point
out-and this, she says, is indeed partially true-that in the aftermath
of emancipation, large numbers of black people were forced by their new
social situation to steal in order to survive. It was the transformation
of petty thievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers of
black people to the"involuntary servitude" legalized by the Thirteenth
Amendment. What Curtin suggests is that these charges of theft were
frequently fabricated outright. They "also served as subterfuge for
political revenge. After emancipation the courtroom became an ideal
place to exact racial retribution". In this sense, the work of the
criminal justice system was intimately related to the extralegal work of
lynching. Alex Lichtenstein, whose study focuses on the role of the
convict lease system in forging a new labor force for the South,
identifies the lease system, along with the new Jim Crow laws, as the
central institution in the development of a racial state.
New South capitalists in Georgia and elsewhere were able to use the
state to recruit and discipline a convict labor force, and thus were
able to develop their states' resources without creating a wage labor
force, and without undermining planters' control of black labor. In
fact, quite the opposite: the penal system could be used as a powerful
sanction against rural blacks who challenged the racial order upon which
agricultural labor control relied.
Lichtenstein discloses, for example, the extent to which the building of
Georgia railroads during the nineteenth century relied on black convict
labor. He further reminds us that as we drive down the most famous
street in Atlanta — Peachtree Street — we ride on the backs of convicts:
"The renowned Peachtree Street and the rest of Atlanta's well paved
roads and modern transportation infrastructure, which helped cement its
place as the commercial hub of the modern South, were originally laid by
convicts".
Lichtenstein's major argument is that the convict lease was not an
irrational regression; it was not primarily a throwback to
pre-capitalist modes of production. Rather, it was a most efficient and
most rational deployment of racist strategies to swiftly achieve
industrialization in the South. In this sense, he argues, "convict labor
was in many ways in the vanguard of the region's first tentative,
ambivalent, steps toward modernity."
Those of us who have had the opportunity to visit nineteenth-century
mansions that were originally constructed on slave plantations are
rarely content with an aesthetic appraisal of these structures, no
matter how beautiful they may be. Sufficient visual imagery of toiling
black slaves circulate enough in our environment for us to imagine the
brutality that hides just beneath the surface of these wondrous
mansions. We have learned how to recognize the role of slave labor, as
well as the racism it embodied. But black convict labor remains a hidden
dimension of our history. It is extremely unsettling to think of modern,
industrialized urban areas as having been originally produced under the
racist labor conditions of penal servitude that are often described by
historians as even worse than slavery.
I grew up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Because of its mines-coal
and iron ore-and its steel mills that remained active until the
de-industrialization process of the 1980s, it was widely known as "the
Pittsburgh of the South. " The fathers of many of my friends worked in
these mines and mills. It is only recently that I have learned that the
black miners and steelworkers I knew during my childhood inherited their
place in Birmingham's industrial development from black convicts forced
to do this work under the lease system. As Curtin observes:
Many ex-prisoners became miners because Alabama used prison labor
extensively in its coal mines. By 1888 all of Alabama's able male
prisoners were leased to two major mining companies: the Tennessee Coal
and Iron Company (TCI) and Sloss Iron and Steel Company. For a charge of
up to $18.50 per month per man, these corporations "leased," or rented
prison laborers and worked them in coal mines.
Learning about this little-acknowledged dimension of black and labor
history has caused me to reevaluate my own childhood experiences.
One of the many ruses racism achieves is the virtual erasure of
historical contributions by people of color. Here we have a penal system
that was racist in many respects-discriminatory arrests and sentences,
conditions of work, modes of punishment-together with the racist erasure
of the significant contributions made by black convicts as a result of
racist coercion. Just as it is difficult to imagine how much is owed to
convicts relegated to penal servitude during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, we find it difficult today to feel a connection
with the prisoners who produce a rising number of commodities that we
take for granted in our daily lives. In the state of California, public
colleges and universities are provided with furniture produced by
prisoners, the vast majority of whom are Latino and black.
There are aspects of our history that we need to interrogate and
rethink, the recognition of which may help us to adopt more complicated,
critical postures toward the present and the future. I have focused on
the work of a few scholars whose work urges us to raise questions about
the past, present, and future. Curtin, for example, is not simply
content with offering us the possibility of reexamining the place of
mining and steelwork in the lives of black people in Alabama. She also
uses her research to urge us to think about the uncanny parallels
between the convict lease system in the nineteenth century and prison
privatization in the twenty-first.
In the late nineteenth century, coal companies wished to keep their
skilled prison laborers for as long as they could, leading to denials of
"short time". Today, a slightly different economic incentive can lead to
similar consequences. CCA [Corrections Corporation of America] is paid
per prisoner. If the supply dries up, or too many are released too
early, their profits are affected. Longer prison terms mean greater
profits, but the larger point is that the profit motive promotes the
expansion of imprisonment.
The persistence of the prison as the main form of punishment, with its
racist and sexist dimensions, has created this historical continuity
between the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century convict lease system
and the privatized prison business today. While the convict lease system
was legally abolished, its structures of exploitation have reemerged in
the patterns of privatization, and, more generally, in the wide-ranging
corporatization of punishment that has produced a prison industrial
complex. If the prison continues to dominate the landscape of punishment
throughout this century and into the next, what might await coming
generations of impoverished African-Americans, Latinos, Native
Americans, and Asian-Americans? Given the parallels between the prison
and slavery, a productive exercise might consist in speculating about
what the present might look like if slavery or its successor, the
convict lease system, had not been abolished.
To be sure, I am not suggesting that the abolition of slavery and the
lease system has produced an era of equality and justice. On the
contrary, racism surreptitiously defines social and economic structures
in ways that are difficult to identify and thus are much more damaging.
In some states, for example, more than one-third of black men have been
labeled felons. In Alabama and Florida, once a felon, always a felon,
which entails the loss of status as a rights-bearing citizen. One of the
grave consequences of the powerful reach of the prison was the 2000
(s)election of George W. Bush as president. If only the black men and
women denied the right to vote because of an actual or presumed felony
record had been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the
White House today. And perhaps we would not be dealing with the awful
costs of the War on Terrorism declared during the first year of his
administration. If not for his election, the people of Iraq might not
have suffered death, destruction, and environmental poisoning by U.S.
military forces.
As appalling as the current political situation may be, imagine what our
lives might have become if we were still grappling with the institution
of slavery-or the convict lease system or racial segregation. But we do
not have to speculate about living with the consequences of the prison.
There is more than enough evidence in the lives of men and women who
have been claimed by ever more repressive institutions and who are
denied access to their families, their communities, to educational
opportunities, to productive and creative work, to physical and mental
recreation. And there is even more compelling evidence about the damage
wrought by the expansion of the prison system in the schools located in
poor communities of color that replicate the structures and regimes of
the prison. When children attend schools that place a greater value on
discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development,
they are attending prep schools for prison. If this is the predicament
we face today, what might the future hold if the prison system acquires
an even greater presence in our society? In the nineteenth century,
antislavery activists insisted that as long as slavery continued, the
future of democracy was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century,
antiprison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the
revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison
system.
"One should recall that the movement for reforming the prisons, for
controlling their functioning is not a recent phenomenon. It does not
even seem to have originated in a recognition of failure. Prison
'reform' is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it
constitutes, as it were, its programme."
- Michel Foucault
It is ironic that the prison itself was a product of concerted efforts
by reformers to create a better system of punishment. If the words
"prison reform" so easily slip from our lips, it is because "prison" and
"reform" have been inextricably linked since the beginning of the use of
imprisonment as the main means of punishing those who violate social
norms. As I have already indicated, the origins of the prison are
associated with the American Revolution and therefore with the
resistance to the colonial power of England. Today this seems ironic,
but incarceration within a penitentiary was assumed to be humane-at
least far more humane than the capital and corporal punishment inherited
from England and other European countries. Foucault opens his study,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , with a description of a
1757 execution in Paris. The man who was put to death was first forced
to undergo a series of formidable tortures ordered by the court. Red-hot
pincers were used to burn away the flesh from his limbs, and molten
lead, boiling oil, burning resin, and other substances were melted
together and poured onto the wounds. Finally, he was drawn and
quartered, his body burned, and the ashes tossed into the wind. Under
English common law, a conviction for sodomy led to the punishment of
being buried alive, and convicted heretics also were burned alive. "The
crime of treason by a female was punished initially under the common law
by burning alive the defendant. However, in the year 1790 this method
was halted and the punishment became strangulation and burning of the
corpse.
European and American reformers set out to end macabre penalties such as
this, as well as other forms of corporal punishment such as the stocks
and pillories, whippings, brandings, and amputations. Prior to the
appearance of punitive incarceration, such punishment was designed to
have its most profound effect not so much on the person punished as on
the crowd of spectators. Punishment was, in essence, public spectacle.
Reformers such as John Howard in England and Benjamin Rush in
Pennsylvania argued that punishment-if carried out in isolation, behind
the walls of the prison-would cease to be revenge and would actually
reform those who had broken the law.
It should also be pointed out that punishment has not been without its
gendered dimensions. Women were often punished within the domestic
domain, and instruments of torture were sometimes imported by
authorities into the household. In seventeenth-century Britain, women
whose husbands identified them as quarrelsome and un-accepting of male
dominance were punished by means of a gossip's bridle, or "branks," a
headpiece with a chain attached and an iron bit that was introduced into
the woman's mouth. Although the branking of women was often linked to a
public parade, this contraption was sometimes hooked to a wall of the
house, where the punished woman remained until her husband decided to
release her. I mention these forms of punishment inflicted on women
because, like the punishment inflicted on slaves, they were rarely taken
up by prison reformers.
Other modes of punishment that predated the rise of the prison include
banishment, forced labor in galleys, transportation, and appropriation
of the accused's property. The punitive transportation of large numbers
of people from England, for example, facilitated the initial
colonization of Australia. Transported English convicts also settled the
North American colony of Georgia. During the early 1700s, one in eight
transported convicts were women, and the work they were forced to
perform often consisted of prostitution.
Imprisonment was not employed as a principal mode of punishment until
the eighteenth century in Europe and the nineteenth century in the
United States. And European prison systems were instituted in Asia and
Africa as an important component of colonial rule. In India, for
example, the English prison system was introduced during the second half
of the eighteenth century, when jails were established in the regions of
Calcutta and Madras. In Europe, the penitentiary movement against
capital and other corporal punishments reflected new intellectual
tendencies associated with the Enlightenment, activist interventions by
Protestant reformers, and structural transformations associated with the
rise of industrial capitalism. In Milan in 1764, Cesare Beccaria
published his Essay on Crimes and Punishments, which was strongly
influenced by notions of equality advanced by the
philosophies-especially Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Beccaria
argued that punishment should never be a private matter, nor should it
be arbitrarily violent; rather, it should be public, swift, and as
lenient as possible. He revealed the contradiction of what was then a
distinctive feature of imprisonment-the fact that it was generally
imposed prior to the defendant's guilt or innocence being decided.
However, incarceration itself eventually became the penalty, bringing
about a distinction between imprisonment as punishment and pretrial
detention or detention until the infliction of punishment. The process
through which imprisonment developed into the primary mode of state
inflicted punishment was very much related to the rise of capitalism and
to the appearance of a new set of ideological conditions. These new
conditions reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie as the social class
whose interests and aspirations furthered new scientific, philosophical,
cultural, and popular ideas. It is thus important to grasp the fact that
the prison as we know it today did not make its appearance on the
historical stage as the superior form of punishment for all times. It
was simply-though we should not underestimate the complexity of this
process-what made most sense at a particular moment in history. We
should therefore question whether a system that was intimately related
to a particular set of historical circumstances that prevailed during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can lay absolute claim on the
twenty-first century.
It may be important at this point in our examination to acknowledge the
radical shift in the social perception of the individual that appeared
in the ideas of that era. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, the
individual came to be regarded as a bearer of formal rights and
liberties. The notion of the individual's inalienable rights and
liberties was eventually memorialized in the French and American
Revolution. "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" from the French Revolution
and "We hold these truths to be self-evident: all men are created equal
. . ." from the American Revolution were new and radical ideas, even
though they were not extended to women, workers, Africans, and Indians.
Before the acceptance of the sanctity of individual rights, imprisonment
could not have been understood as punishment. If the individual was not
perceived as possessing inalienable rights and liberties, then the
alienation of those rights and liberties by removal from society to a
space tyrannically governed by the state would not have made sense.
Banishment beyond the geographical limits of the town may have made
sense, but not the alteration of the individual's legal status through
imposition of a prison sentence.
Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always computed in terms of
time, is related to abstract quantification, evoking the rise of science
and what is often referred to as the Age of Reason. We should keep in
mind that this was precisely the historical period when the value of
labor began to be calculated in terms of time and therefore compensated
in another quantifiable way, by money. The computability of state
punishment in terms of months, years-resonates with the role of
labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist
commodities. Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely
the historical period during which the commodity form arose is the era
during which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primary form of
punishment.
Today, the growing social movement contesting the supremacy of global
capital is a movement that directly challenges the rule of the human,
animal, and plant populations, as well as its natural resources-by
corporations that are primarily interested in the increased production
and circulation of ever more profitable commodities. This is a challenge
to the supremacy of the commodity form, a rising resistance to the
contemporary tendency to commodify every aspect of planetary existence.
The question we might consider is whether this new resistance to
capitalist globalization should also incorporate resistance to the
prison.
Thus far I have largely used gender-neutral language to describe the
historical development of the prison and its reformers. But convicts
punished by imprisonment in emergent penitentiary systems were primarily
male. This reflected the deeply gender-biased structure of legal,
political, and economic rights. Since women were largely denied public
status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished
by the deprivation of such rights through imprisonment.43 This was
especially true of married women, who had no standing before the law.
According to English common law, marriage resulted in a state of "civil
death," as symbolized by the wife's assumption of the husband's name.
Consequently, she tended to be punished for revolting against her
domestic duties rather than for failure in her meager public
responsibilities. The relegation of white women to domestic economies
prevented them from playing a significant role in the emergent commodity
realm. This was especially true since wage labor was typically gendered
as male and racialized as white. It is not fortuitous that domestic
corporal punishment for women survived long after these modes of
punishment had become obsolete for (white) men. The persistence of
domestic violence painfully attests to these historical modes of
gendered punishment.
Some scholars have argued that the word "penitentiary" may have been
used first in connection with plans outlined in England in 1758 to house
"penitent prostitutes." In 1777, John Howard, the leading Protestant
proponent of penal reform in England, published The State of the
Prisons,44 in which he conceptualized imprisonment as an occasion for
religious self-reflection and self-reform. Between 1787 and 1791, the
utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham published his letters on a prison
model he called the panopticon. Bentham claimed that criminals could
only internalize productive labor habits if they were under constant
surveillance. According to his panopticon model, prisoners were to be
housed in single cells on circular tiers, all facing a multilevel guard
tower. By means of blinds and a complicated play of light and darkness,
the prisoners-who would not see each other at all-would be unable to see
the warden. From his vantage point, on the other hand, the warden would
be able to see all of the prisoners. However-and this was the most
significant aspect of Bentham's mammoth panopticon-because each
individual prisoner would never be able to determine where the warden's
gaze was focused, each prisoner would be compelled to act, that is,
work, as if he were being watched at all times. If we combine Howard's
emphasis on disciplined self reflection with Bentham's ideas regarding
the technology of internalization designed to make surveillance and
discipline the purview of the individual prisoner, we can begin to see
how such a conception of the prison had far-reaching implications. The
conditions of possibility for this new form of punishment were strongly
anchored in a historical era during which the working class needed to be
constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of
performing the requisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist
system. John Howard's ideas were incorporated in the Penitentiary Act of
1799, which opened the way for the modern prison. While Jeremy Bentham's
ideas influenced the development of the first national English
penitentiary, located in Millbank and opened in 1816, the first
full-fledged effort to create a panopticon prison was in the United
States.
The Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, based on a revised
architectural model of the panopticon, opened in 1826. But the
penitentiary had already made its appearance in the United States.
Pennsylvania's Walnut Street Jail housed the first state penitentiary in
the United States, when a portion of the jail was converted in 1790 from
a detention facility to an institution housing convicts whose prison
sentences simultaneously became punishment and occasions for penitence
and reform. Walnut Street's austere regime-total isolation in single
cells where prisoners lived, ate, worked, read the Bible (if, indeed,
they were literate), and supposedly reflected and repented-came to be
known as the Pennsylvania system. This regime would constitute one of
that era's two major models of imprisonment. Although the other model,
developed in Auburn, New York, was viewed as a rival to the Pennsylvania
system, the philosophical basis of the two models did not differ
substantively. The Pennsylvania model, which eventually crystallized in
the Eastern State Penitentiary in Cherry Hill-the plans for which were
approved in 1821-emphasized total isolation, silence, and solitude,
whereas the Auburn model called for solitary cells but labor in common.
This mode of prison labor, which was called congregate, was supposed to
unfold in total silence. Prisoners were allowed to be with each other as
they worked, but only under condition of silence. Because of its more
efficient labor practices, Auburn eventually became the dominant model,
both for the United States and Europe. Why would eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century reformers become so invested in creating conditions
of punishment based on solitary confinement? Today, aside from death,
solitary confinement-next to torture, or as a form of torture-is
considered the worst form of punishment imaginable. Then, however, it
was assumed to have an emancipatory effect. The body was placed in
conditions of solitude in order to allow the soul to flourish. It is not
accidental that most of the reformers of that era were deeply religious
and therefore saw the architecture and of the penitentiary as emulating
the architecture and regimes of monastic life. Still, observers of the
new penitentiary saw, early on, the real potential for insanity in
solitary confinement. In an often-quoted passage of his American Notes,
Charles Dickens prefaced a description of his 1842 visit to Eastern
Penitentiary with the observation that "the system here is rigid,
strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects,
to be cruel and wrong."
In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant
for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system
of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into
execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that
very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and
agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon
the sufferers . . . I am only the more convinced that there is a depth
of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can
fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his
fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries
of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body . .
.because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries
that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret
punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Unlike other Europeans such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de
Beaumont, who believed that such punishment would result in moral
renewal and thus mold convicts into better citizens, Dickens was of the
opinion that "[t]hose who have undergone this punishment MUST pass into
society again morally unhealthy and diseased."48 This early critique of
the penitentiary and its regime of solitary confinement troubles the
notion that imprisonment is the most suitable form of punishment for a
democratic society.
The current construction and expansion of state and federal
super-maximum security prisons, whose putative purpose is to address
disciplinary problems within the penal system, draws upon the historical
conception of the penitentiary, then considered the most progressive
form of punishment. Today African-Americans and Latinos are vastly
overrepresented in these supermax prisons and control units, the first
of which emerged when federal correctional authorities began to send
prisoners housed throughout the system whom they deemed to be
"dangerous" to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. In 1983, the
entire prison was "locked down," which meant that prisoners were
confined to their cells twenty-three hours a day. This lockdown became
permanent, thus furnishing the general model for the control unit and
supermax prison. Today, there are approximately sixty super-maximum
security federal and state prisons located in thirty-six states and many
more supermax units in virtually every state in the country. A
description of supermaxes in a 1997 Human Rights Watch report sounds
chillingly like Dickens's description of Eastern State Penitentiary.
What is different, however, is that all references to individual
rehabilitation have disappeared.
Inmates in super-maximum security facilities are usually held in single
cell lock-down, commonly referred to as solitary confinement . . .
[C]ongregate activities with other prisoners are usually prohibited;
other prisoners cannot even be seen from an inmate's cell; communication
with other prisoners is prohibited or difficult (consisting, for
example, of shouting from cell to cell); visiting and telephone
privileges are limited.
The new generation of super-maximum security facilities also rely on
state-of-the-art technology for monitoring and controlling prisoner
conduct and movement, utilizing, for example, video monitors and remote
controlled electronic doors. "These prisons represent the application of
sophisticated, modern technology dedicated to the task of social
control, and they isolate, regulate and surveil more effectively than
anything that has preceded them".
I have highlighted the similarities between the early U.S.
penitentiary-with its aspirations toward individual rehabilitation-and
the repressive supermaxes of our era as a reminder of the mutability of
history. What was once regarded as progressive and even revolutionary
represents today the marriage of technological superiority and political
backwardness. No one-not even the most ardent defenders of the
supermax-would try to argue today that absolute segregation, including
sensory deprivation, is restorative and healing. The prevailing
justification for the supermax is that the horrors it creates are the
perfect complement for the horrifying personalities deemed the worst of
the worst by the prison system. In other words, there is no pretense
that rights are respected, there is no concern for the individual, there
is no sense that men and women incarcerated in super- maxes deserve
anything approaching respect and comfort. According to a 1999 report
issued by the National Institute of Corrections,
Generally, the overall constitutionality of these [supermax] programs
remains unclear. As larger numbers of inmates with a greater diversity
of characteristics, backgrounds, and behaviors are incarcerated in these
facilities, the likelihood of legal challenge is increased.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, absolute solitude and
strict regimentation of the prisoner's every action were viewed as
strategies for transforming habits and ethics. That is to say, the idea
that imprisonment should be the main form of punishment reflected a
belief in the potential of white mankind for progress, not only in
science and industry, but at the level of the individual member of
society as well. Prison reformers mirrored Enlightenment assumptions of
progress in every aspect of human-or to be more precise, white
Western-society. In his 1987 study Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction
and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, John Bender
proposes the very intriguing argument that the emergent literary genre
of the novel furthered a discourse of progress and individual
transformation that encouraged attitudes toward punishment to change.
These attitudes, he suggests, heralded the conception and construction
of penitentiary prisons during the latter part of the eighteenth century
as a reform suited to the capacities of those who were deemed human.
Reformers who called for the imposition of penitentiary architecture and
regimes on the then existing structure of the prison aimed their
critiques at the prisons that were primarily used for purposes of
pretrial detention or as an alternative punishment for those who were
unable to pay fines exacted by the courts. John Howard, the most well
known of these reformers, was what you might today call a prison
activist. Beginning in 1773, at the age of forty-seven, he initiated a
series of visits that took him "to every institution for the poor in
Europe . . . [a campaign] which cost him his fortune and finally his
life in a typhus war of the Russian army at Cherson in 1791." At the
conclusion of his first trip abroad, he successfully ran for the office
of sheriff in Bedfordshire. As sheriff he investigated the prisons under
his own jurisdiction and later "set out to visit every prison in England
and Wales to document the evils he had first observed at Bedford".
Bender argues that the novel helped facilitate these campaigns to
transform the old prisons-which were filthy and in disarray, and which
thrived on the bribery of the wardens-into well-ordered rehabilitative
penitentiaries. He shows that novels such as Moll Flanders and Robinson
Crusoe emphasized "the power of confinement to reshape personality" and
popularized some of the ideas that moved reformers to action. As Bender
points out, the eighteenth century reformers criticized the old prisons
for their chaos, their lack of organization and classification, for the
easy circulation of alcohol and prostitution they permitted, and for the
prevalence of contagion and disease.
The reformers, primarily Protestant, among whom Quakers were especially
dominant, couched their ideas in large part in religious frameworks.
Though John Howard was not himself a Quaker-he was an independent
Protestant-nevertheless
[h]e was drawn to Quaker asceticism and adopted the dress "of a plain
Friend." His own brand of piety was strongly reminiscent of the Quaker
traditions of silent prayer, "suffering" introspection, and faith in the
illumining power of God's light. Quakers, for their part, were bound to
be drawn to the idea of imprisonment as a purgatory, as a forced
withdrawal from the distractions of the senses into silent and solitary
confrontation with the self. Howard conceived of a convict's process of
reformation in terms similar to the spiritual awakening of a believer at
a Quaker meeting.
However, according to Michael Ignatieff, Howard's contributions did not
so much reside in the religiosity of his reform efforts.
The originality of Howard's indictment lies in its "scientific," not in
its moral character. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756 and
author of several scientific papers on climatic variations in
Bedfordshire, Howard was one of the first philanthropists to attempt a
systematic statistical description of a social problem.
Likewise, Bender's analysis of the relationship between the novel and
the penitentiary emphasizes the extent to which the philosophical
underpinnings of the prison reformer's campaigns echoed the materialism
and utilitarianism of the English Enlightenment. The campaign to reform
the prisons was a project to impose order, classification, cleanliness,
good work habits, and self-consciousness. He argues that people detained
within the old prisons were not severely restricted-they sometimes even
enjoyed the freedom to move in and out of the prison. They were not
compelled to work and, depending on their own resources, could eat and
drink as they wished. Even sex was sometimes available, as prostitutes
were sometimes allowed temporary entrance into the prisons. Howard and
other reformers called for the imposition of rigid rules that would
"enforce solitude and penitence, cleanliness and work". The new
penitentiaries, according to Bender, "supplanting both the old prisons
and houses of correction, explicitly reached toward . . . three goals:
maintenance of order within a largely urban labor force, salvation of
the soul, and rationalization of personality." He argues that this is
precisely what was narratively accomplished by the novel. It ordered and
classified social life, it represented individuals as conscious of their
surroundings and as self-aware and self-fashioning. Bender thus sees a
kinship between two major developments of the eighteenth century-the
rise of the novel in the cultural sphere and the rise of the
penitentiary in the socio-legal sphere. If the novel as a cultural form
helped to produce the penitentiary, then prison reformers must have been
influenced by the ideas generated by and through the eighteenth-century
novel.
Literature has continued to play a role in campaigns around the prison.
During the twentieth century, prison writing, in particular, has
periodically experienced waves of popularity. The public recognition of
prison writing in the United States has historically coincided with the
influence of social movements calling for prison reform and/or
abolition. Robert Burns's I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, and
the 1932 Hollywood film upon which it was based, played a central role
in the campaign to abolish the chain gang. During the 1970s, which were
marked by intense organizing within, outside, and across prison walls,
numerous works authored by prisoners followed the 1970 publication of
George Jackson's Soledad Brother and the anthology I coedited with
Bettina Aptheker, If They Come in the Morning. While many prison writers
during that era had discovered the emancipatory potential of writing on
their own, relying either on the education they had received prior to
their imprisonment or on their tenacious efforts at self-education,
others pursued their writing as a direct result of the expansion of
prison educational programs during that era. Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has
challenged the contemporary dismantling of prison education programs,
asks in Live from Death Row,
What societal interest is served by prisoners who remain illiterate?
What social benefit is there in ignorance? How are people corrected
while imprisoned if their education is outlawed? Who profits (other than
the prison establishment itself) from stupid prisoners?
A practicing journalist before his arrest in 1982 on charges of killing
Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, Abu Jamal has regularly produced
articles on capital punishment, focusing especially on its racial and
class disproportions. His ideas have helped to link critiques of the
death penalty with the more general challenges to the expanding U.S.
prison system and are particularly helpful to activists who seek to
associate death penalty abolitionism with prison abolitionism. His
prison writings have been published in both popular and scholarly
journals (such as The Nation and Yale Law Journal) as well as in three
collections, Live from Death Row, Death Blossoms, and All Things
Censored. Abu-Jamal and many other prison writers have strongly
criticized the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners, which was
enacted in the 1994 crime bill, as indicative of the contemporary
pattern of dismantling educational programs behind bars. As creative
writing courses for prisoners were defunded, virtually every literary
journal publishing prisoners' writing eventually collapsed. Of the
scores of magazines and newspapers produced behind walls, only the
Angolite at Louisiana's Angola Prison and Prison Legal News at
Washington State Prison remain. What this means is that precisely at a
time of consolidating a significant writing culture behind bars,
repressive strategies are being deployed to dissuade prisoners from
educating themselves.
If the publication of Malcolm X's autobiography marks a pivotal moment
in the development of prison literature and a moment of vast promise for
prisoners who try to make education a major dimension of their time
behind bars, contemporary prison practices are systematically dashing
those hopes. In the 1950s, Malcolm's prison education was a dramatic
example of prisoners' ability to turn their incarceration into a
transformative experience. With no available means of organizing his
quest for knowledge, he proceeded to read a dictionary, copying each
word in his own hand. By the time he could immerse himself in reading,
he noted, "months passed without my even thinking about being
imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my
life." Then, according to Malcolm, prisoners who demonstrated an unusual
interest in reading were assumed to have embarked upon a journey of
self-rehabilitation and were frequently allowed special privileges-such
as checking out more than the maximum number of books. Even so, in order
to pursue this self-education, Malcolm had to work against the prison
regime-he often read on his cell floor, long after lights-out, by the
glow of the corridor light, taking care to return to bed each hour for
the two minutes during which the guard marched past his cell. The
contemporary disestablishment of writing and other prison educational
programs is indicative of the official disregard today for
rehabilitative strategies, particularly those that encourage individual
prisoners to acquire autonomy of the mind. The documentary film The Last
Graduation describes the role prisoners played in establishing a
four-year college program at New York's Greenhaven Prison and,
twenty-two years later, the official decision to dismantle it. According
to Eddie Ellis, who spent twenty-five years in prison and is currently a
well-known leader of the antiprison movement, "As a result of Attica,
college programs came into the prisons."
In the aftermath of the 1971 prisoner rebellion at Attica and the
government-sponsored massacre, public opinion began to favor prison
reform. Forty-three Attica prisoners and eleven guards and civilians
were killed by the National Guard, who had been ordered to retake the
prison by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The leaders of the prison
rebellion had been very specific about their demands. In their
"practical demands" they expressed concerns about diet, improvement in
the quality of guards, more realistic rehabilitation programs, and
better education programs. They also wanted religious freedom, freedom
to engage in political activity, and an end to censorship-all of which
they saw as indispensable to their educational needs. As Eddie Ellis
observes in The Last Graduation,
Prisoners very early recognized the fact that they needed to be better
educated, that the more education they had, the better they would be
able to deal with themselves and their problems, the problems of the
prisons and the problems of the communities from which most of them
came.
Lateef Islam, another former prisoner featured in this documentary,
said, "We held classes before the college came. We taught each other,
and sometimes under penalty of a beat-up."
After the Attica Rebellion, more than five hundred prisoners were
transferred to Greenhaven, including some of the leaders who continued
to press for educational programs. As a direct result of their demands,
Marist College, a New York state college near Greenhaven, began to offer
college-level courses in 1973 and eventually established the
infrastructure for an on-site four-year college program. The program
thrived for twenty-two years. Some of the many prisoners who earned
their degrees at Greenhaven pursued postgraduate studies after their
release. As the documentary powerfully demonstrates, the program
produced dedicated men who left prison and offered their newly acquired
knowledge and skills to their communities on the outside.
In 1994, consistent with the general pattern of creating more prisons
and more repression within all prisons, Congress took up the question of
withdrawing college funding for inmates. The congressional debate
concluded with a decision to add an amendment to the 1994 crime bill
that eliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, thus effectively
defunding all higher educational programs. After twenty two years,
Marist College was compelled to terminate its program at Greenhaven
Prison. Thus, the documentary revolves around the very last graduation
ceremony on July 15, 1995, and the poignant process of removing the
books that, in many ways, symbolized the possibilities of freedom. Or,
as one of the Marist professors said, "They see books as full of gold."
The prisoner who for many years had served as a clerk for the college
sadly reflected, as books were being moved, that there was nothing left
to do in prison-except perhaps bodybuilding. But, he asked, "what's the
use of building your body if you can't build your mind?" Ironically, not
long after educational programs were disestablished, weights and
bodybuilding equipment were also removed from most U.S. prisons.
"I have been told that I will never leave prison if I continue to fight
the system. My answer is that one must be alive in order to leave
prison, and our current standard of medical care is tantamount to a
death sentence. Therefore, I have no choice but to continue . . .
Conditions within the institution continually re-invoke memories of
violence and oppression, often with devastating results. Unlike other
incarcerated women who have come forward to reveal their impressions of
prison, I do not feel 'safer' here because 'the abuse has stopped.' It
has not stopped. It has shifted shape and paced itself differently, but
it is as insidious and pervasive in prison as ever it was in the world I
know outside these walls. What has ceased is my ignorance of the facts
concerning abuse-and my willingness to tolerate it in silence."
- Marcia Bunny
Over the last five years, the prison system has received far more
attention by the media than at any time since the period following the
1971 Attica Rebellion. However, with a few important exceptions, women
have been left out of the public discussions about the expansion of the
U.S. prison system. I am not suggesting that simply bringing women into
the existing conversations on jails and prisons will deepen our analysis
of state punishment and further the project of prison abolition.
Addressing issues that are specific to women's prisons is of vital
importance, but it is equally important to shift the way we think about
the prison system as a whole. Certainly women's prison practices are
gendered, but so, too, are men's prison practices. To assume that men's
institutions constitute the norm and women's institutions are marginal
is, in a sense, to participate in the very normalization of prisons that
an abolitionist approach seeks to contest. Thus, the title of this
chapter is not "Women and the Prison System," but rather "How Gender
Structures the Prison System." Moreover, scholars and activists who are
involved in feminist projects should not consider the structure of state
punishment as marginal to their work. Forward-looking research and
organizing strategies should recognize that the deeply gendered
character of punishment both reflects and further entrenches the
gendered structure of the larger society.
Women prisoners have produced a small but impressive body of literature
that has illuminated significant aspects of the organization of
punishment that would have otherwise remained unacknowledged. Assata
Shakur's memoirs, for example, reveal the dangerous intersections of
racism, male domination, and state strategies of political repression.
In 1977 she was convicted on charges of murder and assault in connection
with a 1973 incident that left one New Jersey state trooper dead and
another wounded. She and her companion, Zayd Shakur, who was killed
during the shootout, were the targets of what we now name racial
profiling and were stopped by state troopers under the pretext of a
broken taillight. At the time Assata Shakur, known then as Joanne
Chesimard, was underground and had been anointed by the police and the
media as the "Soul of the Black Liberation Army." By her 1977
conviction, she either had been acquitted or had charges dismissed in
six other cases-upon the basis of which she had been declared a fugitive
in the first place. Her attorney, Lennox Hinds, has pointed out that
since it was proven that Assata Shakur did not handle the gun with which
the state troopers were shot, her mere presence in the automobile,
against the backdrop of the media demonization to which she was
subjected, constituted the basis of her conviction. In the foreword to
Shakur's autobiography Hinds writes:
In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has
ever been treated as she was, continuously confined in a men's prison,
under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her most intimate functions,
without intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, and
exercise, and without the company of other women for all the years she
was in their custody.
There is no doubt that Assata Shakur's status as a black political
prisoner accused of killing a state trooper caused her to be singled out
by the authorities for unusually cruel treatment. However, her own
account emphasizes the extent to which her individual experiences
reflected those of other imprisoned women, especially black and Puerto
Rican women. Her description of the strip search, which focuses on the
internal examination of body cavities, is especially revealing:
Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur [members of the Black Panther Party] had told
me about it after they had been bailed out in the Panther 21 trial. When
they had told me, I was horrified. "You mean they really put their hands
inside you, to search you?" I had asked. "Uh-huh," they answered. Every
woman who has ever been on the rock, or in the old house of detention,
can tell you about it. The women call it "getting the finger" or, more
vulgarly, "getting fucked."What happens if you refuse?" I had asked
Afeni. "They lock you in the hole and they don't let you out until you
consent to be searched internally."
I thought about refusing, but I sure as hell didn't want to be in the
hole. I had had enough of solitary. The "internal search" was as
humiliating and disgusting as it sounded. You sit on the edge of this
table and the nurse holds your legs open and sticks a finger in your
vagina and moves it around. She has a plastic glove on. Some of them try
to put one finger in your vagina and another one up your rectum at the
same time.
I have quoted this passage so extensively because it exposes an everyday
routine in women's prisons that verges on sexual assault as much as it
is taken for granted. Having been imprisoned in the Women's House of
Detention to which Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur refer, I can personally
affirm the veracity of their claims. Over thirty years after Bird and
Afeni Shakur were released and after I myself spent several months in
the Women's House of Detention, this issue of the strip search is still
very much on the front burner of women's prison activism. In 2001
Sisters Inside, an Australian support organization for women prisoners,
launched a national campaign against the strip search, the slogan of
which was "Stop State Sexual Assault." Assata Shakur's autobiography
provides an abundance of insights about the gendering of state
punishment and reveals the extent to which women's prisons have held on
to oppressive patriarchal practices that are considered obsolete in the
"free world". She spent six years in several jails and prisons before
escaping in 1979 and receiving political asylum by the Republic of Cuba
in 1984, where she lives today.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote an earlier account of life in a women's
prison, The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner. At the
height of the McCarthy era, Flynn, a labor activist and Communist
leader, was convicted under the Smith Act and served two years in
Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women from 1955 to 1957. Following the
dominant model for women's prisons during that period, Alderson's
regimes were based on the assumption that "criminal" women could be
rehabilitated by assimilating correct womanly behaviors-that is, by
becoming experts in domesticity-especially cooking, cleaning, and
sewing. Of course, training designed to produce better wives and mothers
among middle-class white women effectively produced skilled domestic
servants among black and poor women. Flynn's book provides vivid
descriptions of these everyday regimes. Her autobiography is located in
a tradition of prison writing by political prisoners that also includes
women of this era. Contemporary writings by women political prisoners
today include poems and short stories by Ericka Huggins and Susan
Rosenberg, analyses of the prison industrial complex by Linda Evans, and
curricula for HIV/AIDS education in women's prisons by Kathy Boudin and
the members of the Bedford Hills ACE collective.
Despite the availability of perceptive portrayals of life in women's
prisons, it has been extremely difficult to persuade the public-and
even, on occasion, to persuade prison activists who are primarily
concerned with the plight of male prisoners-of the centrality of gender
to an understanding of state punishment. Although men constitute the
vast majority of prisoners in the world, important aspects of the
operation of state punishment are missed if it is assumed that women are
marginal and thus undeserving of attention. The most frequent
justification for the inattention to women prisoners and to the
particular issues surrounding women's imprisonment is the relatively
small proportion of women among incarcerated populations throughout the
world. In most countries, the percentage of women among prison
populations hovers around five percent. However, the economic and
political shifts of the 1980s-the globalization of economic markets, the
de-industrialization of the U.S. economy, the dismantling of such social
service programs as Aid to Families of Dependent Children, and, of
course, the prison construction boom-produced a significant acceleration
in the rate of women's imprisonment both inside and outside the United
States. In fact, women remain today the fastest-growing sector of the
U.S. prison population. This recent rise in the rate of women's
imprisonment points directly to the economic context that produced the
prison industrial complex and that has had a devastating impact on men
and women alike.
It is from this perspective of the contemporary expansion of prisons,
both in the United States and throughout the world, that we should
examine some of the historical and ideological aspects of state
punishment imposed on women. Since the end of the eighteenth century,
when, as we have seen, imprisonment began to emerge as the dominant form
of punishment, convicted women have been represented as essentially
different from their male counterparts. It is true that men who commit
the kinds of transgressions that are regarded as punishable by the state
are labeled as social deviants. Nevertheless, masculine criminality has
always been deemed more "normal" than feminine criminality. There has
always been a tendency to regard those women who have been publicly
punished by the state for their misbehaviors as significantly more
aberrant and far more threatening to society than their numerous male
counterparts.
In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of
prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and
evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be
routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been
acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in
psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons.79
Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in
mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have
been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions
have served a similar purpose for women. That dcviant men have been
constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as
insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the
women's prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more
extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts. A
Native American woman incarcerated in the Women's Correctional Center in
Montana related her experience with psychotropic drugs to sociologist
Luana Ross:
Haldol is a drug they give people who can't cope with lockup. It makes
you feel dead, paralyzed. And then I started getting side effects from
Haldol. I wanted to fight anybody, any of the officers. I was screaming
at them and telling them to get out of my face, so the doctor said, "We
can't have that." And, they put me on Tranxene. I don't take pills; I
never had trouble sleeping until I got here. Now I'm supposed to see
[the counselor] again because of my dreams. If you got a problem,
they're not going to take care of it. They're going to put you on drugs
so they can control you.
Prior to the emergence of the penitentiary and thus of the notion of
punishment as "doing time," the use of confinement to control beggars,
thieves, and the insane did not necessarily distinguish among these
categories of deviancy. At this phase in the history of punishment-prior
to the American and French Revolutions-the classification process
through which criminality is differentiated from poverty and mental
illness had not yet developed. As the discourse on criminality and the
corresponding institutions to control it distinguished the "criminal"
from the "insane' the gendered distinction took hold and continued to
structure penal policies. Gendered as female, this category of insanity
was highly sexualized. When we consider the impact of class and race
here, we can say that for white and affluent women, this equalization
tends to serve as evidence for emotional and mental disorders, but for
black and poor women, it has pointed to criminality.
It should also be kept in mind that until the abolition of slavery, the
vast majority of black women were subject to regimes of punishment that
differed significantly from those experienced by white women. As slaves,
they were directly and often brutally disciplined for conduct considered
perfectly normal in a context of freedom. Slave punishment was visibly
gendered-special penalties, were, for example, reserved for pregnant
women unable to reach the quotas that determined how long and how fast
they should work. In the slave narrative of Moses Grandy, an especially
brutal form of whipping is described in which the woman was required to
lie on the ground with her stomach positioned in a hole, whose purpose
was to safeguard the fetus (conceived as future slave labor). If we
expand our definition of punishment under slavery, we can say that the
coerced sexual relations between slave and master constituted a penalty
exacted on women, if only for the sole reason that they were slaves. In
other words, the deviance of the slave master was transferred to the
slave woman, whom he victimized. Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards
is translated into hyper-sexuality of women prisoners. The notion that
"female deviance" always has a sexual dimension persists in the
contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and sexuality
continues to be racialized. Thus, white women labeled as "criminals" are
more closely associated with blackness than their "normal" counterparts.
Prior to the emergence of the prison as the major form of public
punishment, it was taken for granted that violators of the law would be
subjected to corporal and frequently capital penalties. What is not
generally recognized is the connection between state-inflicted corporal
punishment and the physical assaults on women in domestic spaces. This
form of bodily discipline has continued to be routinely meted out to
women in the context of intimate relationships, but it is rarely
understood to be related to state punishment. Quaker reformers in the
United States-especially the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the
Miseries of Public Prisons, founded in 1787-played a pivotal role in
campaigns to substitute imprisonment for corporal punishment. Following
in the tradition established by Elizabeth Fry in England, Quakers were
also responsible for extended crusades to institute separate prisons for
women. Given the practice of incarcerating criminalized women in men's
prisons, the demand for separate women's prisons was viewed as quite
radical during this period. Fry formulated principles governing prison
reform for women in her 1827 work, Observations in Visiting,
Superintendence and Government of Female Prisoners, which were taken up
in the United States by women such as Josephine Shaw Lowell and Abby
Hopper Gibbons. In the 1870s, Lowell and Gibbons helped to lead the
campaign in New York for separate prisons for women.
Prevailing attitudes toward women convicts differed from those toward
men convicts, who were assumed to have forfeited rights and liberties
that women generally could not claim even in the "free world". Although
some women were housed in penitentiaries, the institution itself was
gendered as male, for by and large no particular arrangements were made
to accommodate sentenced women.
The women who served in penal institutions between 1820 and 1870 were
not subject to the prison reform experienced by male inmates. Officials
employed isolation, silence, and hard labor to rehabilitate male
prisoners. The lack of accommodations for female inmates made isolation
and silence impossible for them and productive labor was not considered
an important part of their routine. The neglect of female prisoners,
however, was rarely benevolent. Rather, a pattern of overcrowding, harsh
treatment, and sexual abuse recurred throughout prison histories.
Male punishment was linked ideologically to penitence and reform. The
very forfeiture of rights and liberties implied that with
self-reflection, religious study, and work, male convicts could achieve
redemption and could recover these rights and liberties. However, since
women were not acknowledged as securely in possession of these rights,
they were not eligible to participate in this process of redemption.
According to dominant views, women convicts were irrevocably fallen
women, with no possibility of salvation. If male criminals were
considered to be public individuals who had simply violated the social
contract, female criminals were seen as having transgressed fundamental
moral principles of womanhood. The reformers, who, following Elizabeth
Fry, argued that women were capable of redemption, did not really
contest these ideological assumptions about women's place. In other
words, they did not question the very notion of "fallen women." Rather,
they simply opposed the idea that "fallen women" could not be saved.
They could be saved, the reformers contended, and toward that end they
advocated separate penal facilities and a specifically female approach
to punishment. Their approach called for architectural models that
replaced cells with cottages and "rooms" in a way that was supposed to
infuse domesticity into prison life. This model facilitated a regime
devised to reintegrate criminalized women into the domestic life of wife
and mother. They did not, however, acknowledge the class and race
underpinnings of this regime. Training that was, on the surface,
designed to produce good wives and mothers in effect steered poor women
(and especially black women) into "free world" jobs in domestic service.
Instead of stay-at-home skilled wives and mothers, many women prisoners
would become maids, cooks, and washerwomen for more affluent women. A
female custodial staff, the reformers also argued, would minimize the
sexual temptations, which they believed were often at the root of female
criminality.
When the reform movement calling for separate prisons for women emerged
in England and the United States during the nineteenth century,
Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Shaw, and other advocates argued against the
established idea that criminal women were beyond the reach of moral
rehabilitation. Like male convicts, who presumably could be "corrected"
by rigorous prison regimes, female convicts, they suggested, could also
be molded into moral beings by differently gendered imprisonment
regimes. Architectural changes, domestic regimes, and an all-female
custodial staff were implemented in the reformatory program proposed by
reformers,82 and eventually women's prisons became as strongly anchored
to the social landscape as men's prisons, but even more invisible. Their
greater invisibility was as much a reflection of the way women's
domestic duties under patriarchy were assumed to be normal, natural, and
consequently invisible as it was of the relatively small numbers of
women incarcerated in these new institutions.
Twenty-one years after the first English reformatory for women was
established in London in 1853, the first U.S. reformatory for women was
opened in Indiana. The aim was to
train the prisoners in the "important" female role of domesticity. Thus
an important role of the reform movement in women's prisons was to
encourage and ingrain "appropriate" gender roles, such as vocational
training in cooking, sewing and cleaning. To accommodate these goals,
the reformatory cottages were usually designed with kitchens, living
rooms, and even some nurseries for prisoners with infants.
However, this feminized public punishment did not affect all women in
the same way. When black and Native American women were imprisoned in
reformatories, they often were segregated from white women. Moreover,
they tended to be disproportionately sentenced to men's prisons. In the
southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War, black women endured
the cruelties of the convict lease system unmitigated by the
feminization of punishment; neither their sentences nor the labor they
were compelled to do were lessened by virtue of their gender. As the
U.S. prison system evolved during the twentieth century, feminized modes
of punishment-the cottage system domestic training, and so on-were
designed ideologically to reform white women, relegating women of color
in large part to realms of public punishment that made no pretense of
offering them femininity.
Moreover as Lucia Zedner has pointed out sentencing practices for women
within the reformatory system often required women of all racial
backgrounds to do more time than men for similar offenses. "This
differential was justified on the basis that women were sent to
reformatories not to be punished in proportion to the seriousness of
their offense but to be reformed and retrained, a process that, it was
argued, required time. At the same time, Zedner points out, this
tendency to send women to prison for longer terms than men was
accelerated by the eugenics movement, "which sought to have 'genetically
inferior' women removed from social circulation for as many of their
childbearing years as possible". At the beginning of the twenty-first
century, women's prisons have begun to look more like their male
counterparts, particularly facilities constructed in the contemporary
era of the prison industrial complex. As corporate involvement in
punishment expands in ways that would have been unimaginable just two
decades ago, the prison's presumed goal of rehabilitation has been
thoroughly displaced by incapacitation as the major objective of
imprisonment. As I have already pointed out, now that the population of
U.S. prisons and jails has surpassed two million people, the rate of
increase in the numbers of women prisoners has exceeded that of men. As
criminologist Elliot Currie has pointed out,
For most of the period after World War II, the female incarceration rate
hovered at around 8 per 100,000, it did not reach double digits until
1977. Today it is 51 per 100,000 . . . At the current rates there will
be more women in American prisons in the year 2010 than there were
inmates of both sexes in 1970. When we combine the effects of race and
gender, the nature of these shifts in the prison population is even
clearer. The prison incarceration rate for black women today exceeds
that for white men as recently as 1980.
Luana Ross's study of Native American women incarcerated in the Women's
Correctional Center in Montana argues that "prisons, as employed by the
Euro-American system, operate to keep Native Americans in a colonial
situation. She points out that Native people are vastly overrepresented
in the country's federal and state prisons. In Montana, where she did
her research, they constitute 6 percent of the general population, but
7.3 percent of the imprisoned population. Native women are even more
disproportionately present in Montana's prison system. They constitute
25 percent of all women imprisoned by the state. Thirty years ago,
around the time of the Attica uprising and the murder of George Jackson
at San Quentin, radical opposition to the prison system identified it as
a principal site of state violence and repression. In part as a reaction
to the invisibility of women prisoners in this movement and in part as a
consequence of the rising women's liberation movement, specific
campaigns developed in defense of the rights of women prisoners. Many of
these campaigns put forth-and continue to advance-radical critiques of
state repression and violence. Within the correctional community,
however, feminism has been influenced largely by liberal constructions
of gender equality.
In contrast to the nineteenth-century reform movement, which was
grounded in an ideology of gender difference, late-twentieth-century
"reforms" have relied on a "separate but equal" model. This "separate
but equal" approach often has been applied uncritically, ironically
resulting in demands for more repressive conditions in order to render
women's facilities "equal" to men's. A clear example of this can be
discovered in a memoir, The Warden Wore Pink, written by a former warden
of Huron Valley Women's Prison in Michigan. During the 1980s, the
author, Tekla Miller, advocated a change in policies within the Michigan
correctional system that would result in women prisoners being treated
the same as men prisoners. With no trace of irony, she characterizes as
"feminist" her own fight for "gender equality" between male and female
prisoners and for equality between male and female institutions of
incarceration. One of these campaigns focuses on the unequal allocation
of weapons, which she sought to remedy:
Arsenals in men's prisons are large rooms with shelves of shotguns,
rifles, hand guns, ammunition, gas canisters, and riot equipment . . .
Huron Valley Women's arsenal was a small, five feet by two feet closet
that held two rifles, eight shotguns, two bullhorns, five handguns, four
gas canisters, and twenty sets of restraints.
It does not occur to her that a more productive version of feminism
would also question the organization of state punishment for men as well
and, in my opinion, would seriously consider the proposition that the
institution as a whole gendered as it is-calls for the kind of critique
that might lead us to consider its abolition.
Miller also describes the case of an attempted escape by a woman
prisoner. The prisoner climbed over the razor ribbon but was captured
after she jumped to the ground on the other side. This escape attempt
occasioned a debate about the disparate treatment of men and women
escapees. Miller's position was that guards should be instructed to
shoot at women just as they were instructed to shoot at men. She argued
that parity for women and men prisoners should consist in their equal
right to be fired upon by guards. The outcome of the debate, Miller
observed, was that
escaping women prisoners in medium or higher [security] prisons are
treated the same way as men. A warning shot is fired. If the prisoner
fails to halt and is over the fence, an officer is allowed to shoot to
injure. If the officer's life is in danger, the officer can shoot to
kill.
Paradoxically, demands for parity with men's prisons, instead of
creating greater educational, vocational, and health opportunities for
women prisoners, often have led to more repressive conditions for women.
This is not only a consequence of deploying liberal-that is,
formalistic- notions of equality, but of, more dangerous, allowing male
prisons to function as the punishment norm. Miller points out that she
attempted to prevent a female prisoner, whom she characterizes as a
"murderer" serving a long term, from participating in graduation
ceremonies at the University of Michigan because male murderers were not
given such privileges. (Of course, she does not indicate the nature of
the woman's murder charges-whether, for instance, she was convicted of
killing an abusive partner, as is the case for a substantial number of
women convicted of murder). Although Miller did not succeed in
preventing the inmate from participating in the commencement, in
addition to her cap and gown, the prisoner was made to wear leg chains
and handcuffs during the ceremony. This is indeed a bizarre example of
feminist demands for equality within the prison system.
A widely publicized example of the use of repressive paraphernalia
historically associated with the treatment of male prisoners to create
"equality" for female prisoners was the 1996 decision by Alabama's
prison commissioner to establish women's chain gangs. After Alabama
became the first state to reinstitute chain gangs in 1995, then State
Corrections Commissioner Ron Jones announced the following year that
women would be shackled while they cut grass, picked up trash, or worked
a vegetable garden at Julia Tutwiler State Prison for Women. This
attempt to institute chain gangs for women was in part a response to
lawsuits by male prisoners, who charged that male chain gains
discriminated against men by virtue of their gender.92 However,
immediately after Jones's announcement, Governor Fob James, who
obviously was pressured to prevent Alabama from acquiring the dubious
distinction of being the only U.S. state to have equal- opportunity
chain gangs, fired him.
Shortly after Alabama's embarrassing flirtation with the possibility of
chain gangs for women, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopo County,
Arizona-represented in the media as "the toughest sheriff in
America"-held a press conference to announce that because he was "an
equal opportunity incarcerator," he was establishing the country's first
female chain gang. When the plan was implemented, newspapers throughout
the country carried a photograph of chained women cleaning Phoenix's
streets. Even though this may have been a publicity stunt designed to
bolster the fame of Sheriff Arpaio, the fact that this women's chain
gang emerged against the backdrop of a generalized increase in the
repression inflicted on women prisoners is certainly cause for alarm.
Women's prisons throughout the country increasingly include sections
known as security housing units. The regimes of solitary confinement and
sensory deprivation in the security housing unit (SHU) in these sections
within women's prisons are smaller versions of the rapidly proliferating
super-maximum security prisons. Since the population of women in prison
now consists of a majority of women of color, the historical resonances
of slavery, colonization, and genocide should not be missed in these
images of women in chains and shackles.
As the level of repression in women's prisons increases, and,
paradoxically, as the influence of domestic prison regimes recedes,
sexual abuse-which, like domestic violence, is yet another dimension of
the privatized punishment of women-has become an institutionalized
component of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard-on-prisoner
sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with
which offending officers are treated suggests that for women, prison is
a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the
larger society is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the
landscape of punishment behind prison walls.
According to a 1996 Human Rights Watch report on the sexual abuse of
women in U.S. prisons:
Our findings indicate that being a woman prisoner in U.S. state prisons
can be a terrifying experience. If you are sexually abused, you cannot
escape from your abuser. Grievance or investigatory procedures, where
they exist, are often ineffcctual, and correctional employees continue
to engage in abuse because they believe they will rarely be held
accountable, administratively or criminally. Few people outside the
prison walls know what is going on or care if they do know. Fewer still
do anything to address the problem.
The following excerpt from the summary of this report, entitled All Too
Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons, reveals the
extent to which women's prison environments are violently sexualized,
thus recapitulating the familiar violence that characterizes many
women's private lives:
We found that male correctional employees have vaginally, anally, and
orally raped female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them. We
found that in the course of committing such gross misconduct, male
officers have not only used actual or threatened physical force, but
have also used their near total authority to provide or deny goods and
privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other
cases, to reward them for having-done so. In other cases, male officers
have violated their most basic professional duty and engaged in sexual
contact with female prisoners absent the use of threat of force or any
material exchange. In addition to engaging in sexual relations with
prisoners, male officers have used mandatory pat-frisks or room searches
to grope women's breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas and to view them
inappropriately while in a state of undress in the housing or bathroom
areas. Male correctional officers and staff have also engaged in regular
verbal degradation and harassment of female prisoners, thus contributing
to a custodial environment in the state prisons for women that is often
highly sexualized and excessively hostile.
The violent sexualization of prison life within women's institutions
raises a number of issues that may help us develop further our critique
of the prison system. Ideologies of sexuality-and particularly the
intersection of race and sexuality-have had a profound effect on the
representations of and treatment received by women of color both within
and outside prison. Of course, black and Latino men experience a
perilous continuity in the way they are treated in school, where they
are disciplined as potential criminals; in the streets, where they are
subjected to racial profiling by the police; and in prison, where they
are warehoused and deprived of virtually all of their rights. For women,
the continuity of treatment from the free world to the universe of the
prison is even more complicated, since they also confront forms of
violence in prison that they have confronted in their homes and intimate
relationships. The criminalization of black and Latina women includes
persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual
assaults against them both in and outside of prison. Such images were
vividly rendered in a Nightline television series filmed in November
1999 on location at California's Valley State Prison for Women. Many of
the women interviewed by Ted Kappel complained that they received
frequent and unnecessary pelvic examinations, including when they
visited the doctor with such routine illnesses as colds. In an attempt
to justify these examinations, the chief medical officer explained that
women prisoners had rare opportunities for "male contact," and that they
therefore welcomed these superfluous gynecological exams. Although this
officer was eventually removed from his position as a result of these
comments, his reassignment did little to alter the pervasive
vulnerability of imprisoned women to sexual abuse. Studies on female
prisons throughout the world indicate that sexual abuse is an abiding,
though unacknowledged, form of punishment to which women, who have the
misfortune of being sent to prison, are subjected. This is one aspect of
life in prison that women can expect to encounter, either directly or
indirectly, regardless of the written policies that govern the
institution. In June 1998, Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations
Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women, visited federal and state
prisons as well as Immigration and Naturalization detention facilities
in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Georgia, and
California. She was refused permission to visit women's prisons in
Michigan, where serious allegations of sexual abuse were pending. In the
aftermath of her visits, Coomaraswamy announced that sexual misconduct
by prison staff is widespread in American women's prisons. This
clandestine institutionalization of sexual abuse violates one of the
guiding principles of the United Nations' Standard Minimum Rules for the
Treatment of Prisoners, a UN instrument first adopted in 1955 and used
as a guideline by many governments to achieve what is known as "good
prison practice." However, the U.S. government has done little to
publicize these rules and it is probably the case that mast correctional
personnel have never heard of these UN standards. According to the
Standard Minimum Rules,
Imprisonment and other measures which result in cutting off an offender
from the outside world are afflictive by the very fact of taking from
the person the right of self-determination hy depriving him of his
liberty. Therefore the prison system shall not, except as incidental to
justifiable segregation or the maintenance of discipline, aggravate the
suffering inherent in such a situation?7
Sexual abuse is surreptitiously incorporated into one of the mast
habitual aspects of women's imprisonment, the strip search. As activists
and prisoners themselves have pointed out, the state itself is directly
implicated in this routinization of sexual abuse, both in permitting
such conditions that render women vulnerable to explicit sexual coercion
carried out by guards and other prison staff and by incorporating into
routine policy such practices as the strip search and body cavity
search. Australian lawyer/activist Amanda George has pointed out that
[t]he acknowledgement that sexual assault does occur in institutions for
people with intellectual disabilities, prisons, psychiatric hospitals,
youth training centers and police stations, usually centers around the
criminal acts of rape and sexual assault by individuals employed in
those institutions. These offenses, though they are rarely reported, are
clearly understood as being "crimes" for which the individual and not
the state is responsible. At the same time as the state deplores
"unlawful" sexual assaults by its employees, it actually uses sexual
assault as a means of control.
In Victoria, prison and police officers are vested with the power and
responsibility to do acts which, if done outside of work hours, would be
crimes of sexual assault. If a person does not consent to being stripped
naked by these officers, force can lawfully be used to do it . . . These
legal strip searches are, in the author's view, sexual assaults within
the definition of indecent assault in the (Vic) as amended in section
39.
At a November 2001 conference on women in prison held by the
Brisbane-based organization Sisters Inside, Amanda George described an
action performed before a national gathering of correctional personnel
working in women's prisons. Several women seized control of the stage
and, some playing guards, others playing the roles of prisoners,
dramatized a strip search. According to George, the gathering was so
repulsed by this enactment of a practice that occurs routinely in
women's prisons everywhere that many of the participants felt compelled
to disassociate themselves from such practices, insisting that this was
not what they did. Some of the guards, George said, simply cried upon
watching representations of their own actions outside the prison
context. What they must have realized is that "without the uniform,
without the power of the state, [the strip search] would be sexual
assault".
But why is an understanding of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in
women's prisons an important element of a radical analysis of the prison
system, and especially of those forward-looking analyses that lead us in
the direction of abolition? Because the call to abolish the prison as
the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the
institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are
hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that
retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls. The destructive
combination of racism and misogyny, however much it has been challenged
by social movements, scholarship, and art over the last three decades,
retains all its awful consequences within women's prisons. The
relatively uncontested presence of sexual abuse in women's prisons is
one of many such examples. The increasing evidence of a U.S. prison
industrial complex with global resonances leads us to think about the
extent to which the many corporations that have acquired an investment
in the expansion of the prison system are, like the state, directly
implicated in an institution that perpetuates violence against women.
"For private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No
union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or
workers' compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign
countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie
acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for
Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure,
and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for
Victoria's Secret, all at a fraction of the cost of 'free labor.'"
-Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg.
The exploitation of prison labor by private corporations is one aspect
among an array of relationships linking corporations, government,
correctional communities, and media. These relationships constitute what
we now call a prison industrial complex. The term "prison industrial
complex" was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing
beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting
prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the
attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been
driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit. Social
historian Mike Davis first used the term in relation to California's
penal system, which, he observed, already had begun in the 1990s to
rival agribusiness and land development as a major economic and
political force.
To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context
of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to
be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime.
How often do we encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what
extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and punishment"
in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and
documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to
think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals
located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural,
necessary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about
the viability of the prison today?
The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of
the punishment process that take into account economic and political
structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual
criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example,
that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an
important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with
which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official
studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a
prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison
populations-and this is not only true of the United States, but of
Europe, South America, and Australia as well-is not an incidental
feature.
Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by
abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of
the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice
movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.
At the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism held in
Durban, South Africa, a few individuals active in abolitionist campaigns
in various countries attempted to bring this connection to the attention
of the international community. They pointed out that the expanding
system of prisons throughout the world both relies on and further
promotes structures of racism even though its proponents may adamantly
maintain that it is race-neutral. Some critics of the prison system have
employed the term "correctional industrial complex" and others "penal
industrial complex." These and the term I have chosen to underscore,
"prison industrial complex' all clearly resonate with the historical
concept of a "military industrial complex" whose usage dates back to the
presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. It may seem ironic that a Republican
president was the first to underscore a growing and dangerous alliance
between the military and corporate worlds, but it clearly seemed right
to antiwar activists and scholars during the era of the Vietnam War.
Today, some activists mistakenly argue that the prison industrial
complex is moving into the space vacated by the military industrial
complex. However, the so called War on Terrorism initiated by the Bush
administration in the aftermath of the 2002 attacks on the World Trade
Center has made it very clear that the links between the military,
corporations, and government are growing stronger, not weaker. A more
cogent way to define the relationship between the military industrial
complex and the prison industrial complex would be to call it symbiotic.
These two complexes mutually support and promote each other and, in
fact, often share technologies. During the early nineties, when defense
production was temporarily on the decline, this connection between the
military industry and the criminal justice/punishment industry was
acknowledged in a 1994 Wall Street Journal article entitled "Making
Crime Pay: The Cold War of the '90s":
Parts of the defense establishment are cashing in, too, sensing a
logical new line of business to help them offset military cutbacks.
Westinghouse Electric Corp., Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co, GDE
Systems (a division of the old General Dynamics) and Alliant Techsystems
Inc., for instance, are pushing crime fighting equipment and have
created special divisions to retool their defense technology for
America's streets.
The article describes a conference sponsored by the National Institute
of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, entitled "Law
Enforcement Technology in the 21st Century". The secretary of defense
was a major presenter at this conference, which explored topics such as,
the role of the defense industry, particularly for dual use and
conversion".
Hot topics: defense-industry technology that could lower the level of
violence involved in crime fighting. Sandia National Laboratories, for
instance, is experimenting with a dense foam that can be sprayed at
suspects, temporarily blinding and deafing-them under breathable
bubbles. Stinger Corporation is working on 'smart guns' which will fire
only for the owner, and retractable spiked barrier strips to unfurl in
front of fleeing vehicles. Westinghouse is promoting the "smart car" in
which minicomputers could be linked up with big mainframes at the police
department, allowing for speedy booking of prisoners, as well as quick
exchanges of information...
But an analysis of the relationship between the military and prison
industrial complex is not only concerned with the transference of
technologies from the military to the law enforcement industry. What may
be even more important to our discussion is the extent to which both
share important structural features. Both systems generate huge profits
from processes of social destruction. Precisely that which is
advantageous to those corporations, elected officials, and government
agents who have obvious stakes in the expansion of these systems begets
grief and devastation for poor and racially dominated communities in the
United States and throughout the world. The transformation of imprisoned
bodies-and they are in their majority bodies of color-into sources of
profit who consume and also often produce all kinds of commodities,
devours public funds, which might otherwise be available for social
programs such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug
programs.
Punishment no longer constitutes a marginal area of the larger economy.
Corporations producing all kinds of goods from buildings to electronic
devices and hygiene products and providing all kinds of services-from
meals to therapy and healthcare-are now directly involved in the
punishment business. That is to say, companies that one would assume are
far removed from the work of state punishment have developed major
stakes in the perpetuation of a prison system whose historical
obsolescence is therefore that much more difficult to recognize. It was
during the decade of the 1980s that corporate ties to the punishment
system became more extensive and entrenched than ever before. But
throughout the history of the U.S. prison system, prisoners have always
constituted a potential source of profit. For example, they have served
as valuable subjects in medical research, thus positioning the prison as
a major link between universities and corporations.
During the post-World War II period, for example, medical
experimentation on captive populations helped to hasten the development
of the pharmaceutical industry. According to Allen Hornblum, the number
of American medical research programs that relied on prisoners as
subjects rapidly expanded as zealous doctors and researchers,
grantmaking universities, and a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry raced
for greater market share. Society's marginal people were, as they had
always been, the grist for the medical-pharmaceutical mill, and prison
inmates in particular would become the raw materials for postwar
profit-making and academic advancement.
Hornblum's book, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison,
highlights the career of research dermatologist Albert Kligman, who was
a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Kligman, the "Father of
Retin-A," conducted hundreds of experiments on the men housed in
Holmesburg Prison and, in the process, trained many researchers to use
what were later recognized as unethical research methods.
When Dr. Kligman entered the aging prison he was awed by the potential
it held for his research. In 1966, he recalled in a newspaper interview:
All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a
fertile field for the first time." The hundreds of inmates walking
aimlessly before him represented a unique opportunity for unlimited and
undisturbed medical research. He described it in this interview as "an
anthropoid colony, mainly healthy" under perfect control conditions.
By the time the experimentation program was shut down in 1974 and new
federal regulations prohibited the use of prisoners as subjects for
academic and corporate research, numerous cosmetics and skin creams had
already been tested. Some of them had caused great harm to these
subjects and could not be marketed in their original form. Johnson and
Johnson, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical are only a few of the
corporations that reaped great material benefits from these experiments.
The potential impact of corporate involvement in punishment could have
been glimpsed in the Kligman experiments at Holmesburg Prison as early
as the 1950s and 1960s. However, it was not until the 1980s and the
increasing globalization of capitalism that the massive surge of capital
into the punishment economy began. The de-industrialization processes
that resulted in plant shutdowns throughout the country created a huge
pool of vulnerable human beings, a pool of people for whom no further
jobs were available. This also brought more people into contact with
social services, such as AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children)
and other welfare agencies. It is not accidental that "welfare, as we
have known it"—to use former President Clinton's words—came under severe
attack and was eventually disestablished. This was known as "welfare
reform." At the same time, we experienced the privatization and
corporatization of services that were previously run by government. The
most obvious example of this privatization process was the
transformation of government-run hospitals and health services into a
gigantic complex of what are euphemistically called health maintenance
organizations. In this sense we might also speak of a "medical
industrial complex." In fact, there is a connection between one of the
first private hospital companies, Hospital Corporation of America -
known today as HCA - and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Board
members of HCA, which today has two hundred hospitals and seventy
outpatient surgery centers in twenty-four states, England, and
Switzerland helped to start Correctional Corporations of America in
1983.
In the context of an economy that was driven by an unprecedented pursuit
of profit, no matter what the human cost, and the concomitant
dismantling of the welfare state, poor people's abilities to survive
became increasingly constrained by the looming presence of the prison.
The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the
means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had
implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In the meantime, elected
officials and the dominant media justified the new draconian sentencing
practices, sending more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive
to build more and more prisons by arguing that this was the only way to
make our communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers.
The media, especially television . . . have a vested interest in
perpetuating the notion that crime is out of control. With new
competition from cable networks and 24-hour news channels, TV news and
programs about crime . . . have proliferated madly.
According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, crime coverage was
the number-one topic on the nightly news over the past decade. From 1990
to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half nationwide, but homicide stories
on the three major networks rose almost fourfold.
During the same period when crime rates were declining, prison
populations soared. According to a recent report by the U.S. Department
of Justice, at the end of the year 2001, there were 2,100,146 people
incarcerated in the United States. The terms and numbers as they appear
in this government report require some preliminary discussion. I
hesitate to make un-mediated use of such statistical evidence because it
can discourage the very critical thinking that ought to be elicited by
an understanding of the prison industrial complex. It is precisely the
abstraction of numbers that plays such a central role in criminalizing
those who experience the misfortune of imprisonment. There are many
different kinds of men and women in the prisons, jails, and INS and
military detention centers, whose lives are erased by the Bureau of
Justice Statistics figures. The numbers recognize no distinction between
the woman who is imprisoned on drug conspiracy and the man who is in
prison for killing his wife, a man who might actually end up spending
less time behind bars than the woman.
With this observation in mind, the statistical breakdown is as follows:
There were 1,324,465 people in "federal and state prisons," 15,852 in
"territorial prisons," 631,240 in "local jails," 8,761 in "Immigration
and Naturalization Service detention facilities," 2,436 in "military
facilities," 1,912 in "jails in Indian country," and 108,965 in
"juvenile facilities." In the ten years between 1990 and 2000, 351 new
places of confinement were opened by states and more than 528,000 beds
were added, amounting to 1,320 state facilities, representing an
eighty-one percent increase. Moreover, there are currently 84 federal
facilities and 264 private facilities.
The government reports, from which these figures are taken, emphasize
the extent to which incarceration rates are slowing down. The Bureau of
Justice Statistics report entitled "Prisoners in 2001" introduces the
study by indicating that "the Nation's prison population grew 1.1%,
which was less than the average annual growth of 3.8% since year end
1995. During 2001 the prison population rose at the lowest rate since
1972 and had the smallest absolute increase since 1979." However small
the increase, these numbers themselves would defy the imagination were
they not so neatly classified and rationally organized. To place these
figures in historical perspective, try to imagine how people in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-and indeed for most of the twentieth
century-who welcomed the new, and then quite extraordinary, system of
punishment called the prison might have responded had they known that
such a colossal number of lives would be eventually claimed permanently
by this institution. I have already shared my own memories of a time
three decades ago when the prison population was comprised of a tenth of
the present numbers.
The prison industrial complex is fueled by privatization patterns that,
it will be recalled, have also drastically transformed health care,
education, and other areas of our lives. Moreover, the prison
privatization trends-both the increasing presence of corporations in the
prison economy and the establishment of private prisons-are reminiscent
of the historical efforts to create a profitable punishment industry
based on the new supply of "free" black male laborers in the aftermath
of the Civil War. Steven Donziger, drawing from the work of Norwegian
criminologist Nils Christie, argues:
[C]ompanies that service the criminal system need sufficient quantities
of raw materials to guarantee long-term growth . . . In the criminal
justice field, the raw material is prisoners and industry will do what
is necessary to guarantee a steady supply. For the supply of prisoners
to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of
incarcerated Americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the
incarceration is necessary.
In the post-Civil War era, emancipated black men and women comprised an
enormous reservoir of labor at a time when planters-and
industrialists-could no longer rely on slavery, as they had done in the
past. This labor became increasingly available for use by private agents
precisely through the convict lease system, discussed earlier, and
related systems such as debt peonage. Recall that in the aftermath of
slavery, the penal population drastically shifted, so that in the South
it rapidly became disproportionately black. This transition set the
historical stage for the easy acceptance of disproportionately black
prison populations today. According to 2002 Bureau of Justice
Statistics, African-Americans as a whole now represent the majority of
county, state, and federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400 black
inmates, more than the total number of white inmates. If we include
Latinos, we must add another 283,000 bodies of color.
As the rate of increase in the incarceration of black prisoners
continues to rise, the racial composition of the incarcerated population
is approaching the proportion of black prisoners to white during the era
of the southern convict lease and county chain gang systems. Whether
this human raw material is used for purposes of labor or for the
consumption of commodities provided by a number of corporations directly
implicated in the prison industrial complex, it is clear that black
bodies are considered dispensable within the "free world" but as a major
source of profit in the prison world.
The privatization characteristic of convict leasing has its contemporary
parallels, as companies such as CCA and Wackenhut literally run prisons
for profit. At the beginning of the twenty first century, the numerous
private prison companies operating in the United States own and operate
facilities that hold 91,828 federal and state prisoners. Texas and
Oklahoma can claim the largest number of people in private prisons. But
New Mexico imprisons forty-four percent of its prison population in
private facilities, and states such as Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming
turned over more than twenty-five percent of their prison population to
private companies. In arrangements reminiscent of the convict lease
system, federal, state, and county governments pay private companies a
fee for each inmate, which means that private companies have a stake in
retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities
filled. In the state of Texas there are thirty-four government-owned,
privately run jails in which approximately 5,500 out of-state prisoners
are incarcerated. These facilities generate about eighty million dollars
annually for Texas.116 One dramatic example involves Capital Corrections
Resources, Inc., which operates the Brazoria Detention Center, a
government owned facility located forty miles outside of Houston, Texas.
Brazoria came to public attention in August 1997 when a videotape
broadcast on national television showed prisoners there being bitten by
police dogs and viciously kicked in the groin and stepped on by guards.
The inmates, forced to crawl on the floor, also were being shocked with
stun guns, while guards-who referred to one black prisoner as
"boy"-shouted, "Crawl faster!" In the aftermath of the release of this
tape, the state of Missouri withdrew the 415 prisoners it housed in the
Brazoria Detention Center. Although few references were made in the
accompanying news reports to the indisputably racialized character of
the guards' outrageous behavior, in the section of the Brazoria
videotape that was shown on national television, black male prisoners
were seen to be the primary targets of the guards' attacks.
The thirty-two-minute Brazoria tape, represented by the jail authorities
as a training tape-allegedly showing corrections officers "what not to
do"-was made in September 1996, after a guard allegedly smelled
marijuana in the jail. Important evidence of the abuse that takes place
behind the walls and gates of private prisons, it came to light in
connection with a lawsuit filed by one of the prisoners who was bitten
by a dog; he was suing Brazoria County for a hundred thousand dollars in
damage. The Brazoria jailors' actions---which, according to prisoners
there, were far worse than depicted on the tape-are indicative not only
of the ways in which many prisoners throughout the country are treated,
but of generalized attitudes toward people locked up in jails and
prisons.
According to an Associated Press news story, the Missouri inmates, once
they had been transferred back to their home state from Brazoria, told
the Kansas City Star:
[G]uards at the Brazoria County Detention Center used cattle prods and
other forms of intimidation to win respect and force prisoners to say,
"I love Texas." "What you saw on tape wasn't a fraction of what happened
that day," said inmate Louis Watkins, referring to the videotaped
cell-block raid of September 18, 1996. "I've never seen anything like
that in the movies".
In 2000 there were twenty-six for-profit prison corporations in the
United States that operated approximately 150 facilities in twenty-eight
states.119 The largest of these companies, CCA and Wackenhut, control
76.4 percent of the private prison market globally. CCA is headquartered
in Nashville, Tennessee, and until 2001, its largest shareholder was the
multinational headquartered in Paris, Sodexho Alliance, which, through
its U.S. subsidiary, Sodexho Marriott, provides catering services at
nine hundred U.S. colleges and universities. The Prison Moratorium
Project, an organization promoting youth activism, led a protest
campaign against Sodexho Marriott on campuses throughout the country.
Among the campuses that dropped Sodexho were SUNY Albany, Goucher
College, and James Madison University. Students had staged sit-ins and
organized rallies on more than fifty campuses before Sodexho divested
its holdings in CCA in fall 2001.
Though private prisons represent a fairly small proportion of prisons in
the United States, the privatization model is quickly becoming the
primary mode of organizing punishment in many other countries.121 These
companies have tried to take advantage of the expanding population of
women prisoners, both in the United States and globally. In 1996, the
first private women's prison was established by CCA in Melbourne,
Australia. The government of Victoria adopted the U.S. model of
privatization in which financing, design, construction, and ownership of
the prison are awarded to one contractor and the government pays them
back for construction over twenty years. This means that it is virtually
impossible to remove the contractor because that contractor owns the
prison.
As a direct consequence of the campaign organized by prison activist
groups in Melbourne, Victoria withdrew the contract from CCA in 2001.
However, a significant portion of Australia's prison system remains
privatized. In the fall of 2002, the government of Queensland renewed
Wackenhut's contract to run a 7l0-bed prison in Brisbane. The value of
the five-year contract is $66.5 million. In addition to the facility in
Brisbane, Wackenhut manages eleven other prisons in Australia and New
Zealand and furnishes health care services in eleven public prisons in
the state of Victoria. In the press release announcing this contract
renewal, Wackenhut describes its global business activities as follows:
WCC, a world leader in the privatized corrections industry, has
contracts/awards to manage 60 correctional/detention facilities in North
America, Europe, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand with a total of
approximately 43,000 beds. WCC also provides prisoner transportation
services, electronic monitoring for home detainees, correctional health
care and mental health services. WCC offers government agencies a
turnkey approach to the development of new correctional and mental
health institutions that includes design, construction, financing, and
operations.
But to understand the reach of the prison industrial complex, it is not
enough to evoke the looming power of the private prison business. By
definition, those companies court the state within and outside the
United States for the purpose of obtaining prison contracts, bringing
punishment and profit together in a menacing embrace. Still, this is
only the most visible dimension of the prison industrial complex, and it
should not lead us to the more comprehensive corporatization that is a
feature of contemporary punishment. As compared to earlier historical
eras, the prison economy is no longer a small, identifiable, and
containable set of markets. Many corporations, whose names are highly
recognizable by "free world" consumers, have discovered new
possibilities for expansion by selling their products to correctional
facilities.
In the 1990s, the variety of corporations making money from prisons is
truly dizzying, ranging from Dial Soap to Famous Amos cookies, from AT&T
to health-care providers. In 1995 Dial Soap sold $100,000 worth of its
product to the New York City jail system alone. When VitaPro Foods of
Montreal, Canada, contracted to supply inmates in the state of Texas
with its soy-based meat substitute, the contract was worth $34 million a
year.
Among the many businesses that advertise in the yellow pages on the
corrections.com Web site are Archer Daniel Midlands, Nestle Food
Service, Ace Hardware, Polaroid, Hewlett-Packard, RJ Reynolds, and the
communications companies Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and Ameritech. One
conclusion to be drawn here is that even if private prison companies
were prohibited-an unlikely prospect, indeed-the prison industrial
complex and its many strategies for profit would remain relatively
intact. Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies
that run them, but public prisons have become so thoroughly saturated
with the profit-producing products and services of private corporations
that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect.
Campaigns against privatization that represent public prisons as an
adequate alternative to private prisons can be misleading. A major
reason for the profitability of private prisons consists in the nonunion
labor they employ, and this important distinction should be highlighted.
Nevertheless, public prisons are now equally tied to the corporate
economy and constitute an ever-growing source of capitalist profit.
Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the
stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists
must be willing to look much further in their analyses and organizing
strategies than the actual institution of the prison. Prison reform
rhetoric, which has always undergirded dominant critiques of the prison
system, will not work in this new situation. If reform approaches have
tended to bolster the permanence of the prison in the past, they
certainly will not suffice to challenge the economic and political
relationships that sustain the prison today. This means that in the era
of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions
about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of
U.S.-style prisons throughout the world.
The global prison economy is indisputably dominated by the United
States. This economy not only consists of the products, services, and
ideas that are directly marketed to other governments, but it also
exercises an enormous influence over the development of the style of
state punishment throughout the world. One dramatic example can be seen
in the opposition to Turkey's attempts to transform its prisons. In
October 2000, prisoners in Turkey, many of whom are associated with left
political movements, began a "death fast" as a way of dramatizing their
opposition to the Turkish government's decision to introduce "F-Type,"
or U.S.-style, prisons. Compared to the traditional dormitory-style
facilities, these new prisons consist of one- to three-person cells,
which are opposed by the prisoners because of the regimes of isolation
they facilitate and because mistreatment and torture are far more likely
in isolation. In December 2000, thirty prisoners were killed in clashes
with security forces in twenty prisons.126 As of September 2002, more
than fifty prisoners have died of hunger, including two women, Gulnihal
Yilmaz and Birsen Hosver, who were among the most recent prisoners to
succumb to the death fast.
"F-Type" prisons in Turkey were inspired by the recent emergence of the
super-maximum security-or super max-prison in the United States, which
presumes to control otherwise unmanageable prisoners by holding them in
permanent solitary confinement and by subjecting them to varying degrees
of sensory deprivation. In its 2002 World Report, Human Rights Watch
paid particular attention to the concerns raised by
the spread of ultra-modern "super-maximum" security prisons. Originally
prevalent in the United States . . . the supermax model was increasingly
followed in other countries. Prisoners confined in such facilities spent
an average of twenty-three hours a day in their cells, enduring extreme
social isolation, enforced idleness, and extraordinarily limited
recreational and educational opportunities. While prison authorities
defended the use of supermaximum security facilities by asserting that
they held only the most dangerous, disruptive, or escape prone inmates,
few safeguards existed to prevent other prisoners from being arbitrarily
or discriminatorily transferred to such facilities. In Australia, the
inspector of custodial services found that some prisoners were held
indefinitely in special high security units without knowing why or when
their isolation would end.
Among the many countries that have recently constructed super-maximum
security prisons is South Africa. Construction was completed on the
supermax prison in Kokstad, KwaZulu-Natal in August 2000, but it was not
officially opened until May 2002. Ironically, the reason given for the
delay was the competition for water between the prison and a new
low-cost housing development. I am highlighting South Africa's embrace
of the supermax because of the apparent ease with which this most
repressive version of the U.S. prison has established itself in a
country that has just recently initiated the project of building a
democratic, nonracist, and nonsexist society. South Africa was the first
country in the world to create constitutional assurances for gay rights,
and it immediately abolished the death penalty after the dismantling of
apartheid. Nevertheless, following the example of the United States, the
South African prison system is expanding and becoming more oppressive.
The U.S. private prison company Wackenhut has secured several contracts
with the South African government and by constructing private prisons
further legitimizes the trend toward privatization (which affects the
availability of basic services from utilities to education) in the
economy as a whole.
South Africa's participation in the prison industrial complex
constitutes a major impediment to the creation of a democratic society.
In the United States, we have already felt the insidious and socially
damaging effects of prison expansion. The dominant social expectation is
that young black, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian men and
increasingly women as well-will move naturally from the free world into
prison, where, it is assumed, they belong.
Despite the important of antiracist social movements over the last half
century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its
most reliable refuge is the prison system.
The racist arrests of vast numbers of immigrants from Middle Eastern
countries in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the
subsequent withholding of information about the names of numbers of
people held in INS detention centers, some of which are owned and
operated by private corporations, do not augur a democratic future. The
uncontested detention of increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants
from the global South has been aided considerably by the structures and
ideologies associated with the prison industrial complex. We can hardly
move in the direction of justice and equality in the twenty-first
century if we are unwilling to recognize the enormous role played by
this system in extending the power of racism and xenophobia.
Radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the
antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the terrain on which
the quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist,
anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the
abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the
same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with the millions
of men, women, and children who are behind bars. A major challenge of
this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable
environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of
the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of
passionately attending to the needs of prisoners-calling for less
violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical
and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better
educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more
connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative
sentencing and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing
altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies
that question the place of the prison in our future?
"Forget about reform; it's time to talk about abolishing jails and
prisons in American society. Still-abolition? Where do you put the
prisoners? The 'criminals'? What's the alternative? First, having no
alternative at all would create less crime than the present criminal
training centers do. Second, the only full alternative is building the
kind of society that does not need prisons: A decent redistribution of
power and income so as to put out the hidden fire of burning envy that
now flames up in crimes of property-both burglary by the poor and
embezzlement by the affluent. And a decent sense of community that can
support, reintegrate and truly rehabilitate those who suddenly become
filled with fury or despair, and that can face them not as
objects-'criminals'-but as people who have committed illegal acts, as
have almost all of us."
-Arthur Waskow, Institute for Policy Studies
If jails and prisons are to be abolished, then what will replace them?
This is the puzzling question that often interrupts further
consideration of the prospects for abolition. Why should it be so
difficult to imagine alternatives to our current system of
incarceration? There are a number of reasons why we tend to balk at the
idea that it may be possible to eventually create an entirely
different-and perhaps more egalitarian-system of justice. First of all,
we think of the current system, with its exaggerated dependence on
imprisonment, as an unconditional standard and thus have great
difficulty envisioning any other way of dealing with the more than two
million people who are currently being held in the country's jails,
prisons, youth facilities, and immigration detention centers.
Ironically, even the anti-death penalty campaign tends to rely on the
assumption that life imprisonment is the most rational alternative to
capital punishment. As important as it may be to abolish the death
penalty, we should be conscious of the way the contemporary campaign
against capital punishment has a propensity to recapitulate the very
historical patterns that led to the emergence of the prison as the
dominant form of punishment. The death penalty has coexisted with the
prison, though imprisonment was supposed to serve as an alternative to
corporal and capital punishment. This is a major dichotomy. A critical
engagement with this dichotomy would involve taking seriously the
possibility of linking the goal of death penalty abolitionism with
strategies for prison abolition.
It is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system-and
perhaps this is the problem that leads to the assumption that
imprisonment is the only alternative to death-it is very hard to imagine
a structurally similar system capable of handling such a vast population
of lawbreakers. If, however, we shift our attention from the prison,
perceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that
comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easier to think about
alternatives. In other words, a more complicated framework may yield
more options than if we simply attempt to discover a single substitute
for the prison system. The first step, then, would be to let go of the
desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that
would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.
Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly ensconced in
the economic, political and ideological life of the United States and
the transnational trafficking in U.S. commodities, culture, and ideas.
Thus, the prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the
jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic
relationships among correctional communities, transnational
corporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislative and
court agendas. If it is true that the contemporary meaning of punishment
is fashioned through these relationships, then the most effective
abolitionist strategies will contest these relationships and propose
alternatives that pull them apart. What, then, would it mean to imagine
a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of
corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class
are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment
itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?
An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these
would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies
and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the
social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we
would not be looking for prison like substitutes for the prison, such as
house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather,
positing de-carceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to
envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of
schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that
provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system
based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and
vengeance.
The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now
occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so
that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and
psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful
alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of
violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of
color-including the presence of armed security guards and police-and
unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these
schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would
be to transform schools into vehicles for de-carceration. Within the
health care system, it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of
institutions available to poor people who suffer severe mental and
emotional illnesses. There are currently more people with mental and
emotional disorders in jails and prisons than in mental institutions.
This call for new facilities designed to assist poor people should not
be taken as an appeal to re-institute the old system of mental
institutions, which were and in many cases still are-as repressive as
the prisons. It is simply to suggest that the racial and class
disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to
be eradicated, thus creating another vehicle for decarceration.
To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the
existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of
alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects
of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male
dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination
will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not
advance the goal of abolition.
It is within this context that it makes sense to consider the
decriminalization of drug use as a significant component of a larger
strategy to simultaneously oppose structures of racism within the
criminal justice system and further the abolitionist agenda of
decarceration. Thus, with respect to the project of challenging the
role-played by the so-called War on Drugs in bringing huge numbers of
people of color into the prison system, proposals to decriminalize drug
use should be linked to the development of a constellation of free,
community-based programs accessible to all people who wish to tackle
their drug problems. This is not to suggest that all people who use
drugs-or that only people who use illicit drugs-need such help. However,
anyone, regardless of economic status, who wishes to conquer drug
addiction should be able to enter treatment programs.
Such institutions are, indeed, available to affluent communities. The
most well known program is the Betty Ford Center, which, according to
its web site, "accepts patients dependent on alcohol and other mood
altering chemicals. Treatment services are open to all men and women
eighteen years of age and older regardless of race, creed, sex, national
origin, religion or sources of payment for care."130 However, the cost
for the first six days is $1,175 per day, and after that $525 per day.
If a person requires thirty days of treatment, the cost would amount to
$19,000, almost twice the annual salary of a person working a
minimum-wage job.
Poor people deserve to have access to effective, voluntary drug
treatment programs. Like the Betty Ford program, their operation should
not be under the auspices of the criminal justice system. As at the Ford
Center, family members also should be permitted to participate. But
unlike the Betty Ford program, they should be free of charge. For such
programs to count as "abolitionist alternatives," they would not be
linked-unlike existing programs, to which individuals are "sentenced"-to
imprisonment as a last resort.
The campaign to decriminalize drug use-from marijuana to heroin-is
international in scope and has led countries such as the Netherlands to
revise their laws, legalizing personal use of such drugs as marijuana
and hashish. The Netherlands also has a history of legalized sex work,
another area in which there has been extensive campaigning for
decriminalization. In the cases of drugs and sex work, decriminalization
would simply require repeal of all those laws that penalize individuals
who use drugs and who work in the sex industry. The decriminalization of
alcohol use serves as a historical example. In both these cases,
decriminalization would advance the abolitionist strategy of
decarceration-that is, the consistent reduction in the numbers of people
who are sent to prison-with the ultimate aim of dismantling the prison
system as the dominant mode of punishment. A further challenge for
abolitionists is to identify other behaviors that might be appropriately
decriminalized as preliminary steps toward abolition.
One obvious and very urgent aspect of the work of decriminalization is
associated with the defense of immigrants' rights. The growing numbers
of immigrants-especially since the attacks on September 11, 2001-who are
incarcerated in immigrant detention centers, as well as in jails and
prisons, can be halted by dismantling the processes that punish people
for their failure to enter this country without documents. Current
campaigns that call for the decriminalization of undocumented immigrants
are making important contributions to the overall struggle against the
prison industrial complex and are challenging the expansive reach of
racism and male dominance. When women from countries in the southern
region are imprisoned because they have entered this country to escape
sexual violence, instead of being granted refugee status, this
reinforces the generalized tendency to punish people who are persecuted
in their intimate lives as a direct consequence of pandemics of violence
that continue to be legitimized by ideological and legal structures.
Within the United States, the "battered women's syndrome" legal defense
reflects an attempt to argue that a woman who kills an abusive spouse
should not be convicted of murder. This defense has been abundantly
criticized, both by detractors and proponents of feminism; the former do
not want to recognize the pervasiveness and dangers of intimate violence
against women and the latter challenge the idea that the legitimacy of
this defense resides in the assertion that those who kill their
batterers are not responsible for their actions. The point feminist
movements attempt to make-regardless of their specific positions on
battered women's syndrome-is that violence against women is a pervasive
and complicated social problem that cannot be solved by imprisoning
women who fight back against their abusers. Thus, a vast range of
alternative strategies of minimizing violence against women-within
intimate relationships and within relationships to the state should be
the focus of our concern.
The alternatives toward which I have gestured thus far-and this is only
a small selection of examples, which can also include job and living
wage programs, alternatives to the disestablished welfare program,
community-based recreation, and many more-are associated both directly
and indirectly with the existing system of criminal justice. But,
however mediated their relation might be to the current system of jails
and prisons, these alternatives are attempting to reverse the impact of
the prison industrial complex on our world. As they contest racism and
other networks of social domination, their implementation will certainly
advance the abolitionist agenda of decarceration.
Creating agendas of decarceration and broadly casting the net of
alternatives helps us to do the ideological work of pulling apart the
conceptual link between crime and punishment. This more nuanced
understanding of the social role of the punishment system requires us to
give up our usual way of thinking about punishment as an inevitable
consequence of crime. We would recognize that "punishment" does not
follow from "crime" in the neat and logical sequence offered by
discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment, but rather
punishment-primarily through imprisonment (and sometimes death)-is
linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations,
and media representations of crime. Imprisonment is associated with the
racialization of those most likely to be punished. It is associated with
their class and, as we have seen, gender structures the punishment
system as well. If we insist that abolitionist alternatives trouble
these relationships, that they strive to disarticulate crime and
punishment, race and punishment, class and punishment, and gender and
punishment, then our focus must not rest only on the prison system as an
isolated institution but must also be directed at all the social
relations that support the permanence of the prison.
An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives
to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why
"criminals" have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of
human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to
others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category
"lawbreakers" is far greater than the category of individuals who are
deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the
law at one time or another. Even President Bill Clinton admitted that he
had smoked marijuana at one time, insisting, though, that he did not
inhale. However, acknowledged disparities in the intensity of police
surveillance-as indicated by the present-day currency of the term
"racial profiling" which ought to cover far more territory than "driving
while black or brown"-account in part for racial and class-based
disparities in arrest and imprisonment rates. Thus, if we are willing to
take seriously the consequences of a racist and class-biased justice
system, we will reach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people are
in prison simply because they are, for example, black, Chicano,
Vietnamese, Native American or poor, regardless of their ethnic
background. They are sent to prison, not so much because of the crimes
they may have indeed committed, but largely because their communities
have been criminalized. Thus, programs for decriminalization will not
only have to address specific activities that have been
criminalized-such as drug use and sex work-but also criminalized
populations and communities.
It is against the backdrop of these more broadly conceived abolitionist
alternatives that it makes sense to take up the question of radical
transformations within the existing justice system. Thus, aside from
minimizing, through various strategies, the kinds of behaviors that will
bring people into contact with the police and justice systems, there is
the question of how to treat those who assault the rights and bodies of
others. Many organizations and individuals both in the United States and
other countries offer alternative modes of making justice. In limited
instances, some governments have attempted to implement alternatives
that range from conflict resolution to restorative or reparative
justice. Such scholars as Herman Bianchi have suggested that crime needs
to be defined in terms of tort and, instead of criminal law, should be
reparative law. In his words, "[The lawbreaker] is thus no longer an
evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, a liable person whose
human duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume
the duty of repair".
There is a growing body of literature on reshaping systems of justice
around strategies of reparation, rather than retribution, as well as a
growing body of experiential evidence of the advantages of these
approaches to justice and of the democratic possibilities they promise.
Instead of rehearsing the numerous debates that have emerged over the
last decades-including the most persistent question, "What will happen
to the murderers and rapists?"-I will conclude with a story of one of
the most dramatic successes of these experiments in reconciliation. I
refer to the case of Amy Biehl, the white Fulbright scholar from Newport
Beach, California, who was killed by young South African men in
Guguletu, a black township in Capetown, South Africa.
In 1993, when South Africa was on the cusp of its transition, Amy Biehl
was devoting a significant amount of her time as a foreign student to
the work of rebuilding South Africa. Nelson Mandela had been freed in
1990, but had not yet been elected president. On August 25, Biehl was
driving several black friends to their home in Guguletu when a crowd
shouting antiwhite slogans confronted her, and some of them stoned and
stabbed her to death. Four of the men participating in the attack were
convicted of her murder and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. In
1997, Linda and Peter Biehl-Amy's mother and father-decided to support
the amnesty petition the men presented to the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. The four apologized to the Biehls and were released in July
1998. Two of them-Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni-Iater met with the
Biehls, who, despite much pressure to the contrary, agreed to see them.
According to Nofemela, he wanted to say more about his own sorrow for
killing their daughter than what had been possible during Truth and
Reconciliation hearings. "I know you lost a person you love," he says he
told them during that meeting. "I want you to forgive me and take me as
your child."
The Biehls, who had established the Amy Biehl Foundation in the
aftermath of their daughter's death, asked Nofemela and Peni to work at
the Guguletu branch of the foundation. Nofemela became an instructor in
an after-school sports program and Peni an administrator. In June 2002,
they accompanied Linda Biehl to New York, where they all spoke before
the American Family Therapy Academy on reconciliation and restorative
justice. In a Boston Globe interview, Linda Biehl, when asked how she
now feels about the men who killed her daughter, said, "I have a lot of
love for them." After Peter Biehl died in 2002, she bought two plots of
land for them in memory of her husband so that Nofemela and Peni can
build their own homes. A few days after the September 1 1 attacks, the
Biehls had been asked to speak at a synagogue in their community.
According to Peter Biehl, "We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to
shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask: 'Why do
these terrible things happen?' instead of simply reacting."