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Acknowledgments

1 should not be listed as the sole author of this book, for its
ideas reflect various forms of collaboration over the last six
years with activists, scholars, prisoners, and cultura) work:
exs who have tried to reveal and contest the impact of the
prison industrial complex on the lives of people—within and
outside prisons—throughout the world, The organizing
committee for the 1998 Berkeley conference, Critical
Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, included
Be (risa d. brown}, Ellen Barry, Jennifer Beach, Rose Braz,
Julie Browne, Cynthia Chendler, Kamari Clarke, Leslie
DiBenedetto Skopek, Gita Drury, Rayne Galbraith, Ruthie
Gilmore, Naneen Karraker, Terry Kupers, Rachel Lederman,
Joyce Miller, Dorsey Nunn, Dylan Rodriguez, Eli
Rosenblatt, Jane Segal, Cassandra Shaylor, Andrea Smith,
Nancy Stoller, Julia Sudbury, Robin Templeton, and Suran
Thrift, In the long process of coordinating plans for this con-
ference, which attracted aver three thousand people, w=
worked through anumber of the questions that I raise in this
book. I thank the members of tha: committee, including
those who used the conference as a foundation to build the
organization Critical Resistance. In 2000, I was a memer of
a University of California Humanities Research Institute
Resident Research G:oup and had the opportunity to partic-
ipate in regular discussions on many of these issues. I thank
the members of the group—Cina Dent, Ruth Gilmore,
Avery Gurdon, David Coldberg Nancy Schepper Hughes,
and Sandy Barringer—for their invaluable insights.
Cassandra Shaylor and I ccauthored a report to the 2001
Worlé Conference Against Racism on women of color and
the prison industrial complex—a number of whose ideas
have made their way into this book. I have alsc drawn from.

a number of other recent articles I have published in various:
collections. Over the last five years Gina Dent and I have
made numerous presentations together, published together,
and engaged in protracted conversations on what it means to
do scholarly and activist work that can encourage us all to
imagine a world without prisons. I thenk her for reading the
manuscript and I am deeply appreciative of her intellectual
and emotioaal support. Finally, I thank Greg Ruggiero, the
editor of this series, for his patience and encouragement.

3
Contents

ARE PRISONS
OBSOLETE?

Acknowledgments .........

CHAPTER
Inuoduction—Prison Reform or Prison Abolition? .....

CHAPTER 2
Siavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist
Perspectives Toward Prison . .

CHAPTERS
Imprisonment and Reform

© 2003 by Angela Y. Davis

Cpen Media series editor, Greg Ruggiero.

SEVEN STORIES PRESS
New York

$1 4 \\ntroduction-Prison Reform or Prison Abolition? In most parts of the world, it is taker: for granted that who- ever is convicted of a serious crime will be seut to prison, In some countries—inclnding the United States—where capital punishment has not yet been abolished, a small but signifi- cant numter cf people are seater.ced to death for what are considered especially grave crimes. Many people are familiar with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fac:, ithas already been abolished in most countries. Even the staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few peo- ple find life without the death penalty difficu:t to imagine. On the other hand, the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives. Most people are quite surprised to hear that the prison atolition movement also has a long history—one that dates back to the historical appeureuive of the prison as the main form of punishment, In fact, the most natural reaction is to assume that prison activists—even those who consciously refer ta themselves as “antiprison activists’—-are simply trying to ameliorate prison conditions or perhaps to reform the priscn in more fundamental ways, In mos: cixcles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists arc dis- missed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are. a: hest nnre- alistic and impracticatle, and, at worst, mystifying and fool- ish. This is a measure of how difficalt :t is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful pleces designed to separate -hem from$

s

their communities and families. ‘he prison is considered so
“macural” that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it

It is my hope that this book will encourage readers to
ouestion their own assumptions about the prison. Many peo-
ple havealready reached the conclusion that the deathpenal-
ty is an outmoded form of punishment that violates basic
principles of human rights. It is time, I believe, toencourage
similar conversations ahont the prison. During my own
career as an antiprison activist I have seen the population of
US. prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in
black, Latino, and Native American communities now have
4 far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent
education. When many young people decide to join the mili-
tary service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in
prison, it should cause us to wonéer whether we should not
try to introduce better alternatives.

The question of whether the prison has become an obso-
lete institution has become especially urgent in light of the
fact that more than two million people (out of a world total
of rine million} now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facili-
ties, and immigrant detention centers, Are we willing to rel-
egate ever larger numbere of people from racially oppressed
communities to an isclated existence marked by authoritari-
an regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion
that produce severe mental instability? According toa recent
study, there may be twice as many people suffering from
mental illness who are in jails ard prisons than there are ir
all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined!

‘When { first became involved in antiprison activism dur-

ing the late 1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were
then slose to two hundred thousand people in prison. Had
anyone told me that in three decades ten times as niany peo-
ple would be locked away in cages, I would have heen
absolately incredulous. Timagine that I would haverespond-
ced 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 beea consolidat.
ed], 1do not believe that the U.S. government will be able :0
lock up ¢0 many people without producing power/ul public

acteristics, backgrounds, end behaviors are incar-
cerated in these facilities, the likelihood of legal
challenge is increased. 53 28

During the cighicenth aud nineteenth centuries, absolute
solitude and strict regimentation of the prisoner's every
action were viewed as strategies for transfcrming kabits and
ethics. That is té say, the idea that imprisonment should be
the main form of punishment reflected a belief in the poten-
tial of white mankind for progress, no: only in science and
industry, but at the level of the individual membe: of socie-
ty as well. Prison reformers mirrored Enlightermeat
assumptions of progress in every aspect of human—or to be
more precise, white Western—society. In his 1987 study
Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction aul the Architecture of
Mind in ighteenth-Century England, fohn Bender proposes
the very intriguing argument that the emergent literary genre
of the novel furthered a discourse of progress and individual
transformation tha: encouraged attitudes toward punish-
ment to change. These attitudes, he suggests, heralded the
conception and constructicn of penitentiary prisons during
the latter part of the eighteenth century as. reform suited to
the capacities of those who were deemed human,

Reformers who called for the imposition of penitentiary
erchitecturc and regimes on the thea existing structure of the
prison aimed their critiques at the prisons that were primari-
ly used for purposes of pretrial detention or as an alternative
runishment for those who were unable to pay fines exacted
ty 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 Russiaa army at
Chersomin 1791.”58 At the conclusion of his first trip abroad,
he successfully ran for the office of sheriff in Bedfoxdshire. As
sheriff he investigated the prisons under his own jurisdiction
and later “set out tc visit every prison in England and Wales
to docuraent the evils he had first observed at Bedford,"58

Located in the same town as Valley State and literally acrose
the streets the second-largest womer’s prison im the world—
Central California Women’s Fac:lity—whose population in
900), slsn havered around thirty-five hundred?

If you look at a map of California depicting the Locatior
of the thirty-three state prisons, you will see that the only
area that is not heavily populated by prisons is the aree
north of Sacramento. Still, there are two prisons in the towr.
of Susanville, and Pelican Bay, one of the state's notorious
super-maximum security prisons, is near the Oregon border.
California art:st Sandow Birk was inspired by the colonizing
ofthe landscape by prisons tc produce a series of thirty-taree
landscape paintings of these institutions and their surround.
ings. They are collected in his book Incarcerated: Visions a!
Califcenia in the Twenty-first Century.®

1 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 systesn of incarceration with
the implicit consent of the public. Why were peaple so quick
to assume thet locking away an increasingly large proportion
of the U.S, population would help those who live in the free
world feel saier and more secure? ‘Ihis question can be for-
mulated itt more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make
people think thet 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 pris
ons in California as “a geographical solution to socio-eco-
nomic problems.” Her analysis of the prison industrial com-
plex in California describes these developmentsas a response
to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity.

California's new prisons are sited on devalued rural
Jand, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultur-
al acres... The State bougat 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.1¢

But, as Gilmore points out, neither the jobs nor the more
general economic rev.talization promised by prisons as
occurred, At the same time, this promise of progress helps
us to undesstand why the legislature and California’s voters
decided to approve -he construction of all these new prisons.
People wanted to believe that prisons would not only reduce
crime, they would also provide jobs and stimulate ecnonam-
ic development in out-of-the-way places.

Atbottom, there is one fundamental question: Why do we
take prison for granted? While a relatively small proportion
of the population has ever dizectly experienced life inside
prison, this is not true in poor black and Latina communi-
ties, Neither is it true for Native Americans or ‘or certain
Asian-American communities, But even among those people
who must regrettably accept prison sentences—especially
young people—es 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 whoie, 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, i: 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 alraid 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 thet anyone, including our-
selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the
prison es 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. Beceuse of the per-
sistent power of racism, “criminals” and “evildoers” are, in
the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The
prison therefore functions ideologica'ly as an abstract site
into which undesirabies are deposited, relieving us of the
responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those
communities from which prisoners are drawn in such dispro-
pottionate numbers, This is the ideclogical work that the
prison periorms—it relieves us of the responsibility of seri-
ously engaging with the problems of our suciety, especially
those produced by racism end, increasingly, global capitalism,

What, for example, do we miss if we try to think about
prison expansion without address.ng larger economic devel-
opments? 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
shambies. Huge numbers of people Lose jobs and prospects
for future jobs. Because the cconomic base of these commu
nities is destroyed, education and other surviving social
services are profoundly affected. This rocess turns the men,
womer, and children whe live in these damaged communi-
ties into perfect candidates fo: prison.

In the meantime, corporations associated with the pan-
ishment 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 lack hole into
which the detritus of contemporary capitalisn is deposited.
Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devonrs social
wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions
that lead people to prison. There ate thus real and often quite
complicated connections between the deindustrislization of
the eccnoray—a process that reached its pcak during the
1980s—an¢ the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began
to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era, However, the demand

lo

fox mure prisons was cepreserted to the public in simplistic
terms. More priscns were needed because there was more
crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the
time the prison construction boom began, official crime sta-
tistics were alreacy felling. Moreover, draconian drag laws
were being enacted, and “three-strikes” provisions were on
the agendas of many s:atcs. iY

In order to understand the proliferstion 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 cightics and
nineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was there
such an obvious level of comfort with the prospect cf many
new prisons? A partial answer to this question has to do
with Ute way we consume media images of the prison, even
as the cealities of imprisonment ere hidden from almost all
who have not had the misfortune of doing time, Cultural
critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiari-
ty with the prison comes in part from representations of
prisons in filin and other visual media,

The history of visuality linked tc the prison is also
a main reinforcement of the institution of the
prison as a naturalized part of our social landscape,
The histury of film has always been wedded to the
representation of incarceration. Thomas Edison's
first films (dating back to the |901 reenactment pre-
sexted as newsreel, Execution of Czolgosz with
Panorama of Auburr: Prison} 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, in fact a genre.!!

Some of the most well known prison films are: J Want to
Live, Papillon, Cool Hand Luke. and Escape from Aicatraz.
It also bears mention:ng that television programming has

become increasingly saturated with images of p:isons. Some
recent documentaries include the ABE series The Big
House, which vousists uf programs on San Quentin,
Alcatraz, Leevenworth, and Alderson Federal Reformatory
for Women. The long-running HBO program Oz has -nar-
aged 10 persuade many viewers that they know exactly whet
goes on in maje maximum-security prisons, IZ

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
o not, by the simple fact of watching movies or TV. It is vis~
tually impossible to avoid consuming images of prison. In
1997, I was myself quite astonished to find, when I inte:-
viewed 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 cur image environment. This has
caused ns to take the existence of prisons for granted The
prison hes becomea key ingredient of our commonsense. 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 imaginetion to envision life
beyoad the prison,

This is not to dismiss the profound changes that have
occu:red in the way public conversaticns about the prison
are conducted. Ten years ago, even as the drive to expand the.
prison system reached its zenith, there were very few or-
tiques of this process available to the public. In fact, 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 bea ccnfined :o low, medium,
and max:mum security, a new category was invented—chat
of the super-maximum security prison, or the supermax.
‘The turn toward increased repression in # prison system,
distinguished from the beginning of its history by ite repres.
sive regimes, caused some journalists, public intellectuals,

and progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance on
prisons to solve social problems that are actua‘ly exacerbst-
ed by mass incarceration. 13

In 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project pub-
lished 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 aiges of ewenty and :wenty-nine were
among these numbers.!2 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 renge were in jail or prison, ox on p:0-
bation or parole. The second study also revealed that the
group experiencing the greatest increase was black women,
whose imprisonment increased by seventy-eight percent.'3
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Abrican-
‘Americans as a whole now represent the majority of state
and federal prisoners, with a total of 603,400 black
inmates—118,600 more than the total number of white
inmates.14 During the late 1990s major articles on prisom
expansion appeared in Newsweek, Harper's, Emerge, and
Atlantic Monthly. Even Colin Powell raised the question of
the rising number of black men in prisor. 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 propusals fcr prison reform. While public dis-
course has bezome more flexible, the emphasis is almost
inevitably on generating the changes that will produce a bet-
ter prison system. In other words, the increased flexibility
that has allowed for critical discussicn of the problems asso:
ciated with the expausion of prisons also restricts this dis.
cuceion to the question of prison reform.

‘As important as some reforms may be—the eliminetion
of sexual abuse aad medical neglect in women’s prison, for
example—frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help
toproduce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the
prison, Debares about strategies of decarceratior, which
should be the focal point of our conversations cn the prisoa

ciisis, 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 Sring
as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into
what prisoners call “the free world.” How can we move to
decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services?
How can we take serivusly strategies of restorative rather
than exclusively punitive justice? Flfective 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 espe-
cfally communtsies of color, into the juvenile system and
then on to prison. The most difficult end urgent challenge
today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice,
where the prisor. no longer serves as our major anchor.

4

Slavery, Civil Rights, and
Abolitionist Perspectives Toward
Prison

“Advocates of incarceration . .. hoped that the pen'ten.
timry would zzhabilitote its inmates. Whereas phioso-
phers perceived a ceaseless state of war between chattel
slaves and their masters, criminnlogises hored to negot:
ate a peace treaty of sorts within the prison walls. Yet
herein lurked a patadox: if the penitentiery’s internal
regime resembled that of the plantation so closely that the
two were often loosely equated, how could the prison pos:
sibly fanecion co rehabilitate crimiralst”

Adam Jay Hirech!5

‘The prison is net the ordy institution that has posed complex
challenges to the people whu have lived with it and have
become 50 inured to iis presence that they could not con-
ceive 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 che abolition of the “pecu-
liar institution.” White antislavery abolitionists sachas John
Brown and William Lloyd Gazrison were represented in the
dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics.
When Frederick Douglass embarked on his cereer as an anti-
slavery oratus, white peogle—even those who were passion
ate abclitionisis—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 :t dilticult to imagine black people as equals. Ss

Tt took a long aud violent civil war in order to legally dis.
establish the “peculiar institution.” Even though the
‘Thirteenth Amendment :o the U.S. Constitution outlaweé
involuntary servitude, white supremacy continued to be
embraced by vas: ntmbers of people and became deeply
inscribed in aew institutions. One of these post elavery
institutions was lynching, which was widely accepted fo:
many decades thereafter. Thanks to the work of figures such
as Ida B. Wells, an antilynching campaign was gradually
legitimized daring the first half of the twentieth century.
‘The NAACP, an organization that continues to conduct
egal challenges against discrimination, evolved from these
efforts to abolish lynching.

Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a cen-
tury after the abolition of slavery. Many pzople who lived
under Jin Crow could net envision « legal system defined by
racial equality. When the gavernor of Alabama personally
attempted to preven: Aithucine 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. “Scaregation today, segregation tomo:
row, 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
dian he could have imagined.

‘Althongh government, comporatioas, and the dominant
media try:to represent racism as a2 unfortunate aberration of
the past tat has been relegated to the graveyard of U.S. his-
tory, it continues to profocndly influence contemporary
structures, attitudes, and behaviurs. 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 nor have imagined life without slavery,
life without lynching, olife without segregation. The 2001
World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia, and Related Intclerances held ir. Durban, Sout
‘Africa, divulged the immensity of the global task of eliminat-
ing racism, There may be mary disagreements regarding wha
counts as racism end what are the mest effective strategies to
eliminate it, However, especially with che downfall of the
apartheid regime in South Africa, there is a global consensus
that racism should not define the future of the planet.

(have referred to these historica: examples of efforts to
dismantle racist institutions because they have considerable
relevance to cur 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
scgrcgation are certainly compelling examples of social insti-
tutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as
everlesting as the sun. Yet, ia the case of all three examples,
‘we can point to movernents that assumed the radical stance
of announcing the obsolescence of these institusions. It may
help us gain perspective on the pricon if we txy to imagine
how strange and discomforting the debates about the abso-
lescence of slavery must have been to those who took the
“peculiar institution” for granted—and especially to those
who veaped direct benefi:s from this dreadful system: of racist
explcitation. And even though there wae widespread resie:

ance among black slaves, there weie even some among them
who assumed that they and their progeny would be always
subjected to the tyzanny of slaver 17

bave introduced three abolition carapaigns 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 beliets
to justify the relegation of people of African desvent w the
legal status of property. Lynching was an extralegal institu-
tion that surrendered thou sands of African-American lives
to the violence of ruthless racist mobs. Uncer segregation,
black people were legelly declared second-class citizens, for
whom voting, job, education, ané housing rights were dras-
tically curtailed, if they were availabe at all.

‘What is the relationship between hese historical expres-
sions of racism and the role of the prison system today?
Exploring such connections may offer us a different perspec
tive on the current state of the punishizent indusuy. I! we
are already perouaded that racism should not be allowed ta
define the planet's futuré and if we can successful.y argue
that prisons are racist institutions, this may lead us to take
seriously the prospect of declaring prisons obsolete.

For the moment ] am concentrating on the history of
antiblack racism in order to make the point that the prison
reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operaze 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. punishmeut system as
well—the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, and
Asian-Americans. These racisms also congeal end 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 racisin that target people of colcr
who are not black. Consider the mass arrests and detention
of people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Muslim her-
itage in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on
the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

This leads us wo two isnportant 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 eatly peusiteutiary system, The
penitentiary as an institution that simultaneously punished
and rehabilitéted its inhabitants was a new system of pun-
ishment chat first made its appearance in the United States
around the time of the American Revolution. This new sys-
tem was based on the replacement of capital and corpora
punishment by incarceration. 1a

Imprisonment itself was new neither to the United States,
nor to the world, but until the creation of this new institu-
tion called the penitentiiry, it served as a prelude to punisk-
ment, People who were to be subjec:ed to some form of cor
poral punishment were detained in prison until the execu-
tion of the punishment. With the penitentiary, inca:ceration
became the punishirent itself. As is indicated in the desig-
natioa “penitentiary,” imprisonment was regarded as rehe~
bilitative and the penitentiary prison wes devised te provide
convicts with the conditions for re‘lecting 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 revolu-
tionary period, the penitentiary was generally viewed ah 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 Englsh, However, the contention that
prisoners would refashion themselves if only given the
opportunity to reflect and labor in solitude and silence dis-
regarded the impact of authoritarian regimes of living and
work, Indeed, there were significant similarities between
slavery and the penitentiary prison. Historian Adam Jay
Hirsch hes pointed ont:

One may perceive in the penitentiary many reflec-

$tions ot chactel slavery as it was practiced im the j 9 South. Both ‘institutions subordinated their subjects to the will of others. Like Southern slaves, prison inmates followed 4 daily routine specified by their superiors. Both institutions reduced their subjects to dependence un otkers for the supply of basic human services such ss food-and shelter. Both isclated their subjects from the general populetion by confining them to a fixed habita:. And both frequently coerced their subjects :0 work, often for longer hours and for less compensation than free laborers.\\6 ‘As Hirsch has observed, both institutions deployed simi- Jar 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. Mo:cover, both prisonero and claves were considered to have pronounced proclivities to crime, People sentenced to the penitentiary ir 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 Ilirsch further reveals, ‘Thomas Jefferson, who supported the sentencing af con- victed people to hard lator on road and water projects, also pointed out that he would exclude slaves from: this sort cf punishment. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sen- tencing them to penal labor would nut mark a difference in their condition. Jefferson saggested banishment to nther countries instead.!8 Particularly in the United States, race has always played a central role in constrecting presumptions of criminality. After the abolition of slavery, former slave states passed new legislation revising the Slave Cades in order to regulate the behavior of free blacks in weys similar to those thet had existed daring 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 gesturcs or acts—that were criminalized only
when the person charged was black. With the pessage of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constiution, slavery and
involuntary servitude were putatively abolished. However,
there was,a significant exception. In the wording of the
amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude were abol
ished “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 bean extricated fram a condition
of hard labor for life, could be legelly sen:enced to penal
servitude 20

In che immediate «ftermath ofslavery, the southem 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 cxample,
declared vagrant “anyone/who was guilty of theft, had run
away from a‘ob, apparently}, was drunk, was wanton in con-
duct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money
cerelessly, and . .. all other idle and disorderly persons,”
‘Thus, vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable
by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very
plantations that previously had tvived on slave labor

‘Mary Ellen Cartin’s study of Alabama prisoners during
the decades following emancipation discloses that before the
tour hundred thousand black slaves in that state were set
free, ninety-nine percent of prisoners in Alabama's peniten-
tiaries were white. As a consequence of the shiits provoked
by the institution of the Black Codes, within a sho:t period
of time, the overwhelming majority of Alabama's convicts
were black.20 She further observes:

Althongh the vast majority of Alabama's antebel-
lam prisoners were white, the popular perception
was that the South’s true criminals were its black
slaves. During the 1870s the growing number of

black prisoners in the South further butcressed the
belief that African Americans were inherently 21
criminal and, in particular, prone to larceny2?

In 1883, Frederick Douglass had already written about
the South's tendency to “impute crime to color. When a
particularly egregious cr:me was committed, he noted, not
only was guilt frequently assigned to a black person regard
Jess of the perpetrator’s race, but white men sometimes
sough: to escape punishment by disguising themselves as
black. Douglass won'd 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 rob-
bery. The wounded man, however, was discovered to be a
respectable white citizen whw hed colored his face black.

The above example from Douglass demonstrates how
whiteness, in the words of legal scholar Chery] Harris, oper-
ates as property.23 According to Hamis, the fac: that white
identity was possessed as property meant that rights, liber-
ties, and sclf-identity were affisimed 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 ir. schemes to deny black people their rights te due
process. Interestingly, cases similar to the one Douglass dis-
cusses above emerged in the United States during the 1990s:
in Boston, Charles Stuart mardered 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 cr:me continues to be imputed to color
resides in the maay evocations of “racial profiling” in our
time, That it is possible ro be targeted by the police for no
other reason than the color o! one’s skin is not mere specu:
lation. Police departments in major urban areas have admit
ted the existence of forma! procedures designed to maximize
the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested—

even in the absence of probable cause. In the aftermath o:
the September 11 attacks, vast numbers of reop‘e of Middle
Exstem and South Asian heritage were arrested and detained
by the police agency known as Immigcation and
Naturalization Services {INS}. The INS is the federal agency
that claims the largest number of armed agents, even more
than the FBL?*,

During the post-slavery era, as black people were inte:
grated into southern penal systems—and as the penal sys-
tem became a systern of penal servitude—the punishments
associated with slavery became further incorporated into
the pena) system. “Whipping,” ay 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 priscners.’2£ Asindicat-
ed above, black people were imprisoned under the laws
assembled in the various Black Codes uf the suuchern states,
which, because they were rearticulations of the Slave Codes,
tended to racialize penality and link it closely with previous
regimes of slavery. The expansion cf the convict lease sys-
tem and the county chain gang mesnt that the antebellum
criminal justice system, which focused far more iutensely
‘on black people thar. on whites, defined southern criminal
justice largely as < means o! 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 hac
shown them to have labored in the past: in gangs,
subjected to constant supervision, and under the
discipline of the lash, Since Whese were the requi-
sites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks,
Southern whites almost universally conchided that
blacks could not work unless subjected to such
intense surveillance and discipline26

Scholars who have studied the convict lease system poirt
out that in many important respects, convict leasing was fer

worsethan slavery, an insight that can be gleaned from citles
such as One Dies, Get Another (by Mancini}, Worse Thaz
Slavery (David Oshinsky’s work on Parchmen Prison|,2” and
Twice the Work cf Pree Labor (Alex Lichtenstein’s examina-
tion of the political economy. of convict Jeasing}2® Slave
owners may have been concerned for the survival of indi-
vidual slaves, who, after all, represented significant invest-
ments. Convicts, on the other hand, were lease¢ not as indi-
viduals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to
death withou: affecting the profitability of « convict crew.

According to descriptions by contemporaries, the condi-
tions under which leased convicts end county chain gangs
lived were far worse than those under which black people
had lived as slaves. The records ct Mississippi plantations in
‘zoo Delta during the late 1880s indicate that

the prisoners ate and slept on bere ground, without
blankets or mattresses, and often without clothes.
They were punished for “slow hoeing” jten lashes},
“sory plenting” (five lashes’, and "being light with
cotton” five lashes}. Some who attempted to
escape were whippec “till the blood ran down their
legs”; others had a metal spur riveted to their ‘eet
Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumcnia,
malana, frostbite, consumption, sunstxoke, dyse-
tery, gunshot wounds, and ‘shackle poisoning” {the
constant rubbing of chains ané leg irons against
bare fleshi.29

‘The appalling treatment to which convicts were subject-
ed uncer the lease system recapizulated and further extend.
ed the regimes of slavery. If, as Adam Jay Hirsch contends,
the early iacamations of the U.S. penitentiary in the North
tended to mirtor the institution of slavery in many impor-
tant respects, the post~Civil War evolution of the punish:
ment system was in very literal ways the continuation of a
slave system, which was no longer legal in the “ree” world.
‘The population of convicts, whose racial composition was
dramatically transformed by the abolition of slevery, could

be scbjected to such intense exploitation and to such hor-
rendous modes of punishment precisely because they con-
tinued to be perceived as slaves, 2

Historian Mary Ann Curtin has observed that many schol-
as who have acknowledged the deeply entrenched racism of
the post-Civil Wer structures of punishment in the South have
failed to identify the extent to which racism colored common-
sense 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—znd this, she says, is indeed par-
tially true—that in the aftermathof emancipation, large num:-
bers of black people were forced by their new social situation
to steal in order to survive, It was the transfcrmation of petty
thievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers cf
black people to the “involuntary servitude” legalized hy the
Tairteenth Amendment, What Curtin suggests :s that these
charges cf theft were frequently fabricated outright. They
“also set ved as subterfuge for politicel revenge. After emanci-
pation the courtroom became an ideal place to exact racial ret
ribution.”90 In this sense, the work of the criminal justice sys-
ter was intimately related tc the extralegal work of lynching,

Alex Lichtenstein, whose study focuses on the role of the
convict lease system ia furging a new lator 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 labo:
tcrce, an¢ without uadermining planters’ control of
black labor. tn fact, quite the opposite: the penal
system could be used as a powerful sanctior. ageinst
rural blacks who challenged the racial order upon
which agricultural lzbor control relied.s?

Lichtenstein discloses, for example, the extent to which

the building of Georgia railvosds during the nineteenth cen-
tury relied on black convict labor. He further reminds us
that as we drive dows. the most famous street in Atlanca—
Peachtree Street—we ride on the backs of conviets. “{TIhe
renowned Peachtree Street aad 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.”82 2S

Lichtenstein’s major argument is that the convict lease
was not an irrational regression; it was not primarily a
throwback to precapitalise modes of producsion, Rather, it
‘was a most efficient and most rational deployment of racist
strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South.
In chis sense, he argues, “convict labor was in many ways in
the vanguard cf the region’s first tentative, ambivalent, s:cps
towaré medernity.”33

‘Those of us who have had the opportunity tc visit nine-
teenth-century mansions thet were originally constructed
on slave plantations are rarely concent with an aesthetic
appraisal of these structures, no matter how beauti‘ul they
may be. Sufficient visual imagery of toiling black slaves cir-
culate enoughin our environment for us to imagine the bra-
tality that hides just beneath the suiface of these wondrous
mansions. We have learned how to recognize the role of
slave labor, as well as the racism it embodied, But black con-
viet labor remains a hidden dimension of our history. It is
extremely unsettling to think of modern, industria‘ized
urban areas a3 having been originally produced under the
racist labor concitions of penal servitude that are often
described by historians as even worse than slavery.

1 giew up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Because of
its mines—cnal and iron ore—and its steel mills tha:
remained active until the deindustrialization process of the
1980s, it was widely known as “the Pistsburgh of the
South.” ‘the Jathers of many of my fricads worked in these
mincs and mills. It is only recently that I have learned that
the black miners and stéelworkers I knew during my child-
hood inherited their place in Birmingham’s industrial deve!-
opment from black convicts forced to do this work under the
lease system. As Custin observes,

‘Many ex-prisoners became miners because Alabama
used prison labor extensively in its coalmines. By
2886 all of Alabemats able male prisoners were leased
to two major mining companies the Tennessee Coal
and Iron Company (TCf} and Sloss {ron and Steel
‘Company. For a cha:ge of up to $18.50 per month per
tan, these corporations “leased,” or sented prisou
laborers and worked them in coalmines3¢

Learning about this little-acknowledged dimension of
black and labor history has caused me to reevaluate my own
chilchovd experiences,

‘One of the many ruses racism achieves is the virtual era-
sure of historical contributions by people of calor. Here we
kave a penal system that ‘was racist in many respects—dis-
criminatory arrests and sentences, conditions of work,
modes of punishment—together with the racist erasure of
the significant contributions .made by block convicts as a
result of racist coercion, Just as it is difficult to imagine how
souch is owed to convicts relegated to penal servitude during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find it difficult
wday to feel a connection with che prisoners who produce a
ising number of commodities that we take for grantedin our
daily lives. In the state of California, public colleges and uni-
versities are provided with furnituce produced by prisoners,
the vast majority of whom are Latizo and black.

“There are aspects of our history thet we need wo interty-
gate and rethink, the recognition of which may help us to
adopt more complicated, critical postures towarc the pres-
entend che future, [have focused oa the work of afewschol-
ars whose work urges us to raise questions about the past,
present, and future. Curtin, for example, is not simply von-
tent 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 sesearch to urge us to think
about the uncanny paraile's between :he convict lease sys-
tem in the ninctecnth century and prison privatization in
the twenty-tirst.

In the late nineteenth century, coal companies

wished to keer their skilled prison laborers for as,

long as they, could, leading to denials of “short 2 7
time.” Today, ¢ slightly different economic incen-

tive can lead to similer consequences. CCA
[Corree:ions Corporation of America| ie paid per
prisoner. If the supply dries up, or too many are
released too early, their profits are affectec .

Longer prison terms mean greater profits, but the
larger point is that the profit motive promotes the
expansion of imprisonment.35

‘The persistence of the prison es the main form cf pun-
sshment, with its racist ard sexis: dimensiors, has created
his historical continuity berween the nineteenth- and early-
twentieth century convict lease systern and the privatized
prison business today. While the convict lease system was
legally abolished, its struccures cf exploitation have
ceemerged in the patterns of privatization, and, more gener-
ally, in che wide-ranging corporatization of punishment that
has produced a prison industrial complex. If the prison con-
tinues to dominate the landscape of punisment throughout
this century and into the next, what might await coming
generations of impoverished African-Americans, Latinos,
Native Americans, and Asian-Americans? Given the paral-
lels between the prison and slavery, a productive exercise
might consist in speculating zbout what the present might
look like if slavery or its successor, the convict lease system,
had not been abolishec.

To be sure, am not suggesting that the abolition of slav-
ery and the lease system has produced an era of equality and
justice. On the contcary, racism surreptitiously defines
social and economic structures in ways that are difficult to
identity 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 0U0 (slelection of George W. Bush as
president. If only the black men and women denicd the right
10 vote because of an actual or pr2sumed felony record had

been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the
White House today. Aad perhaps we would not be dealing
with the awful costs of the War oa Terrorism declared dur-
ing the first year of his administration. If not for his election,
the people of Iraq might not have suffersd death, destruc
tion, 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
cave system or racial segregation. But we do nut 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 produc-
tive and creative work, to physical and mental recreation.
‘And there is even more compelling evidence about the dam-
age wrought by the expansion of the prison system in the
schools located in poor cominunities 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 intellectua; 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 greate: presence in our soci-
ety! In the nineteenth century, antislavery activists insisted
that as long ac slavery continued, the future of democreey
was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprison
activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revi-
talization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the
prison system,

3
Imprisonment and Reform
“One should recall that the movernent for reforming the

prisons, for controling their fanctioning is no: a recent
phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in

23

public spectacle. Reformers such as Joha Howard in England
aad Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania argued that punish-
ment—if carried out in isclation, behind the walls of the
prison—would cease to be revenge and would actually
reform those who had broken the lew, 30

Itshould also be pointed out that punishment has not beet
without its gendered dimensions. Women were often pun-
ished within the'domestic domain, and instruments of torture
were sometimes imported by authorities into the household.
In seventeenth-century Britain, women whese husbands iden-
tified them as cuarrelsome and unaccepting of male domi-
nance were punished by means of a gostip’s bridle, or
“banks,” 2 headpiece with a chair, 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 tc a wall of :he house,
where the punished woman remained until her husband
decided to release her. ] 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, trans-
portation, and appropriation of the accused’s property. The
punitive transportation of large aumbers of people from
England, for example, facilitated the :nitial colonization of
Austraka, Transporteé English convicts also settled the
Nouth Aimerican colony of Georgia. During the carly 1700s,
one in eight transported convicts were women, and the work
they were forced to per‘orm often consisted of prostitution 4°

Imprisonment was not employed as a principal mode of
punishment until the eighteenth century in Europe and the
nineteenth century in ke United States. And European
prison systems were instituted in Asia and Africa as an
important component of colonial <ule. In India, for example,
the English prison system was introduced during the second
hal! of the eighteenth century, when jails were established
in the regions of Calcatta and Madras. In Europe, the peni-
tentiary movement against capital and cther corporal pun-
ishments reflected new intellectual tendencies associated
with the Enlightenment, activist interventions by

Protestant reformers, and ctructural transiormations associ-
ated with the rise of industrial capital:sm. in Milan im 1764,
Cesare Beccaria published his Essay on Crimes end
Punishmenis,4! which was strongly influenced by notions of
equality advanced by the philosophes—especially Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Becearia argued that punish-
ment should never be a private matter, nor should it be a-bi-
warily violent; rather, it should be public, swift, and as
lenient as possible. He revealed the contradiction of what

was then a distinctive feeture of imprisonment—the fact

that it was generally imposed price to the defendant’s guilt

or innocence being decidec. 3/

However, incarceration itself eventually became the
penalty, bringing about a distinction between imprisonment
as punishment and pretria: detent.on 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 :he rise of
capitalism and to the appearance of a new set of ideological
conilitions, These new conditions reflected the cise of the
bourgeoisie as the social class whose interests and aspira-
tions 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 sugeritx form of panishment for
all times. It was simply—though we should not vnderesti-
mate the complexity o: this process—what made most sense
at a particular moment in history. We should therefore ques-
tion whether a system thet was intimately related to a par-
ticular set of historical cizeuinstences that prevailed during
the cightcenth and nineteenth centuries caa lay absolute
claim on the twenty-first century,

It may be important at this point in our examination to
acknowledge the radical saitt in the social perception of the
individual that appeared iu the ideas of that ere. With the
rise of the bourgecisie, the individual came te he regarded as
a bearet of formal righ:s and liberties. The notion of the indi-
vidual's inalienable sights and liberties was eventually
memorialized in the French and American Revolution.

“Liberté, Fgalité, Fraternité” from the Frenca Revolution
and “We hold these :ruths to be self-evident: all men are cre-
ated equal...” from the American Revolution were new and
radical ideas, even though they were not extended to
women, workers, Africans, and Indians. Refore the accept-
ance of the sanctity of individual rights, smprisonment
could not have been understood as punishment. If the indi-
vidual was not perceived as possessing inalienable rights and
liberties, then the alienation of those :ights and liberties by
removal from gociety to a space tyrannically governed by the
state would no: 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, Be

Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always comput
ed in terms of time, is related to abstract quantification,
evoxing the rise of science and what is often referred to as
the Age of Reason. We should keep in minc that this was
precisely the historical period when the value of labor began
to be celculated in terme cf time and therefore compensated
in another quantifiable way, by money. The computability
of state punishment in texms of time—days, monchs,
years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for
computing the vale of capitalist sommoditics. Marxist the-
orists 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 punishments?

Today, the growing sucial movement contesting the
supremacy of global capital isa movement that directly chal-
Jenges the rule of the planet—its human, animal, and plan:
populations, as well as its nataral resources—by corporations
that are primarily interested in the increased production and
circulation of ever more profitable cornmodities. This is a
challenge to the supremacy of the commodity form, a rising
resistance to the contemporary teadency to commodify
every aspect of planetary emistence. The question we might
consicer is whether tais new resistance to capitalist global-
ization 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

33
reformers. But convicts punished by imprisonment in emer-
gent pen.tentiary systems were primarily male, Thus reflect-
ed the deeply gender-bicsed structure of legal, polisica!, 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 impris-
cnment. This was especially true of married wormen, who
had no standing before the law. According to English com-
mon law, marriage restlted in a state of “civil death,” as
symbolized by the wife's assumption of the husbands name.
Consequently, she tended to be punished for revolting
against her domestic duties rather than for failure in her mea-
ger public responsibilities, The relegation of white women to
domestic economies prevented them from playing a signifi-
cant role in the emergent commodity realm. This was espe-
cially true since wage labor was typically gendered as male
and racialized as white. It is not fortuitous that domestic cor-
poral punishment for women survived longafterthese 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 ergusd that the word “penitentiary”
may have been used first in connection with plans outlined
in England in 1758 to heuse “penitent prostitutes.” In 1777,
John Howard, the leading Protestant proponent of penal
reform in England, published The State of the Prisons in
which he conceptualized imprisonment as an occasion for
religious self-reflection and self-relorm. Between 1787 and
1791, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham published
his letters on a prison model he called the panopticon 45
Bentham claimed that criminals could only internalize pro-
ductive labor habits if they were under constant surveil-
lance. According to his panopticon model, prisone:s were to
be housed in single cells on circular tiers, all facing a multi-
level 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 tu see the warden. From
his vantage poirt, on the other hand, the warden would be
able to see all o! the prisoners. However—and this was the

most significant aspect of Bentham’s manno.l panopti-
con—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 al! times.

If we combine Howerd’s cmphasis on discipliaed self-
reflection with Bentham’s ideas regarding the technology of
internélization 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 impli-
catione. The conditions of possibility for this new {ori 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 req-
uisite industrial labor fora developing capitalist system.

john Howard's idces were incorporated in the
Penitentiary Act of 1795, 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 ir. 1816, the first full-fledged
effort to create a panopticon prison was in the United States.
‘The Western State Penitentiary in Pittssurgh, 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 fail
housed the first statc penitentiary in che United States,
when a portion of the jail was converted in 1790 froma
detention facility to aa institutioa housing convicts whose
prison sentences simultaneously became punishment and
occasions for penitence and reforra,

Walaut Suieet’s austere segirne—total isolation in single
cells where prisoners lived, ate, worked, read the Bible lif,
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 ‘mp:isonment, Aluhough dhe other medel, devel-
oped 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

aS

model, which eventuelly crystallized in the Eastern State
Penitentiary in Cherry Hill—the pians for whick were
approved in 1821—emphasized total :solation, silence, and
solitude, waereas the Auburn model called for solitary cells
but labor in common. This mode of prison lator, 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 condi:ion of silence. Because of its
more eificient labor practices, Auburn eventually became
the dominant model, both for the United States and Europe.

Why would eighteenth. and ninetecath-century reform
ers become so invested in creating conditions of punishment
based on solitary confinement? Todey, aside from death,
solitary confinement—next to torture, or as a form of tor-
ture—is considered the worst ‘orm of punishment imagina-
ble, Then, howsver, it was assumed to have an émancipato-
ry effect. The body was placed in corditions of segregation
and solitude in order to allow the soul to flourish, I: is not
accidental that most of the reformers of that era were deeply
religious and therefore saw the architecture and regimes of
the penitentiary as emulating the architecture and regimes
of monastic life. Still, cbse:vers of the new peniteatiary saw,
early on, the real poteatial for insanity in solitary confine-
ment. In an often.qucted 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 aopeless sclitary confinement. I
believe it, in its effects, tobe cruel and wrong.”

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind,
humane, and meant for reformation, but I am per
suaded that those who devised this system of Prison
Discipline, and those benevolen: gentlemen who
carry it into execution, do not know what it is that
they are doing. I believe that very few men are capa-
ble of estimating the immense amount of torture and
agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for
years, inflicts upon the sufferers .. .1 am only the
moce convinced tat there is a depth of terrible
endurance in it which nore but the sufferers them

selves can fathom, and which no man has a right to
inflict vpon his fellow-creature. I kold this slow and 3
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 eers can hear; therefore

I the more denounc® it, as a secret punishment which
slumbering Humanity is not roused up to stay“

Unlike other Europeans such as Alexis de Tocqueville
and Gustzve de Beaumont, who believed that such punish.
ment would result in moxal renewal and thus mold convicts
into better citizens? Dickens was of the opinion thet
‘“jt}hose who have undergone this panishment MUST pat
into society again morally unhealthy and diseased."48 Tht
carly critique of the penitentiary and its regime of solitary
confinement :roubles the uutior that imprisonment is the
most suitable form of punishment fer a democratic society,

‘The current construction and expansion of state and fed
erel super-maximum security prisons, whose putative pure
ose is to address disciplinary problems within the penal
system, draws upon the historical conception of the penl-
tentiary, then considered the most progressive form of pun-
ishment. Today African-Americans and Latinos are vastly
overrepresented in these supermax prisons and control
units, the firs: of which emerged when federal correctional
authorities began to send prisoners housed throughout the
system whom they deemed to be “dangecoue” to the federal
prison in Marion, Ilinois. In 1983, the entire prison was
“Iecked down,” which meant that prisoners were confined
to their cells twenty-thee hours a day. This lockdown
became permancut, thus furnishing the general model for
the control uit and supermax prison.9 Today, there are
approximately sixty super-maximum security federal and
state prisons located in thirty-six states and many more
supermax uni:s in virtually every state in the country.

A description of supecuaxes 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 disap-
peared.

Inmates in super maximum security facilities are
usually held in single ell lock-down, commonly
refered to as solitary ccnfinement. . . [Clongregate
activities with other prisoners are usually prohibit-
ed; other prisuners cannot even ke seen from an
inmite’s cell, communication with other prisoners
is prohibited or difficult (consisting, for example, of
shouting from cell to cell); visiting and telephone
privileges are Jimited 2° 37

‘The new generation of super-maximum security facilities
aiso rely on state-of-the-art technology for monitoring and
controlling prisoner conduct and movement, utilizing, for
example, video monitors and remote-controlled elec:ronic
doors.5! “These prisons represent the application of suphis-
ticated, modern tecknology dedicated entirely to the task of
social control, and they isolate, regulate and surveil more
effectively than anything that has preceded them.”52

Thave highlighted the similarities between the carly U.S.
penitentiary—with its aspiratioas toward individual rchabil-
itation—and the repressive supermaxes of our era as a
reminder of the mutabili:y of history. What was once
regarded as progressive and even revolutionary represents
today the marriage of technological superiority and political
backwardness, No one—not cven the most ardent defenders
of the supermax—would try to argue today that absolute
segregation, including sensory cepr:vation, is restorative and
healing. The prevailing justification for the supermax:s that
the horrors it creates are the perfect complement for the hor-
sifying perscnalities deemed the worst of the worst by the
priscn system, In other words, there is no pretense that
rights are respected, there is no concem for te individual,
there is no sense thet men end women incarcerated in suver-
maxes deserve anything approach:ng respect and comfort.
According to a 1999 report issued vy the Nationa! Institute
of Corrections,

Genera‘ly, the overali constitutionality of these
jsupermax] programs remains unclear. As larger
numbers of inmates with a greaterdiversity of char-

Consider the case of Ualitornia, whose landscape has
deen thoroughly prisonized over the last twenty years. The
first state prison in California was San Quentin, which
opened in :852.4 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 con-
structed in California. Between 1962 and 1955, two camps
were established, along with the California Rehabilitation
Center. No: a single prison opcned during the second half of
the sixties, nor during the entire decade of the 1970s

However, a massive project of prisoa construckion was ini-
tiated during the 1980s—thatiis, duing the years ofthe Reagan
presidency. Nine prisons, including the Northern Calitornia
Facility for Women, were opened between 1984 aud 1989.
Recall thatit had talzen more than a hundred years to build the
first nine Californie 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 Vallcy State Prison for Women was
opened, According to its mission statement, it “provides 1,980
women’s beds for California's overcrowded prisoa system.”
However, in 2002, there were 3,570 prisoners® and the other
two women’s prisons were equally overcrowded.

‘There are now thirty-three prisous, thicty-eight camps, six-
teen commanity cerrectional facilities, and five tiny prisoner
mother facilities in California, In 2002 there were 157,979
people incarcerated in these instituticns, including approxi-
mately twenty thcusand people whom the state holds for
imaigtation violations, Tle 1acial composition of this prison
population is revealing. Latinos, who aze now in the majority,
account for 35.2 percent; African-Americans 20 percent; and
white prisoners 29.2 percent There are now more women in
prison in the state of California than there were in the entire
countsy 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.

Bedfordshire, Howard was one of the first philsn-
thiopists to attempt a systematic statistical 7
deccription of a social problem 5?

Likewise, Bender's analysis of the relationship between
the novel and the penitentiary emphasizes the extent to
which the philosupivel underpinnings of the prison
reformer's canipaigns echoed the materialism and utilitari-
anism of the English Enlightenment. The campaign to
reform the prisons was a project to impose order, classifica-
tion, cleanliness, good work habits, and self-conscicusness.
He argues that people detained within the old prisons were
no: 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 w:shed. Even sex was sometimes
available, as prostitutes were sometimes allowed temperary
entrance into the prisons: Howard and other reformers
called for the imposition of rigid rules that would “enforce
solitude and penitence, cleanliness and work.”60

“The new peritentiaries,” according to Bender, “sup-
planting both the old priscns and houses of co:rection,
explicitly reached toward . . . three goals: maintenance of
order within a largely urban lador force, salvation of the
soul, and rationalization of personality."6! He argues that
this is precisely wha: was narratively accomplished by the
novel. It ordered and classified social life, it representedindi-
viduals ay conscious of their surcoundings and as self-aware
and self-fashioning. Render tius sees a kinship between two
major developments of the eighteenth century~-the rise of
the novel in the cultaral sphere and the rise of the peniten-
tiary in the socio-legal sphere. If the novel as a culrural 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 writ-
ing, in particular, has periodically experienced waves of pop-
ularity. The public recognition of prison writing in the

United States has histcrically coincided with the influence of
social movements calling for prison reform and/r abolition
Robert Bumns's I Am a Fugitive from a Geo:gia Chain
Gang, and the 1932 Hollywood film upor, which it was
based, played a central role in the campaign to abolish the
chain gang, During the 1970s, which were mazked by intense
omanizing within, outside, and across prison walls, numer-
ous works authored by prisoners followed the 1970 publica-
tion of Geo:ge Jackson's Soledad Erother® and the antholo-
ay I covdited with Bettina Aptheker, If They Come in the
Moming.64 While many prison writers during that era had
discovered the emancipatory potential of writing or. their
own, relying either on the education they had received prior
to their imprisonment or on their tenacious efforts at self-
education, uthers pursued thei: writing as a direct result of
the expansion of prison educational programs during that ea,
Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has challenged the contemporary
dismantling of prison education programs, asks in Live from
Death Row, di

What societal interest is sexved by prisoners who
remain illiterate? What social benefit is there in
igncrance? How are people corrected while impris-
oned if their education is outlawed? Who profits
fother than the pr.sou establishment itself} from
stupid prisoners?65

A practicing journalist before his arrest in 1982 on charges
of K:lling Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, Abu-
Jamal has regularly produced articles un capital punishment,
focusing especially on its racial and clase disproportions, His
ideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty with
the more general challenges to the expanding US. prison sys-
tem and are particularly helpful to activists whosee< to asso-
ciate death penalty abolitiunism with prison abolitionism.
His prison writings have been published in both popular and
scholarly jou-nals (such as The Nation and Yale Law Journal}
as well as in three collections, Live from Death Row, Death
Blossoms, and All 1hings Censored.*’

Abu-Jamal and many otker prison writers have strongly
ctiticizec the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners, which
‘was enacted in the 1994 crime bill,6® as indicative of the
contemporary pattern of dismantling educational programs
‘behind bars. As creasive writing courses for prisoners were
defunded, virtually every literary journal publishing prison-
ers’ writing eventually collapsed. Of the scores of magazines
and newspapers pyoduced Leind walls, only the Augolite at
Louisiana’s Angola Prison and Prison Legal News at
Washington State Prison remain, What this means is that
precisely at a time of consol:dating 2 significant writing cul-
ture behind bars, repressive strategies are being deployed to
dissuade prisoners from educating themselves.

If the publication of Malcolm X's autobiography marks
2 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 prisun practices are systematically
dashing those hopes. In the 1950s, Malectm’s prisor. edu-
cation was a dramatic example of prisoners’ ability to turn
their incarceration into a transformative experience. With
no available means of crganizing his quest for knowledge,
hy proceeded tu read a dictivuaty, copying each word in his
own hand, By the time he could immerse himself in read-
ing, he noted, “months passed wishout my even thinking
abou: being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had
been so trely 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 speciai
privileges—such as checking out more than the maximum
number of books. Even so, in orde: to pursue this self-edu-
cation, Malcolm had towork against the prison regime—he
often read on his cell floor, long after lights out, by the
glow of the corridor light, talcing 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
priscn educational programs is indscative of the official dis-
regard today for rehabilitative strategiss, particularly thase

Y¥2

that encourage individnal prisoners to acquire au-onomy of
the mind. The documentary film The Last Graduation
describes the role pisoners played in establishing @ four-year
sollege program at New York's Greenhaven Prison and,
twenty-two years later, the official decision to dismantle it.
According to Eddie Filis, 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.”7! 43

In the aftermath of the 1971 prisoner rebellion at Attica
and the government-sponsored massacre, public opinion
began to fevor prison reform. Forty-three Attica prisoners
and eleven guards and civilians were killed by the National
Guard, who kad been ordered to <etake the prison by
Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The leaders of the prison
rebellicn had been very specific about their demands. In
their “practical demands’ they expsessed 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 ené to censorship—all of which.
they saw as indispensable to their educational needs. As
Eddie Ellis observes in The Lost Gracuation,

Prisoners very early recognized the fact thet they
needed to be better educated, that the more educa-
tion they had, the better they would be able to deal
with themselves and their problems, the problems
of the prisons and the problemas of the communi.ies
{com which most of them came.

Lateef Islam, another former prisoner featured in this
documentary, said, “We he'd classes before the college
came, We aught each other, and sumtimes under penalty
of a beat-up.”

‘After the Attica Rebellion, more than five hundred pris-
oners were transferred to Greemhaven, including some of the
leaders who continued to press for educational programs. As
a direct result of theirdemands, Marist College, a New York

state college near Greeahaven, began to offer college-level
courses in 1973 and eventually established the infrastrec-
ture for an on-site four-year college program. The program
thrived for twenty-two years. Some of the many prisoners
who eared their degrees at Greenhaver pursved postgradu-
ate studies after their release. As the documentary power-
fully demonstrates, the progrsm produced dedicated men
who left prison and offered thetr newly acquired knowledge
and skills to their communities on the outside.

In 1994, consistent with the general pattern of creating
more prisons and: more sepression within all prisons,
Congress took up the question of withdrawing college fund.
ing for inmetes. The congressional debate concluded with a
cecision to add an amendment to the 1994 crime bill that
eliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, thus effectively
cefunding all higher elucatioual prograins. 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 0: removing the books
that, in many ways, syasbolized the possibilities of freedom.
Or, as one of the Marist professors sai, “They see books as
fnll af gold.” The prisoner whofor many years had served as
a clerk for the college sadly reflected, as books were being
moved, that there was nothing left to do m prison-—except
perhaps bodybuilding. “Bu:,” 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
irom most U.S. prisons.

South Chicago ABC.
e ig

4 Zine Distro
a P.O. Box 721

Fiomewood, IL 60430

Furst Three Chaptery

Acknowledgments

1 should not be listed as the sole author of this book, for its
ideas reflect various forms of collaboration over the last six
years with activists, scholars, prisoners, and cultura) work:
exs who have tried to reveal and contest the impact of the
prison industrial complex on the lives of people—within and
outside prisons—throughout the world, The organizing
committee for the 1998 Berkeley conference, Critical
Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, included
Be (risa d. brown}, Ellen Barry, Jennifer Beach, Rose Braz,
Julie Browne, Cynthia Chendler, Kamari Clarke, Leslie
DiBenedetto Skopek, Gita Drury, Rayne Galbraith, Ruthie
Gilmore, Naneen Karraker, Terry Kupers, Rachel Lederman,
Joyce Miller, Dorsey Nunn, Dylan Rodriguez, Eli
Rosenblatt, Jane Segal, Cassandra Shaylor, Andrea Smith,
Nancy Stoller, Julia Sudbury, Robin Templeton, and Suran
Thrift, In the long process of coordinating plans for this con-
ference, which attracted aver three thousand people, w=
worked through anumber of the questions that I raise in this
book. I thank the members of tha: committee, including
those who used the conference as a foundation to build the
organization Critical Resistance. In 2000, I was a memer of
a University of California Humanities Research Institute
Resident Research G:oup and had the opportunity to partic-
ipate in regular discussions on many of these issues. I thank
the members of the group—Cina Dent, Ruth Gilmore,
Avery Gurdon, David Coldberg Nancy Schepper Hughes,
and Sandy Barringer—for their invaluable insights.
Cassandra Shaylor and I ccauthored a report to the 2001
Worlé Conference Against Racism on women of color and
the prison industrial complex—a number of whose ideas
have made their way into this book. I have alsc drawn from.
a number of other recent articles I have published in various:
collections. Over the last five years Gina Dent and I have
made numerous presentations together, published together,
and engaged in protracted conversations on what it means to
do scholarly and activist work that can encourage us all to
imagine a world without prisons. I thenk her for reading the
manuscript and I am deeply appreciative of her intellectual
and emotioaal support. Finally, I thank Greg Ruggiero, the
editor of this series, for his patience and encouragement.

3
Contents

ARE PRISONS
OBSOLETE?

Acknowledgments .........

CHAPTER
Inuoduction—Prison Reform or Prison Abolition? .....

CHAPTER 2
Siavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist
Perspectives Toward Prison . .

CHAPTERS
Imprisonment and Reform

© 2003 by Angela Y. Davis

Cpen Media series editor, Greg Ruggiero.

SEVEN STORIES PRESS
New York
1 4

\ntroduction-Prison Reform or
Prison Abolition?

In most parts of the world, it is taker: for granted that who-
ever is convicted of a serious crime will be seut to prison, In
some countries—inclnding the United States—where capital
punishment has not yet been abolished, a small but signifi-
cant numter cf people are seater.ced to death for what are
considered especially grave crimes. Many people are familiar
with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fac:, ithas
already been abolished in most countries. Even the
staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the
fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few peo-
ple find life without the death penalty difficu:t 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 atolition movement
also has a long history—one that dates back to the historical
appeureuive 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 ta themselves as
“antiprison activists’—-are simply trying to ameliorate
prison conditions or perhaps to reform the priscn in more
fundamental ways, In mos: cixcles prison abolition is simply
unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists arc dis-
missed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are. a: hest nnre-
alistic and impracticatle, and, at worst, mystifying and fool-
ish. This is a measure of how difficalt :t is to envision a
social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering
people in dreadful pleces designed to separate -hem from

s

their communities and families. ‘he prison is considered so
“macural” that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it

It is my hope that this book will encourage readers to
ouestion their own assumptions about the prison. Many peo-
ple havealready reached the conclusion that the deathpenal-
ty is an outmoded form of punishment that violates basic
principles of human rights. It is time, I believe, toencourage
similar conversations ahont the prison. During my own
career as an antiprison activist I have seen the population of
US. prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in
black, Latino, and Native American communities now have
4 far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent
education. When many young people decide to join the mili-
tary service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in
prison, it should cause us to wonéer whether we should not
try to introduce better alternatives.

The question of whether the prison has become an obso-
lete institution has become especially urgent in light of the
fact that more than two million people (out of a world total
of rine million} now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facili-
ties, and immigrant detention centers, Are we willing to rel-
egate ever larger numbere of people from racially oppressed
communities to an isclated existence marked by authoritari-
an regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion
that produce severe mental instability? According toa recent
study, there may be twice as many people suffering from
mental illness who are in jails ard prisons than there are ir
all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined!

‘When { first became involved in antiprison activism dur-

ing the late 1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were
then slose to two hundred thousand people in prison. Had
anyone told me that in three decades ten times as niany peo-
ple would be locked away in cages, I would have heen
absolately incredulous. Timagine that I would haverespond-
ced 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 beea consolidat.
ed], 1do not believe that the U.S. government will be able :0
lock up ¢0 many people without producing power/ul public

acteristics, backgrounds, end behaviors are incar-
cerated in these facilities, the likelihood of legal
challenge is increased. 53 28

During the cighicenth aud nineteenth centuries, absolute
solitude and strict regimentation of the prisoner's every
action were viewed as strategies for transfcrming kabits and
ethics. That is té say, the idea that imprisonment should be
the main form of punishment reflected a belief in the poten-
tial of white mankind for progress, no: only in science and
industry, but at the level of the individual membe: of socie-
ty as well. Prison reformers mirrored Enlightermeat
assumptions of progress in every aspect of human—or to be
more precise, white Western—society. In his 1987 study
Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction aul the Architecture of
Mind in ighteenth-Century England, fohn Bender proposes
the very intriguing argument that the emergent literary genre
of the novel furthered a discourse of progress and individual
transformation tha: encouraged attitudes toward punish-
ment to change. These attitudes, he suggests, heralded the
conception and constructicn of penitentiary prisons during
the latter part of the eighteenth century as. reform suited to
the capacities of those who were deemed human,

Reformers who called for the imposition of penitentiary
erchitecturc and regimes on the thea existing structure of the
prison aimed their critiques at the prisons that were primari-
ly used for purposes of pretrial detention or as an alternative
runishment for those who were unable to pay fines exacted
ty 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 Russiaa army at
Chersomin 1791.”58 At the conclusion of his first trip abroad,
he successfully ran for the office of sheriff in Bedfoxdshire. As
sheriff he investigated the prisons under his own jurisdiction
and later “set out tc visit every prison in England and Wales
to docuraent the evils he had first observed at Bedford,"58

Located in the same town as Valley State and literally acrose
the streets the second-largest womer’s prison im the world—
Central California Women’s Fac:lity—whose population in
900), slsn havered around thirty-five hundred?

If you look at a map of California depicting the Locatior
of the thirty-three state prisons, you will see that the only
area that is not heavily populated by prisons is the aree
north of Sacramento. Still, there are two prisons in the towr.
of Susanville, and Pelican Bay, one of the state's notorious
super-maximum security prisons, is near the Oregon border.
California art:st Sandow Birk was inspired by the colonizing
ofthe landscape by prisons tc produce a series of thirty-taree
landscape paintings of these institutions and their surround.
ings. They are collected in his book Incarcerated: Visions a!
Califcenia in the Twenty-first Century.®

1 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 systesn of incarceration with
the implicit consent of the public. Why were peaple so quick
to assume thet locking away an increasingly large proportion
of the U.S, population would help those who live in the free
world feel saier and more secure? ‘Ihis question can be for-
mulated itt more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make
people think thet 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 pris
ons in California as “a geographical solution to socio-eco-
nomic problems.” Her analysis of the prison industrial com-
plex in California describes these developmentsas a response
to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity.

California's new prisons are sited on devalued rural
Jand, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultur-
al acres... The State bougat 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.1¢

But, as Gilmore points out, neither the jobs nor the more
general economic rev.talization promised by prisons as
occurred, At the same time, this promise of progress helps
us to undesstand why the legislature and California’s voters
decided to approve -he construction of all these new prisons.
People wanted to believe that prisons would not only reduce
crime, they would also provide jobs and stimulate ecnonam-
ic development in out-of-the-way places.

Atbottom, there is one fundamental question: Why do we
take prison for granted? While a relatively small proportion
of the population has ever dizectly experienced life inside
prison, this is not true in poor black and Latina communi-
ties, Neither is it true for Native Americans or ‘or certain
Asian-American communities, But even among those people
who must regrettably accept prison sentences—especially
young people—es 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 whoie, 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, i: 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 alraid 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 thet anyone, including our-
selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the
prison es 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. Beceuse of the per-
sistent power of racism, “criminals” and “evildoers” are, in
the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The
prison therefore functions ideologica'ly as an abstract site
into which undesirabies are deposited, relieving us of the
responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those
communities from which prisoners are drawn in such dispro-
pottionate numbers, This is the ideclogical work that the
prison periorms—it relieves us of the responsibility of seri-
ously engaging with the problems of our suciety, especially
those produced by racism end, increasingly, global capitalism,

What, for example, do we miss if we try to think about
prison expansion without address.ng larger economic devel-
opments? 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
shambies. Huge numbers of people Lose jobs and prospects
for future jobs. Because the cconomic base of these commu
nities is destroyed, education and other surviving social
services are profoundly affected. This >rocess turns the men,
womer, and children whe live in these damaged communi-
ties into perfect candidates fo: prison.

In the meantime, corporations associated with the pan-
ishment 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 >lack hole into
which the detritus of contemporary capitalisn is deposited.
Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devonrs social
wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions
that lead people to prison. There ate thus real and often quite
complicated connections between the deindustrislization of
the eccnoray—a process that reached its pcak during the
1980s—an¢ the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began
to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era, However, the demand

lo

fox mure prisons was cepreserted to the public in simplistic
terms. More priscns were needed because there was more
crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the
time the prison construction boom began, official crime sta-
tistics were alreacy felling. Moreover, draconian drag laws
were being enacted, and “three-strikes” provisions were on
the agendas of many s:atcs. iY

In order to understand the proliferstion 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 cightics and
nineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was there
such an obvious level of comfort with the prospect cf many
new prisons? A partial answer to this question has to do
with Ute way we consume media images of the prison, even
as the cealities of imprisonment ere hidden from almost all
who have not had the misfortune of doing time, Cultural
critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiari-
ty with the prison comes in part from representations of
prisons in filin and other visual media,

The history of visuality linked tc the prison is also
a main reinforcement of the institution of the
prison as a naturalized part of our social landscape,
The histury of film has always been wedded to the
representation of incarceration. Thomas Edison's
first films (dating back to the |901 reenactment pre-
sexted as newsreel, Execution of Czolgosz with
Panorama of Auburr: Prison} 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, in fact a genre.!!

Some of the most well known prison films are: J Want to
Live, Papillon, Cool Hand Luke. and Escape from Aicatraz.
It also bears mention:ng that television programming has
become increasingly saturated with images of p:isons. Some
recent documentaries include the ABE series The Big
House, which vousists uf programs on San Quentin,
Alcatraz, Leevenworth, and Alderson Federal Reformatory
for Women. The long-running HBO program Oz has -nar-
aged 10 persuade many viewers that they know exactly whet
goes on in maje maximum-security prisons, IZ

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
o not, by the simple fact of watching movies or TV. It is vis~
tually impossible to avoid consuming images of prison. In
1997, I was myself quite astonished to find, when I inte:-
viewed 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 cur image environment. This has
caused ns to take the existence of prisons for granted The
prison hes becomea key ingredient of our commonsense. 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 imaginetion to envision life
beyoad the prison,

This is not to dismiss the profound changes that have
occu:red in the way public conversaticns about the prison
are conducted. Ten years ago, even as the drive to expand the.
prison system reached its zenith, there were very few or-
tiques of this process available to the public. In fact, 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 bea ccnfined :o low, medium,
and max:mum security, a new category was invented—chat
of the super-maximum security prison, or the supermax.
‘The turn toward increased repression in # prison system,
distinguished from the beginning of its history by ite repres.
sive regimes, caused some journalists, public intellectuals,
and progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance on
prisons to solve social problems that are actua‘ly exacerbst-
ed by mass incarceration. 13

In 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project pub-
lished 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 aiges of ewenty and :wenty-nine were
among these numbers.!2 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 renge were in jail or prison, ox on p:0-
bation or parole. The second study also revealed that the
group experiencing the greatest increase was black women,
whose imprisonment increased by seventy-eight percent.'3
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Abrican-
‘Americans as a whole now represent the majority of state
and federal prisoners, with a total of 603,400 black
inmates—118,600 more than the total number of white
inmates.14 During the late 1990s major articles on prisom
expansion appeared in Newsweek, Harper's, Emerge, and
Atlantic Monthly. Even Colin Powell raised the question of
the rising number of black men in prisor. 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 propusals fcr prison reform. While public dis-
course has bezome more flexible, the emphasis is almost
inevitably on generating the changes that will produce a bet-
ter prison system. In other words, the increased flexibility
that has allowed for critical discussicn of the problems asso:
ciated with the expausion of prisons also restricts this dis.
cuceion to the question of prison reform.

‘As important as some reforms may be—the eliminetion
of sexual abuse aad medical neglect in women’s prison, for
example—frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help
toproduce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the
prison, Debares about strategies of decarceratior, which
should be the focal point of our conversations cn the prisoa
ciisis, 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 Sring
as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into
what prisoners call “the free world.” How can we move to
decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services?
How can we take serivusly strategies of restorative rather
than exclusively punitive justice? Flfective 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 espe-
cfally communtsies of color, into the juvenile system and
then on to prison. The most difficult end urgent challenge
today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice,
where the prisor. no longer serves as our major anchor.

4

Slavery, Civil Rights, and
Abolitionist Perspectives Toward
Prison

“Advocates of incarceration . .. hoped that the pen'ten.
timry would zzhabilitote its inmates. Whereas phioso-
phers perceived a ceaseless state of war between chattel
slaves and their masters, criminnlogises hored to negot:
ate a peace treaty of sorts within the prison walls. Yet
herein lurked a patadox: if the penitentiery’s internal
regime resembled that of the plantation so closely that the
two were often loosely equated, how could the prison pos:
sibly fanecion co rehabilitate crimiralst”

Adam Jay Hirech!5
‘The prison is net the ordy institution that has posed complex
challenges to the people whu have lived with it and have
become 50 inured to iis presence that they could not con-
ceive 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 che abolition of the “pecu-
liar institution.” White antislavery abolitionists sachas John
Brown and William Lloyd Gazrison were represented in the
dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics.
When Frederick Douglass embarked on his cereer as an anti-
slavery oratus, white peogle—even those who were passion
ate abclitionisis—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 :t dilticult to imagine black people as equals. Ss

Tt took a long aud violent civil war in order to legally dis.
establish the “peculiar institution.” Even though the
‘Thirteenth Amendment :o the U.S. Constitution outlaweé
involuntary servitude, white supremacy continued to be
embraced by vas: ntmbers of people and became deeply
inscribed in aew institutions. One of these post elavery
institutions was lynching, which was widely accepted fo:
many decades thereafter. Thanks to the work of figures such
as Ida B. Wells, an antilynching campaign was gradually
legitimized daring the first half of the twentieth century.
‘The NAACP, an organization that continues to conduct
egal challenges against discrimination, evolved from these
efforts to abolish lynching.

Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a cen-
tury after the abolition of slavery. Many pzople who lived
under Jin Crow could net envision « legal system defined by
racial equality. When the gavernor of Alabama personally
attempted to preven: Aithucine 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. “Scaregation today, segregation tomo:
row, 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
dian he could have imagined.

‘Althongh government, comporatioas, and the dominant
media try:to represent racism as a2 unfortunate aberration of
the past tat has been relegated to the graveyard of U.S. his-
tory, it continues to profocndly influence contemporary
structures, attitudes, and behaviurs. 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 nor have imagined life without slavery,
life without lynching, olife without segregation. The 2001
World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia, and Related Intclerances held ir. Durban, Sout
‘Africa, divulged the immensity of the global task of eliminat-
ing racism, There may be mary disagreements regarding wha
counts as racism end what are the mest effective strategies to
eliminate it, However, especially with che downfall of the
apartheid regime in South Africa, there is a global consensus
that racism should not define the future of the planet.

(have referred to these historica: examples of efforts to
dismantle racist institutions because they have considerable
relevance to cur 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
scgrcgation are certainly compelling examples of social insti-
tutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as
everlesting as the sun. Yet, ia the case of all three examples,
‘we can point to movernents that assumed the radical stance
of announcing the obsolescence of these institusions. It may
help us gain perspective on the pricon if we txy to imagine
how strange and discomforting the debates about the abso-
lescence of slavery must have been to those who took the
“peculiar institution” for granted—and especially to those
who veaped direct benefi:s from this dreadful system: of racist
explcitation. And even though there wae widespread resie:

ance among black slaves, there weie even some among them
who assumed that they and their progeny would be always
subjected to the tyzanny of slaver 17

bave introduced three abolition carapaigns 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 beliets
to justify the relegation of people of African desvent w the
legal status of property. Lynching was an extralegal institu-
tion that surrendered thou sands of African-American lives
to the violence of ruthless racist mobs. Uncer segregation,
black people were legelly declared second-class citizens, for
whom voting, job, education, ané housing rights were dras-
tically curtailed, if they were availabe at all.

‘What is the relationship between hese historical expres-
sions of racism and the role of the prison system today?
Exploring such connections may offer us a different perspec
tive on the current state of the punishizent indusuy. I! we
are already perouaded that racism should not be allowed ta
define the planet's futuré and if we can successful.y argue
that prisons are racist institutions, this may lead us to take
seriously the prospect of declaring prisons obsolete.

For the moment ] am concentrating on the history of
antiblack racism in order to make the point that the prison
reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operaze 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. punishmeut system as
well—the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, and
Asian-Americans. These racisms also congeal end 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 racisin that target people of colcr
who are not black. Consider the mass arrests and detention
of people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Muslim her-
itage in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on
the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

This leads us wo two isnportant 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 eatly peusiteutiary system, The
penitentiary as an institution that simultaneously punished
and rehabilitéted its inhabitants was a new system of pun-
ishment chat first made its appearance in the United States
around the time of the American Revolution. This new sys-
tem was based on the replacement of capital and corpora
punishment by incarceration. 1a

Imprisonment itself was new neither to the United States,
nor to the world, but until the creation of this new institu-
tion called the penitentiiry, it served as a prelude to punisk-
ment, People who were to be subjec:ed to some form of cor
poral punishment were detained in prison until the execu-
tion of the punishment. With the penitentiary, inca:ceration
became the punishirent itself. As is indicated in the desig-
natioa “penitentiary,” imprisonment was regarded as rehe~
bilitative and the penitentiary prison wes devised te provide
convicts with the conditions for re‘lecting 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 revolu-
tionary period, the penitentiary was generally viewed ah 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 Englsh, However, the contention that
prisoners would refashion themselves if only given the
opportunity to reflect and labor in solitude and silence dis-
regarded the impact of authoritarian regimes of living and
work, Indeed, there were significant similarities between
slavery and the penitentiary prison. Historian Adam Jay
Hirsch hes pointed ont:

One may perceive in the penitentiary many reflec-
tions ot chactel slavery as it was practiced im the j 9
South. Both ‘institutions subordinated their subjects
to the will of others. Like Southern slaves, prison
inmates followed 4 daily routine specified by their
superiors. Both institutions reduced their subjects to
dependence un otkers for the supply of basic human
services such ss food-and shelter. Both isclated their
subjects from the general populetion by confining
them to a fixed habita:. And both frequently coerced
their subjects :0 work, often for longer hours and for
less compensation than free laborers.\6

‘As Hirsch has observed, both institutions deployed simi-
Jar 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. Mo:cover, both
prisonero and claves were considered to have pronounced
proclivities to crime, People sentenced to the penitentiary ir
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 Ilirsch further reveals,
‘Thomas Jefferson, who supported the sentencing af con-
victed people to hard lator on road and water projects, also
pointed out that he would exclude slaves from: this sort cf
punishment. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sen-
tencing them to penal labor would nut mark a difference in
their condition. Jefferson saggested banishment to nther
countries instead.!8

Particularly in the United States, race has always played
a central role in constrecting presumptions of criminality.
After the abolition of slavery, former slave states passed
new legislation revising the Slave Cades in order to regulate
the behavior of free blacks in weys similar to those thet had
existed daring 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 gesturcs or acts—that were criminalized only
when the person charged was black. With the pessage of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constiution, slavery and
involuntary servitude were putatively abolished. However,
there was,a significant exception. In the wording of the
amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude were abol
ished “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 bean extricated fram a condition
of hard labor for life, could be legelly sen:enced to penal
servitude 20

In che immediate «ftermath ofslavery, the southem 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 cxample,
declared vagrant “anyone/who was guilty of theft, had run
away from a‘ob, apparently}, was drunk, was wanton in con-
duct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money
cerelessly, and . .. all other idle and disorderly persons,”
‘Thus, vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable
by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very
plantations that previously had tvived on slave labor

‘Mary Ellen Cartin’s study of Alabama prisoners during
the decades following emancipation discloses that before the
tour hundred thousand black slaves in that state were set
free, ninety-nine percent of prisoners in Alabama's peniten-
tiaries were white. As a consequence of the shiits provoked
by the institution of the Black Codes, within a sho:t period
of time, the overwhelming majority of Alabama's convicts
were black.20 She further observes:

Althongh the vast majority of Alabama's antebel-
lam prisoners were white, the popular perception
was that the South’s true criminals were its black
slaves. During the 1870s the growing number of

black prisoners in the South further butcressed the
belief that African Americans were inherently 21
criminal and, in particular, prone to larceny2?

In 1883, Frederick Douglass had already written about
the South's tendency to “impute crime to color. When a
particularly egregious cr:me was committed, he noted, not
only was guilt frequently assigned to a black person regard
Jess of the perpetrator’s race, but white men sometimes
sough: to escape punishment by disguising themselves as
black. Douglass won'd 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 rob-
bery. The wounded man, however, was discovered to be a
respectable white citizen whw hed colored his face black.

The above example from Douglass demonstrates how
whiteness, in the words of legal scholar Chery] Harris, oper-
ates as property.23 According to Hamis, the fac: that white
identity was possessed as property meant that rights, liber-
ties, and sclf-identity were affisimed 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 ir. schemes to deny black people their rights te due
process. Interestingly, cases similar to the one Douglass dis-
cusses above emerged in the United States during the 1990s:
in Boston, Charles Stuart mardered 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 cr:me continues to be imputed to color
resides in the maay evocations of “racial profiling” in our
time, That it is possible ro be targeted by the police for no
other reason than the color o! one’s skin is not mere specu:
lation. Police departments in major urban areas have admit
ted the existence of forma! procedures designed to maximize
the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested—

even in the absence of probable cause. In the aftermath o:
the September 11 attacks, vast numbers of reop‘e of Middle
Exstem and South Asian heritage were arrested and detained
by the police agency known as Immigcation and
Naturalization Services {INS}. The INS is the federal agency
that claims the largest number of armed agents, even more
than the FBL?*,

During the post-slavery era, as black people were inte:
grated into southern penal systems—and as the penal sys-
tem became a systern of penal servitude—the punishments
associated with slavery became further incorporated into
the pena) system. “Whipping,” ay 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 priscners.’2£ Asindicat-
ed above, black people were imprisoned under the laws
assembled in the various Black Codes uf the suuchern states,
which, because they were rearticulations of the Slave Codes,
tended to racialize penality and link it closely with previous
regimes of slavery. The expansion cf the convict lease sys-
tem and the county chain gang mesnt that the antebellum
criminal justice system, which focused far more iutensely
‘on black people thar. on whites, defined southern criminal
justice largely as < means o! 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 hac
shown them to have labored in the past: in gangs,
subjected to constant supervision, and under the
discipline of the lash, Since Whese were the requi-
sites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks,
Southern whites almost universally conchided that
blacks could not work unless subjected to such
intense surveillance and discipline26

Scholars who have studied the convict lease system poirt
out that in many important respects, convict leasing was fer
worsethan slavery, an insight that can be gleaned from citles
such as One Dies, Get Another (by Mancini}, Worse Thaz
Slavery (David Oshinsky’s work on Parchmen Prison|,2” and
Twice the Work cf Pree Labor (Alex Lichtenstein’s examina-
tion of the political economy. of convict Jeasing}2® Slave
owners may have been concerned for the survival of indi-
vidual slaves, who, after all, represented significant invest-
ments. Convicts, on the other hand, were lease¢ not as indi-
viduals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to
death withou: affecting the profitability of « convict crew.

According to descriptions by contemporaries, the condi-
tions under which leased convicts end county chain gangs
lived were far worse than those under which black people
had lived as slaves. The records ct Mississippi plantations in
‘zoo Delta during the late 1880s indicate that

the prisoners ate and slept on bere ground, without
blankets or mattresses, and often without clothes.
They were punished for “slow hoeing” jten lashes},
“sory plenting” (five lashes’, and "being light with
cotton” five lashes}. Some who attempted to
escape were whippec “till the blood ran down their
legs”; others had a metal spur riveted to their ‘eet
Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumcnia,
malana, frostbite, consumption, sunstxoke, dyse-
tery, gunshot wounds, and ‘shackle poisoning” {the
constant rubbing of chains ané leg irons against
bare fleshi.29

‘The appalling treatment to which convicts were subject-
ed uncer the lease system recapizulated and further extend.
ed the regimes of slavery. If, as Adam Jay Hirsch contends,
the early iacamations of the U.S. penitentiary in the North
tended to mirtor the institution of slavery in many impor-
tant respects, the post~Civil War evolution of the punish:
ment system was in very literal ways the continuation of a
slave system, which was no longer legal in the “ree” world.
‘The population of convicts, whose racial composition was
dramatically transformed by the abolition of slevery, could
be scbjected to such intense exploitation and to such hor-
rendous modes of punishment precisely because they con-
tinued to be perceived as slaves, 2

Historian Mary Ann Curtin has observed that many schol-
as who have acknowledged the deeply entrenched racism of
the post-Civil Wer structures of punishment in the South have
failed to identify the extent to which racism colored common-
sense 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—znd this, she says, is indeed par-
tially true—that in the aftermathof emancipation, large num:-
bers of black people were forced by their new social situation
to steal in order to survive, It was the transfcrmation of petty
thievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers cf
black people to the “involuntary servitude” legalized hy the
Tairteenth Amendment, What Curtin suggests :s that these
charges cf theft were frequently fabricated outright. They
“also set ved as subterfuge for politicel revenge. After emanci-
pation the courtroom became an ideal place to exact racial ret
ribution.”90 In this sense, the work of the criminal justice sys-
ter was intimately related tc the extralegal work of lynching,

Alex Lichtenstein, whose study focuses on the role of the
convict lease system ia furging a new lator 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 labo:
tcrce, an¢ without uadermining planters’ control of
black labor. tn fact, quite the opposite: the penal
system could be used as a powerful sanctior. ageinst
rural blacks who challenged the racial order upon
which agricultural lzbor control relied.s?

Lichtenstein discloses, for example, the extent to which
the building of Georgia railvosds during the nineteenth cen-
tury relied on black convict labor. He further reminds us
that as we drive dows. the most famous street in Atlanca—
Peachtree Street—we ride on the backs of conviets. “{TIhe
renowned Peachtree Street aad 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.”82 2S

Lichtenstein’s major argument is that the convict lease
was not an irrational regression; it was not primarily a
throwback to precapitalise modes of producsion, Rather, it
‘was a most efficient and most rational deployment of racist
strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South.
In chis sense, he argues, “convict labor was in many ways in
the vanguard cf the region’s first tentative, ambivalent, s:cps
towaré medernity.”33

‘Those of us who have had the opportunity tc visit nine-
teenth-century mansions thet were originally constructed
on slave plantations are rarely concent with an aesthetic
appraisal of these structures, no matter how beauti‘ul they
may be. Sufficient visual imagery of toiling black slaves cir-
culate enoughin our environment for us to imagine the bra-
tality that hides just beneath the suiface of these wondrous
mansions. We have learned how to recognize the role of
slave labor, as well as the racism it embodied, But black con-
viet labor remains a hidden dimension of our history. It is
extremely unsettling to think of modern, industria‘ized
urban areas a3 having been originally produced under the
racist labor concitions of penal servitude that are often
described by historians as even worse than slavery.

1 giew up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Because of
its mines—cnal and iron ore—and its steel mills tha:
remained active until the deindustrialization process of the
1980s, it was widely known as “the Pistsburgh of the
South.” ‘the Jathers of many of my fricads worked in these
mincs and mills. It is only recently that I have learned that
the black miners and stéelworkers I knew during my child-
hood inherited their place in Birmingham’s industrial deve!-
opment from black convicts forced to do this work under the
lease system. As Custin observes,

‘Many ex-prisoners became miners because Alabama
used prison labor extensively in its coalmines. By
2886 all of Alabemats able male prisoners were leased
to two major mining companies the Tennessee Coal
and Iron Company (TCf} and Sloss {ron and Steel
‘Company. For a cha:ge of up to $18.50 per month per
tan, these corporations “leased,” or sented prisou
laborers and worked them in coalmines3¢

Learning about this little-acknowledged dimension of
black and labor history has caused me to reevaluate my own
chilchovd experiences,

‘One of the many ruses racism achieves is the virtual era-
sure of historical contributions by people of calor. Here we
kave a penal system that ‘was racist in many respects—dis-
criminatory arrests and sentences, conditions of work,
modes of punishment—together with the racist erasure of
the significant contributions .made by block convicts as a
result of racist coercion, Just as it is difficult to imagine how
souch is owed to convicts relegated to penal servitude during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find it difficult
wday to feel a connection with che prisoners who produce a
ising number of commodities that we take for grantedin our
daily lives. In the state of California, public colleges and uni-
versities are provided with furnituce produced by prisoners,
the vast majority of whom are Latizo and black.

“There are aspects of our history thet we need wo interty-
gate and rethink, the recognition of which may help us to
adopt more complicated, critical postures towarc the pres-
entend che future, [have focused oa the work of afewschol-
ars whose work urges us to raise questions about the past,
present, and future. Curtin, for example, is not simply von-
tent 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 sesearch to urge us to think
about the uncanny paraile's between :he convict lease sys-
tem in the ninctecnth century and prison privatization in
the twenty-tirst.

In the late nineteenth century, coal companies
wished to keer their skilled prison laborers for as,

long as they, could, leading to denials of “short 2 7
time.” Today, ¢ slightly different economic incen-

tive can lead to similer consequences. CCA
[Corree:ions Corporation of America| ie paid per
prisoner. If the supply dries up, or too many are
released too early, their profits are affectec .

Longer prison terms mean greater profits, but the
larger point is that the profit motive promotes the
expansion of imprisonment.35

‘The persistence of the prison es the main form cf pun-
sshment, with its racist ard sexis: dimensiors, has created
his historical continuity berween the nineteenth- and early-
twentieth century convict lease systern and the privatized
prison business today. While the convict lease system was
legally abolished, its struccures cf exploitation have
ceemerged in the patterns of privatization, and, more gener-
ally, in che wide-ranging corporatization of punishment that
has produced a prison industrial complex. If the prison con-
tinues to dominate the landscape of punisment throughout
this century and into the next, what might await coming
generations of impoverished African-Americans, Latinos,
Native Americans, and Asian-Americans? Given the paral-
lels between the prison and slavery, a productive exercise
might consist in speculating zbout what the present might
look like if slavery or its successor, the convict lease system,
had not been abolishec.

To be sure, am not suggesting that the abolition of slav-
ery and the lease system has produced an era of equality and
justice. On the contcary, racism surreptitiously defines
social and economic structures in ways that are difficult to
identity 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 0U0 (slelection of George W. Bush as
president. If only the black men and women denicd the right
10 vote because of an actual or pr2sumed felony record had

been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the
White House today. Aad perhaps we would not be dealing
with the awful costs of the War oa Terrorism declared dur-
ing the first year of his administration. If not for his election,
the people of Iraq might not have suffersd death, destruc
tion, 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
cave system or racial segregation. But we do nut 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 produc-
tive and creative work, to physical and mental recreation.
‘And there is even more compelling evidence about the dam-
age wrought by the expansion of the prison system in the
schools located in poor cominunities 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 intellectua; 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 greate: presence in our soci-
ety! In the nineteenth century, antislavery activists insisted
that as long ac slavery continued, the future of democreey
was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprison
activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revi-
talization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the
prison system,

3
Imprisonment and Reform
“One should recall that the movernent for reforming the

prisons, for controling their fanctioning is no: a recent
phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in

23
a recognition of tailure, Pricon ‘ietorm’ ia virtually eon.
temporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were,
its programme.”

Michel Foucauit3*
24

It is ironic that the prison itself was a product of concerted

efforts by reformers to crease a better system of punishment.

If the words “prison reform” so easily slip from our lips, it is

because “prison” und “sefoun” have been inextricably

linked since the heginning of the nse 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. Tuday this

seems ironiz, but incarceration within a penitenti:
assumed to be humane—at least far more humane than the
capital and corporal punishment inherited from England end
other European countries. Foucault opers his study,

Discipline and Punish: The Birch of the Prison, with a graph-

ic description of a 1757 execution in Paris, The man who

was put to death was first forced to undergo a series of for-
midable torcures ordered by the court. Red-hot pincers were
used to burn away the flesh from his limbs, and molten lead,
boiling ofl, burning resin, and other substances were melted
together and poureé onto the wounds. Finally, he was drawn
and quartered, his body burned, and che ashes tossed into
the wind.3? Under English common law, a conviction for
sodcmy led to the punishment of being buried alive, and
convicted heretics alsc were burned alive. “The crime of
treason by a female wes punished initially under the com-
mon law by buming alive the defendant, However, in the
year 1790 this method was halted and the punishment
became strangulation and burning of the corpse."38
European and American reformers set out to end macabre
penalties such ao this, es well a other forms of corporal pun~
ishment such as the stocks and pillories, whippings, brand-
ings, and amputations. Prior to the appearance of punitive
incarceration, such punishment was designed to have its
siust profound effect not so suuch ou te persun punished as
on the srowd of spectators. Punishment was, in essence,

was

public spectacle. Reformers such as Joha Howard in England
aad Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania argued that punish-
ment—if carried out in isclation, behind the walls of the
prison—would cease to be revenge and would actually
reform those who had broken the lew, 30

Itshould also be pointed out that punishment has not beet
without its gendered dimensions. Women were often pun-
ished within the'domestic domain, and instruments of torture
were sometimes imported by authorities into the household.
In seventeenth-century Britain, women whese husbands iden-
tified them as cuarrelsome and unaccepting of male domi-
nance were punished by means of a gostip’s bridle, or
“banks,” 2 headpiece with a chair, 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 tc a wall of :he house,
where the punished woman remained until her husband
decided to release her. ] 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, trans-
portation, and appropriation of the accused’s property. The
punitive transportation of large aumbers of people from
England, for example, facilitated the :nitial colonization of
Austraka, Transporteé English convicts also settled the
Nouth Aimerican colony of Georgia. During the carly 1700s,
one in eight transported convicts were women, and the work
they were forced to per‘orm often consisted of prostitution 4°

Imprisonment was not employed as a principal mode of
punishment until the eighteenth century in Europe and the
nineteenth century in ke United States. And European
prison systems were instituted in Asia and Africa as an
important component of colonial <ule. In India, for example,
the English prison system was introduced during the second
hal! of the eighteenth century, when jails were established
in the regions of Calcatta and Madras. In Europe, the peni-
tentiary movement against capital and cther corporal pun-
ishments reflected new intellectual tendencies associated
with the Enlightenment, activist interventions by
Protestant reformers, and ctructural transiormations associ-
ated with the rise of industrial capital:sm. in Milan im 1764,
Cesare Beccaria published his Essay on Crimes end
Punishmenis,4! which was strongly influenced by notions of
equality advanced by the philosophes—especially Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Becearia argued that punish-
ment should never be a private matter, nor should it be a-bi-
warily violent; rather, it should be public, swift, and as
lenient as possible. He revealed the contradiction of what

was then a distinctive feeture of imprisonment—the fact

that it was generally imposed price to the defendant’s guilt

or innocence being decidec. 3/

However, incarceration itself eventually became the
penalty, bringing about a distinction between imprisonment
as punishment and pretria: detent.on 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 :he rise of
capitalism and to the appearance of a new set of ideological
conilitions, These new conditions reflected the cise of the
bourgeoisie as the social class whose interests and aspira-
tions 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 sugeritx form of panishment for
all times. It was simply—though we should not vnderesti-
mate the complexity o: this process—what made most sense
at a particular moment in history. We should therefore ques-
tion whether a system thet was intimately related to a par-
ticular set of historical cizeuinstences that prevailed during
the cightcenth and nineteenth centuries caa lay absolute
claim on the twenty-first century,

It may be important at this point in our examination to
acknowledge the radical saitt in the social perception of the
individual that appeared iu the ideas of that ere. With the
rise of the bourgecisie, the individual came te he regarded as
a bearet of formal righ:s and liberties. The notion of the indi-
vidual's inalienable sights and liberties was eventually
memorialized in the French and American Revolution.
“Liberté, Fgalité, Fraternité” from the Frenca Revolution
and “We hold these :ruths to be self-evident: all men are cre-
ated equal...” from the American Revolution were new and
radical ideas, even though they were not extended to
women, workers, Africans, and Indians. Refore the accept-
ance of the sanctity of individual rights, smprisonment
could not have been understood as punishment. If the indi-
vidual was not perceived as possessing inalienable rights and
liberties, then the alienation of those :ights and liberties by
removal from gociety to a space tyrannically governed by the
state would no: 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, Be

Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always comput
ed in terms of time, is related to abstract quantification,
evoxing the rise of science and what is often referred to as
the Age of Reason. We should keep in minc that this was
precisely the historical period when the value of labor began
to be celculated in terme cf time and therefore compensated
in another quantifiable way, by money. The computability
of state punishment in texms of time—days, monchs,
years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for
computing the vale of capitalist sommoditics. Marxist the-
orists 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 punishments?

Today, the growing sucial movement contesting the
supremacy of global capital isa movement that directly chal-
Jenges the rule of the planet—its human, animal, and plan:
populations, as well as its nataral resources—by corporations
that are primarily interested in the increased production and
circulation of ever more profitable cornmodities. This is a
challenge to the supremacy of the commodity form, a rising
resistance to the contemporary teadency to commodify
every aspect of planetary emistence. The question we might
consicer is whether tais new resistance to capitalist global-
ization 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

33
reformers. But convicts punished by imprisonment in emer-
gent pen.tentiary systems were primarily male, Thus reflect-
ed the deeply gender-bicsed structure of legal, polisica!, 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 impris-
cnment. This was especially true of married wormen, who
had no standing before the law. According to English com-
mon law, marriage restlted in a state of “civil death,” as
symbolized by the wife's assumption of the husbands name.
Consequently, she tended to be punished for revolting
against her domestic duties rather than for failure in her mea-
ger public responsibilities, The relegation of white women to
domestic economies prevented them from playing a signifi-
cant role in the emergent commodity realm. This was espe-
cially true since wage labor was typically gendered as male
and racialized as white. It is not fortuitous that domestic cor-
poral punishment for women survived longafterthese 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 ergusd that the word “penitentiary”
may have been used first in connection with plans outlined
in England in 1758 to heuse “penitent prostitutes.” In 1777,
John Howard, the leading Protestant proponent of penal
reform in England, published The State of the Prisons in
which he conceptualized imprisonment as an occasion for
religious self-reflection and self-relorm. Between 1787 and
1791, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham published
his letters on a prison model he called the panopticon 45
Bentham claimed that criminals could only internalize pro-
ductive labor habits if they were under constant surveil-
lance. According to his panopticon model, prisone:s were to
be housed in single cells on circular tiers, all facing a multi-
level 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 tu see the warden. From
his vantage poirt, on the other hand, the warden would be
able to see all o! the prisoners. However—and this was the

most significant aspect of Bentham’s manno.l panopti-
con—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 al! times.

If we combine Howerd’s cmphasis on discipliaed self-
reflection with Bentham’s ideas regarding the technology of
internélization 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 impli-
catione. The conditions of possibility for this new {ori 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 req-
uisite industrial labor fora developing capitalist system.

john Howard's idces were incorporated in the
Penitentiary Act of 1795, 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 ir. 1816, the first full-fledged
effort to create a panopticon prison was in the United States.
‘The Western State Penitentiary in Pittssurgh, 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 fail
housed the first statc penitentiary in che United States,
when a portion of the jail was converted in 1790 froma
detention facility to aa institutioa housing convicts whose
prison sentences simultaneously became punishment and
occasions for penitence and reforra,

Walaut Suieet’s austere segirne—total isolation in single
cells where prisoners lived, ate, worked, read the Bible lif,
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 ‘mp:isonment, Aluhough dhe other medel, devel-
oped 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

aS

model, which eventuelly crystallized in the Eastern State
Penitentiary in Cherry Hill—the pians for whick were
approved in 1821—emphasized total :solation, silence, and
solitude, waereas the Auburn model called for solitary cells
but labor in common. This mode of prison lator, 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 condi:ion of silence. Because of its
more eificient labor practices, Auburn eventually became
the dominant model, both for the United States and Europe.

Why would eighteenth. and ninetecath-century reform
ers become so invested in creating conditions of punishment
based on solitary confinement? Todey, aside from death,
solitary confinement—next to torture, or as a form of tor-
ture—is considered the worst ‘orm of punishment imagina-
ble, Then, howsver, it was assumed to have an émancipato-
ry effect. The body was placed in corditions of segregation
and solitude in order to allow the soul to flourish, I: is not
accidental that most of the reformers of that era were deeply
religious and therefore saw the architecture and regimes of
the penitentiary as emulating the architecture and regimes
of monastic life. Still, cbse:vers of the new peniteatiary saw,
early on, the real poteatial for insanity in solitary confine-
ment. In an often.qucted 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 aopeless sclitary confinement. I
believe it, in its effects, tobe cruel and wrong.”

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind,
humane, and meant for reformation, but I am per
suaded that those who devised this system of Prison
Discipline, and those benevolen: gentlemen who
carry it into execution, do not know what it is that
they are doing. I believe that very few men are capa-
ble of estimating the immense amount of torture and
agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for
years, inflicts upon the sufferers .. .1 am only the
moce convinced tat there is a depth of terrible
endurance in it which nore but the sufferers them
selves can fathom, and which no man has a right to
inflict vpon his fellow-creature. I kold this slow and 3
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 eers can hear; therefore

I the more denounc® it, as a secret punishment which
slumbering Humanity is not roused up to stay“

Unlike other Europeans such as Alexis de Tocqueville
and Gustzve de Beaumont, who believed that such punish.
ment would result in moxal renewal and thus mold convicts
into better citizens? Dickens was of the opinion thet
‘“jt}hose who have undergone this panishment MUST pat
into society again morally unhealthy and diseased."48 Tht
carly critique of the penitentiary and its regime of solitary
confinement :roubles the uutior that imprisonment is the
most suitable form of punishment fer a democratic society,

‘The current construction and expansion of state and fed
erel super-maximum security prisons, whose putative pure
ose is to address disciplinary problems within the penal
system, draws upon the historical conception of the penl-
tentiary, then considered the most progressive form of pun-
ishment. Today African-Americans and Latinos are vastly
overrepresented in these supermax prisons and control
units, the firs: of which emerged when federal correctional
authorities began to send prisoners housed throughout the
system whom they deemed to be “dangecoue” to the federal
prison in Marion, Ilinois. In 1983, the entire prison was
“Iecked down,” which meant that prisoners were confined
to their cells twenty-thee hours a day. This lockdown
became permancut, thus furnishing the general model for
the control uit and supermax prison.9 Today, there are
approximately sixty super-maximum security federal and
state prisons located in thirty-six states and many more
supermax uni:s in virtually every state in the country.

A description of supecuaxes 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 disap-
peared.

Inmates in super maximum security facilities are
usually held in single ell lock-down, commonly
refered to as solitary ccnfinement. . . [Clongregate
activities with other prisoners are usually prohibit-
ed; other prisuners cannot even ke seen from an
inmite’s cell, communication with other prisoners
is prohibited or difficult (consisting, for example, of
shouting from cell to cell); visiting and telephone
privileges are Jimited 2° 37

‘The new generation of super-maximum security facilities
aiso rely on state-of-the-art technology for monitoring and
controlling prisoner conduct and movement, utilizing, for
example, video monitors and remote-controlled elec:ronic
doors.5! “These prisons represent the application of suphis-
ticated, modern tecknology dedicated entirely to the task of
social control, and they isolate, regulate and surveil more
effectively than anything that has preceded them.”52

Thave highlighted the similarities between the carly U.S.
penitentiary—with its aspiratioas toward individual rchabil-
itation—and the repressive supermaxes of our era as a
reminder of the mutabili:y of history. What was once
regarded as progressive and even revolutionary represents
today the marriage of technological superiority and political
backwardness, No one—not cven the most ardent defenders
of the supermax—would try to argue today that absolute
segregation, including sensory cepr:vation, is restorative and
healing. The prevailing justification for the supermax:s that
the horrors it creates are the perfect complement for the hor-
sifying perscnalities deemed the worst of the worst by the
priscn system, In other words, there is no pretense that
rights are respected, there is no concem for te individual,
there is no sense thet men end women incarcerated in suver-
maxes deserve anything approach:ng respect and comfort.
According to a 1999 report issued vy the Nationa! Institute
of Corrections,

Genera‘ly, the overali constitutionality of these
jsupermax] programs remains unclear. As larger
numbers of inmates with a greaterdiversity of char-
Consider the case of Ualitornia, whose landscape has
deen thoroughly prisonized over the last twenty years. The
first state prison in California was San Quentin, which
opened in :852.4 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 con-
structed in California. Between 1962 and 1955, two camps
were established, along with the California Rehabilitation
Center. No: a single prison opcned during the second half of
the sixties, nor during the entire decade of the 1970s

However, a massive project of prisoa construckion was ini-
tiated during the 1980s—thatiis, duing the years ofthe Reagan
presidency. Nine prisons, including the Northern Calitornia
Facility for Women, were opened between 1984 aud 1989.
Recall thatit had talzen more than a hundred years to build the
first nine Californie 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 Vallcy State Prison for Women was
opened, According to its mission statement, it “provides 1,980
women’s beds for California's overcrowded prisoa system.”
However, in 2002, there were 3,570 prisoners® and the other
two women’s prisons were equally overcrowded.

‘There are now thirty-three prisous, thicty-eight camps, six-
teen commanity cerrectional facilities, and five tiny prisoner
mother facilities in California, In 2002 there were 157,979
people incarcerated in these instituticns, including approxi-
mately twenty thcusand people whom the state holds for
imaigtation violations, Tle 1acial composition of this prison
population is revealing. Latinos, who aze now in the majority,
account for 35.2 percent; African-Americans 20 percent; and
white prisoners 29.2 percent There are now more women in
prison in the state of California than there were in the entire
countsy 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.
Bedfordshire, Howard was one of the first philsn-
thiopists to attempt a systematic statistical 7
deccription of a social problem 5?

Likewise, Bender's analysis of the relationship between
the novel and the penitentiary emphasizes the extent to
which the philosupivel underpinnings of the prison
reformer's canipaigns echoed the materialism and utilitari-
anism of the English Enlightenment. The campaign to
reform the prisons was a project to impose order, classifica-
tion, cleanliness, good work habits, and self-conscicusness.
He argues that people detained within the old prisons were
no: 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 w:shed. Even sex was sometimes
available, as prostitutes were sometimes allowed temperary
entrance into the prisons: Howard and other reformers
called for the imposition of rigid rules that would “enforce
solitude and penitence, cleanliness and work.”60

“The new peritentiaries,” according to Bender, “sup-
planting both the old priscns and houses of co:rection,
explicitly reached toward . . . three goals: maintenance of
order within a largely urban lador force, salvation of the
soul, and rationalization of personality."6! He argues that
this is precisely wha: was narratively accomplished by the
novel. It ordered and classified social life, it representedindi-
viduals ay conscious of their surcoundings and as self-aware
and self-fashioning. Render tius sees a kinship between two
major developments of the eighteenth century~-the rise of
the novel in the cultaral sphere and the rise of the peniten-
tiary in the socio-legal sphere. If the novel as a culrural 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 writ-
ing, in particular, has periodically experienced waves of pop-
ularity. The public recognition of prison writing in the

United States has histcrically coincided with the influence of
social movements calling for prison reform and/r abolition
Robert Bumns's I Am a Fugitive from a Geo:gia Chain
Gang, and the 1932 Hollywood film upor, which it was
based, played a central role in the campaign to abolish the
chain gang, During the 1970s, which were mazked by intense
omanizing within, outside, and across prison walls, numer-
ous works authored by prisoners followed the 1970 publica-
tion of Geo:ge Jackson's Soledad Erother® and the antholo-
ay I covdited with Bettina Aptheker, If They Come in the
Moming.64 While many prison writers during that era had
discovered the emancipatory potential of writing or. their
own, relying either on the education they had received prior
to their imprisonment or on their tenacious efforts at self-
education, uthers pursued thei: writing as a direct result of
the expansion of prison educational programs during that ea,
Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has challenged the contemporary
dismantling of prison education programs, asks in Live from
Death Row, di

What societal interest is sexved by prisoners who
remain illiterate? What social benefit is there in
igncrance? How are people corrected while impris-
oned if their education is outlawed? Who profits
fother than the pr.sou establishment itself} from
stupid prisoners?65

A practicing journalist before his arrest in 1982 on charges
of K:lling Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, Abu-
Jamal has regularly produced articles un capital punishment,
focusing especially on its racial and clase disproportions, His
ideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty with
the more general challenges to the expanding US. prison sys-
tem and are particularly helpful to activists whosee< to asso-
ciate death penalty abolitiunism with prison abolitionism.
His prison writings have been published in both popular and
scholarly jou-nals (such as The Nation and Yale Law Journal}
as well as in three collections, Live from Death Row, Death
Blossoms, and All 1hings Censored.*’
Abu-Jamal and many otker prison writers have strongly
ctiticizec the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners, which
‘was enacted in the 1994 crime bill,6® as indicative of the
contemporary pattern of dismantling educational programs
‘behind bars. As creasive writing courses for prisoners were
defunded, virtually every literary journal publishing prison-
ers’ writing eventually collapsed. Of the scores of magazines
and newspapers pyoduced Leind walls, only the Augolite at
Louisiana’s Angola Prison and Prison Legal News at
Washington State Prison remain, What this means is that
precisely at a time of consol:dating 2 significant writing cul-
ture behind bars, repressive strategies are being deployed to
dissuade prisoners from educating themselves.

If the publication of Malcolm X's autobiography marks
2 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 prisun practices are systematically
dashing those hopes. In the 1950s, Malectm’s prisor. edu-
cation was a dramatic example of prisoners’ ability to turn
their incarceration into a transformative experience. With
no available means of crganizing his quest for knowledge,
hy proceeded tu read a dictivuaty, copying each word in his
own hand, By the time he could immerse himself in read-
ing, he noted, “months passed wishout my even thinking
abou: being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had
been so trely 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 speciai
privileges—such as checking out more than the maximum
number of books. Even so, in orde: to pursue this self-edu-
cation, Malcolm had towork against the prison regime—he
often read on his cell floor, long after lights out, by the
glow of the corridor light, talcing 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
priscn educational programs is indscative of the official dis-
regard today for rehabilitative strategiss, particularly thase

Y¥2
that encourage individnal prisoners to acquire au-onomy of
the mind. The documentary film The Last Graduation
describes the role pisoners played in establishing @ four-year
sollege program at New York's Greenhaven Prison and,
twenty-two years later, the official decision to dismantle it.
According to Eddie Filis, 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.”7! 43

In the aftermath of the 1971 prisoner rebellion at Attica
and the government-sponsored massacre, public opinion
began to fevor prison reform. Forty-three Attica prisoners
and eleven guards and civilians were killed by the National
Guard, who kad been ordered to <etake the prison by
Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The leaders of the prison
rebellicn had been very specific about their demands. In
their “practical demands’ they expsessed 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 ené to censorship—all of which.
they saw as indispensable to their educational needs. As
Eddie Ellis observes in The Lost Gracuation,

Prisoners very early recognized the fact thet they
needed to be better educated, that the more educa-
tion they had, the better they would be able to deal
with themselves and their problems, the problems
of the prisons and the problemas of the communi.ies
{com which most of them came.

Lateef Islam, another former prisoner featured in this
documentary, said, “We he'd classes before the college
came, We aught each other, and sumtimes under penalty
of a beat-up.”

‘After the Attica Rebellion, more than five hundred pris-
oners were transferred to Greemhaven, including some of the
leaders who continued to press for educational programs. As
a direct result of theirdemands, Marist College, a New York
state college near Greeahaven, began to offer college-level
courses in 1973 and eventually established the infrastrec-
ture for an on-site four-year college program. The program
thrived for twenty-two years. Some of the many prisoners
who eared their degrees at Greenhaver pursved postgradu-
ate studies after their release. As the documentary power-
fully demonstrates, the progrsm produced dedicated men
who left prison and offered thetr newly acquired knowledge
and skills to their communities on the outside.

In 1994, consistent with the general pattern of creating
more prisons and: more sepression within all prisons,
Congress took up the question of withdrawing college fund.
ing for inmetes. The congressional debate concluded with a
cecision to add an amendment to the 1994 crime bill that
eliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, thus effectively
cefunding all higher elucatioual prograins. 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 0: removing the books
that, in many ways, syasbolized the possibilities of freedom.
Or, as one of the Marist professors sai, “They see books as
fnll af gold.” The prisoner whofor many years had served as
a clerk for the college sadly reflected, as books were being
moved, that there was nothing left to do m prison-—except
perhaps bodybuilding. “Bu:,” 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
irom most U.S. prisons.

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