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 Zine Distro a P.O. Box 721 Fiomewood, IL 60430 Furst Three Chaptery