Making A Prison

 Having been inside one, I have a vested interest in Public Books' What Makes a Prison? by Dan Berger, I was surprised to find an Indiana connection.

Incarceration persists, then, because of its elasticity. Prisons are rarely “prisons.” Rather, they are called other names: correctional facilities, reformatories, penitentiaries, jails, and detention centers.¹ Each institution has a unique name, sometimes in honor of a Great Man or a local tree, that fails to convey their widespread presence and overarching purpose.

The all-encompassing nature of the prison is revealed by two recent and incisive books: Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848–1920, edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson, and Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum by Mab Segrest. Both are local case studies, of Indiana and Georgia respectively. The connection between prisons and asylums, including the prison function of asylums, is common to studies of incarceration in early America.² Administrations of Lunacy and Who Would Believe a Prisoner? extend those connections farther into the critical decades before and, especially, following the Civil War. What emerges across these texts is that incarceration is a way of knowing as well as a form of doing. Each book mines what Segrest describes as “the intimate and the historic, action and reflection” in search of usable pasts that can, as Jones writes, “counter the dominant narratives, to expand the canon of knowers and knowledge, and to rewrite history justly.”

A prison is a prison is a prison. To inquire into a prison is to investigate the prevailing wisdom (whether political, economic, social, and geographic) of repressive control. It is to examine who those in power deem disposable, and by what means. It is a line of inquiry that allows—perhaps requires—us to investigate institutions that share similar and similarly adaptive modes of governance. In fact, the history of incarceration is always a history of institutions and the state management of social difference. Across different geographies, social control of an always gendered and racialized working class remained the shared purpose of the various institutions—only sometimes bearing the name “prison”—under consideration here. Examining its function, rather than the hopes ascribed to it, the prison must be defined as a structure of repressive state captivity.

Nothing there I can disagree with. I was sentenced to 151 months in federal prison; my minimum sentence was 630 months. I have lifetime supervision by the federal court through its probation department. Deterrence was claimed to be the purpose of my sentence. Nobody asked if I was deterred by only 60 months. What I got to do was to write and catch up on my reading. That was self-imposed as part of my determination to do some good with the time left me in this world. If you continue to read this blog, I have placed and will place my prison journal here under the topic of Prison Life. Feel free to join me in my prison life. Also read the whole of the article above.

The bottom line is this: prisons do not make you safer; giving criminals an education does far more good. The problem is that there are many parties drinking at the taxpayer funder trough that is the prison-industrial complex.

sch 11/6