America As A Prison

 Having been a guest of the United States government at that gated vacation resort otherwise known as Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution, I have an interest in prison issues. Reading  Marisol LeBrón's A Prison the Size of the State, A Police to Control the World on Public Books, I find some support for some thoughts I had while in New Jersey. 

One thought was that the federal prison system serves African Americans and Hispanics as reservations do for Native Americans. Ms. LeBrón writes:

Indeed, the era of the so-called Indian Wars, Weber reveals, was also a period of mass imprisonment. Those Native people who were seen as “warring” with the United States were imprisoned at military prisons such as Fort Marion, while their children may have been sent to Carlisle or other residential schools. Meanwhile, Native practices of communal landholding were criminalized under federal policies such as the Major Crimes Act of 1885 and the Allotment Act of 1887, which sent Native parents to the vast network of jails that existed in Indian country and their children to the growing number of residential schools as they were transfigured into wards of the state. “The federal government developed a multigenerational strategy,” argues Weber, “that relied on family separation, forced assimilation, and imprisonment on reservations, in residential schools, and in Indian Country jails to exterminate Indigenous placemaking and lifeways.”

I dwell on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and its layered history because it highlights the way that the carceral, as countless scholars and activists have long pointed out, far exceeds prison walls.

I also read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago while in prison (the abridged version). My takeaway was that America hid its prisons in the open while the USSR put them away in Siberia. The media is kept away from American prisons on claims of security; prisoner journalism is forbidden for the same reason. The Gulag and the United States Bureau of Prisons both operate in secrecy. What is the real difference between Solzhenitsyn’s NKVD scooping up its victims in the middle of the night, and American police bursting in with guns blazing and dressed as if they were in a war zone? Neither agency was liable for its actions, not even its mistakes, regardless of the harm caused. The Soviets had the naked protection of a dictatorship, while American police hid behind the judicial creation of qualified immunity.

Again from Ms. LeBrón:

Both Go and Weber force us to think about the carceral state not as a bounded site or discrete object, but as a network of power relations that facilitate racial capitalism and colonial extraction both within and between states. Building from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago, Michel Foucault developed the notion of a carceral archipelago to refer to the continuum of institutions, practices, and epistemologies that comprise the carceral. Weber and Go, while engaging with the Foucauldian understanding of the carceral archipelago, remind us of the importance of holding on to the materiality of Solzhenitsyn’s version of the archipelago. The gulag archipelago indexed the vast network of sites of incarceration spread throughout the Soviet Union, highlighting the role that prisoner transport and isolation played in political repression, something that is extensively discussed in Weber’s book. Additionally, the archipelago’s expanse and distance from the core allows for violence and experimentation, themes that Go highlights in his work.

What Ms. LeBrón points out that I did not realize while in federal custody was the role distance played. The federal rule is that a person can only be so many miles away from their home. Except the BOP found enough loopholes for that rule - such as it was air miles, not a direct line - or just ignored the rule until pestered by an inmate for a transfer. 

The proposals to create a penal colony in Alaska, according to Weber, show how politicians and the press worked to solidify the notion that criminalized segments of society must be banished. In particular, penal colonization gained traction in the postbellum period, as it was seen as a way to prevent Black criminality from contaminating white society. As Weber puts it, “The national penal colony served as a symbol through which they envisioned a national spatial solution to what many white people referred to as the ‘race problem’: through empire.” Alaska never became a prison colony. Still, Weber shows how the United States continued to use spatial fixes to address both issues of crime and empire.

I would make two criticisms of Ms. LeBrón. Nothing major, since her essay is a book review, and that imposes a limitation on the scope of the essay. 

1. There is an emphasis on the federal penal system. The majority of prisoners are in state prisons. Those systems have constitutional and political checks not available in the federal system. The United States Congress spends far less time supervising its prison system than do state legislatures. Some state constitutions enshrine the idea of prison being for reformation rather than punishment into their state Bills of Rights (Indiana does). States also lack the funds, which allow the federal system to operate as a wasteful juggernaut. Yes, lip service is often the state response to those rights. Yes, much of the criticism directed to the federal system applies to the states. However, ignoring the states also ignores the largest system needing reform and the one most accessible to reform.
2. There is no mention of alternate penal systems. The Norwegian system has been touted for several years as an alternative to the American system. See: Rehabilitation Lessons from Norway's Prison System; Norway's Prison System: Investigating Recidivism; How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours.
3. That one way for reducing the population of the United States Bureau Prisons is to reduce the number of federal criminal laws. We have allowed the federal government to have unlimited criminal jurisdiction that was never contemplated by the Founders. 
4. The federal system is premised on punishment. Congress has explicitly refused the idea of rehabilitation for its system. What it created by doing this is human warehouses. 

sch 12/26