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9 8 7 6 5 4 3

C o nt e nt s

Acknowledgments

........................................

........................

CHAPTER I

Introduction—Prison Reform or Prison Abolition? . ,

.........

CHAPTER 2

Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist

Perspectives Toward Prison

................................................. 22

CHAPTER 3

Imprisonment and Reform................................................... 40

CHAPTER 4

How Gender Structures the Prison System .......................60

CHAPTER 5

The Prison Industrial Complex ...........................................84

CHAPTER 6

Abolitionist Alternatives....................................................105

Resources.............................................................................. 116

Notes .....................................................................................119

About the Author.................................................................128

Acknowledgments

I 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 cultural work

ers 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

Bo (rita d. brown), Ellen Barry, Jennifer Beach, Rose Braz,

Julie Browne, Cynthia Chandler, 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 over three thousand people, we

worked through a number of the questions that I raise in this

book. I thank the members of that committee, including

those who used the conference as a foundation to build the

organization Critical Resistance. In 2000, I was a member of

a University of California Humanities Research Institute

Resident Research Group and had the opportunity to partic

ipate in regular discussions on many of these issues. I thank

the members of the group—Gina Dent, Ruth Gilmore,

Avery Gordon, David Goldberg, Nancy Schepper Hughes,

and Sandy Barringer—for their invaluable insights.

Cassandra Shay lor and I coauthored a report to the 2001

World 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 also 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 thank her for reading the

manuscript and I am deeply appreciative of her intellectual

and emotional support. Finally, I thank Greg Ruggiero, the

editor of this series, for his patience and encouragement.

Introduction-Prison Reform or

Prison Abolition?

In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that who

ever is convicted of a serious crime will be sent to prison. In

some countries—including the United States—where capital

punishment has not yet been abolished, a small but signifi

cant number of people are sentenced to death for what are

considered especially grave crimes. Many people are familiar

with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fact, it has

already been abolished in most countries. Even the

staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the

fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few peo

ple find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine.

On the other hand, the prison is considered an inevitable

and permanent feature of our social lives. Most people are

quite surprised to hear that the prison abolition movement

also has a long history—one that dates back to the historical

appearance of the prison as the main form of punishment. In

fact, the most natural reaction is to assume that prison

activists—even those who consciously refer to themselves as

"antiprison activists"—are simply trying to ameliorate

prison conditions or perhaps to reform the prison in more

fundamental ways. In most circles prison abolition is simply

unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dis-

missed as Utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unre

alistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and fool

ish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a

social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering

people in dreadful places designed to separate them from

their communities and families. The prison is considered so

"natural" that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.

It is my hope that this book will encourage readers to

question their own assumptions about the prison. Many peo

ple have already reached the conclusion that the death penal

ty is an outmoded form of punishment that violates basic

principles of human rights. It is time, I believe, to encourage

similar conversations about the prison. During my own

career as an antiprison activist I have seen the population of

U.S. prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in

black, Latino, and Native American communities now have

a far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent

education. When many young people decide to join the mili

tary service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in

prison, it should cause us to wonder whether we should not

try to introduce better alternatives.

The question of whether the prison has become an obso

lete institution has become especially urgent in light of the

fact that more than two million people (out of a world total

of nine million) now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facili

ties, and immigrant detention centers. Are we willing to rel

egate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed

communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritari

an regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion

that produce severe mental instability? According to a recent

study, there may be twice as many people suffering from

mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in

all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined.1

10 | Angela Y. Davis

When I first became involved in antiprison activism dur

ing the late 1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were

then close to two hundred thousand people in prison. Had

anyone told me that in three decades ten times as many peo

ple would be locked away in cages, I would have been

absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have respond

ed something like this: "As racist and undemocratic as this

country may be [remember, during that period, the demands

of the Civil Rights movement had not yet been consolidat

ed], I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to

lock up so many people without producing powerful public

resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this coun

try plunges into fascism/' That might have been my reac

tion thirty years ago. The reality is that we were called upon

to inaugurate the twenty-first century by accepting the fact

that two million people—a group larger than the population

of many countries—are living their lives in places like Sing

Sing, Leavenworth, San Quentin, and Alderson Federal

Reformatory for Women. The gravity of these numbers

becomes even more apparent when we consider that the

U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the

world's total, whereas more than twenty percent of the

world's combined prison population can be claimed by the

United States. In Elliott Currie's words, "[t]he prison has

become a looming presence in our society to an extent

unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial

democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has

been the most thoroughly implemented government social

program of our time. '"2

In thinking about the possible obsolescence of the prison,

we should ask how it is that so many people could end up in

prison without major debates regarding the efficacy of incar

ceration. When the drive to produce more prisons and incar

cerate ever larger numbers of people occurred in the 1980s

during what is known as the Reagan era, politicians argued

that " tough on crime " stances—including certain imprison

ment and longer sentences—would keep communities free

of crime. However, the practice of mass incarceration during

that period had little or no effect on official crime rates. In

fact, the most obvious pattern was that larger prison popu

lations led not to safer communities, but, rather, to even

larger prison populations. Each new prison spawned yet

another new prison. And as the U.S. prison system expand

ed, so did corporate involvement in construction, provision

of goods and services, and use of prison labor. Because of the

extent to which prison building and operation began to

attract vast amounts of capital—from the construction

industry to food and health care provision—in a way that

recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex,

we began to refer to a "prison industrial complex/'3

Consider the case of California, whose landscape has

been thoroughly prisonized over the last twenty years. The

first state prison in California was San Quentin, which

opened in 1852.4 Folsom, another well-known institution,

opened in 1880. Between 1880 and 1933, when a facility for

women was opened in Tehachapi, there was not a single new

prison constructed. In 1952, the California Institution for

Women opened and Tehachapi became a new prison for

men. In all, between 1852 and 1955, nine prisons were con

structed in California. Between 1962 and 1965, two camps

were established, along with the California Rehabilitation

Center. Not a single prison opened during the second half of

the sixties, nor during the entire decade of the 1970s.

However, a massive project of prison construction was ini

tiated during the 1980s—that is, during the years of the Reagan

presidency. Nine prisons, including the Northern California

Facility for Women, were opened between 1984 and 1989.

Recall that it had taken more than a hundred years to build the

first nine California prisons. In less than a single decade, the

number of California prisons doubled. And during the 1990s,

twelve new prisons were opened, including two more for

women. In 1995 the Valley State Prison for Women was

opened. According to its mission statement, it "provides 1,980

women's beds for California's overcrowded prison system."

However, in 2002, there were 3,570 prisoners5 and the other

two women's prisons were equally overcrowded.

There are now thirty-three prisons, thirty-eight camps, six

teen community correctional facilities, and five tiny prisoner

mother facilities in California. In 2002 there were 157,979

people incarcerated in these institutions, including approxi

mately twenty thousand people whom the state holds for

immigration violations. The racial composition of this prison

population is revealing. Latinos, who are now in the majority,

account for 35.2 percent; African-Americans 30 percent; and

white prisoners 29.2 percent.6 There are now more women in

prison in the state of California than there were in the entire

country in the early 1970s. In fact, California can claim the

largest women's prison in the world, Valley State Prison for

Women, with its more than thirty-five hundred inhabitants.

Located in the same town as Valley State and literally across

the street is the second-largest women's prison in the world—

Central California Women's Facility—whose population in

2002 also hovered around thirty-five hundred.7

If you look at a map of California depicting the location

of the thirty-three state prisons, you will see that the only

area that is not heavily populated by prisons is the area

north of Sacramento. Still, there are two prisons in the town

of Susanville, and Pelican Bay, one of the state's notorious

super-maximum security prisons, is near the Oregon border.

California artist Sandow Birk was inspired by the colonizing

of the landscape by prisons to produce a series of thirty-three

landscape paintings of these institutions and their surround

ings. They are collected in his book Incarcerated: Visions of

California in the Twenty-first Century.g

I present this brief narrative of the prisonization of the

California landscape in order to allow readers to grasp how

easy it was to produce a massive system of incarceration with

the implicit consent of the public. Why were people so quick

to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion

of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free

world feel safer and more secure? This question can be for

mulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make

people think that their own rights and liberties are more

secure than they would be if prisons did not exist? What other

reasons might there have been for the rapidity with which

prisons began to colonize the California landscape?

Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of pris

ons in California as "a geographical solution to socio-eco

nomic problems,"9 Her analysis of the prison industrial com

plex in California describes these developments as a response

to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity.

California's new prisons are sited on devalued rural

land, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultur

al acres . . . The State bought land sold by big

landowners. And the State assured the small,

depressed towns now shadowed by prisons that the

new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry would

jump-start local redevelopment.10

But, as Gilmore points out, neither the jobs nor the more

general economic revitalization promised by prisons has

occurred. At the same time, this promise of progress helps

us to understand why the legislature and California's voters

decided to approve the construction of all these new prisons.

People wanted to believe that prisons would not only reduce

crime, they would also provide jobs and stimulate econom

ic development in out-of-the-way places.

At bottom, there is one fundamental question: Why do we

take prison for granted? While a relatively small proportion

of the population has ever directly experienced life inside

prison, this is not true in poor black and Latino communi

ties. Neither is it true for Native Americans or for certain

Asian-American communities. But even among those people

who must regrettably accept prison sentences—especially

young people—as an ordinary dimension of community life,

it is hardly acceptable to engage in serious public discussions

about prison life or radical alternatives to prison. It is as if

prison were an inevitable fact of life, like birth and death.

On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It

is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time,

there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them,

a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus,

the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is

absent from our lives. To think about this simultaneous

presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part

played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our

social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are

often afraid to face the realities they produce. After all, no

one wants to go to prison. Because it would be too agonizing

to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our

selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the

prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true

for some of us, women as well as men, who have already

experienced imprisonment.

We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for

others, a fate reserved for the "evildoers," to use a term

recently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the per

sistent power of racism, "criminals" and "evildoers" are, in

the collective imagination, fantasized as people of colon The

prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site

into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the

responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those

communities from which prisoners are drawn in such dispro

portionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the

prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seri

ously engaging with the problems of our society, especially

those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

What, for example, do we miss if we try to think about

prison expansion without addressing larger economic devel

opments? We live in an era of migrating coiporations. In

order to escape organized labor in this country—and thus

higher wages, benefits, and so on—coiporations roam the

world in search of nations providing cheap labor pools. This

corporate migration thus leaves entire communities in

shambles. Huge numbers of people lose jobs and prospects

for future jobs. Because the economic base of these commu

nities is destroyed, education and other surviving social

services are profoundly affected. This process turns the men,

women, and children who live in these damaged communi

ties into perfect candidates for prison.

In the meantime, corporations associated with the pun

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 black hole into

which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited.

Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social

wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions

that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite

complicated connections between the deindustrialization of

the economy—a process that reached its peak during the

1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began

to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand

for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic

terms. More prisons were needed because there was more

crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the

time the prison construction boom began, official crime sta

tistics were already falling. Moreover, draconian drug laws

were being enacted, and "three-strikes" provisions were on

the agendas of many states.

In order to understand the proliferation of prisons and the

rise of the prison industrial complex, it might be helpful to

think further about the reasons we so easily take prisons for

granted. In California, as we have seen, almost two-thirds of

existing prisons were opened during the eighties and

nineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was there

such an obvious level of comfort with the prospect of many

new prisons? A partial answer to this question has to do

with the way we consume media images of the prison, even

as the realities of imprisonment are hidden from almost all

who have not had the misfortune of doing time. Cultural

critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiari

ty with the prison comes in part from representations of

prisons in film and other visual media.

The history of visuality linked to the prison is also

a main reinforcement of the institution of the

prison as a naturalized part of our social landscape.

The history of film has always been wedded to the

representation of incarceration. Thomas Edison's

first films (dating back to the 1901 reenactment pre

sented as newsreel, Execution of Czolgosz with

Panorama of Auburn 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.11

Some of the most well known prison films are: I Want to

Livef Papillonr Cool Hand Luke, and Escape from Alcatraz.

It also bears mentioning that television programming has

become increasingly saturated with images of prisons. Some

recent documentaries include the A&E series The Big

House, which consists of programs on San Quentin,

Alcatraz, Leavenworth, and Alderson Federal Reformatory

for Women. The long-running HBO program Oz has man

aged to persuade many viewers that they know exactly what

goes on in male maximum-security prisons.

But even those who do not consciously decide to watch a

documentary or dramatic program on the topic of prisons

inevitably consume prison images, whether they choose to

or not, by the simple fact of watching movies or TV. It is vir

tually impossible to avoid consuming images of prison. In

1997, I was myself quite astonished to find, when I inter

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 our image environment. This has

caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The

prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It

is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should

exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it

requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life

beyond the prison.

This is not to dismiss the profound changes that have

occurred in the way public conversations about the prison

are conducted. Ten years ago, even as the drive to expand the

prison system reached its zenith, there were very few cri

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 been confined to low, medium,

and maximum security, a new category was invented—that

of the super-maximum security prison, or the supermax.

The turn toward increased repression in a prison system,

distinguished from the beginning of its history by its repres

sive regimes, caused some journalists, public intellectuals,

and progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance on

prisons to solve social problems that are actually exacerbat

ed by mass incarceration.

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 ages of twenty and twenty-nine were

among these numbers.12 Five years later, a second study

revealed that this percentage had soared to almost one in

three (32.2 percent). Moreover, more than one in ten Latino

men in this same age range were in jail or prison, or on pro

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.13

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, African-

Americans as a whole now represent the majority of state

and federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400 black

inmates—118,600 more than the total number of white

inmates.14 During the late 1990s major articles on prison

expansion appeared in Newsweek, Harper's, Emerge, and

Atlantic Monthly. Even Colin Powell raised the question of

the rising number of black men in prison when he spoke at

the 2000 Republican National Convention, which declared

George W. Bush its presidential candidate.

Over the last few years the previous absence of critical

positions on prison expansion in the political arena has

given way to proposals for prison reform. While public dis

course has become 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 discussion of the problems asso

ciated with the expansion of prisons also restricts this dis

cussion to the question of prison reform.

As important as some reforms may be—the elimination

of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women's prison, for

example—frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help

to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the

prison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, which

should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison

crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center

stage. The most immediate question today is how to prevent

the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring

as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into

what prisoners call "the free world/' How can we move to

decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services?

How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather

than exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives

involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing

"crime" and of the social and economic conditions that

track so many children from poor communities, and espe

cially communities of color, into the juvenile system and

then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge

today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice,

where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.

Slavery, Civil Rights, and

Abolitionist Perspectives Toward

Prison

"Advocates of incarceration . . . hoped that the peniten

tiary would rehabilitate its inmates. Whereas philoso

phers perceived a ceaseless state of war between chattel

slaves and their masters, criminologists hoped to negoti

ate a peace treaty of sorts within the prison walls. Yet

herein lurked a paradox: if the penitentiary's internal

regime resembled that of the plantation so closely that the

two were often loosely equated, how could the prison pos

sibly function to rehabilitate criminals?"

—Adam Jay Hirsch^

The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex

challenges to the people who have lived with it and have

become so inured to its presence that they could not 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 the abolition of the "pecu

liar institution/' White antislavery abolitionists such as John

Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the

dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics.

When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an anti

slavery orator, white people—even those who were passion

ate abolitionists—refused to believe that a black slave could

display such intelligence. The belief in the permanence of

slavery was so widespread that even white abolitionists

found it difficult to imagine black people as equals.

It took a long and violent civil war in order to legally dis

establish the "peculiar institution/' Even though the

Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed

involuntary servitude, white supremacy continued to be

embraced by vast numbers of people and became deeply

inscribed in new institutions. One of these post-slavery

institutions was lynching, which was widely accepted for

many decades thereafter. Thanks to the work of figures such

as Ida B. Wells, an antilynching campaign was gradually

legitimized during the first half of the twentieth century.

The NAACP, an organization that continues to conduct

legal challenges against discrimination, evolved from these

efforts to abolish lynching.

Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a cen

tury after the abolition of slavery. Many people who lived

under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system defined by

racial equality. When the governor of Alabama personally

attempted to prevent Arthurine Lucy from enrolling in the

University of Alabama, his stance represented the inability

to imagine black and white people ever peaceably living and

studying together. "Segregation today, segregation tomor

row, segregation forever7" are the most well known words of

this politician, who was forced to repudiate them some

years later when segregation had proved far more vulnerable

than he could have imagined.

Although government, corporations, and the dominant

media try to represent racism as an unfortunate aberration of

the past that has been relegated to the graveyard of U.S. his

tory, it continues to profoundly influence contemporary

structures, attitudes, and behaviors. Nevertheless, anyone

who would dare to call for the reintroduction of slavery, the

organization of lynch mobs, or the reestablishment of legal

segregation would be summarily dismissed. But it should be

remembered that the ancestors of many of today's most

ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery,

life without lynching, orlife without segregation. The 2001

World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination,

Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances held in Durban, South

Africa, divulged the immensity of the global task of eliminat

ing racism. There may be many disagreements regarding what

counts as racism and what are the most effective strategies to

eliminate it However, especially with the downfall of the

apartheid regime in South Africa, there is a global consensus

that racism should not define the future of the planet.

I have referred to these historical examples of efforts to

dismantle racist institutions because they have considerable

relevance to our discussion of prisons and prison abolition. It

is true that slavery, lynching, and segregation acquired such

a stalwart ideological quality that many, if not most, could

not foresee their decline and collapse. Slavery, lynching, and

segregation are certainly compelling examples cf social insti

tutions that, Jike the prison, were once considered to be as

everlasting as the sun. Yet, in the case of all three examples,

we can point to movements that assumed the radical stance

of announcing the obsolescence of these institutions. It may

help us gain perspective on the prison if we try to imagine

how strange and discomforting the debates about the obso

lescence of slavery must have been to those who took the

"peculiar institution" for granted—and especially to those

who reaped direct benefits from this dreadful system of racist

exploitation. And even though there was widespread resist

ance among black slaves, there were even some among them

who assumed that they and their progeny would be always

subjected to the tyranny of slavery.

I have introduced three abolition campaigns that were

eventually more or less successful to make the point that

social circumstances transform and popular attitudes shift,

in part in response to organized social movements. But I

have also evoked these historical campaigns because they all

targeted some expression of racism. U.S. chattel slavery was

a system of forced labor that relied on racist ideas and beliefs

to justify the relegation of people of African descent to the

legal status of property. Lynching was an extralegal institu

tion that surrendered thousands of African-American lives

to the violence of ruthless racist mobs. Under segregation,

black people were legally declared second-class citizens, for

whom voting, job, education, and housing rights were dras

tically curtailed, if they were available at all.

What is the relationship between these 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 punishment industry. If we

are already persuaded that racism should not be allowed to

define the planet's future and if we can successfully argue

that prisons are racist institutions, this may lead us to take

seriously the prospect of declaring prisons obsolete.

For the moment I am concentrating on the history of

antiblack racism in order to make the point that the prison

reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operate in

clandestine ways. In other words, they are rarely recognized

as racist. But there are other racialized histories that have

affected the development of the U.S. punishment system as

well—the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, and

Asian-Americans. These racisms also congeal and combine

in the prison. Because we are so accustomed to talking about

race in terms of black and white, we often fail to recognize

and contest expressions of racism that target people of color

who are not black. Consider the mass arrests and detention

of people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Muslim her

itage in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on

the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

This leads us to two important questions: Are prisons

racist institutions? Is racism so deeply entrenched in the

institution of the prison that it is not possible to eliminate

one without eliminating the other? These are questions that

we should keep in mind as we examine the historical links

between U.S. slavery and the early penitentiary system. The

penitentiary as an institution that simultaneously punished

and rehabilitated its inhabitants was a new system of pun

ishment that 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 corporal

punishment by incarceration.

Imprisonment itself was new neither to the United States

nor to the world, but until the creation of this new institu

tion called the penitentiary, it served as a prelude to punish

ment. People who were to be subjected to some form of cor

poral punishment were detained in prison until the execu

tion of the punishment. With the penitentiary, incarceration

became the punishment itself. As is indicated in the desig

nation "penitentiary/7 imprisonment was regarded as reha

bilitative and the penitentiary prison was devised to provide

convicts with the conditions for reflecting on their crimes

and, through penitence, for reshaping their habits and even

their souls. Although some antislavery advocates spoke out

against this new system of punishment during the revolu

tionary period, the penitentiary was generally viewed as a

progressive reform, linked to the larger campaign for the

rights of citizens.

In many ways, the penitentiary was a vast improvement

over the many forms of capital and corporal punishment

inherited from the English. However, the contention that

prisoners would refashion themselves if only given the

opportunity to reflect and labor in solitude and silence 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 has pointed out:

One may perceive in the penitentiary many reflec

tions of chattel slavery as it was practiced in the

South. Both institutions subordinated their subjects

to the will of others. Like Southern slaves, prison

inmates followed a daily routine specified by their

superiors. Both institutions reduced their subjects to

dependence on others for the supply of basic human

services such as food and shelter. Both isolated their

subjects from the general population by confining

them to a fixed habitat. And both frequently coerced

their subjects to work, often for longer hours and for

less compensation than free laborers.16

As Hirsch has observed, both institutions deployed simi

lar forms of punishment, and prison regulations were, in fact,

very similar to the Slave Codes—the laws that deprived

enslaved human beings of virtually all rights. Moreover, both

prisoners and slaves were considered to have pronounced

proclivities to crime. People sentenced to the penitentiary in

the North, white and black alike, were popularly represented

as having a strong kinship to enslaved black people.17

The ideologies governing slavery and those governing

punishment were profoundly linked during the earliest

period of U.S. history. While free people could be legally

sentenced to punishment by hard labor, such a sentence

would in no way change the conditions of existence already

experienced by slaves. Thus, as Hirsch further reveals,

Thomas Jefferson, who supported the sentencing of con

victed people to hard labor on road and water projects, also

pointed out that he would exclude slaves from this sort of

punishment. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sen

tencing them to penal labor would not mark a difference in

their condition. Jefferson suggested banishment to other

countries instead.18

Particularly in the United States, race has always played

a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality.

After the abolition of slavery, former slave states passed

new legislation revising the Slave Codes in order to regulate

the behavior of free blacks in ways similar to those that had

existed during slavery. The new Black Codes proscribed a

range of actions—such as vagrancy, absence from work,

breach of job contracts, the possession of firearms, and

insulting gestures or acts—that were criminalized only

when the person charged was black. With the passage of the

Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, slavery and

involuntary servitude were putatively abolished. However,

there was a significant exception. In the wording of the

amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude were 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 been extricated from a condition

of hard labor for life, could be legally sentenced to penal

servitude.

In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states

hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could

legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released

slaves. Black people became the prime targets of a developing

convict lease system, referred to by many as a reincarnation

of slavery. The Mississippi Black Codes, for example,

declared vagrant "anyone/who was guilty of theft, had run

away [from a job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in con

duct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money

carelessly, and . . . all other idle and disorderly persons."19

Thus, vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable

by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very

plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.

Mary Ellen Curtin's study of Alabama prisoners during

the decades following emancipation discloses that before the

four hundred thousand black slaves in that state were set

free, ninety-nine percent of prisoners in Alabama's peniten

tiaries were white. As a consequence of the shifts provoked

by the institution of the Black Codes, within a short period

of time, the overwhelming majority of Alabama's convicts

were black.20 She further observes:

Although the vast majority of Alabama's antebel

lum 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 buttressed the

belief that African Americans were inherently

criminal and, in particular, prone to larceny.21

In 1883, Frederick Douglass had already written about

the South's tendency to "impute crime to color."22 When a

particularly egregious crime was committed, he noted, not

only was guilt frequently assigned to a black person regard

less of the perpetrator's race, but white men sometimes

sought to escape punishment by disguising themselves as

black. Douglass would later recount one such incident that

took place in Granger County, Tennessee, in which a man

who appeared to be black was shot while committing a rob

bery. The wounded man, however, was discovered to be a

respectable white citizen who had colored his face black.

The above example from Douglass demonstrates how

whiteness, in the words of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, oper

ates as property.23 According to Harris, the fact that white

identity was possessed as property meant that rights, liber

ties, and self-identity were affirmed for white people, while

being denied to black people. The latter's only access to

whiteness was through "passing." Douglass's comments

indicate how this property interest in whiteness was easily

reversed in schemes to deny black people their rights to due

process. Interestingly, cases similar to the one Douglass dis

cusses above emerged in the United States during the 1990s:

in Boston, Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife and

attempted to blame an anonymous black man, and in

Union, South Carolina, Susan Smith killed her children and

claimed they had been abducted by a black carjacker. The

racialization of crime—the tendency to "impute crime to

color/' to use Frederick Douglass's words—did not wither

away as the country became increasingly removed from

slavery. Proof that crime continues to be imputed to color

resides in the many evocations of "racial profiling" in our

time. That it is possible to be targeted by the police for no

other reason than the color of one's skin is not mere specu

lation. Police departments in major urban areas have admit

ted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize

the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested—

even in the absence of probable cause. In the aftermath of

the September 11 attacks, vast numbers of people of Middle

Eastern and South Asian heritage were arrested and detained

by the police agency known as Immigration and

Naturalization Services (INS). The INS is the federal agency

that claims the largest number of armed agents, even more

than the FBI24

During the post-slavery era, as black people were inte

grated into southern penal systems—and as the penal sys

tem became a system of penal servitude—the punishments

associated with slavery became further incorporated into

the penal system. "Whipping," as Matthew Mancini has

observed, "was the preeminent form of punishment under

slavery; and the lash, along with the chain, became the very

emblem of servitude for slaves and prisoners/'25 As indicat

ed above, black people were imprisoned under the laws

assembled in the various Black Codes of the southern 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 of the convict lease sys

tem and the county chain gang meant that the antebellum

criminal justice system, which focused far more intensely

on black people than on whites, defined southern criminal

justice largely as a means of controlling black labor.

According to Mancini:

Among the multifarious debilitating legacies of

slavery was the conviction that blacks could only

labor in a certain way—the way experience had

shown them to have labored in the past: in gangs,

subjected to constant supervision, and under the

discipline of the lash. Since these were the requi

sites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks,

Southern whites almost universally concluded that

blacks could not work unless subjected to such

intense surveillance and discipline,26

Scholars who have studied the convict lease system point

out that in many important respects, convict leasing was far

worse than slavery, an insight that can be gleaned from titles

such as

One Dies, Get Another (by Mancini), Worse lhan

Slavery (David Oshinsky's work on Parchman Prison),27 and

Twice the Work of Free Labor (Alex Lichtenstein's examina

tion of the political economy of convict leasing),25 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 leased not as indi

viduals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to

death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.

According to descriptions by contemporaries, the condi

tions under which leased convicts and county chain gangs

lived were far worse than those under which black people

had lived as slaves. The records of Mississippi plantations in

the Yazoo Delta during the late 1880s indicate that

the prisoners ate and slept on bare ground, without

blankets or mattresses, and often without clothes.

They were punished for "slow hoeing" (ten lashes),

"sorry planting'7 (five lashes), and "being light with

cotton" (five lashes). Some who attempted to

escape were whipped "till the blood ran down their

legs"; others had a metal spur riveted to their feet.

Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia,

malaria, frostbite, consumption sunstroke, dysen

tery, gunshot wounds, and "shackle poisoning" (the

constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against

bare flesh].29

The appalling treatment to which convicts were subject

ed under the lease system recapitulated and further extend

ed the regimes of slavery. If, as Adam Jay Hirsch contends,

the early incarnations of the U.S. penitentiary in the North

tended to mirror 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 "free" world.

The population of convicts, whose racial composition was

dramatically transformed by the abolition of slavery, could

be subjected to such intense exploitation and to such hor

rendous modes of punishment precisely because they con

tinued to be perceived as slaves.

Historian Mary Ann Curtin has observed that many schol

ars who have acknowledged the deeply entrenched racism of

the post-Civil War structures of punishment in the South have

failed to identify the extent to which racism colored 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—and this, she says, is indeed par

tially true—that in the aftermath of emancipation, large num

bers of black people were forced by their new social situation

to steal in order to survive. It was the transformation of petty

thievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers of

black people to the "involuntary servitude" legalized by the

Thirteenth Amendment. What Curtin suggests is that these

charges of theft were frequently fabricated outright. They

"also served as subterfuge for political revenge. After emanci

pation the courtroom became an ideal place to exact racial ret

ribution."30 In this sense, the work of the criminal justice sys

tem was intimately related to the extralegal work of lynching.

Alex Lichtenstein, whose study focuses on the role of the

convict lease system in forging a new labor force for the

South, identifies the lease system, along with the new Jim

Crow laws, as the central institution in the development of

a racial state.

New South capitalists in Georgia and elsewhere

were able to use the state to recruit and discipline a

convict labor force, and thus were able to develop

their states' resources without creating a wage labor

force, and without undermining planters' control of

black labor. In fact, quite the opposite: the penal

system could be used as a powerful sanction against

rural blacks who challenged the racial order upon

which agricultural labor control relied.31

Lichtenstein discloses, for example, the extent to which

the building of Georgia railroads during the nineteenth cen

tury relied on black convict labor. He further reminds us

that as we drive down the most famous street in Atlanta—

Peachtree Street—we ride on the backs of convicts: "[T]he

renowned Peachtree Street and the rest of Atlanta's well-

paved roads and modern transportation infrastructure,

which helped cement its place as the commercial hub of the

modern South, were originally laid by convicts."32

Lichtenstein's major argument is that the convict lease

was not an irrational regression; it was not primarily a

throwback to precapitalist modes of production. Rather, it

was a most efficient and most rational deployment of racist

strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South.

In this sense, he argues, "convict labor was in many ways in

the vanguard of the region's first tentative, ambivalent, steps

toward modernity."33

Those of us who have had the opportunity to visit nine-

teenth-century mansions that were originally constructed

on slave plantations are rarely content with an aesthetic

appraisal of these structures, no matter how beautiful they

may be. Sufficient visual imagery of toiling black slaves cir

culate enough in our environment for us to imagine the bru

tality that hides just beneath the surface of these wondrous

mansions. We have learned how to recognize the role of

slave labor, as well as the racism it embodied. But black con

vict labor remains a hidden dimension of our history. It is

extremely unsettling to think of modern, industrialized

urban areas as having been originally produced under the

racist labor conditions of penal servitude that are often

described by historians as even worse than slavery.

I grew up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Because of

its mines—coal and iron ore—and its steel mills that

remained active until the deindustrialization process of the

1980s, it was widely known as "the Pittsburgh of the

South." The fathers of many of my friends worked in these

mines and mills. It is only recently that I have learned that

the black miners and steelworkers I knew during my child

hood inherited their place in Birmingham's industrial devel

opment from black convicts forced to do this work under the

lease system. As Curtin observes,

Many ex-prisoners became miners because Alabama

used prison labor extensively in its coalmines. By

1888 all of Alabama's able male prisoners were leased

to two major mining companies: the Tennessee Coal

and Iron Company (TCI) and Sloss Iron and Steel

Company. For a charge of up to $18.50 per month per

man, these corporations "leased," or rented prison

laborers and worked them in coalmines.34

Learning about this little-acknowledged dimension of

black and labor history has caused me to reevaluate my own

childhood experiences.

One of the many ruses racism achieves is the virtual era

sure of historical contributions by people of color. Here we

have 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 black convicts as a

result of racist coercion. Just as it is difficult to imagine how

much is owed to convicts relegated to penal servitude during

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find it difficult

today to feel a connection with the prisoners who produce a

rising number of commodities that we take for granted in our

daily lives. In the state of California, public colleges and uni

versities are provided with furniture produced by prisoners,

the vast majority of whom are Latino and black.

There are aspects of our history that we need to interro

gate and rethink, the recognition of which may help us to

adopt more complicated, critical postures toward the pres

ent and the future. I have focused on the work of a few schol

ars whose work urges us to raise questions about the past,

present, and future. Curtin, for example, is not simply con

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 research to urge us to think

about the uncanny parallels between the convict lease sys

tem in the nineteenth century and prison privatization in

the twenty-first.

In the late nineteenth century, coal companies

wished to keep their skilled prison laborers for as

long as they could, leading to denials of "short

time." Today, a slightly different economic incen

tive can lead to similar consequences. CCA

[Corrections Corporation of America] is paid per

prisoner. If the supply dries up, or too many are

released too early, their profits are affected . . .

Longer prison terms mean greater profits, but the

larger point is that the profit motive promotes the

expansion of imprisonment.35

The persistence of the prison as the main form of pun

ishment, with its racist and sexist dimensions, has created

this historical continuity between the nineteenth- and early-

twentieth-century convict lease system and the privatized

prison business today. While the convict lease system was

legally abolished, its structures of exploitation have

reemerged in the patterns of privatization, and, more gener

ally, in the wide-ranging corporatization of punishment that

has produced a prison industrial complex. If the prison con

tinues to dominate the landscape of punishment throughout

this century and into the next, what might await coming

generations of impoverished African-Americans, Latinos,

Native Americans, and Asian-Americans? Given the paral

lels between the prison and slavery, a productive exercise

might consist in speculating about what the present might

look like if slavery or its successor, the convict lease system,

had not been abolished.

To be sure, I am not suggesting that the abolition of slav

ery and the lease system has produced an era of equality and

justice. On the contrary, racism surreptitiously defines

social and economic structures in ways that are difficult to

identify and thus are much more damaging. In some states,

for example, more than one-third of black men have been

labeled felons. In Alabama and Florida, once a felon, always

a felon, which entails the loss of status as a rights-bearing

citizen. One of the grave consequences of the powerful reach

of the prison was the 2000 (s)election of George W. Bush as

president. If only the black men and women denied the right

to vote because of an actual or presumed felony record had

been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the

White House today. And perhaps we would not be dealing

with the awful costs of the War on Terrorism declared dur

ing the first year of his administration. If not for his election,

the people of Iraq might not have suffered 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

lease system or racial segregation. But we do not have to

speculate about living with the consequences of the prison.

There is more than enough evidence in the lives of men and

women who have been claimed by ever more repressive

institutions and who are denied access to their families,

their communities, to educational opportunities, to 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 communities of color that replicate

the structures and regimes of the prison. When children

attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and

security than on knowledge and intellectual development,

they are attending prep schools for prison. If this is the

predicament we face today, what might the future hold if the

prison system acquires an even greater presence in our soci

ety? In the nineteenth century, antislavery activists insisted

that as long as slavery continued, the future of democracy

was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprison

activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revi

talization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the

prison system.

Imprisonment and Reform

"One should recall that the movement for reforming the

prisons, for controlling their functioning is not a recent

phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in

a recognition of failure. Prison 'reform' is virtually con

temporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were,

its programme."

—Michel Foucault36

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

efforts by reformers to create a better system of punishment

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

because "prison" and "reform" have been inextricably

linked since the beginning of the use of imprisonment as the

main means of punishing those who violate social norms.

As I have already indicated, the origins of the prison are

associated with the American Revolution and therefore with

the resistance to the colonial power of England. Today this

seems ironic, but incarceration within a penitentiary was

assumed to be humane—at least far more humane than the

capital and corporal punishment inherited from England and

other European countries, Foucault opens his study,

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, with a 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 tortures ordered by the court Red-hot pincers were

used to burn away the flesh from his limbs, and molten lead,

boiling oil, burning resin, and other substances were melted

together and poured onto the wounds. Finally, he was drawn

and quartered, his body burned, and the ashes tossed into

the wind.37 Under English common law, a conviction for

sodomy led to the punishment of being buried alive, and

convicted heretics also were burned alive. "The crime of

treason by a female was punished initially under the com

mon law by burning alive the defendant However, in the

year 1790 this method was halted and the punishment

became strangulation and burning of the corpse."38

European and American reformers set out to end macabre

penalties such as this, as well as 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

most profound effect not so much on the person punished as

on the crowd of spectators. Punishment was, in essence,

public spectacle. Reformers such as John Howard in England

and Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania argued that punish

ment—if carried out in isolation, behind the walls of the

prison—would cease to be revenge and would actually

reform those who had broken the law.

It should also be pointed out that punishment has not been

without its gendered dimensions. Women were often pun

ished within the domestic domain, and instruments of torture

were sometimes imported by authorities into the household.

In seventeenth-century Britain, women whose husbands iden

tified them as quarrelsome and unaccepting of male domi

nance were punished by means of a gossip's bridle, or

"branks," a headpiece with a chain attached and an iron bit

that was introduced into the woman's mouth.39 Although the

branking of women was often linked to a public parade, this

contraption was sometimes hooked to a wall of the house,

where the punished woman remained until her husband

decided to release her. I mention these forms of punishment

inflicted on women because, like the punishment inflicted on

slaves, they were rarely taken up by prison reformers.

Other modes of punishment that predated the rise of the

prison include banishment, forced labor in galleys, trans

portation, and appropriation of the accused's property. The

punitive transportation of large numbers of people from

England, for example, facilitated the initial colonization of

Australia. Transported English convicts also settled the

North American colony of Georgia. During the early 1700s,

one in eight transported convicts were women, and the work

they were forced to perform often consisted of prostitution.40

Imprisonment was not employed as a principal mode of

punishment until the eighteenth century in Europe and the

nineteenth century in the United States. And European

prison systems were instituted in Asia and Africa as an

important component of colonial rule. In India, for example,

the English prison system was introduced during the second

half of the eighteenth century, when jails were established

in the regions of Calcutta and Madras. In Europe, the peni

tentiary movement against capital and other corporal pun

ishments reflected new intellectual tendencies associated

with the Enlightenment, activist interventions by

Protestant reformers, and structural transformations associ

ated with the rise of industrial capitalism. In Milan in 1764,

Cesare Beccaria published his Essay on Crimes and

Punishments,41 which was strongly influenced by notions of

equality advanced by the philosophes—especially Voltaire,

Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Beccaria argued that punish

ment should never be a private matter, nor should it be arbi

trarily violent; rather, it should be public, swift, and as

lenient as possible. He revealed the contradiction of what

was then a distinctive feature of imprisonment—the fact

that it was generally imposed prior to the defendant's guilt

or innocence being decided.

However, incarceration itself eventually became the

penalty, bringing about a distinction between imprisonment

as punishment and pretrial detention or detention until the

infliction of punishment. The process through which

imprisonment developed into the primary mode of state-

inflicted punishment was very much related to the rise of

capitalism and to the appearance of a new set of ideological

conditions. These new conditions reflected the rise of the

bourgeoisie as the social class whose interests and 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 superior form of punishment for

all times. It was simply—though we should not underesti

mate the complexity of this process—what made most sense

at a particular moment in history. We should therefore ques

tion whether a system that was intimately related to a par

ticular set of historical circumstances that prevailed during

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can lay absolute

claim on the twenty-first century.

It may be important at this point in our examination to

acknowledge the radical shift in the social perception of the

individual that appeared in the ideas of that era. With the

rise of the bourgeoisie, the individual came to be regarded as

a bearer of formal rights and liberties. The notion of the indi

vidual's inalienable rights and liberties was eventually

memorialized in the French and American Revolution.

“Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” from the French Revolution

and "We hold these truths to be self-evident: all men are cre

ated equal.. from the American Revolution were new and

radical ideas, even though they were not extended to

women, workers, Africans, and Indians. Before the accept

ance of the sanctity of individual rights, imprisonment

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 rights and liberties by

removal from society to a space tyrannically governed by the

state would not have made sense. Banishment beyond the

geographical limits of the town may have made sense, but

not the alteration of the individual's legal status through

imposition of a prison sentence.

Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always comput

ed in terms of time, is related to abstract quantification,

evoking the rise of science and what is often referred to as

the Age of Reason. We should keep in mind that this was

precisely the historical period when the value of labor began

to be calculated in terms of time and therefore compensated

in another quantifiable way, by money. The computability

of state punishment in terms of time—days, months,

years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for

computing the value of capitalist commodities. 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 punishment42

Today, the growing social movement contesting the

supremacy of global capital is a movement that directly chal

lenges the rule of the planet—its human, animal, and plant

populations, as well as its natural resources—by corporations

that are primarily interested in the increased production and

circulation of ever more profitable commodities. This is a

challenge to the supremacy of the commodity form, a rising

resistance to the contemporary tendency to commodify

every aspect of planetary existence. The question we might

consider is whether this new resistance to capitalist 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

reformers. But convicts punished by imprisonment in emer

gent penitentiary systems were primarily male. This reflect

ed the deeply gender-biased structure of legal, political, and

economic rights. Since women were largely denied public

status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily

punished by the deprivation of such rights through impris

onment.43 This was especially true of married women, who

had no standing before the law. According to English com

mon law, marriage resulted in a state of "civil death/’' as

symbolized by the wife's assumption of the husband's name,

Consequently, she tended to be punished for revolting

against her domestic duties rather than for failure in her 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 long after these modes

of punishment had become obsolete for (white) men. The

persistence of domestic violence painfully attests to these

historical modes of gendered punishment.

Some scholars have argued that the word "penitentiary"

may have been used first in connection with plans outlined

in England in 1758 to house "penitent prostitutes/' In 1777,

John Howard, the leading Protestant proponent of penal

reform in England, published The State of the Prisons,44 in

which he conceptualized imprisonment as an occasion for

religious self-reflection and self-reform. Between 1787 and

1791, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham published

his letters on a prison model he called the panopticon.45

Bentham claimed that criminals could only internalize pro

ductive labor habits if they were under constant surveil

lance. According to his panopticon model, prisoners 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 to see the warden. From

his vantage point, on the other hand, the warden would be

able to see all of the prisoners. However—and this was the

most significant aspect of Bentham's mammoth 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 all times.

If we combine Howard's emphasis on disciplined self

reflection with Bentham's ideas regarding the technology of

internalization designed to make surveillance and discipline

the purview of the individual prisoner, we can begin to see

how such a conception of the prison had far-reaching impli

cations. The conditions of possibility for this new form of

punishment were strongly anchored in a historical era during

which the working class needed to be constituted as an army

of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the req

uisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist system.

John Howard's ideas were incorporated in the

Penitentiary Act of 1799, which opened the way for the

modern prison. While Jeremy Bentham's ideas influenced

the development of the first national English penitentiary,

located in Millbank and opened in 1816, the first full-fledged

effort to create a panopticon prison was in the United States.

The Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, based on a

revised architectural model of the panopticon, opened in

1826. But the penitentiary had already made its appearance

in the United States. Pennsylvania's Walnut Street Jail

housed the first state penitentiary in the United States,

when a portion of the jail was converted in 1790 from a

detention facility to an institution housing convicts whose

prison sentences simultaneously became punishment and

occasions for penitence and reform.

Walnut Street's austere regime—total isolation in single

cells where prisoners lived, ate, worked, read the Bible (if,

indeed, they were literate), and supposedly reflected and

repented—came to be known as the Pennsylvania system.

This regime would constitute one of that era's two major

models of imprisonment. Although the other model, 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

model, which eventually crystallized in the Eastern State

Penitentiary in Cherry Hill—the plans for which were

approved in 1821—emphasized total isolation, silence, and

solitude, whereas the Auburn model called for solitary cells

but labor in common. This mode of prison labor, which was

called congregate, was supposed to unfold in total silence.

Prisoners were allowed to be with each other as they

worked, but only under condition of silence. Because of its

more efficient labor practices, Auburn eventually became

the dominant model, both for the United States and Europe.

Why would eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reform

ers become so invested in creating conditions of punishment

based on solitary confinement? Today, aside from death,

solitary confinement—next to torture, or as a form of tor

ture—is considered the worst form of punishment imagina

ble. Then, however, it was assumed to have an emancipato

ry effect. The body was placed in conditions of segregation

and solitude in order to allow the soul to flourish. It is not

accidental that most of the reformers of that era were deeply

religious and therefore saw the architecture and regimes of

the penitentiary as emulating the architecture and regimes

of monastic life. Still, observers of the new penitentiary saw,

early on, the real potential for insanity in solitary confine

ment. In an often-quoted passage of his American Notes,

Charles Dickens prefaced a description of his 1842 visit to

Eastern Penitentiary with the observation that "the system

here is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I

believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong."

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind,

humane, and meant for reformation; but I am per

suaded that those who devised this system of Prison

Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who

carry it into execution, do not know what it is that

they are doing. I believe that very few men are capa

ble of estimating the immense amount of torture and

agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for

years, inflicts upon the sufferers . . . I am only the

more convinced that there is a depth of terrible

endurance in it which none but the sufferers them

selves can fathom, and which no man has a right to

inflict upon his fellowcreature. I hold this slow and

daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be

immeasurably worse than any torture of the body . ..

because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it

extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore

I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which

slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.46

Unlike other Europeans such as Alexis de Tocqueville

and Gustave de Beaumont, who believed that such punish

ment would result in moral renewal and thus mold convicts

into better citizens,47 Dickens was of the opinion that

"]t]hose who have undergone this punishment MUST pass

into society again morally unhealthy and diseased."48 This

early critique of the penitentiary and its regime of solitary

confinement troubles the notion that imprisonment is the

most suitable form of punishment for a democratic society.

The current construction and expansion of state and fed

eral super-maximum security prisons, whose putative pur

pose is to address disciplinary problems within the penal

system, draws upon the historical conception of the peni

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 first of which emerged when federal correctional

authorities began to send prisoners housed throughout the

system whom they deemed to be "dangerous" to the federal

prison in Marion, Illinois. In 1983, the entire prison was

"locked down," which meant that prisoners were confined

to their cells twenty-three hours a day. This lockdown

became permanent, thus furnishing the general model for

the control unit and supermax prison49 Today, there are

approximately sixty super-maximum security federal and

state prisons located in thirty-six states and many more

supermax units in virtually every state in the country.

A description of supermaxes in a 1997 Human Rights

Watch report sounds chillingly like Dickens's description of

Eastern State Penitentiary. What is different, however, is

that all references to individual rehabilitation have disap

peared.

Inmates in super-maximum security facilities are

usually held in single cell lock-down, commonly

referred to as solitary confinement. . . [C]ongregate

activities with other prisoners are usually prohibit

ed; other prisoners cannot even be seen from an

inmate's cell; communication with other prisoners

is prohibited or difficult (consisting, for example, of

shouting from cell to cell); visiting and telephone

privileges are limited.50

The new generation of super-maximum security facilities

also rely on state-of-the-art technology for monitoring and

controlling prisoner conduct and movement, utilizing, for

example, video monitors and remote-controlled electronic

doors.51 "These prisons represent the application of sophis

ticated, modern technology dedicated entirely to the task of

social control, and they isolate, regulate and surveil more

effectively than anything that has preceded them."52

I have highlighted the similarities between the early U.S.

penitentiary—with its aspirations toward individual rehabil

itation—and the repressive supermaxes of our era as a

reminder of the mutability of history. What was once

regarded as progressive and even revolutionary represents

today the marriage of technological superiority and political

backwardness. No one—not even the most ardent defenders

of the supermax—would try to argue today that absolute

segregation, including sensory deprivation, is restorative and

healing. The prevailing justification for the supermax is that

the horrors it creates are the perfect complement for the hor

rifying personalities deemed the worst of the worst by the

prison system. In other words, there is no pretense that

rights are respected, there is no concern for the individual,

there is no sense that men and women incarcerated in super

maxes deserve anything approaching respect and comfort.

According to a 1999 report issued by the National Institute

of Corrections,

Generally, the overall constitutionality of these

[supermax] programs remains unclear. As larger

numbers of inmates with a greater diversity of char

acteristics, backgrounds, and behaviors are incar

cerated in these facilities, the likelihood of legal

challenge is increased.55

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, absolute

solitude and strict regimentation of the prisoner's every

action were viewed as strategies for transforming habits and

ethics. That is to say, the idea that imprisonment should be

the main form of punishment reflected a belief in the poten

tial of white mankind for progress, not only in science and

industry, but at the level of the individual member of socie

ty as well Prison reformers mirrored Enlightenment

assumptions of progress in every aspect of human—or to be

more precise, white Western—society. In his 1987 study

Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of

Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, John Bender proposes

the very intriguing argument that the emergent literary genre

of the novel furthered a discourse of progress and individual

transformation that encouraged attitudes toward punish

ment to change.54 These attitudes, he suggests, heralded the

conception and construction of penitentiary prisons during

the latter part of the eighteenth century as a reform suited to

the capacities of those who were deemed human.

Reformers who called for the imposition of penitentiary

architecture and regimes on the then existing structure of the

prison aimed their critiques at the prisons that were primari

ly used for purposes of pretrial detention or as an alternative

punishment for those who were unable to pay fines exacted

by the courts. John Howard, the most well known of these

reformers, was what you might today call a prison activist.

Beginning in 1773, at the age of forty-seven, he initiated a

series of visits that took him "to every institution for the

poor in Europe . . . [a campaign] which cost him his fortune

and finally his life in a typhus war of the Russian army at

Cherson in 1791. "55 At the conclusion of his first trip abroad,

he successfully ran for the office of sheriff in Bedfordshire. As

sheriff he investigated the prisons under his own jurisdiction

and later "set out to visit every prison in England and Wales

to document the evils he had first observed at Bedford."56

Bender argues that the novel helped facilitate these cam

paigns to transform the old prisons—which were filthy and

in disarray, and which thrived on the bribery of the war

dens—into well-ordered rehabilitative penitentiaries. He

shows that novels such as Moll Flanders and Robinson

Crusoe emphasized "the power of confinement to reshape

personality"57 and popularized some of the ideas that moved

reformers to action. As Bender points out, the eighteenth-

century reformers criticized the old prisons for their chaos,

their lack of organization and classification, for the easy cir

culation of alcohol and prostitution they permitted, and for

the prevalence of contagion and disease.

The reformers, primarily Protestant, among whom

Quakers were especially dominant, couched their ideas in

large part in religious frameworks. Though John Howard

was not himself a Quaker—he was an independent

Protestant—nevertheless

[h]e was drawn to Quaker asceticism and adopted

the dress "of a plain Friend." His own brand of piety

was strongly reminiscent of the Quaker traditions

of silent prayer, "suffering" introspection, and faith

in the illumining power of God's light. Quakers, for

their part, were bound to be drawn to the idea of

imprisonment as a purgatory, as a forced withdraw

al from the distractions of the senses into silent and

solitary confrontation with the self. Howard con

ceived of a convict's process of reformation in terms

similar to the spiritual awakening of a believer at a

Quaker meeting.58

However, according to Michael Ignatieff, Howard's con

tributions did not so much reside in the religiosity of his

reform efforts.

The originality of Howard's indictment lies in its

"scientific," not in its moral character. Elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756 and author of

several scientific papers on climatic variations in

Bedfordshire, Howard was one of the first philan

thropists to attempt a systematic statistical

description of a social problem.59

Likewise, Bender's analysis of the relationship between

the novel and the penitentiary emphasizes the extent to

which the philosophical underpinnings of the prison

reformer's campaigns echoed the materialism and 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-consciousness.

He argues that people detained within the old prisons were

not severely restricted—they sometimes even enjoyed the

freedom to move in and out of the prison. They were not

compelled to work and, depending on their own resources,

could eat and drink as they wished. Even sex was sometimes

available, as prostitutes were sometimes allowed temporary

entrance into the prisons. Howard and other reformers

called for the imposition of rigid rules that would "enforce

solitude and penitence, cleanliness and work,"60

"The new penitentiaries," according to Bender, "sup

planting both the old prisons and houses of correction,

explicitly reached toward . . . three goals: maintenance of

order within a largely urban labor force, salvation of the

soul, and rationalization of personality."61 He argues that

this is precisely what was narratively accomplished by the

novel. It ordered and classified social life, it represented indi

viduals as conscious of their surroundings and as self-aware

and se If-fashioning. Bender thus sees a kinship between two

major developments of the eighteenth century—the rise of

the novel in the cultural sphere and the rise of the peniten

tiary in the socio-legal sphere. If the novel as a cultural form

helped to produce the penitentiary, then prison reformers

must have been influenced by the ideas generated by and

through the eighteenth-century novel.

Literature has continued to play a role in campaigns

around the prison. During the twentieth century, prison writ

ing, in particular, has periodically experienced waves of pop

ularity. The public recognition of prison writing in the

United States has historically coincided with the influence of

social movements calling for prison reform and/or abolition.

Robert Burns's I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain

Gang.6'1 and the 1932 Hollywood film upon which it was

based, played a central role in the campaign to abolish the

chain gang. During the 1970s, which were marked by intense

organizing within, outside, and across prison walls, numer

ous works authored by prisoners followed the 1970 publica

tion of George Jackson's Soledad Brother65 and the antholo

gy I coedited with Bettina Aptheker, If They Come in the

Morning M While many prison writers during that era had

discovered the emancipatory potential of writing on their

own, relying either on the education they had received prior

to their imprisonment or on their tenacious efforts at self-

education, others pursued their writing as a direct result of

the expansion of prison educational programs during that era.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has challenged the contemporary

dismantling of prison education programs, asks in Live from

Death Row,

What societal interest is served by prisoners who

remain illiterate? What social benefit is there in

ignorance? How are people corrected while impris

oned if their education is outlawed? Who profits

[other than the prison establishment itself) from

stupid prisoners?65

A practicing journalist before his arrest in 1982 on charges

of killing Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, Abu-

Jamal has regularly produced articles on capital punishment,

focusing especially on its racial and class disproportions. His

ideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty with

the more general challenges to the expanding U.S. prison sys

tem and are particularly helpful to activists who seek to asso

ciate death penalty abolitionism with prison abolitionism,

His prison writings have been published in both popular and

scholarly journals (such as

The Nation and Yale Law Journal]

as well as in three collections, Live from Death Row, Death

Blossoms,66 and All Things Censored.67

Abu-Jamal and many other prison writers have strongly

criticized the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners, which

was enacted in the 1994 crime bill,68 as indicative of the

contemporary pattern of dismantling educational programs

behind bars. As creative writing courses for prisoners were

defunded, virtually every literary journal publishing prison

ers' writing eventually collapsed. Of the scores of magazines

and newspapers produced behind walls, only the Angolite at

Louisiana's Angola Prison and Prison Legal News at

Washington State Prison remain. What this means is that

precisely at a time of consolidating a significant writing cul

ture behind bars, repressive strategies are being deployed to

dissuade prisoners from educating themselves.

If the publication of Malcolm X's autobiography marks

a pivotal moment in the development of prison literature

and a moment of vast promise for prisoners who try to

make education a major dimension of their time behind

bars,69 contemporary prison practices are systematically

dashing those hopes. In the 1950s, Malcolm's prison edu

cation was a dramatic example of prisoners' ability to turn

their incarceration into a transformative experience. With

no available means of organizing his quest for knowledge,

he proceeded to read a dictionary, copying each word in his

own hand. By the time he could immerse himself in read

ing, he noted, "months passed without my even thinking

about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had

been so truly free in my life."70 Then, according to

Malcolm, prisoners who demonstrated an unusual interest

in reading were assumed to have embarked upon a journey

of self-rehabilitation and were frequently allowed special

privileges—such as checking out more than the maximum

number of books. Even so, in order to pursue this self-edu

cation, Malcolm had to work against the prison regime—he

often read on his cell floor, long after lights-out, by the

glow of the corridor light, taking care to return to bed each

hour for the two minutes during which the guard marched

past his cell.

The contemporary disestablishment of writing and other

prison educational programs is indicative of the official dis

regard today for rehabilitative strategies, particularly those

that encourage individual prisoners to acquire autonomy of

the mind. The documentary film The Last Graduation

describes the role prisoners played in establishing a four-year

college program at New York's Greenhaven Prison and,

twenty-two years later, the official decision to dismantle it.

According to Eddie Ellis, who spent twenty-five years in

prison and is currently a well-known leader of the antiprison

movement, "As a result of Attica, college programs came

into the prisons."71

In the aftermath of the 1971 prisoner rebellion at Attica

and the government-sponsored massacre, public opinion

began to favor prison reform. Forty-three Attica prisoners

and eleven guards and civilians were killed by the National

Guard, who had been ordered to retake the prison by

Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The leaders of the prison

rebellion had been very specific about their demands. In

their "practical demands" they expressed concerns about

diet, improvement in the quality of guards, more realistic

rehabilitation programs, and better education programs.

They also wanted religious freedom, freedom to engage in

political activity, and an end to censorship—all of which

they saw as indispensable to their educational needs. As

Eddie Ellis observes in The Last Graduation,

Prisoners very early recognized the fact that they

needed to be better educated, that the more educa

tion they had, the better they would be able to deal

with themselves and their problems, the problems

of the prisons and the problems of the communities

from which most of them came.

Lateef Islam, another former prisoner featured in this

documentary, said, "We held classes before the college

came. We taught each other, and sometimes under penalty

of a beat-up."

After the Attica Rebellion, more than five hundred pris

oners were transferred to Greenhaven, including some of the

leaders who continued to press for educational programs. As

a direct result of their demands, Marist College, a New York

state college near Greenhaven, began to offer college-level

courses in 1973 and eventually established the infrastruc

ture for an on-site four-year college program. The program

thrived for twenty-two years. Some of the many prisoners

who earned their degrees at Greenhaven pursued postgradu

ate studies after their release. As the documentary power

fully demonstrates, the program produced dedicated men

who left prison and offered their newly acquired knowledge

and skills to their communities on the outside.

In 1994, consistent with the general pattern of creating

more prisons and more repression within all prisons,

Congress took up the question of withdrawing college fund

ing for inmates. The congressional debate concluded with a

decision to add an amendment to the 1994 crime bill that

eliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, thus effectively

defunding all higher educational programs. After twenty-

two years, Marist College was compelled to terminate its

program at Greenhaven Prison. Thus, the documentary

revolves around the very last graduation ceremony on July

15, 1995, and the poignant process of removing the books

that, in many ways, symbolized the possibilities of freedom.

Or, as one of the Marist professors said, "They see books as

full of gold." The prisoner who for many years had served as

a clerk for the college sadly reflected, as books were being

moved, that there was nothing left to do in prison—except

perhaps bodybuilding. "But/' he asked, "what's the use of

building your body if you can't build your mind?" Ironically,

not long after educational programs were disestablished,

weights and bodybuilding equipment were also removed

from most U.S. prisons.

How Gender Structures the

Prison System

"I have been told that I will never leave prison if I contin

ue to fight the system. My answer is that one must be

alive in order to leave prison, and our current standard of

medical care is tantamount to a death sentence.

Therefore, I have no choice but to continue ... Conditions

within the institution continually reinvoke memories of

violence and oppression, often with devastating results.

Unlike other incarcerated women who have come forward

to reveal their impressions of prison, I do not feel 'safer'

here because 'the abuse has stopped/ It has not stopped. It

has shifted shape and paced itself differently, but it is as

insidious and pervasive in prison as ever it was in the

world I know outside these walls. What has ceased is my

ignorance of the facts concerning abuse—and my willing

ness to tolerate it in silence."

—Marcia Bunny72,

Over the last five years, the prison system has received far

more attention by the media than at any time since the peri

od following the 1971 Attica Rebellion. However, with a few

important exceptions, women have been left out of the pub

lic discussions about the expansion of the U.S. prison sys

tem. I am not suggesting that simply bringing women into

the existing conversations on jails and prisons will deepen

our analysis of state punishment and further the project of

prison abolition. Addressing issues that are specific to

women's prisons is of vital importance, but it is equally

important to shift the way we think about the prison system

as a whole. Certainly women's prison practices are gendered,

but so, too, are men's prison practices. To assume that men's

institutions constitute the norm and women's institutions

are marginal is, in a sense, to participate in the very nor

malization of prisons that an abolitionist approach seeks to

contest. Thus, the title of this chapter is not "Women and

the Prison System/' but rather "How Gender Structures the

Prison System." Moreover, scholars and activists who are

involved in feminist projects should not consider the struc

ture of state punishment as marginal to their work. Forward-

looking research and organizing strategies should recognize

that the deeply gendered character of punishment both

reflects and further entrenches the gendered structure of the

larger society.

Women prisoners have produced a small but impressive

body of literature that has illuminated significant aspects of

the organization of punishment that would have otherwise

remained unacknowledged. Assata Shakur's memoirs,73 for

example, reveal the dangerous intersections of racism, male

domination, and state strategies of political repression. In

1977 she was convicted on charges of murder and assault in

connection with a 1973 incident that left one New Jersey

state trooper dead and another wounded. She and her com

panion, Zayd Shakur, who was killed during the shootout,

were the targets of what we now name racial profiling and

were stopped by state troopers under the pretext of a broken

taillight. At the time Assata Shakur, known then as Joanne

Chesimard, was underground and had been anointed by the

police and the media as the "Soul of the Black Liberation

Army/' By her 1977 conviction, she either had been acquitted

or had charges dismissed in six other cases—upon the basis of

which she had been declared a fugitive in the first place. Her

attorney, Lennox Hinds, has pointed out that since it was

proven that Assata Shakur did not handle the gun with which

the state troopers were shot, her mere presence in the auto

mobile, against the backdrop of the media demonization to

which she was subjected, constituted the basis of her convic

tion. In the foreword to Shakur's autobiography Hinds writes:

In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial

detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she

was, continuously confined in a men's prison,

under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her most

intimate functions, without intellectual suste

nance, adequate medical attention, and exercise,

and without the company of other women for all

the years she was in their custody.74

There is no doubt that Assata Shakur's status as a black

political prisoner accused of killing a state trooper caused

her to be singled out by the authorities for unusually cruel

treatment. However, her own account emphasizes the

extent to which her individual experiences reflected those of

other imprisoned women, especially black and Puerto Rican

women. Her description of the strip search, which focuses

on the internal examination of body cavities, is especially

revealing:

Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur [members of the Black

Panther Party] had told me about it after they had

been bailed out in the Panther 21 trial. When they

had told me, I was horrified.

"You mean they really put their hands inside

you, to search you?" I had asked.

"Uh-huh," they answered. Every woman who

has ever been on the rock, or in the old house of

detention, can tell you about it. The women call it

"getting the finger" or, more vulgarly, "getting fin

ger-fucked."

"What happens if you refuse?" I had asked Afeni.

"They lock you in the hole and they don't let you

out until you consent to be searched internally."

I thought about refusing, but I sure as hell didn't

want to be in the hole. I had had enough of solitary.

The "internal search" was as humiliating and dis

gusting as it sounded. You sit on the edge of this

table and the nurse holds your legs open and sticks

a finger in your vagina and moves it around. She has

a plastic glove on. Some of them try to put one fin

ger in your vagina and another one up your rectum

at the same time.75

I have quoted this passage so extensively because it

exposes an everyday routine in women's prisons that verges

on sexual assault as much as it is taken for granted. Having

been imprisoned in the Women's House of Detention to

which Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur refer, I can personally

affirm the veracity of their claims. Over thirty years after

Bird and Afeni Shakur were released and after I myself spent

several months in the Women's House of Detention, this

issue of the strip search is still very much on the front burn

er of women's prison activism. In 2001 Sisters Inside, an

Australian support organization for women prisoners,

launched a national campaign against the strip search, the

slogan of which was "Stop State Sexual Assault." Assata

Shakur's autobiography provides an abundance of insights

about the gendering of state punishment and reveals the

extent to which women's prisons have held on to oppressive

patriarchal practices that are considered obsolete in the "free

world/' She spent six years in several jails and prisons before

escaping in 1979 and receiving political asylum by the

Republic of Cuba in 1984, where she lives today.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote an earlier account of life in

a women's prison, The Alderson Story?: My Life as a Political

Prisoner.76 At the height of the McCarthy era, Flynn, a labor

activist and Communist leader, was convicted under the

Smith Act and served two years in Alderson Federal

Reformatory for Women from 1955 to 1957. Following the

dominant model for women's prisons during that period,

Alderson's regimes were based on the assumption that

"criminal" women could be rehabilitated by assimilating

correct womanly behaviors—that is, by becoming experts in

domesticity—especially cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Of

course, training designed to produce better wives and moth

ers among middle-class white women effectively produced

skilled domestic servants among black and poor women.

Flynn's book provides vivid descriptions of these everyday

regimes. Her autobiography is located in a tradition of prison

writing by political prisoners that also includes women of

this era. Contemporary writings by women political prison

ers today include poems and short stories by Ericka Huggins

and Susan Rosenberg, analyses of the prison industrial com

plex by Linda Evans, and curricula for HIV/AIDS education

in women's prisons by Kathy Boudin and the members of the

Bedford Hills ACE collective.77

Despite the availability of perceptive portrayals of life in

women's prisons, it has been extremely difficult to persuade

the public—and even, on occasion, to persuade prison

activists who are primarily concerned with the plight of

male prisoners—of the centrality of gender to an under

standing of state punishment. Although men constitute the

vast majority of prisoners in the world, important aspects of

the operation of state punishment are missed if it is assumed

that women are marginal and thus undeserving of attention.

The most frequent justification for the inattention to

women prisoners and to the particular issues surrounding

women's imprisonment is the relatively small proportion of

women among incarcerated populations throughout the

world. In most countries, the percentage of women among

prison populations hovers around five percent.78 However,

the economic and political shifts of the 1980s—the global

ization of economic markets, the deindustrialization of the

U.S. economy, the dismantling of such social service pro

grams as Aid to Families of Dependent Children, and, of

course, the prison construction boom—produced a signifi

cant acceleration in the rate of women's imprisonment both

inside and outside the United States. In fact, women remain

today the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison popula

tion. This recent rise in the rate of women's imprisonment

points directly to the economic context that produced the

prison industrial complex and that has had a devastating

impact on men and women alike.

It is from this perspective of the contemporary expansion

of prisons, both in the United States and throughout the

world, that we should examine some of the historical and

ideological aspects of state punishment imposed on women.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, when, as we have

seen, imprisonment began to emerge as the dominant form

of punishment, convicted women have been represented as

essentially different from their male counterparts. It is true

that men who commit the kinds of transgressions that are

regarded as punishable by the state are labeled as social

deviants. Nevertheless, masculine criminality has always

been deemed more "normal" than feminine criminality.

There has always been a tendency to regard those women

who have been publicly punished by the state for their mis

behaviors as significantly more aberrant and far more threat

ening to society than their numerous male counterparts.

In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the

perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the

prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public pun

ishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to

forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as

such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psy

chiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons.79

Studies indicating that women have been even more likely

to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while

jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the

control of men, mental institutions have served a similar

purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been con

structed as criminal, while deviant women have been con

structed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption

continue to inform the women's prison. Psychiatric drugs

continue to be distributed far more extensively to impris

oned women than to their male counterparts. A Native

American woman incarcerated in the Women's Correctional

Center in Montana related her experience with psychotrop

ic drugs to sociologist Luana Ross:

Haldol is a drug they give people who can't cope

with lockup. It makes you feel dead, paralyzed. And

then I started getting side effects from Haldol. I

wanted to fight anybody, any of the officers. I was

screaming at them and telling them to get out of

my face, so the doctor said, "We can't have that."

And, they put me on Tranxene. I don't take pills; I

never had trouble sleeping until I got here. Now I'm

supposed to see [the counselor] again because of my

dreams. If you got a problem, they're not going to

take care of it. They're going to put you on drugs so

they can control you.80

Prior to the emergence of the penitentiary and thus of the

notion of punishment as " doing time/' the use of confine

ment to control beggars, thieves, and the insane did not nec

essarily distinguish among these categories of deviancy. At

this phase in the history of punishment—prior to the

American and French Revolutions—the classification

process through which criminality is differentiated from

poverty and mental illness had not yet developed. As the dis

course on criminality and the corresponding institutions to

control it distinguished the "criminal" from the "insane/'

the gendered distinction took hold and continued to struc

ture penal policies. Gendered as female, this category of

insanity was highly sexualized. Wlien we consider the

impact of class and race here, we can say that for white and

affluent women, this equalization tends to serve as evidence

for emotional and mental disorders, but for black and poor

women, it has pointed to criminality.

It should also be kept in mind that until the abolition of

slavery, the vast majority of black women were subject to

regimes of punishment that differed significantly from those

experienced by white women. As slaves, they were directly

and often brutally disciplined for conduct considered per

fectly normal in a context of freedom. Slave punishment

was visibly gendered—special penalties, were, for example,

reserved for pregnant women unable to reach the quotas that

determined how long and how fast they should work. In the

slave narrative of Moses Grandy, an especially brutal form of

whipping is described in which the woman was required to

lie on the ground with her stomach positioned in a hole,

whose purpose was to safeguard the fetus (conceived as

future slave labor). If we expand our definition of punish

ment under slavery, we can say that the coerced sexual rela

tions between slave and master constituted a penalty exact

ed on women, if only for the sole reason that they were

slaves. In other words, the deviance of the slave master was

transferred to the slave woman, whom he victimized.

Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into

hypersexuality of women prisoners. The notion that female

"deviance" always has a sexual dimension persists in the

contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and

sexuality continues to be racialized. Thus, white women

labeled as "criminals" are more closely associated with

blackness than their "normal" counterparts*

Prior to the emergence of the prison as the major form of

public punishment, it was taken for granted that violators of

the law would be subjected to coiporal and frequently capital

penalties. What is not generally recognized is the connection

between state-inflicted corporal punishment and the physi

cal assaults on women in domestic spaces. This form of bod

ily discipline has continued to be routinely meted out to

women in the context of intimate relationships, but it is

rarely understood to be related to state punishment.

Quaker reformers in the United States—especially the

Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public

Prisons, founded in 1787—played a pivotal role in campaigns

to substitute imprisonment for corporal punishment.

Following in the tradition established by Elizabeth Fry in

England, Quakers were also responsible for extended crusades

to institute separate prisons for women. Given the practice of

incarcerating criminalized women in men's prisons, the

demand for separate women's prisons was viewed as quite

radical during this period. Fry formulated principles govern

ing prison reform for women in her 1827 work, Observations

in Visiting, Superintendence and Government of Female

Prisoners, which were taken up in the United States by

women such as Josephine Shaw Lowell and Abby Hopper

Gibbons. In the 1870s, Lowell and Gibbons helped to lead the

campaign in New York for separate prisons for women.

Prevailing attitudes toward women convicts differed

from those toward men convicts, who were assumed to have

forfeited rights and liberties that women generally could not

claim even in the "free world/' Although some women were

housed in penitentiaries, the institution itself was gendered

as male, for by and large no particular arrangements were

made to accommodate sentenced women.

The women who served in penal institutions

between 1820 and 1870 were not subject to the

prison reform experienced by male inmates.

Officials employed isolation, silence, and hard labor

to rehabilitate male prisoners. The lack of accom

modations for female inmates made isolation and

silence impossible for them and productive labor

was not considered an important part of their rou

tine, The neglect of female prisoners, however, was

rarely benevolent. Rather, a pattern of overcrowd

ing, harsh treatment, and sexual abuse recurred

throughout prison histories.81

Male punishment was linked ideologically to penitence

and reform. The very forfeiture of rights and liberties implied

that with self-reflection, religious study, and work, male con

victs could achieve redemption and could recover these

rights and liberties. However, since women were not

acknowledged as securely in possession of these rights, they

were not eligible to participate in this process of redemption,

According to dominant views, women convicts were

irrevocably fallen women, with no possibility of salvation. If

male criminals were considered to be public individuals who

had simply violated the social contract, female criminals

were seen as having transgressed fundamental moral princi

ples of womanhood. The reformers, who, following Elizabeth

Fry, argued that women were capable of redemption, did not

really contest these ideological assumptions about women's

place. In other words, they did not question the very notion

of "falien women." Rather, they simply opposed the idea that

"fallen women" could not be saved. They could be saved, the

reformers contended, and toward that end they advocated

separate penal facilities and a specifically female approach to

punishment Their approach called for architectural models

that replaced cells with cottages and "rooms" in a way that

was supposed to infuse domesticity into prison life. This

model facilitated a regime devised to reintegrate criminalized

women into the domestic life of wife and mother. They did

not, however, acknowledge the class and race underpinnings

of this regime. Training that was, on the surface, designed to

produce good wives and mothers in effect steered poor

women (and especially black women) into "free world" jobs

in domestic service. Instead of stay-at-home skilled wives

and mothers, many women prisoners, upon release, would

become maids, cooks, and washerwomen for more affluent

women. A female custodial staff, the reformers also argued,

would minimize the sexual temptations, which they

believed were often at the root of female criminality.

When the reform movement calling for separate prisons

for women emerged in England and the United States during

the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Shaw, and

other advocates argued against the established idea that

criminal women were beyond the reach of moral rehabilita

tion. Like male convicts, who presumably could be "cor

rected" by rigorous prison regimes, female convicts, they

suggested, could also be molded into moral beings by differ

ently gendered imprisonment regimes. Architectural

changes, domestic regimes, and an all-female custodial staff

were implemented in the reformatory program proposed by

reformers,82 and eventually women's prisons became as

strongly anchored to the social landscape as men's prisons,

but even more invisible. Their greater invisibility was as

much a reflection of the way women's domestic duties

under patriarchy were assumed to be normal, natural, and

consequently invisible as it was of the relatively small num

bers of women incarcerated in these new institutions.

Ttoenty-one years after the first English reformatory for

women was established in London in 1853, the first U.S.

reformatory for women was opened in Indiana. The aim

was to

train the prisoners in the "important" female role

of domesticity* Thus an important role of the

reform movement in women's prisons was to

encourage and ingrain "appropriate" gender roles,

such as vocational training in cooking, sewing and

cleaning. To accommodate these goals, the refor

matory cottages were usually designed with

kitchens, living rooms, and even some nurseries for

prisoners with infants.83

However, this feminized public punishment did not affect

all women in the same way. When black and Native

American women were imprisoned in reformatories, they

often were segregated from white women. Moreover, they

tended to be disproportionately sentenced to men's prisons.

In the southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War,

black women endured the cruelties of the convict lease sys

tem unmitigated by the feminization of punishment; neither

their sentences nor the labor they were compelled to do were

lessened by virtue of their gender. As the U.S. prison system

evolved during the twentieth century, feminized modes of

punishment—the cottage system, domestic training, and so

on—were designed ideologically to reform white women, rel

egating women of color in large part to realms of public pun

ishment that made no pretense of offering them femininity.

Moreover, as Lucia Zedner has pointed out, sentencing

practices for women within the reformatory system often

required women of all racial backgrounds to do more time

than men for similar offenses. "This differential was justi

fied on the basis that women were sent to reformatories not

to be punished in proportion to the seriousness of their

offense but to be reformed and retrained, a process that, it

was argued, required time."84 At the same time, Zedner

points out, this tendency to send women to prison for longer

terms than men was accelerated by the eugenics movement,

"which sought to have 'genetically inferior' women

removed from social circulation for as many of their child

bearing years as possible."85

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, women's

prisons have begun to look more like their male counter

parts, particularly facilities constructed in the contemporary

era of the prison industrial complex. As corporate involve

ment in punishment expands in ways that would have been

unimaginable just two decades ago, the prison's presumed

goal of rehabilitation has been thoroughly displaced by inca

pacitation as the major objective of imprisonment. As I have

already pointed out, now that the population of U.S. prisons

and jails has surpassed two million people, the rate of

increase in the numbers of women prisoners has exceeded

that of men. As criminologist Elliot Currie has pointed out,

For most of the period after World War II, the

female incarceration rate hovered at around 8 per

100,000; it did not reach double digits until 1977.

Today it is 51 per 100,000 . . . At the current rates

of increase, there will be more women in American

prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates of

both sexes in 1970. When we combine the effects of

race and gender, the nature of these shifts in the

prison population is even clearer. The prison incar

ceration rate for black women today exceeds that

for white men as recently as 1980.86

Luana Ross's study of Native American women incarcer

ated in the Women's Correctional Center in Montana argues

that "prisons, as employed by the Euro-American system,

operate to keep Native Americans in a colonial situation/'87

She points out that Native people are vastly overrepresented

in the country's federal and state prisons. In Montana, where

she did her research, they constitute 6 percent of the gener

al population, but 17.3 percent of the imprisoned popula

tion. Native women are even more disproportionately pres

ent in Montana's prison system. They constitute 25 percent

of all women imprisoned by the state.88

Thirty years ago, around the time of the Attica uprising

and the murder of George fackson at San Quentin, radical

opposition to the prison system identified it as a principal

site of state violence and repression. In part as a reaction to

the invisibility of women prisoners in this movement and in

part as a consequence of the rising women's liberation

movement, specific campaigns developed in defense of the

rights of women prisoners. Many of these campaigns put

forth—and continue to advance—radical critiques of state

repression and violence. Within the correctional communi

ty, however, feminism has been influenced largely by liber

al constructions of gender equality.

In contrast to the nineteenth-century reform movement,

which was grounded in an ideology of gender difference,

late-twentieth-century "reforms" have relied on a "separate

but equal" model. This "separate but equal" approach often

has been applied uncritically, ironically resulting in

demands for more repressive conditions in order to render

women's facilities "equal" to men's. A clear example of this

can be discovered in a memoir, The Warden Wore Pink,

written by a former warden of Huron Valley Women's Prison

in Michigan. During the 1980s, the author, Tekla Miller,

advocated a change in policies within the Michigan correc

tional system that would result in women prisoners being

treated the same as men prisoners. With no trace of irony,

she characterizes as "feminist" her own fight for "gender

equality" between male and female prisoners and for equal

ity between male and female institutions of incarceration.

One of these campaigns focuses on the unequal allocation of

weapons, which she sought to remedy:

Arsenals in men's prisons are large rooms with

shelves of shotguns, rifles, hand guns, ammunition,

gas canisters, and riot equipment . . . Huron Valley

Women's arsenal was a small, five feet by two feet

closet that held two rifles, eight shotguns, two bull

horns, five handguns, four gas canisters, and twen

ty sets of restraints.89

It does not occur to her that a more productive version of

feminism would also question the organization of state pun

ishment for men as well and, in my opinion, would serious

ly consider the proposition that the institution as a whole—

gendered as it is—calls for the kind of critique that might

lead us to consider its abolition.

Miller also describes the case of an attempted escape by a

woman prisoner. The prisoner climbed over the razor ribbon

but was captured after she jumped to the ground on the

other side. This escape attempt occasioned a debate about

the disparate treatment of men and women escapees.

Miller's position was that guards should be instructed to

shoot at women just as they were instructed to shoot at

men. She argued that parity for women and men prisoners

should consist in their equal right to be fired upon by guards.

The outcome of the debate, Miller observed, was that

escaping women prisoners in medium or higher

[security] prisons are treated the same way as men.

A warning shot is fired. If the prisoner fails to halt

and is over the fence, an officer is allowed to shoot

to injure. If the officer's life is in danger, the officer

can shoot to kill.90

Paradoxically, demands for parity with men's prisons,

instead of creating greater educational, vocational, and

health opportunities for women prisoners, often have led to

more repressive conditions for women. This is not only a

consequence of deploying liberal—that is, formalistic—

notions of equality, but of, more dangerous, allowing male

prisons to function as the punishment norm. Miller points

out that she attempted to prevent a female prisoner, whom

she characterizes as a "murderer" serving a long term, from

participating in graduation ceremonies at the University of

Michigan because male murderers were not given such priv

ileges. (Of course, she does not indicate the nature of the

woman's murder charges—whether, for instance, she was

convicted of killing an abusive partner, as is the case for a

substantial number of women convicted of murder.)

Although Miller did not succeed in preventing the inmate

from participating in the commencement, in addition to her

cap and gown, the prisoner was made to wear leg chains and

handcuffs during the ceremony.91 This is indeed a bizarre

example of feminist demands for equality within the prison

system.

A widely publicized example of the use of repressive para

phernalia historically associated with the treatment of male

prisoners to create "equality" for female prisoners was the

1996 decision by Alabama's prison commissioner to estab

lish women's chain gangs. After Alabama became the first

state to reinstitute chain gangs in 1995, then State

Corrections Commissioner Ron Jones announced the fol

lowing year that women would be shackled while they cut

grass, picked up trash, or worked a vegetable garden at Julia

Tutwiler State Prison for Women. This attempt to institute

chain gangs for women was in part a response to lawsuits by

male prisoners, who charged that male chain gains discrim

inated against men by virtue of their gender.92 However,

immediately after Jones's announcement, Governor Fob

James, who obviously was pressured to prevent Alabama

from acquiring the dubious distinction of being the only

U.S. state to have equal- opportunity chain gangs, fired him.

Shortly after Alabama's embarrassing flirtation with the

possibility of chain gangs for women, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of

Maricopo County, Arizona—represented in the media as

"the toughest sheriff in America"—held a press conference

to announce that because he was "an equal opportunity

incarcerator," he was establishing the country's first female

chain gang.93 When the plan was implemented, newspapers

throughout the country carried a photograph of chained

women cleaning Phoenix's streets. Even though this may

have been a publicity stunt designed to bolster the fame of

Sheriff Arpaio, the fact that this women's chain gang

emerged against the backdrop of a generalized increase in

the repression inflicted on women prisoners is certainly

cause for alarm. Women's prisons throughout the country

increasingly include sections known as security housing

units. The regimes of solitary confinement and sensory dep

rivation in the security housing unit (SHU) in these sections

within women's prisons are smaller versions of the rapidly

proliferating super-maximum security prisons. Since the

population of women in prison now consists of a majority of

women of color, the historical resonances of slavery, colo

nization, and genocide should not be missed in these images

of women in chains and shackles.

As the level of repression in women's prisons increases,

and, paradoxically, as the influence of domestic prison

regimes recedes, sexual abuse—which, like domestic vio

lence, is yet another dimension of the privatized punish

ment of women—has become an institutionalized compo

nent of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard-

on-prisoner sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the wide

spread leniency with which offending officers are treated

suggests that for women, prison is a space in which the

threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger socie

ty is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the land

scape of punishment behind prison walls.

According to a 1996 Human Rights Watch report on the

sexual abuse of women in U.S. prisons:

Our findings indicate that being a woman prisoner

in U.S, state prisons can be a terrifying experience.

If you are sexually abused, you cannot escape from

your abuser. Grievance or investigatory procedures,

where they exist, are often ineffectual, and correc

tional employees continue to engage in abuse

because they believe they will rarely be held

accountable, administratively or criminally. Few

people outside the prison walls know what is going

on or care if they do know. Fewer still do anything

to address the problem.94

The following excerpt from the summary of this report,

entitled All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S.

State Prisons, reveals the extent to which women's prison

environments are violently sexualized, thus recapitulating

the familiar violence that characterizes many women's pri

vate lives:

We found that male correctional employees have

vaginally, anally, and orally raped female prisoners

and sexually assaulted and abused them. We found

that in the course of committing such gross mis

conduct, male officers have not only used actual or

threatened physical force, but have also used their

near total authority to provide or deny goods and

privileges to female prisoners to compel them to

have sex or, in other cases, to reward them for hav

ing done so. In other cases, male officers have vio

lated their most basic professional duty and

engaged in sexual contact with female prisoners

absent the use of threat of force or any material

exchange. In addition to engaging in sexual rela

tions with prisoners, male officers have used

mandatory pat-frisks or room searches to grope

women's breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas and to

view them inappropriately while in a state of

undress in the housing or bathroom areas. Male cor

rectional officers and staff have also engaged in reg

ular verbal degradation and harassment of female

prisoners, thus contributing to a custodial environ

ment in the state prisons for women that is often

highly sexualized and excessively hostile 95

The violent sexualization of prison life within women's

institutions raises a number of issues that may help us

develop further our critique of the prison system. Ideologies

of sexuality—and particularly the intersection of race and

sexuality—have had a profound effect on the representations

of and treatment received by women of color both within

and outside prison. Of course, black and Latino men experi

ence a perilous continuity in the way they are treated in

school, where they are disciplined as potential criminals; in

the streets, where they are subjected to racial profiling by

the police; and in prison, where they are warehoused and

deprived of virtually all of their rights. For women, the con

tinuity of treatment from the free world to the universe of

the prison is even more complicated, since they also con

front forms of violence in prison that they have confronted

in their homes and intimate relationships.

The criminalization of black and Latina women includes

persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sex

ual assaults against them both in and outside of prison. Such

images were vividly rendered in a Nightline television series

filmed in November 1999 on location at California's Valley

State Prison for Women. Many of the women interviewed by

Ted Koppel complained that they received frequent and

unnecessary pelvic examinations, including when they vis

ited the doctor with such routine illnesses as colds. In an

attempt to justify these examinations, the chief medical offi

cer explained that women prisoners had rare opportunities

for "male contact," and that they therefore welcomed these

superfluous gynecological exams. Although this officer was

eventually removed from his position as a result of these

comments, his reassignment did little to alter the pervasive

vulnerability of imprisoned women to sexual abuse.

Studies on female prisons throughout the world indicate

that sexual abuse is an abiding, though unacknowledged,

form of punishment to which women, who have the mis

fortune of being sent to prison, are subjected. This is one

aspect of life in prison that women can expect to

encounter, either directly or indirectly, regardless of the

written policies that govern the institution. In June 1998,

Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations Special

Rapporteur for Violence Against Women, visited federal

and state prisons as well as Immigration and

Naturalization detention facilities in New York,

Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Georgia, and

California. She was refused permission to visit women's

prisons in Michigan, where serious allegations of sexual

abuse were pending. In the aftermath of her visits,

Coomaraswamy announced that "sexual misconduct by

prison staff is widespread in American women's prisons."96

This clandestine institutionalization of sexual abuse vio-

lates one of the guiding principles of the United Nations'

Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, a

UN instrument first adopted in 1955 and used as a guideline

by many governments to achieve what is known as "good

prison practice." However, the U.S. government has done

little to publicize these rules and it is probably the case that

most correctional personnel have never heard of these UN

standards. According to the Standard Minimum Rules,

Imprisonment and other measures which result in

cutting off an offender from the outside world are

afflictive by the very fact of taking from the person

the right of self-determination by depriving him of

his liberty. Therefore the prison system shall not,

except as incidental to justifiable segregation or the

maintenance of discipline, aggravate the suffering

inherent in such a situation

Sexual abuse is surreptitiously incorporated into one of

the most habitual aspects of women's imprisonment, the

strip search. As activists and prisoners themselves have

pointed out, the state itself is directly implicated in this rou-

tinization of sexual abuse, both in permitting such condi

tions that render women vulnerable to explicit sexual coer

cion carried out by guards and other prison staff and by

incorporating into routine policy such practices as the strip

search and body cavity search.

Australian lawyer/activist Amanda George has pointed

out that

[t]he acknowledgement that sexual assault does

occur in institutions for people with intellectual

disabilities, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, youth

training centres and police stations, usually centres

around the criminal acts of rape and sexual assault

by individuals employed in those institutions.

These offences, though they are rarely reported, are

clearly understood as being "crimes" for which the

individual and not the state is responsible. At the

same time as the state deplores "unlawful" sexual

assaults by its employees, it actually uses sexual

assault as a means of control.

In Victoria, prison and police officers are vested

with the power and responsibility to do acts which,

if done outside of work hours, would be crimes of

sexual assault. If a person does not "consent" to

being stripped naked by these officers, force can

lawfully be used to do it... These legal strip search

es are, in the author's view, sexual assaults within

the definition of indecent assault in the Crimes Act

1958 (Vic) as amended in section

At a November 2001 conference on women in prison held

by the Brisbane-based organization Sisters Inside, Amanda

George described an action performed before a national gath

ering of correctional personnel working in women's prisons.

Several women seized control of the stage and, some playing

guards, others playing the roles of prisoners, dramatized a

strip search. According to George, the gathering was so

repulsed by this enactment of a practice that occurs rou

tinely in women's prisons everywhere that many of the par

ticipants felt compelled to disassociate themselves from

such practices, insisting that this was not what they did.

Some of the guards, George said, simply cried upon watch

ing representations of their own actions outside the prison

context. What they must have realized is that "without the

uniform, without the power of the state, [the strip search]

would be sexual assault."99

But why is an understanding of the pervasiveness of sex

ual abuse in women's prisons an important element of a rad

ical analysis of the prison system, and especially of those

forward-looking analyses that lead us in the direction of abo

lition? Because the call to abolish the prison as the domi

nant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which

the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and prac

tices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the

larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind

prison walls. The destructive combination of racism and

misogyny, however much it has been challenged by social

movements, scholarship, and art over the last three decades,

retains all its awful consequences within women's prisons.

The relatively uncontested presence of sexual abuse in

women's prisons is one of many such examples. The increas

ing evidence of a U.S. prison industrial complex with global

resonances leads us to think about the extent to which the

many corporations that have acquired an investment in the

expansion of the prison system are, like the state, directly

implicated in an institution that perpetuates violence

against women.

The Prison Industrial Complex

''For private business prison labor is like a pot of gold No

strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unem

ployment insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No

language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan

prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of fac

tories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for

Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise

hogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards; limou

sines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria's Secret, all at a

fraction of the cost of 'free labor.'"

—Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg100

The exploitation of prison labor by private corporations is

one aspect among an array of relationships linking corpora

tions, government, correctional communities, and media.

These relationships constitute what we now call a prison

industrial complex. The term "prison industrial complex"

was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevail

ing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause

of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison

construction and the attendant drive to fill these new struc

tures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of

racism and the pursuit of profit. Social historian Mike Davis

first used the term in relation to California's penal system,

which, he observed, already had begun in the 1990s to rival

agribusiness and land development as a major economic and

political force.101

To understand the social meaning of the prison today

within the context of a developing prison industrial complex

means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from

its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we

encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what

extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and

punishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, both

fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation

made it extremely difficult to think about punishment

beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located

the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, neces

sary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates

about the viability of the prison today?

The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on

understandings of the punishment process that take into

account economic and political structures and ideologies,

rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal con

duct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, that

many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons

as an important source of profit helps us to understand the

rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at

a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate

was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also

insists that the racialization of prison populations—and this

is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South

America, and Australia as well—is not an incidental feature.

Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken

by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked

to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist

and other social justice movements are incomplete with

attention to the politics of imprisonment. At the 2001

United Nations World Conference Against Racism held in

Durban, South Africa, a few individuals active in abolition

ist campaigns in various countries attempted to bring this

connection to the attention of the international community.

They pointed out that the expanding system of prisons

throughout the world both relies on and further promotes

structures of racism even though its proponents may

adamantly maintain that it is race-neutral.

Some critics of the prison system have employed the

term "correctional industrial complex" and others "penal

industrial complex." These and the term I have chosen to

underscore, "prison industrial complex," all clearly resonate

with the historical concept of a "military industrial com

plex," whose usage dates back to the presidency of Dwight

Eisenhower. It may seem ironic that a Republican president

was the first to underscore a growing and dangerous alliance

between the military and corporate worlds, but it clearly

seemed right to antiwar activists and scholars during the era

of the Vietnam War. Today, some activists mistakenly argue

that the prison industrial complex is moving into the space

vacated by the military industrial complex. However, the so-

called War on Terrorism initiated by the Bush administra

tion in the aftermath of the 2002 attacks on the World Trade

Center has made it very clear that the links between the

military, corporations, and government are growing

stronger, not weaker.

A more cogent way to define the relationship between

the military industrial complex and the prison industrial

complex would be to call it symbiotic. These two complex

es mutually support and promote each other and, in fact,

often share technologies. During the early nineties, when

defense production was temporarily on the decline, this con

nection between the military industry and the criminal jus

tice/punishment industry was acknowledged in a 1994 Wall

Street Journal article entitled "Making Crime Pay: The Cold

War of the '90s":

Parts of the defense establishment are cashing in,

too, sensing a logical new line of business to help

them offset military cutbacks, Westinghouse

Electric Corp., Minnesota Mining and

Manufacturing Co, GDE Systems (a division of the

old General Dynamics) and Alliant Techsystems

Incv for instance, are pushing crime fighting equip

ment and have created special divisions to retool

their defense technology for America's streets.102

The article describes a conference sponsored by the

National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice

Department, entitled "Law Enforcement Technology in the

21st Century." The secretary of defense was a major presen

ter at this conference, which explored topics such as, "The

role of the defense industry, particularly for dual use and

conversion/'

Hot topics: defense-industry technology that could

lower the level of violence involved in crime fight

ing. Sandia National Laboratories, for instance, is

experimenting with a dense foam that can be

sprayed at suspects, temporarily blinding and deaf

ening them under breathable bubbles. Stinger

Corporation is working on "smart guns," which

will fire only for the owner, and retractable spiked

barrier strips to unfurl in front of fleeing vehicles.

Westinghouse is promoting the "smart car," in

which minicomputers could be linked up with big

mainframes at the police department, allowing for

speedy booking of prisoners, as well as quick

exchanges of information . . .103

But an analysis of the relationship between the military

and prison industrial complex is not only concerned with

the transference of technologies from the military to the

law enforcement industry. What may be even more impor

tant to our discussion is the extent to which both share

important structural features. Both systems generate huge

profits from processes of social destruction. Precisely that

which is advantageous to those coiporations, elected offi

cials, and government agents who have obvious stakes in

the expansion of these systems begets grief and devastation

for poor and racially dominated communities in the United

States and throughout the world. The transformation of

imprisoned bodies—and they are in their majority bodies of

color—into sources of profit who consume and also often

produce all kinds of commodities, devours public funds,

which might otherwise be available for social programs

such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug

programs.

Punishment no longer constitutes a marginal area of the

larger economy. Corporations producing all kinds of goods—

from buildings to electronic devices and hygiene products—

and providing all kinds of services—from meals to therapy

and healthcare—are now directly involved in the punish

ment business. That is to say, companies that one would

assume are far removed from the work of state punishment

have developed major stakes in the perpetuation of a prison

system whose historical obsolescence is therefore that much

more difficult to recognize. It was during the decade of the

1980s that corporate ties to the punishment system became

more extensive and entrenched than ever before. But

throughout the history of the U.S. prison system, prisoners

have always constituted a potential source of profit. For

example, they have served as valuable subjects in medical

research, thus positioning the prison as a major link

between universities and corporations.

During the post-World War II period, for example, med

ical experimentation on captive populations helped to has

ten the development of the pharmaceutical industry.

According to Allen Hornblum,

[T]he number of American medical research pro

grams that relied on prisoners as subjects rapidly

expanded as zealous doctors and researchers, grant-

making universities, and a burgeoning pharmaceu

tical industry raced for greater market share.

Society's marginal people were, as they had always

been, the grist for the medical-pharmaceutical mill,

and prison inmates in particular would become the

raw materials for postwar profit-making and aca

demic advancement.104

Hornblum's book, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at

Holmesburg Prison, highlights the career of research derma

tologist Albert Kligman, who was a professor at the

University of Pennsylvania. Kligman, the "Father of Retin-

A,"105 conducted hundreds of experiments on the men

housed in Holmesburg Prison and, in the process, trained

many researchers to use what were later recognized as

unethical research methods.

When Dr. Kligman entered the aging prison he was

awed by the potential it held for his research. In

1966, he recalled in a newspaper interview: "All I

saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a

farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time." The

hundreds of inmates walking aimlessly before him

represented a unique opportunity for unlimited and

undisturbed medical research. He described it in

this interview as "an anthropoid colony, mainly

healthy" under perfect control conditions.106

By the time the experimentation program was shut down

in 1974 and new federal regulations prohibited the use of

prisoners as subjects for academic and corporate research,

numerous cosmetics and skin creams had already been test

ed. Some of them had caused great harm to these subjects

and could not be marketed in their original form. Johnson

and Johnson, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical are

only a few of the corporations that reaped great material

benefits from these experiments.

The potential impact of corporate involvement in pun

ishment could have been glimpsed in the Kligman experi

ments at Holmesburg Prison as early as the 1950s and 1960s.

However, it was not until the 1980s and the increasing glob

alization of capitalism that the massive surge of capital into

the punishment economy began. The deindustrialization

processes that resulted in plant shutdowns throughout the

country created a huge pool of vulnerable human beings, a

pool of people for whom no further jobs were available. This

also brought more people into contact with social services,

such as AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children)

and other welfare agencies. It is not accidental that "welfare,

as we have known it"—to use former President Clinton's

words—came under severe attack and was eventually dises

tablished. This was known as "welfare reform." At the same

time, we experienced the privatization and corporatization

of services that were previously run by government. The

most obvious example of this privatization process was the

transformation of government-run hospitals and health

services into a gigantic complex of what are euphemistical

ly called health maintenance organizations. In this sense we

might also speak of a "medical industrial complex/'107 In

fact, there is a connection between one of the first private

hospital companies, Hospital Corporation of America—

known today as HCA—and Corrections Corporation of

America (CCA). Board members of HCA, which today has

two hundred hospitals and seventy outpatient surgery cen

ters in twenty-four states, England, and Switzerland helped

to start Correctional Corporations of America in 1983.

In the context of an economy that was driven by an

unprecedented pursuit of profit, no matter what the human

cost, and the concomitant dismantling of the welfare state,

poor people's abilities to survive became increasingly con

strained by the looming presence of the prison. The massive

prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the

means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist

system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In the

meantime, elected officials and the dominant media justified

the new draconian sentencing practices, sending more and

more people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more and

more prisons by arguing that this was the only way to make

our communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers.

The media, especially television . . . have a vested

interest in perpetuating the notion that crime is out

of control. With new competition from cable net

works and 24-hour news channels, TV news and

programs about crime . . . have proliferated madly.

According to the Center for Media and Public

Affairs, crime coverage was the number-one topic

on the nightly news over the past decade. From

1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half

nationwide, but homicide stories on the three

major networks rose almost fourfold.108

During the same period when crime rates were declining,

prison populations soared. According to a recent report by

the U.S. Department of Justice, at the end of the year 2001,

there were 2,100,146 people incarcerated in the United

States.109 The terms and numbers as they appear in this gov

ernment report require some preliminary discussion. I hesi

tate to make unmediated use of such statistical evidence

because it can discourage the very critical thinking that

ought to be elicited by an understanding of the prison indus

trial complex. It is precisely the abstraction of numbers that

plays such a central role in criminalizing those who experi

ence the misfortune of imprisonment. There are many dif

ferent kinds of men and women in the prisons, jails, and INS

and military detention centers, whose lives are erased by the

Bureau of Justice Statistics figures. The numbers recognize

no distinction between the woman who is imprisoned on

drug conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing his

wife, a man who might actually end up spending less time

behind bars than the woman.

With this observation in mind, the statistical breakdown is

as follows: There were 1,324,465 people in "federal and state

prisons/7 15,852 in "territorial prisons/7 631,240 in "local

jails/7 8,761 in "Immigration and Naturalization Service

detention facilities/7 2,436 in "military facilities/7 1,912 in

"jails in Indian country/7 and 108,965 in "juvenile facilities.'7

In the ten years between 1990 and 2000, 351 new places of

confinement were opened by states and more than 528,000

beds were added, amounting to 1,320 state facilities, repre

senting an eighty-one percent increase. Moreover, there are

currently 84 federal facilities and 264 private facilities.110

The government reports, from which these figures are

taken, emphasize the extent to which incarceration rates

are slowing down. The Bureau of Justice Statistics report

entitled "Prisoners in 2001" introduces the study by indi

cating that "the Nation's prison population grew 1.1%,

which was less than the average annual growth of 3.8%

since yearend 1995. During 2001 the prison population rose

at the lowest rate since 1972 and had the smallest absolute

increase since 1979."111 However small the increase, these

numbers themselves would defy the imagination were they

not so neatly classified and rationally organized. To place

these figures in historical perspective, try to imagine how

people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and

indeed for most of the twentieth century—who welcomed

the new, and then quite extraordinary, system of punish

ment called the prison might have responded had they

known that such a colossal number of lives would be even

tually claimed permanently by this institution. I have

already shared my own memories of a time three decades

ago when the prison population was comprised of a tenth of

the present numbers.

The prison industrial complex is fueled by privatization

patterns that, it will be recalled, have also drastically trans

formed health care, education, and other areas of our lives.

Moreover, the prison privatization trends—both the increas

ing presence of corporations in the prison economy and the

establishment of private prisons—are reminiscent of the his

torical efforts to create a profitable punishment industry

based on the new supply of "free" black male laborers in the

aftermath of the Civil War. Steven Donziger, drawing from

the work of Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, argues:

[Cjompanies that service the criminal justice sys

tem need sufficient quantities of raw materials to

guarantee long-term growth ... In the criminal jus

tice field, the raw material is prisoners, and indus

try will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady

supply. For the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal

justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of

incarcerated Americans regardless of whether

crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary.112

In the post-Civil War era, emancipated black men and

women comprised an enormous reservoir of labor at a time

when planters—and industrialists—could no longer rely on

slavery, as they had done in the past. This labor became

increasingly available for use by private agents precisely

through the convict lease system, discussed earlier, and

related systems such as debt peonage. Recall that in the

aftermath of slavery, the penal population drastically shift

ed, so that in the South it rapidly became disproportionate

ly black. This transition set the historical stage for the easy

acceptance of disproportionately black prison populations

today. According to 2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics,

African-Americans as a whole now represent the majority of

county, state, and federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400

black inmates—118, 600 more than the total number of

white inmates. If we include Latinos, we must add another

283,000 bodies of color.113

As the rate of increase in the incarceration of black pris

oners continues to rise, the racial composition of the incar

cerated population is approaching the proportion of black

prisoners to white during the era of the southern convict

lease and county chain gang systems. Whether this human

raw material is used for purposes of labor or for the con

sumption of commodities provided by a rising number of

corporations directly implicated in the prison industrial

complex, it is clear that black bodies are considered dispen

sable within the "free world" but as a major source of profit

in the prison world.

The privatization characteristic of convict leasing has its

contemporary parallels, as companies such as CCA and

Wackenhut literally run prisons for profit. At the beginning

of the twenty-first century, the numerous private prison

companies operating in the United States own and operate

facilities that hold 91,828 federal and state prisoners.114

Texas and Oklahoma can claim the largest number of people

in private prisons. But New Mexico imprisons forty-four

percent of its prison population in private facilities, and

states such as Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming turned over

more than twenty-five percent of their prison population to

private companies.115 In arrangements reminiscent of the

convict lease system, federal, state, and county governments

pay private companies a fee for each inmate, which means

that private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as

long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled.

In the state of Texas, there are thirty-four government-

owned, privately run jails in which approximately 5,500 out-

of-state prisoners are incarcerated. These facilities generate

about eighty million dollars annually for Texas.116 One dra

matic example involves Capital Corrections Resources, Inc.,

which operates the Brazoria Detention Center, a government-

owned facility located forty miles outside of Houston, Texas.

Brazoria came to public attention in August 1997 when a

videotape broadcast on national television showed prisoners

there being bitten by police dogs and viciously kicked in the

groin and stepped on by guards. The inmates, forced to crawl

on the floor, also were being shocked with stun guns, while

guards—who referred to one black prisoner as "boy"—shout

ed, "Crawl faster!"117 In the aftermath of the release of this

tape, the state of Missouri withdrew the 415 prisoners it

housed in the Brazoria Detention Center. Although few refer

ences were made in the accompanying news reports to the

indisputably racialized character of the guards' outrageous

behavior, in the section of the Brazoria videotape that was

shown on national television, black male prisoners were seen

to be the primary targets of the guards' attacks.

The thirty-two-minute Brazoria tape, represented by the jail

authorities as a training tape—allegedly showing corrections

officers "what not to do"—was made in September 1996, after

a guard allegedly smelled marijuana in the jail. Important evi

dence of the abuse that takes place behind the walls and gates

of private prisons, it came to light in connection with a law

suit filed by one of the prisoners who was bitten by a dog; he

was suing Brazoria County for a hundred thousand dollars in

damage. The Brazoria jailors' actions—which, according to

prisoners there, were far worse than depicted on the tape—are

indicative not only of the ways in which many prisoners

throughout the country are treated, but of generalized atti

tudes toward people locked up in jails and prisons.

According to an Associated Press news story, the

Missouri inmates, once they had been transferred back to

their home state from Brazoria, told the Kansas City Star:

[GJuards at the Brazoria County Detention Center

used cattle prods and other forms of intimidation to

win respect and force prisoners to say, "I love

Texas." "What you saw on tape wasn't a fraction of

what happened that day/' said inmate Louis

Watkins, referring to the videotaped cellbloclc raid

of September 18, 1996. 'Tve never seen anything

like that in the movies/'118

In 2000 there were twenty-six for-profit prison corpora

tions in the United States that operated approximately 150

facilities in twenty-eight states,119 The largest of these com

panies, CCA and Wackenhut, control 76.4 percent of the pri

vate prison market globally. CCA is headquartered in

Nashville, Tennessee, and until 2001, its largest shareholder

was the multinational headquartered in Paris, Sodexho

Alliance, which, through its U.S. subsidiary, Sodexho

Marriott, provides catering services at nine hundred U.S.

colleges and universities. The Prison Moratorium Project, an

organization promoting youth activism, led a protest cam

paign against Sodexho Marriott on campuses throughout the

country. Among the campuses that dropped Sodexho were

SUNY Albany, Goucher College, and James Madison

University. Students had staged sit-ins and organized rallies

on more than fifty campuses before Sodexho divested its

holdings in CCA in fall 2001.120

Though private prisons represent a fairly small propor

tion of prisons in the United States, the privatization model

is quickly becoming the primary mode of organizing pun

ishment in many other countries.121 These companies have

tried to take advantage of the expanding population of

women prisoners, both in the United States and globally. In

1996, the first private women's prison was established by

CCA in Melbourne, Australia. The government of Victoria

"adopted the U.S. model of privatization in which financing,

design, construction, and ownership of the prison are award

ed to one contractor and the government pays them back for

construction over twenty years. This means that it is virtu

ally impossible to remove the contractor because that con

tractor owns the prison."122

As a direct consequence of the campaign organized by

prison activist groups in Melbourne, Victoria withdrew the

contract from CCA in 2001. However, a significant portion of

Australia's prison system remains privatized. In the fall of

2002, the government of Queensland renewed Wackenhut's

contract to run a 710-bed prison in Brisbane. The value of the

five-year contract is $66.5 million. In addition to the facility

in Brisbane, Wackenhut manages eleven other prisons in

Australia and New Zealand and furnishes health care servic

es in eleven public prisons in the state of Victoria.123 In the

press release announcing this contract renewal, Wackenhut

describes its global business activities as follows:

WCC, a world leader in the privatized corrections

industry, has contracts/awards to manage 60 cor

rectional/detention facilities in North America,

Europe, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand

with a total of approximately 43,000 beds. WCC

also provides prisoner transportation services, elec-

tronic monitoring for home detainees, correctional

health care and mental health services. WCC offers

government agencies a turnkey approach to the

development of new correctional and mental health

institutions that includes design, construction,

financing, and operations.124

But to understand the reach of the prison industrial com

plex, it is not enough to evoke the looming power of the pri

vate prison business. By definition, those companies court

the state within and outside the United States for the pur

pose of obtaining prison contracts, bringing punishment and

profit together in a menacing embrace. Still, this is only the

most visible dimension of the prison industrial complex,

and it should not lead us to ignore the more comprehensive

corporatization that is a feature of contemporary punish

ment As compared to earlier historical eras, the prison

economy is no longer a small, identifiable, and containable

set of markets. Many corporations, whose names are highly

recognizable by "free world" consumers, have discovered

new possibilities for expansion by selling their products to

correctional facilities.

In the 1990s, the variety of corporations making

money from prisons is truly dizzying, ranging from

Dial Soap to Famous Amos cookies, from AT&T to

health-care providers . . . In 1995 Dial Soap sold

$100,000 worth of its product to the New York City

jail system alone . . . When VitaPro Foods of

Montreal, Canada, contracted to supply inmates in

the state of Texas with its soy-based meat substi

tute, the contract was worth S34 million a year.125

Among the many businesses that advertise in the yellow

pages on the corrections.com Web site are Archer Daniel

Midlands, Nestle Food Service, Ace Hardware, Polaroid,

Hewlett-Packard, RJ Reynolds, and the communications

companies Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and Ameritech. One con

clusion to be drawn here is that even if private prison com

panies were prohibited—an unlikely prospect, indeed—the

prison industrial complex and its many strategies for profit

would remain relatively intact. Private prisons are direct

sources of profit for the companies that run them, but pub

lic prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the

profit-producing products and services of private corpora

tions that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might

suspect. Campaigns against privatization that represent pub

lic prisons as an adequate alternative to private prisons can

be misleading. It is true that a major reason for the prof

itability of private prisons consists in the nonunion labor

they employ, and this important distinction should be high

lighted. Nevertheless, public prisons are now equally tied to

the corporate economy and constitute an ever-growing

source of capitalist profit.

Extensive corporate investment in prisons has signifi

cantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that

serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much

further in their analyses and organizing strategies than the

actual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric,

which has always undergirded dominant critiques of the

prison system, will not work in this new situation. If reform

approaches have tended to bolster the permanence of the

prison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to chal

lenge the economic and political relationships that sustain

the prison today. This means that in the era of the prison

industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions

about the relationship between global capitalism and the

spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world.

The global prison economy is indisputably dominated by

the United States. This economy not only consists of the

products, services, and ideas that are directly marketed to

other governments, but it also exercises an enormous influ

ence over the development of the style of state punishment

throughout the world. One dramatic example can be seen in

the opposition to Turkey's attempts to transform its prisons.

In October 2000, prisoners in Turkey, many of whom are

associated with left political movements, began a "death

fast" as a way of dramatizing their opposition to the Turkish

government's decision to introduce "F~Type," or U.S.-style,

prisons. Compared to the traditional dormitory-style facilb

ties, these new prisons consist of one- to three-person cells,

which are opposed by die prisoners because of the regimes of

isolation they facilitate and because mistreatment and tor

ture are far more likely in isolation. In December 2000, thir

ty prisoners were killed in clashes with security forces in

twenty prisons.126 As of September 2002, more than fifty

prisoners have died of hunger, including two women,

Gulnihal Yilmaz and Birsen Hosver, who were among the

most recent prisoners to succumb to the death fast.

"F-Type" prisons in Turkey were inspired by the recent

emergence of the super-maximum security—or supermax—

prison in the United States, which presumes to control oth

erwise unmanageable prisoners by holding them in perma

nent solitary confinement and by subjecting them to varying

degrees of sensory deprivation. In its 2002 World Report,

Human Rights Watch paid particular attention to the con

cerns raised by

the spread of ultra-modern "super-maximum"

security prisons. Originally prevalent in the United

States ... the supermax model was increasingly fol

lowed in other countries. Prisoners confined in

such facilities spent an average of twenty-three

hours a day in their cells, enduring extreme social

isolation, enforced idleness, and extraordinarily

limited recreational and educational opportunities.

While prison authorities defended the use of super

maximum security facilities by asserting that they

held only the most dangerous, disruptive, or escape-

prone inmates, few safeguards existed to prevent

other prisoners from being arbitrarily or discrimina-

torily transferred to such facilities. In Australia, the

inspector of custodial services found that some pris

oners were being held indefinitely in special high

security units without knowing why or when their

isolation would end.127

Among the many countries that have recently construct

ed super-maximum security prisons is South Africa.

Construction was completed on the supermax prison in

Kokstad, KwaZulu-Natal in August 2000, but it was not offi

cially opened until May 2002. Ironically, the reason given for

the delay was the competition for water between the prison

and a new low-cost housing development.128 I am highlight

ing South Africa's embrace of the supermax because of the

apparent ease with which this most repressive version of the

U.S. prison has established itself in a country that has just

recently initiated the project of building a democratic, non

racist, and nonsexist society. South Africa was the first coun

try in the world to create constitutional assurances for gay

rights, and it immediately abolished the death penalty after

the dismantling of apartheid. Nevertheless, following the

example of the United States, the South African prison sys

tem is expanding and becoming more oppressive. The U.S.

private prison company Wackenhut has secured several con

tracts with the South African government and by construct

ing private prisons further legitimizes the trend toward pri

vatization (which affects the availability of basic services

from utilities to education) in the economy as a whole.

South Africa's participation in the prison industrial com

plex constitutes a major impediment to the creation of a

democratic society. In the United States, we have already

felt the insidious and socially damaging effects of prison

expansion. The dominant social expectation is that young

black, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian men—

and increasingly women as well—will move naturally from

the free world into prison, where, it is assumed, they belong.

Despite the important gains of antiracist social movements

over the last half century, racism hides from view within

institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the

prison system.

The racist arrests of vast numbers of immigrants from

Middle Eastern countries in the aftermath of the attacks on

September 11, 2001, and the subsequent withholding of infor«

mation about the names of numbers of people held in INS

detention centers, some of which are owned and operated by

private corporations, do not augur a democratic future. The

uncontested detention of increasing numbers of undocument

ed immigrants from the global South has been aided consid

erably by the structures and ideologies associated with the

prison industrial complex. We can hardly move in the direc

tion of justice and equality in the twenty-first century if we

are unwilling to recognize the enormous role played by this

system in extending the power of racism and xenophobia.

Radical opposition to the global prison industrial com

plex sees the antiprison movement as a vital means of

expanding the terrain on which the quest for democracy will

unfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist,

antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition of

the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the

same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with

the millions of men, women, and children who are behind

bars. A major challenge of this movement is to do the work

that will create more humane, habitable environments for

people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the

prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing

act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners—call

ing for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault,

improved physical and mental health care, greater access to

drug programs, better educational work opportunities,

unionization of prison labor, more connections with fami

lies and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing—

and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing alto

gether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strate

gies that question the place of the prison in our future?

Abolitionist Alternatives

"Forget about reform, it's time to talk about abolishing

jails and prisons in American society . . . Still—abolition?

Where do you put the prisoners? The 'criminals'? What's

the alternative? First, having no alternative at all would

create less crime than the present criminal training cen

ters do. Second, the only full alternative is building the

kind of society that does not need prisons: A decent redis

tribution of power and income so as to put out the hidden

fire of burning envy that now flames up in crimes of prop

erty—both burglary by the poor and embezzlement by the

affluent. And a decent sense of community that can sup

port, reintegrate and truly rehabilitate those who sudden

ly become filled with fury or despair, and that can face

them not as objects—'criminals'—but as people who have

committed illegal acts, as have almost all of us."

—Arthur Waskow, Institute for Policy Studies12^

If jails and prisons are to be abolished, then what will replace

them? This is the puzzling question that often interrupts

further consideration of the prospects for abolition. Why

should it be so difficult to imagine alternatives to our cur

rent system of incarceration? There are a number of reasons

why we tend to balk at the idea that it may be possible to

eventually create an entirely different—and perhaps more

egalitarian—system of justice. First of all, we think of the

current system, with its exaggerated dependence on impris

onment, as an unconditional standard and thus have great

difficulty envisioning any other way of dealing with the

more than two million people who are currently being held

in the country's jails, prisons, youth facilities, and immigra

tion detention centers. Ironically, even the anti-death penal

ty campaign tends to rely on the assumption that life impris

onment is the most rational alternative to capital punish

ment As important as it may be to abolish the death penal

ty, we should be conscious of the way the contemporary

campaign against capital punishment has a propensity to

recapitulate the very historical patterns that led to the emer

gence of the prison as the dominant form of punishment

The death penalty has coexisted with the prison, though

imprisonment was supposed to serve as an alternative to

corporal and capital punishment This is a major dichotomy.

A critical engagement with this dichotomy would involve

taking seriously the possibility of linking the goal of death

penalty abolitionism with strategies for prison abolition.

It is true that if we focus myopically on the existing sys

tem—and perhaps this is the problem that leads to the

assumption that imprisonment is the only alternative to

death—it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar sys

tem capable of handling such a vast population of lawbreak

ers. If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, per

ceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships

that comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easi

er to think about alternatives. In other words, a more com

plicated framework may yield more options than if we sim

ply attempt to discover a single substitute for the prison sys

tem. The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to

discover one single alternative system of punishment that

would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.

Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increas

ingly ensconced in the economic, political and ideological

life of the United States and the transnational trafficking in

U.S. commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the prison

industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the

jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic rela

tionships among correctional communities, transnational

corporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and leg

islative and court agendas. If it is true that the contemporary

meaning of punishment is fashioned through these relation

ships, then the most effective abolitionist strategies will

contest these relationships and propose alternatives that

pull them apart. What, then, would it mean to imagine a

system in which punishment is not allowed to become the

source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in

which race and class are not primary determinants of pun

ishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the

central concern in the making of justice?

An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions

such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of

alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate

aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological

landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be

looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as

house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance

bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching

strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alterna

tives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revital

isation of education at all levels, a health system that pro

vides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice sys

tem based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retri

bution and vengeance.

The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the

space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to

crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly

smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools

can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails

and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are

eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of

color—including the presence of armed security guards and

police—and unless schools become places that encourage the

joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits

to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools

into vehicles for decaxceration. Within the health care sys

tem, it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of

institutions available to poor people who suffer severe men

tal and emotional illnesses. There are currently more people

with mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons than

in mental institutions. This call for new facilities designed to

assist poor people should not be taken as an appeal to rein

stitute the old system of mental institutions, which were—

and in many cases still are—as repressive as the prisons. It is

simply to suggest that the racial and class disparities in care

available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradi

cated, thus creating another vehicle for decarceration.

To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alter

native to the existing system of incarceration, we might

envision an array of alternatives that will require radical

transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives

that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia,

class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in

the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance

the goal of abolition.

It is within this context that it makes sense to consider

the decriminalization of drug use as a significant component

of a larger strategy to simultaneously oppose structures of

racism within the criminal justice system and further the

abolitionist agenda of decarceration. Thus, with respect to

the project of challenging the roleplayedby the so-called War

on Drugs in bringing huge numbers of people of color into the

prison system, proposals to decriminalize drug use should be

linked to the development of a constellation of free, commu-

nity-based programs accessible to all people who wish to

tackle their drug problems. This is not to suggest that all peo

ple who use drugs—or that only people who use illicit

drugs^need such help. However, anyone, regardless of eco

nomic status, who wishes to conquer drug addiction should

be able to enter treatment programs.

Such institutions are, indeed, available to affluent com

munities. The most well known program is the Betty Ford

Center, which, according to its Web site, "accepts patients

dependent on alcohol and other mood altering chemicals.

Treatment services are open to all men and women eighteen

years of age and older regardless of race, creed, sex, national

origin, religion or sources of payment for care."130 However,

the cost for the first six days is $1,175 per day, and after that

$525 per day.131 If a person requires thirty days of treatment,

the cost would amount to $19,000, almost twice the annual

salary of a person, working a minimum-wage job.

Poor people deserve to have access to effective, voluntary

drug treatment programs. Like the Betty Ford program, their

operation should not be under the auspices of the criminal

justice system. As at the Ford Center, family members also

should be permitted to participate. But unlike the Betty Ford

program, they should be free of charge. For such programs to

count as "abolitionist alternatives," they would not be

linked—unlike existing programs, to which individuals are

"sentenced"—to imprisonment as a last resort.

The campaign to decriminalize drug use—from marijua

na to heroin—is international in scope and has led countries

such as the Netherlands to revise their laws, legalizing per

sonal use of such drugs as marijuana and hashish. The

Netherlands also has a history of legalized sex work, anoth

er area in which there has been extensive campaigning for

decriminalization. In the cases of drugs and sex work,

decriminalization would simply require repeal of all those

laws that penalize individuals who use drugs and who work

in the sex industry. The decriminalization of alcohol use

serves as a historical example. In both these cases, decrimi

nalization would advance the abolitionist strategy of

decarceration—that is, the consistent reduction in the num

bers of people who are sent to prison—with the ultimate aim

of dismantling the prison system as the dominant mode of

punishment. A further challenge for abolitionists is to iden

tify other behaviors that might be appropriately decriminal

ized as preliminary steps toward abolition.

One obvious and very urgent aspect of the work of

decriminalization is associated with the defense of immi

grants' rights. The growing numbers of immigrants—espe

cially since the attacks on September 11, 2001—who are

incarcerated in immigrant detention centers, as well as in

jails and prisons, can be halted by dismantling the processes

that punish people for their failure to enter this country

without documents. Current campaigns that call for the

decriminalization of undocumented immigrants are making

important contributions to the overall struggle against the

prison industrial complex and are challenging the expansive

reach of racism and male dominance. When women from

countries in the southern region are imprisoned because

they have entered this country to escape sexual violence,

instead of being granted refugee status, this reinforces the

generalized tendency to punish people who are persecuted in

their intimate lives as a direct consequence of pandemics of

violence that continue to be legitimized by ideological and

legal structures.

Within the United States, the "battered women's syn

drome" legal defense reflects an attempt to argue that a

woman who kills an abusive spouse should not be convict

ed of murder. This defense has been abundantly criticized,

both by detractors and proponents of feminism; the former

do not want to recognize the pervasiveness and dangers of

intimate violence against women and the latter challenge

the idea that the legitimacy of this defense resides in the

assertion that those who kill their batterers are not respon

sible for their actions. The point feminist movements

attempt to make—regardless of their specific positions on

battered women's syndrome—is that violence against

women is a pervasive and complicated social problem that

cannot be solved by imprisoning women who fight back

against their abusers. Thus, a vast range of alternative strate

gies of minimizing violence against women—within inti

mate relationships and within relationships to the state—

should be the focus of our concern.

The alternatives toward which I have gestured thus far—

and this is only a small selection of examples, which can

also include job and living wage programs, alternatives to

the disestablished welfare program, community-based recre

ation, and many more—are associated both directly and

indirectly with the existing system of criminal justice. But,

however mediated their relation might be to the current sys

tem of jails and prisons, these alternatives are attempting to

reverse the impact of the prison industrial complex on our

world. As they contest racism and other networks of social

domination, their implementation will certainly advance

the abolitionist agenda of decarceration.

Creating agendas of decarceration and broadly casting the

net of alternatives helps us to do the ideological work of

pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punish

ment. This more nuanced understanding of the social role of

the punishment system requires us to give up our usual way

of thinking about punishment as an inevitable consequence

of crime. We would recognize that "punishment" does not

follow from "crime" in the neat and logical sequence offered

by discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment, but

rather punishment—primarily through imprisonment (and

sometimes death)—is linked to the agendas of politicians, the

profit drive of corporations, and media representations of

crime. Imprisonment is associated with the racialization of

those most likely to be punished. It is associated with their

class and, as we have seen, gender structures the punishment

system as well. If we insist that abolitionist alternatives

trouble these relationships, that they strive to disarticulate

crime and punishment, race and punishment, class and pun

ishment, and gender and punishment, then our focus must

not rest only on the prison system as an isolated institution

but must also be directed at all the social relations that sup

port the permanence of the prison.

An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imag

ining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological

work of questioning why "criminals" have been constituted

as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving

of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical

criminologists have long pointed out that the category "law

breakers" is far greater than the category of individuals who

are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us

have broken the law at one time or another. Even President

Bill Clinton admitted that he had smoked marijuana at one

time, insisting, though, that he did not inhale. However,

acknowledged disparities in the intensity of police surveil

lance—as indicated by the present-day currency of the term

"racial profiling" which ought to cover far more territory

than "driving while black or brown"—account in part for

racial and class-based disparities in arrest and imprisonment

rates. Thus, if we are willing to take seriously the conse

quences of a racist and class-biased justice system, we will

reach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people are

in prison simply because they are, for example, black,

Chicano, Vietnamese, Native American or poor, regardless

of their ethnic background. They are sent to prison, not so

much because of the crimes they may have indeed commit

ted, but largely because their communities have been crim

inalized. Thus, programs for decriminalization will not only

have to address specific activities that have been criminal

ized—such as drug use and sex work—but also criminalized

populations and communities.

It is against the backdrop of these more broadly conceived

abolitionist alternatives that it makes sense to take up the

question of radical transformations within the existing jus

tice system. Thus, aside from minimizing, through various

strategies, the kinds of behaviors that will bring people into

contact with the police and justice systems, there is the ques

tion of how to treat those who assault the rights and bodies

of others. Many organizations and individuals both in the

United States and other countries offer alternative modes of

making justice. In limited instances, some governments have

attempted to implement alternatives that range from conflict

resolution to restorative or reparative justice. Such scholars

as Herman Bianchi have suggested that crime needs to be

defined in terms of tort and, instead of criminal law, should

be reparative law. In his words, "[The lawbreaker] is thus no

longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, a

liable person whose human duty is to take responsibility for

his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair."132

There is a growing body of literature on reshaping sys

tems of justice around strategies of reparation, rather than

retribution, as well as a growing body of experiential evi

dence of the advantages of these approaches to justice and of

the democratic possibilities they promise. Instead of

rehearsing the numerous debates that have emerged over the

last decades—including the most persistent question, "What

will happen to the murderers and rapists?"—I will conclude

with a story of one of the most dramatic successes of these

experiments in reconciliation. I refer to the case of Amy

Biehl, the white Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach,

California, who was killed by young South African men in

Guguletu, a black township in Capetown, South Africa.

In 1993, when South Africa was on the cusp of its transi

tion, Amy Biehl was devoting a significant amount of her

time as a foreign student to the work of rebuilding South

Africa. Nelson Mandela had been freed in 1990, but had not

yet been elected president. On August 25, Biehl was driving

several black friends to their home in Guguletu when a

crowd shouting antiwhite slogans confronted her, and some

of them stoned and stabbed her to death. Four of the men

participating in the attack were convicted of her murder and

sentenced to eighteen years in prison. In 1997, Linda and

Peter Biehl—Amy's mother and father—decided to support

the amnesty petition the men presented to the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission. The four apologized to the

Biehls and were released in July 1998. Two of them—Easy

Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni—later met with the Biehls,

who, despite much pressure to the contrary, agreed to see

them.133 According to Nofemela, he wanted to say more

about his own sorrow for killing their daughter than what

had been possible during Truth and Reconciliation hearings.

"I know you lost a person you love/7 he says he told them

during that meeting. "I want you to forgive me and take me

as your child."134

The Biehls, who had established the Amy Biehl

Foundation in the aftermath of their daughter's death, asked

Nofemela and Peni to work at the Guguletu branch of the

foundation. Nofemela became an instructor in an after

school sports program and Peni an administrator. In June

2002, they accompanied Linda Biehl to New York, where

they all spoke before the American Family Therapy

Academy on reconciliation and restorative justice. In a

Boston Globe interview, Linda Biehl, when asked how she

now feels about the men who killed her daughter, said, "I

have a lot of love for them." After Peter Biehl died in 2002,

she bought two plots of land for them in memory of her hus

band so that Nofemela and Peni can build their own

homes.135 A few days after the September 11 attacks, the

Biehls had been asked to speak at a synagogue in their com

munity. According to Peter Biehl, "We tried to explain that

sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other peo

ple have to say, to ask; 'Why do these terrible things hap

pen?' instead of simply reacting."136

Resources

CRITICAL RESISTANCE: BEYOND THE

PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

www.criticalresistance.org

National Office:

1904 Franklin Street, Suite 504

Oakland, CA 94612

Phone: (510)444-0484

Fax: (510) 444-2177

[email protected]

NORTHEAST REGIONAL OFFICE

460 W. 128th Street

New York, NY 10027

Phone: (917)493-9795

Fax: (917) 493-9798

crne@criticalresistance.org

SOUTHERN REGIONAL OFFICE

P.O. Box 791213

New Orleans, LA 70179

Phone: (504) 837-5348 or toll free (866) 579-0885

crsouth@criticalresistance.org

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH PRISON PROJECT

350 5th Avenue, 34th Floor

New York, NY 10118-3299

Phone: (212) 290-4700

Fax: (212) 736-1300

hrwny c@hrw. org

www.hrw.org

INCITE! WOMEN OF COLOR AGAINST VIOLENCE

P.O. Box 6861

Minneapolis, MN 55406-0861

Phone: (415) 553-3837

[email protected]

www.incite-national.org/

JUSTICE NOW (JUSTICE NETWORK ON WOMEN)

1322 Webster Street, Suite 210

Oakland, CA 94612

Phone: (510) 839-7654

Fax: (510) 839-7615

cynthia@jnow.org, cassandra@jnow.org

www.jnow.org

THE NATIONAL CENTER ON INSTITUTIONS

AND ALTERNATIVES (NCIA)

3125 Mt. Vernon Avenue

Alexandria, VA 22305

Phone: (703) 684-0373

Fax: (703) 549-4077

info@ncianet.org

www.ncianet.org/ncia;www.sentencing.org

PRISON ACTIVIST RESOURCE CENTER

P.O. Box 339

Berkeley, CA 94701

Phone: (510) 893-4648

Fax: (510) 893-4607

parc@prisonactivist.org

www.prisonactivist.org

PRISON LEGAL NEWS

2400 NW 80th Street, PMB #148

Seattle, WA 98117

Phone: (206) 781-6524

www.prisonlegalnews.org

PRISON MORATORIUM PROJECT

388 Atlantic Avenue, 3rd Floor

Brooklyn, NY 11217

Phone:(718)260-8805

Fax: (212) 727-8616

pmp@nomoreprisons.org

www.nomoreprisons.org

THE SENTENCING PROJECT

514-10th Street NW#1000

Washington, DC 20004

Phone: (202) 628-0871

Fax: (202) 628-1091

www.sentencingproject.org

Notes

1 Katherine Stapp, "Prisons Double as Mental Wards/' Asheville Global

Report, no. 164 (7-13 March 2002), www.agrnews.org. Stapp's article

describes a study by Seena Fazel of Oxford University and John Danesh of

Cambridge University published in the British medical journal The

Lancet According to Stapp, the researchers concluded, "One in seven

inmates suffers from a mental illness that could be a risk factor for sui

cide, says the study. This represents more than one million people in

Western countries. The study's authors . . . surveyed data on the mental

health of 23,000 prisoners in 12 Western countries over a period of three

decades. They found that prisoners 'were several times more likely to

have psychosis and major depression, and about 10 times more likely to

have anti-social personality disorder, than the general population/"

2 Elliot Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Henry Holt

and Company, 1998), 21.

3 Mike Davis, "Hell Factories in the Field: A Prison-Industrial Complex,"

The Nation 260, no.7 (20 February 1995).

4 The information in this paragraph regarding the dates California prisons

opened was taken from the Web site of the California Department of

Corrections, www.cdc.state.ca.us/facility/facil.htm.

5 www.cdc.state.ca.us/facility/instvspw.htm.

6 www.cdc.state.ca.us/facility/factsht.htm.

7 www.cdc.state.ca.us/facility/instccwf.htm.

8 Sandow Birk, Incarcerated: Visions of California in the Twenty-First

Century (San Francisco: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2001).

9 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalisation and U.S. Prison Growth: From

Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism," Race and Class 40

no. 2/3 (October 1998-March 1999): 174.

10 Gilmore, 184.

11 Gina Dent, "Stranger Inside and Out: Black Subjectivity in the Women-

in-Prison Film/' in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Black

Performance and Black Popular Culture, edited by Harry Elam and

Kennel Jackson (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press, forthcoming

2003).

12 Marc Mauer, "Young Men and the Criminal Justice System: A Growing

National Problem" (Washington, D.C.: The Sentencing Project, 1990).

13 Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling, "Young Black Americans and the

Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later" (Washington, D.C.: The

Sentencing Project, 1995).

14 Allen J, Beck, Jennifer C. Karberg, and Paige M. Harrison, ''Prison and Jail

Inmates at Midyear 2001," Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,

April 2002, N CJ191702), 12.

15 Adam Jay Hirsh, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in

Earfy America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 84.

16 Ibid., 71.

17 Ibid., 73.

18 Ibid., 74-75.

19 Milton Fierce, Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Southern Convict Lease

System, 1865-1933 (New York: African Studies Research Center,

Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 1994), 85-86.

20 Mary Ann Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama.

1865-1900 (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia,

2000}, 6.

21 Curtin, 42.

22 Phillip S, Foner, ed. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Volume

4: Reconstruction and After (New Yorltt International Publishers, 1955),

379.

23 Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," in Critical Race Theory, by

Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas.

(New York: The New Press, 1995).

24 On March 1, 2003, thelNS was officially disestablished andics operations

were folded into the new Department of Homeland Security

25 Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the

American Southr 7.866-1928 [Columbia, S.C.: South Carolina Press,

1996), 25.

26 Ibid.

27 David Oshinsky, *Worse Than SlaveryParchman Farm and the Ordeal

of Jim Crow Justice (New York: The Free Press, 1996).

28 Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy

of Convict Labor in the New South (London, New York: Verso), 1996.

29 Oshinsky, 45.

30 Curtin, 44.

31 Lichtenstein, 13.

32 Ibid.,x2x.

33 Ibid.

34 Curtin, 1.

35 Curtin, 213-14.

36 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New

York: Vintage Books, 1979), 234.

37 Ibid, 3.

38 Louis J. Palmer Jr., The Death Penalty: An American Citizen*s Guide to

Understanding Federal and State Laws (Jefferson, N.C., and London:

McFarland & Co, Inc, Publishers, 1998).

39 Russell P. Dobash, R. Emerson Dobash, and Sue Gutteridge, The

Imprisonment of Women (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 19.

40 John Hirst, "The Australian Experience: The Convict Colony," In The

Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western

Society, edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (New York,

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 244.

41 Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995).

42 See Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social

Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), and Dario

Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Piison and the Factory: Origins of the

Penitentiary System (Totowa, N.J: Barnes and Noble Books, 1981).

43 Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in

America, 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 10.

44 See discussion of John Howard's 1777 report, The State of the Prisons in

England and Wales, in A fust Measure of Pairr The Penitentiary in the

Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850, by Michael Ignatieff (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1978).

45 Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon and Other Prison Writings (London and

New York: Verso, 1995).

46 Charles Dickens, The Works of Charles Dickens, Vol. 27, American

Notes (New York: Peter Fcnelon Collier and Son, 19001, 119-20.

47 Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary

System in the United States and its Application in France (Carbondale

and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press), 1964 [1833],

48 Beaumont an. d Tocqueville, 131.

49 "Cold Storage: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana," A

Human Rights Watch Report (New York: Human Rights Watch, October

1997), 13.

50 "Cold Storage/' 18-19.

51 For an extended discussion of the Supermax, see Craig Haney and Mona

Lynch, "Regulating Prisons of the Future: A Psychological Analysis of

Supermax and Solitary Confinement," New York University Review of

Law and Social Change 23 (1997): 477-570.

52 "Cold Storage," 19.

53 Chase Riveland, "Supermax Prisons: Overview and General

Considerations." (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Corrections,

U,S. Department of Justice, January 1999), 4.

54 John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of

Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press, 1987), 2.

55 Ignatieff, 47.

56 Ibid., 53.

57 Bender, 1.

5 8 Ignatieff, 58.

59 Ibid., 52.

60 Bender, 29.

61 Ibid., 31.

62 Robert Bums, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chaingang (Savannah, Ga.:

Beehive Press, 1994|.

63 George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

(Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1994).

64 Bettina Aptheker and Angela Davis, eds. // They Come in the Morning:

Voices of Resistance (New York: Third Press, 1971).

65 Mumia Abu-famal, live from Death Row (New York: Addison-Wesley

Publishing Company, 1995], 65-67.

66 Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms (Farmington, Pa.: The Plough

Publishing House, 1997).

67 Mumia Abu-Jamal, AH Things Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press,

2000).

68 Section 20411 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of

1994 prohibited the award of Pell Grants to fund prisoners' education. It

remains in effect today. See usinfo.state.gov/infousa/laws/majorlaws/

h3355_en,htm.

69 H. Bruce Franklin, ed. Prison Writing in TWentieth-Century America

(New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 13,

70 Malcolm X, 7he Autobiography of Malcohn X (As Ibid to Alex Haley)

(New York: Random House, 1965).

71 The Last Graduation, directed by Barbara Zahm. (Zahm Productions and

Deep Dish TV, 1997).

72 Marcia Bunney, "One Life in Prison: Perception, Reflection, and

Empowerment," in Harsh Punishment: International Experiences of

Women's Imprisonment, edited by Sandy Cook and Susaime Davies

(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 29-30.

73 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence

Hill and Co., 1987).

74 Ibid, x.

75 Ibid., 83-84.

76 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political

Prisoner (New York: International Publishers, 1972).

77 ACE (Members of AIDS Counseling and Education), Breaking the Walls

of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum Security

Prison (New York: Overlook Press, 1998).

78 Vivien Stern, A Sin Against: the Future: Imprisonment in the World

(Boston: Northeastern Press, 1998), 138.

79 See Elaine Showaiter, "Victorian Women and Insanity," in Madhouses,

Mad-Doctors and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the

Victorian Era, edited by Andrew Scull (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press), 1981.

80 Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native

American Criminality. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 121.

81 Freedman, 15.

82 See Freedman, chapters 3 and 4,

83 Joanne Belknap, The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice

(Belmont, Calif.: Watsworth Publishing Company), 95.

84 Lucia Zedner, "Wayward Sisters: The Prison for Women/' in The Oxford

History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society,

edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (New York: Oxford

University Press), 318.

85 Ibid., 318.

86 Currie, 14.

87 Ross, 89.

88 Ibid., 90.

89 Tekla Dennison Miller, The Warden Wore Pink (Brunswick, Me.: Biddle

Publishing Company, 1996), 97-98.

90 Ibid. 100.

91 Ibid., 121.

92 Philadelphia Daily News, 26 April 1996.

93 American Civil Liberties Union Freedom. Network, 26 August 1996,

aclu.org/news/w82696b.html.

94 All Tbo Familiar: Sexual Abuse o f Women in U.S. State Prisons (New

York: HumanRights Watch, December 1996), 1.

95 ibid., 2.

96 www.oneword.org/ips2/aug98/03_56_003.

97 Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (adopted by the

First United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the

Treatment of Offenders, held at Geneva in 1955, and approved by the

Economic and Social Council by its resolution 663 C (XXTV) of 31 July

1957 and 2076 (LXII) of 13 May 1977).

98 Amanda George, "Strip Searches: Sexual Assault by the State,"

www.aic.gov.au/publication5/proceedings/20/george.pdf, 211-12.

99 Amanda George made this comment in the video Strip Search. Produced

by Sinmiering Video and Coalition Against Police Violence (date unavail

able).

100 Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg, "The Prison Industrial Complex and the

Global Economy" (pamphlet) (Berkeley. Calif.: Prison Activist Resource

Center, 1997).

101 See note 3.

102 Wall Street Journal, 12 May 1994.

103 Ibid.

104 Allen M. Hornblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg

Prison (New York: Routledge, 1998], xvi.

105 Hornblmn, 212.

106 Hornblum, 37.

107 See A.S. Reiman, "The New Medical Industrial Complex/' New England

Journal of Medicine 30 (17) (23 October 1980): 963-70.

108 Vince Beisei, "How We Got to Two Million: How Did the Land of the Free

Become the World's Leading Jailer?" Debt to Society, MotherJones.com

Special Report, 10 July 2001. Available at: www.motherjones.com/pris-

ons/overview,html, 6.

109 Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, "Prisoners in 2001," Bureau of

Justice Statistics Bulletin [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,

Office of Justice Programs, July 2002, NCJ 195189), I.

110 Allen Beck and Paige M. Harrison., "Prisoners in 2000/' Bureau of Justice

Statistics Bulletin (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office

of Justice Programs, August 2001, NCJ 1888207), I,

111 Harrison and Beck, "Prisoners in2001/'

i i2 Steve Donziger, The Real WaronCrime: Report of the National Criminal

Justice Commission (New York: Perennial Publishers, 1996), 87.

113 Allen J. Beck, Jennifer C. Karberg, and Paige M. Harrison. "Prison and Jail

Inmates at Midyear 2001," Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin

(Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,

April 2002, NCJ 191702), 12.

114 Harrison and Beck, "Prisoners in 2001," 7.

115 Ibid.

116 Sue Anne Pressley, "Texas County Sued b y Missouri Over Alleged Abuse

of Inmates," Washington Post( 27 August 1997, A2.

117 Madeline Baro, "Video Prompts Prison Probe," Philadelphia Daily News,

20 August 1997.

118 "Beatings Worse Than Shown on Videotape, Missouri Inmates Say/' The

Associated Press, 27 August 1997, 7:40 p.m. EDT.

119 Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prison Machine: How America Profits from

Crime (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2000).

120 Abby Ellin, "A Food Fight Over Private Prisons," New York Times,

Education Life, Sunday, 8 April 2001.

121 See. Julia Sudbury, "Mules and Other Hybrids: Incarcerated Women and

the Limits of Diaspora," Harvard Journal of African American Public

Policy, Fall 2002,

122 Amanda George, "The New Prison Culture: Making Millions from

Misery/' in Sandy Cook and Susanne Davies, Harsh Punishment:

International Experiences of Women's Imprisonment, by Sandy Cook and

Susanne Davies (Boston; Northeastern Press, 1999], 190.

123 Pi ess release issued by Wackenhut, 23 August 2002.

124 Ibid.

125 Dyer, 14.

126 See Amnesty International Press Release at www.geocities.com/turkish-

hungerstrike/ amapriLhtml.

127 www.hrw.org/wr2k2/prisons.html

128 www.suntimes.co.za/20

129 Arthur Waskow, resident, Institute for Policy Studies,

Saturday Review, 8

January 1972, quoted in Fay Honey Knopp, et al., Instead of Prisons: A

Handbook for Abolitionists [Syracuse, N.Y.: Prison Research Education

Action Project, 1976], 15-16.

130 www.bettyfordcenter.org/programs/programs/index.html

131 www.bettyfordcenter.org/programs/programs/prices.html

132 Herman Bianchi, "Abolition: Assensus and Sanctuary," in Abolitionism:

Toward a Non-Repressive Approach to Crime, eds. Herman Bianchi and

Reni Swaaningen (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1986], 117.

133 Anthropologist Nancy Schepper-Hughes described this astonishing turn

of events in a talk she delivered at UC Berkeley on September 24, 2001,

entitled "Un-Doing: The Politics of the Impossible in the New South

Africa."

134 Bella English, "Why Do They Forgive Us/' Boston Globe, 23 April 2003.

135 Ibid.

136 Gavin Du Venage, "Our Daughter's Killers Are Now Our Friends," The

Straits Times (Singapore], 2 December 2 2001.

About the Author

ANGELA YVONNE DA VIS is a professor of history of con

sciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Over

the last thirty years, she has been active in numerous organ

izations challenging prison-related repression. Her advocacy

on behalf of political prisoners led to three capital charges,

sixteen months in jail awaiting trial, and a highly publicized

campaign then acquittal in 1972. In 1973, the National

Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners,

along with the Attica Brothers, the American Indian

Movement and other organizations founded the National

Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, of which

she remained co-chairperson for many years. In 1998, she

was one of the twenty-five organizers of the historic Berkeley

conference "Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial

Complex" and since that time has served as convener of a

research group bearing the same name under the auspices of

the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Angela is author of many books, including Blues Legacies

and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith,

and Billie Holiday. Her new book, forthcoming from

Random House, is Prisons and Democracy.

SOCIOLOGY

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“In this extraordinary book, Angela Davis challenges

us to confront the human rights catastrophe In our

jails and prisons. As she so convincingly argues, the

contemporary U.S. practice of super-incarceration is

closer to new age slavery than to any recognizable

system of 'criminal Justice/"

-'Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities and City of Quartz

“In this brilliant, thoroughly researched book,

Angela Davis swings a wrecking ball into the racist

and sexist underpinnings of the American prison

system. Her arguments are well wrought and

restrained, leveling an unflinching critique of how

and why more than 2 million Americans are

presently behind bars, and the corporations who

profit from their suffering. Davis explores the bias

es that criminalize communities of color, politically

disenfranchising huge chunks of minority voters in

the process. Uncompromising in her vision, Davis

calls not merely for prison reform, but for nothing

short of 'new terrains of Justice/ Another invaluable

work in the Open Media Series by one of America's

last truly fearless public intellectuals/'

-former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney

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DISTRIBUTED TO THE U,S. BOOK TRADC BY CONSORTIUM

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