Indefinite Detention Comes Home

Barack Obama now appears ready to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law. Among other provisions, this bill mandates that terrorism suspects be indefinitely imprisoned under the authority of the U.S. military, rather than civilian courts; allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, even when they are captured in the country; and makes it more difficult to transfer detainees out of the war prison at Guantanamo.

Amnesty International protests that "the NDAA enshrines the war paradigm that has eroded the United States’ human rights record and served it so poorly over the past decade as the country’s primary counterterrorism tool."

Reflecting on the NDAA, Glenn Greenwald at Salon has this to say about the President's record on civil liberties and human rights: "Obama has, for three years now, been defending and entrenching exactly the detention powers this law vests, but doing it through radical legal theories..., continuities with the Bush/Cheney template, and devotion to Endless War and the civil liberties assaults it entails."

For Mother Jones's coverage, see "White House Caves on Defense Veto Threat," here.

Buried Lives

Just appearing from the University of Georgia Press is a new collection of essays, Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, edited by Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell.

Here is the publisher's description:

"Buried Lives offers the first critical examination of the experience of imprisonment in early America. These interdisciplinary essays investigate several carceral institutions to show how confinement shaped identity, politics, and the social imaginary both in the colonies and in the new nation. The historians and literary scholars included in this volume offer a complement and corrective to conventional understandings of incarceration that privilege the intentions of those in power over the experiences of prisoners.

Considering such varied settings as jails, penitentiaries, almshouses, workhouses, floating prison ships, and plantations, the contributors reconstruct the struggles of people imprisoned in locations from Antigua to Boston. The essays draw upon a rich array of archival sources from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War, including warden logs, petitions, execution sermons, physicians' clinical notes, private letters, newspaper articles, runaway slave advertisements, and legal documents. Through the voices, bodies, and texts of the incarcerated, Buried Lives reveals the largely ignored experiences of inmates who contested their subjection to regimes of power."

Slavery by Another Name (or Is it the Same Name)? by Lisa Guenther

*This post by Lisa Guenther originally appeared on the New APPS blog.

The New York Times reports that an Alabama inmate, Mark Melvin, is suing prison officials at the Kilby Correctional Facility in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Alabama Commissioner of Corrections for the right to read a book. According to prison officials, this book is "too incendiary" and "too provocative" to be allowed within prison walls. It might incite "violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality, or disobedience toward law enforcement officials or correctional staff." What is this incendiary book, and why is it so dangerous?

The book is called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon, a senior correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. It documents the history of the Convict Lease System, which sprang up across the South after the formal abolition of slavery in 1865. Through this system, thousands of inmates were leased to private and public corporations. They built railroads; they worked in coal mines; they even worked on plantations planting and picking cotton, sometimes for the same planters who used to own them as slaves. When their bodies were spent, they were sold to medical schools for dissection; their urine was collected and sold to tanneries.

Historian David Oshinsky has called the convict lease system “worse than slavery” because it granted white property owners access to a ceaselessly-renewed source of labor while removing the incentive to provide even a minimal degree of care for the workers. The inmates were not paid for their labor; they were leased at a flat rate from the prison. Often, inmates were not even fed but rather left to scrounge in the woods for food after a full day of heavy labor. Mortality rates were extremely high, with many prisoners dying before they could serve out their full sentence.

Convict lease systems sprang up in every former slave state; they operated between 1868 (with Georgia as the first state to institute such a system) and 1928 (with Alabama as the last state to outlaw it). During its period of operation, incarceration rates in those states skyrocketed, with a 10-fold increase in the prison population in Georgia from 1868–1908, more than a 10-fold increase in North Carolina from 1870-1890, an 8.5-fold increase in Florida from 1881-1904, a 4-fold increase in Mississippi from 1871-1879, and a 6.5-fold increase in Alabama from 1869-1919 (see Sheldon 2005). A vastly disproportionate number of these inmates were black, charged under the new Black Codes and later under Jim Crow laws.

How could such a thing happen after the abolition of slavery? To this day, the Thirteenth Amendment continues to this day to hold open an exception for prison inmates: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (emphasis added). By leaving open the possibility of treating convicted criminals as slaves, the Thirteenth Amendment did not simply abolish slavery, it relocated and reinscribed slavery within the prison system, and within the legal limits of the constitution.

Slavery by Another Name is indeed an incendiary book; it takes as its very subject-matter a "violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality." But this violence is only compounded by the censorship of reading material available to prisoners who remain caught in the space of exception held open by the Thirteenth Amendment.

Joy James has argued that, by leaving open a loophole for the enslavement of convicted criminals, the 13^th amendment did not abolish slavery, but rather "resurrected social death as a permanent legal category in U.S. life, yet no longer registered death within the traditional racial markings. Breaking with a two hundred-year-old tradition, the government ostensibly permitted the enslavement of nonblacks. Now not the ontological status of “nigger” but the ontological status of “criminal” renders one a slave" (James 2005, xxix).

Mark Melvin is white; he has been in prison for almost twenty years, since he was convicted at the age of fourteen for helping his older brother commit two murders. What does it mean to deny him access to this book? What would it mean to let him read it?

*

Lisa Guenther is assistant professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction, and she is writing a new book about solitary confinement.

Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America

Why, in the early nineteenth century, did imprisonment become the new standard in punishment? In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, most other forms of violence and stigma--the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post--were abandoned by state authorities. The death penalty endured, of course, but even the gallows were withdrawn from public view. Governments from Maine to Louisiana and beyond built massive penitentiaries to house their convicts.

There are several explanations--political, social, economic. Violent spectacles were associated with old-world despotism, and the new republic displayed its enlightenment by inflicting a more "humane" punishment that would seek to rehabilitate broken lives and save lost souls. As racial categories became central to group identities, the treatment of white criminals had to be distinguished from the brutality and terror that persisted on Southern plantations. With the rise of an industrial economy, the prison promised to exploit the labor of the condemned, rather than wasting their blood.

Now, a careful and perceptive historian offers a new book-length study of the crucial role of religion in the making of the early prison system. Jennifer Graber's The Furnace of Affliction shows how Protestant reformers shaped the ideals of moral instruction and spiritual reawakening that were enshrined in the institution known as the penitentiary--and how, in turn, the endeavor redefined religion's place in the public life of the nation.

Focusing on New York, whose experiments in incarceration became the models for many other states, Graber describes how Quakers, Congregationalists, and others refashioned both penalty and piety through their efforts to redeem the souls of the incarcerated. "They stressed a Christian faith," Graber writes of the reformers, "realized most significantly as moral living and obedience to governmental authority" (12).

In the end, religious leaders lost their prominence in defining the means and ends of punishment. Along the way, though, they had helped to build an institution riven by contradictions that have never been resolved:

"To some degree, the Protestant prison activists made a distinctive claim against inmate suffering. They registered a particular voice affirming prisoners' reformative potential. They argued strenuously for the connection between democracy and humane punishment. But in other ways, they contributed to the prison's development in all its cruelty. They advocated an institution that enclosed people against their will, forced them to labor, separated them from all human comforts, and deprived them of every freedom" (176).

A Reading List in Prison Studies

Alternet presets a list of "10 Books about Prison that Will Make You Rethink the United States Penal System," by Anna Clark.

The list includes pathbreaking new studies like Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" as well as some classics like George Jackson's "Soledad Brother" and Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish." A rich introduction to the history of a crisis--in theory, in practice, and in the imagination.

Arkansas' Prison Farms

The latest issue of Front Porch, the official publication of the Arkansas Farm Bureau, includes a cover story on inmate labor in the state's prison farms.

The racist image shows an African American inmate standing in the fields. He holds a rusty, beat-up hoe, and his head is wrapped in a rag. Behind him, a guard on horseback oversees the scene. The visual connections to the history of slavery and segregation are obvious.

Historians like David Oshinsky, the author of Worse than Slavery, have worked hard to show how prison farms emerged as replacements for the plantations of the Old South. In the post-Reconstruction era, the criminal justice system was reinvented to serve the interests of wealthy planters and white supremacists. Legal scholars like Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, have shown how today’s prison system is working to resegregate the United States, pushing back against the advances of the Civil Rights era.

According to The Sentencing Project, Arkansas imprisons African Americans at a rate four times higher than whites, and 9% of the state’s black population has been disenfranchised by the criminal justice system. These statistics only begin to tell the story of the many lives that have been disrupted and destroyed by the system of mass incarceration.

What makes the issue of “Front Porch” such a strange, startling document, though is the way it presents this racist system as a normal, inoffensive reality. The headline cheerfully announces, “Ag[riculture] a big part of inmates’ lives.” Just below these words, the magazine promises “Cool watermelon recipes.”

The Art of the Shiv

From the archives at Design Observer, William Drenttel's "Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv" has this to say about the weapons made by hand in American prisons:

"The individual parts that make up a shiv tend to be everyday objects, innocent things furtively reconstituted as lethal weapons. Each design choice is essential, but what's particularly notable is that shivs, at their core, are not so much evocations of minimalism as they are symbols of survivalism. A shiv is all about masked utility: it's an innocuous object with improbably toxic intent."

Click here to view the slideshow of images from the East Jersey State Prison.