Lock and Key: The Southern Prison Farm

The New York Times presents "The Land of Lock and Key," a review essay on the history of prison farms in Texas and the South, by Daniel Bergner. Bergner writes beautifully about the "sacred" place of prisons in American society:

'Prisons are sacred places. There our society claims control over the lives of men and women; there we assume the roles of gods. And whether the prison sprawls over thousands of acres like the penitentiary farms of the Deep South, or compresses its convicts on tight tiers, the air within holds a particular density, a palpable weight created not only by the crimes the inmates have committed but also by the ownership we have taken of the convicts, whether we acknowledge it or not.'

Bergner, the author of God of the Rodeo: The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana’s Angola Prison, has done his own research into the role of religion in the prison system. Here, he takes up the work of another scholar, Robert Perkinson, the author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire.

Like others who have wondered how today's sprawling prison complexes could have emerged from an older penitentiary system devoted to rehabilitation, Perkinson asks us to confront the ruined hopes of reform and the new realities of mass incarceration:

'As Perkinson sets out to tell the story of America’s movement from, in his words, “the age of slavery to the age of incarceration,” with the latter period beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing to the present day, he concentrates on Texas in part because the modern surge of its inmate population has far outstripped even the spike in national numbers. Between 1965 and 2000, the number of prisoners in the country rose by 600 percent; in Texas, the growth was twice that. The state ranks near the very top for the percentage of its people kept behind bars. And for well over a century, Texas has held to a perspective on penology — an outlook devoid even of the goal, let alone the reality, of rehabilitation — that now dominates the nation. The state, in Perkinson’s eyes, has provided a “template for a more fearful and vengeful society,” for a country that no longer aims, with its inmates, “to repair and redeem but to warehouse, avenge and permanently differentiate convicted criminals from law-abiding citizens.” '

Ordinary Injustice

The New Haven (CT) Advocate presents Ordinary Injustice, an essay on the history of punishment and the state of the criminal justice system today. Does the American prison still represent an ideal of justice, or has it become an expression of fear and indifference?

"The idea behind punishment, if there is one, seems to be simple containment. The public wants the thugs and predators off the streets. We want criminals to be incapacitated. To disappear. At the heart of our penal system is no longer the spirit of justice, but a ghostly, inchoate fear.

"If the prison’s only purpose is to remove convicts from society, though, what is to be done with them while they are locked away? They are not to be tortured. They are not to be reformed. They are just supposed to linger in their holding cells, invisible.

"Meanwhile, in the world at large, a penal system without a theory of justice turns out to be very hard to change. How do you argue against an institution that doesn’t represent an idea?"

The occasion for the piece is the case of George Gould and Ronald Taylor, two men wrongly convicted of murder and held in Connecticut prisons for over fourteen years. Gould and Taylor's conviction has been overturned, and they now await their release. The New Haven Independent covers the story here.

The Prison and the Global Imagination

The November/ December 2009 issue of World Literature Today features “Voices Against the Darkness,” a special section on writers who have served time as political prisoners under some of the world’s most repressive regimes—Iran, Burma, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and the South Africa of the apartheid era.

The American prison has always been part of broad, transnational patterns of violence and reform. “Voices Against the Darkness” provokes us to confront a truly global network of carceral spaces in the present. It also invites us to return to the imperatives of human rights, a standard of liberty and justice that transcends the legal systems enforced by national powers.

In her impassioned introductory essay, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman of International PEN recalls that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents a promise “whose full realization has not yet been achieved.” She understands the effort to publish the writings of political prisoners as work towards a fuller realization.

The poems and stories collected in “Voices Against the Darkness” offer a kind of testimony from beyond the pale. Some of the most moving passages are simple descriptions. A Burmese ex-prisoner using the pseudonym Tha Zin writes, “The cell I was allotted measured about fifteen feet square, with a row of metal bars forming one wall. It was lit by a 40-watt bulb. One corner had a bamboo mat….” These sparse lines summon a whole vision of claustrophobia and deprivation.

“Voices Against the Darkness” also includes a short, fascinating piece by Breyten Breytenbach, the South African author of The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and other works. Breytenbach reflects on the burdens he feels as an author who is expected to testify about the brutalities of the apartheid regime. His own release from prison, he says, delivered him into a new kind of “captivity.” He had become “a convict of respectability and accountability.”

“I have seen. I am responsible. I must report.”

Breytenbach’s thoughts on his own place in the global economy of letters remind us that literary testimony might not always give us the clearest of moral or political lessons. It might also draw us into mystery and contradiction.

Herman Krieger's "Prison Scene"

"Rained In (Northern Correctional Facility, Iowa)" by Herman Krieger.

Herman Krieger presents "Prison Scene," a photo essay featuring images of prisons and other institutions around the United States, especially the Midwest and the West.

You can link to the essay through Gabriel City or see the whole thing here.