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The U.S. Prison State - Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor - Book Review
Monthly Review, Feb, 2004 by Marilyn Buck
Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, editors, Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor (New York: Routledge, 2003), 256 pages, cloth $80.00, paper $19.95.
I sit in the day room/lobby waiting to be released for lunch. I read a novel in which one character, a Pole, comments to another that the Germans consider Poles to be untermenschen, subhuman. I look at the women around me: Latinas arguing among themselves in Spanish; a black woman making signals to someone I don't see; two white women--one of whom is stringing beads--are murmuring together. Two of these women are here because they are undocumented workers; three are incarcerated for economic offenses; the other is falsely convicted; all of us are caught inside the nightmare of an oppressive state and an expanding empire. Instead of storm trooper boots and brown shirts, those who command wear Tony Lamas cowboy boots, expensive suits, and ties--men who see in the U.S. prison establishment ways to both intensify control of the population and squeeze more profits out of late-stage capitalism.
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Prison has always been the final gate in the repressive apparatus of a state. It serves the purpose of social and political control, although it manifests itself differently in different nation-states and in different political periods. Nevertheless, the prisoner is, with few exceptions, always a scapegoat and considered a deviant. Prison is not only a class weapon; it is also an instrument to control "alien" populations. In the United States, these "alien" populations are formerly colonized peoples--former slaves, Native Americans, Latin Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders--and they have all too often been considered the internal enemy. They are the people most needing control and are therefore the majority of those locked down in U.S. prisons.
The United States is the world's primary example of a country that deals with its social, economic, and cultural problems by incarceration. But this is its history. Prisons are the logical outcome of the country's foundation on the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the "manifest destiny" of imperial settlerism--from sea to shining sea.
Prison Nation is a recently-released anthology of essays on both the state of U.S. prison and the U.S. prison state. Most of the essays were written in the new century. One more century of American prisoners. The writers are prisoners, journalists, academics, and activists. Unfortunately, none of the writers are women prisoners or ex-prisoners.
Readers are probably familiar with abominable prison conditions--rape, torture, restraint chairs, gladiator fights--from newspaper and magazine accounts. Prison and human rights activists might even have read some of the book's essays. But what marks this collection as a whole is the first-rate discussion of these brutal circumstances and how these are the logical and normative result of incarceration itself.
The essays in sections 5, "Malign Neglect: Prison Medicine," and 6, "Rape, Racism, and Repression," give ample evidence of the inhumanity and cruelty of the system: Death sentences result from nonexistent or malpracticed medical care. The mentally ill are warehoused and even healthy prisoners tend to fall prey to mental illness because of the insane and brutal conditions of prison's bedlam (see "The New Bedlam" by Willie Wisely). Prisoner rape--both rape by guards mainly of female prisoners, and by predatory male prisoners of other male prisoners--is frequently given free reign by guards.
There are other essays which detail the more subtle elements of dehumanization, ones that those who have not experienced prison either as a prisoner or as a family member or friend of a prisoner might not ever consider--such as a prisoner being warehoused far from home and family. Nell Bernstein discusses the far-reaching repercussions of long distance visiting and the need of children for their parents in two essays: "Swept Away," and "Relocation Blues."
The psychological trauma and cruelty generated inside the prison system filters through into everything outside of it, deforming and undermining the whole of civil society. Prison society begins to serve as a model for other organizations. In his essay "Capital Crimes," George Winslow concludes, "Corporate power currently allows companies to create serious social problems by legal and illegal means."
The U.S. prison state has spread its tentacles into communities and classes, which are manipulated both by the law and the lure of economic development. In "An American Seduction," Joelle Fraser draws a portrait of a prison town in need of more inhabitants and more work. Susanville, California expected economic well-being; what it got was a supermax prison, greater pressure on its social infrastructure, and a culture of violence unexpected even among its many ranchers, hunters, and fishers. Even the night has been affected. The author's brother describes returning home to a brightly lit prison, which has destroyed the darkness of the countryside night. "It looked futuristic, unnatural, something out of a science fiction movie. Like some giant alien mother ship had landed."
