Models of Silence

THESE STRUCTURES OF CONCRETE,

BARBED WIRE, BARS & WALLS FOSTER

THESE SYSTEMS OF

VIOLENT TRIALS. THEY INCUBATE THIS ABUSED, NERVOUS,

PAINED CONDITION. SO WHAT ARE THEY

BUT SOME SYSTEMIC MODELS OF SILENCE

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In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that whoever is convicted of a serious crime will be sent to prison. In some countries-including the United States-where capital punishment hasn't yet been, a small but significant number of people are sentenced to death for what are punishment acknowledge the fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine.

Modern prison design has its roots in the first “prison boom� which started in the late 1700s. Under the influence of the Catholic Church, communities had increasingly begun to rely on imprisonment as punishment, rather than the previously used tactics of death, mutilation or exile. In England, prison construction was driven by the fact that authorities could no longer merely banish offenders to America; the Revolution had put a stop to that. In America, expanding civilization and the development of criminal law drove a similar construction boom.

The most famous prison design of this period is the Panopticon, envisioned by prison reform activist Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon concept was a circular building with inmate cells built on the outside wall, with the keeper’s gallery rising in the center. This allowed the keepers to observe the prisoners, but not to be observed by them.

Bentham even went so far as to suggest that inmates would not need to be under constant supervision because they would not know when they were being observed, so they would be compelled to behave at all times.

By the mid-1970s, societal changes such as rising crime rates, conservative public attitudes and high recidivism rates forced a change toward a “get tough” attitude against offenders. In 1974, the “Martinson report” effectively ended the medical model.

Martinson detailed the ineffectiveness of treatment programs and argued that rehabilitation was rarely successful in prisons.

MODELS OF SILENCE The Louisiana Museum

On Writing In The American Prison Systems

ESSAYS Are Prisons Obsolete?

Angela Y. Davis pg. 20

A Letter From A Birmingham Jail Martin Luther King Jr. pg. 66

Devil On The Cross Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o pg. 114

EPHEMERAL CATALOGUE Caged Rage pg. 138 Letters From Prison Writing On the Walls PHOTOS Contraband Zora J. Murff pg. 226

Forget Me Nots Alene Rubyns pg. 258

A Room With A View Alan Levine pg. 278

pg. 162 pg. 198

“ By putting a writer in prison, you’re 16

not deterring them; you are inspiring them.”

– Harry Conway

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ESSAYS

ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE?

Writing By ANGELA Y. DAVIS Photos By RICHARD ROSS

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In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that whoever 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 significant 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 people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine this.

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 conare simply trying to ameliorate prison conditions or permost litionists are dis-missed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. 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 pleas 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 people have already reached the conclusion that the death penalty is an outmoded form of punishment that violates basic principles of human rights. It is time, I believe, to encourage similar anti-prison activist I have seen the population of U.S. prisons 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 military 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 obsolete institution has become especially urgent in light of the fact that

MODELS OF SILENCE

Angela Yvonne Davis is best known as a radical African American educator and activist for civil rights and other social issues. She was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama to Sallye and Frank Davis, an elementary school teacher and the owner of a service station.

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more than two million people (out of a world total of nine million) now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers. Are we willing to relegate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian 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.

When I first became involved in antiprison activism during 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 people would be locked away in cages, I would have been absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded 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 consolidated], 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 country plunges into fascism.” That might have been my reaction thirty years ago. The reality is that we were called upon to inaugurate the twenty-first century by accepting the fact that two million 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 most thoroughly implemented government program of time.

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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 incarceration.

When the drive to produce more prisons and incarcerate 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 imprisonment and longer sentences-would keep communities free of crime. However, the 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 populations 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 expanded, so did corporate involvement in construction, provision of goods and services, and use of labor. Because of the extent to which prison building 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”. Consider the case of California, whose landscape has been thoroughly prisonized over the last twenty years. The first 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 constructed in California.

Between 1962 and 1965, two camps were established, along

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Praised by many on the left in the US and internationally, Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize.

Accused of supporting political violence, she has sustained criticism from the highest levels of the American government.

Prison architecture has historically featured designs that function to minimize contact between inmates as punishment for criminal activity.

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.

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However, a massive project of prison construction was initiated 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 prisoners and the other two women’s prisons were equally overcrowded. There are now thirty-three prisons, thirty-eight camps, sixteen community correctional facilities, and five tiny prisoner mother facilities in California. In 2002 there were 157,979 people incarcerated in these institutions, including approximately 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. 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 Birle was inspired by the colonizing of the landscape by prisons to produce a series of thirty-three landscape paintings of these institutions and their surroundings.

They are collected in his book Incarcerated: Visions of California in the Twenty-first Century.

Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of prisons in California as “a geographical solution to socia-economic problems.”9 Her analysis of the prison industrial complex 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 agricultural 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,

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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 formulated 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 prisons began to colonize the California landscape?

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non-polluting industry would jump-start local redevelopment.

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 economic development in out-ofthe-way places.

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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 communities. 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 ourselves, 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 persistent power of racism, “criminals” and “evildoers” are, in the imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison

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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 disproportionate numbers.

This is the ideological work that the prison performs-it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously 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 developments? We live in an era of migrating corporations. In order to escape organized labor in this country-and thus higher wages, benefits, and so on-corporations 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 communities is destroyed, education and other surviving social services are profoundly affected. This process turns the men, women, and children who live in these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison. In the meantime, corporations associated with the punishment 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, ten quite complicated connections between the de-industrialization 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. 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 statistics were already falling. Moreover, draconian drug laws were being enacted, and “three-strikes� provisions were on the agendas of many states.

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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 thc 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 familiarity 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 presented as newsreel, Execution of Czolgosz with 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. Some of the most well known prison films are: I Live, Papillon, 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 managed to persuade viewers that they know exactly what

There is little evidence for the value of isolation, however, ample evidence points to a slew of mental health issues that come from being socially and physically cut off for long periods of time.

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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 virtually impossible to avoid consuming images of prison. In 1997, I was myself quite astonished to find, when I interviewed 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 critiques of this process available to the public. sion. 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 repressive regimes, caused some journalists public intellectuals and progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance on prisons to solve social problems that are actually exacerbated by the issue of mass incarceration.

In 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project published 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 probation 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.

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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 discourse has become more flexible, the emphasis is almost inevitably on generating the changes that will produce a better prison system. In other words, the increased flexibility that has allowed for critical discussion of the problems associated with the expansion of prisons also restricts this discussion of prison reform.

As important as some reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women’s prison, for exam-

ple-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of 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 lithe 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 especially 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.

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If Advocates of incarceration.. . hoped that the penitentiary would rehabilitate its inmates. Whereas philosophers perceived a ceaseless state of war between chattel slaves and their masters, criminologists hoped to negotiate 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 possibly function to rehabilitate criminals?” sats 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 conceive 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 took almost a century to achieve the abolition of the “peculiar institution.” Antislavery abolitionists such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in

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the dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics.

When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an antislavery orator, white people-even those who were passionate 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 disestablish the “peculiar institution. II 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 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 century after the abolition of slavery. Many people who lived under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system defined by racial equality.

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 tomorrow, segregation forever� 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. history, it continues to profoundly influence contemporary structures, attitudes, and behaviors. Nevertheless, anyone who would dare to call for

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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, or life 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 eliminating 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 of social institutions that, like 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 obsolescence 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 resistance 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 institution 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 drastically curtailed, if they were available at all.

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What is the relationship between these historicalexpressions of racism and the role of the prison system today? Exploringsuch connections may offer us a different perspective 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 seriouslythe 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 rac-

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Solitary confinement is currently used in criminal justice systems worldwide as a means to manage disruptive inmates. The method involves placing an inmate in a secluded cell with little or no social interaction.

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isms 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 heritage 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 punishment that first made its appearance in the United States around the time of the American Revolution. This new system 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 institution called the penitentiary, it served as a prelude to punishment. People who were to be subjected to some form of corporal punishment were detained in prison until the execution of the punishment.

With the penitentiary, incarceration became the punishment itself. As is indicated in the designation “penitentiary,� imprisonment was regarded as rehabilitative 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 revolutionary 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 disregarded 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 reflections 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.

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As Hirsch has observed, both institutions deployed similar 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.

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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 convicted 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 hard labor, sentencing them to penal labor would not mark a difference in their condition. Jefferson banishment to other countries instead.

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Particularly in the United 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 abolished “except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.II 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 conduct 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 penitentiaries 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.

In 1883, Frederick Douglass had already written about the South’s tendency to “impute crime to color.”22 When particularly egregious crime was committed, he noted, not only was guilt frequently assigned to a black person regardless of the perpetrator’s race, but white men sometimes sought to escape

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Although the vast majority of Alabama’s antebellum were white, the popular perception was that the South’s true criminals were its black slaves. In the 1870s the growing number of black prisoners in the South further buttressed the belief that African Americans were inherently criminal and prone to larceny.

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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 robbery. 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, operates as property.23 According to Harris, the fact that white identity was possessed as property meant that rights, liberand 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 discusses 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 speculation. Police departments in major urban areas have admitted 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 FBJ. During the post-slavery era, as black people were integrated into southern penal systems--and as

MODELS OF SILENCE

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MODELS OF SILENCE

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

Time requirements for solitary confinement, or disciplinary segregation, in federal prisons are defined by the severity of the inmate offense classified into one of four categories ranging from “low, moderate, high, greatest.

For the high and greatest categories, disciplinary segregation can last 30-60 days. Emphasizing the stark reality of isolation, Breslow described solitary confinement as a “prison within a prison.�

Typically, a trip to the SHU occurs for one of the following three reasons. Multiple referrals for misbehavior can result in a sentence of solitary confinement. Prison officials may place an inmate in the SHU for his own protection.

It is not unusual to find inmates motivated to inflict harm on others, especially in the high profile cases where the newly arriving prisoner has crossed the line even by hardened criminal standards of confinement

13th Ammendment American Prisons as cuurent Chattel Slavery systems.

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The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. In Congress, it was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865

MODELS OF SILENCE

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

Mandated Death Senteces How COVID-19 has become a death sentence for prisoners.

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A total of 42,107 of 1,295,285 prisoners had been infected with the novel coronavirus, for a case rate of 3.25%, versus 0.59% in the general US population. In the US population, there had been 1,920,904 coronavirus cases and 95,608 deaths. Of prisoners infected, 510 died, for a death rate of 0.039%, versus 0.029% outside of prisons. But the proportion of prisoners aged 65 and older in the prison population was smaller than that of the general population (3% vs 16%, respectively). That agegroup accounted for 81% of US coronavirus deaths.

MODELS OF SILENCE

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

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MODELS OF SILENCE

Million*

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

* The number of people the American criminal justice system holds in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails and in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.

THE LETTER FROM THE BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

Writing By DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. Photography By JOHN EDMONDS

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

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MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here In Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanacross the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I. compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

MODELS OF SILENCE

To those in the know, this is called sagging – a male fashion trend that has dipped in and out of popularity since the early 1990s and was first popularised in Hip-Hop and skate culture. But how did something as stupid as this make its way into the mainstream?

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Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Birmingham.

But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through an these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.

Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants --- for example, to remove the stores humiliating racial signs.

On the basis of these Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

MODELS OF SILENCE

As in so many past experiences, our hopes bad been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves : “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic with with-drawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-oat we decided again to postpone

John Edmonds (b. 1989) is an American artist and photographer who first came to public recognition with his intimate portraits of lovers, close friends and strangers. He earned his MFA in Photography from Yale University and his BFA at the Corcoran School of Arts & Design. His series Higher documents black specific fashion through symbols often associated with racist connotations of blackness

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Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Birmingham.

But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through an these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.

Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants --- for example, to remove the stores humiliating racial signs.

On the basis of these Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

MODELS OF SILENCE

As in so many past experiences, our hopes bad been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves : “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic with with-drawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-oat we decided again to

John Edmonds (b. 1989) is an American artist and photographer who first came to public recognition with his intimate portraits of lovers, close friends and strangers. He earned his MFA from Yale University and his BFA at the Corcoran School of Arts & Design. His series Higher focuses black specific fashion through symbols often associated with racist connotations of blackness

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action until the day after the run-off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some

MODELS OF SILENCE

Prison uniforms in the United States often consist of a distinctive orange jumpsuit or scrubs with a white T-shirt underneath set to make escape more difficult, as it is difficult for an escaped inmate to avoid recognition and recapture in such a distinctive attire.

One of the most widely repeated stories proposes that in the American prison system, sagging pants were a sign of ‘sexual availability’ and this is where the trend first originated. Another rumour is that gang members in the states took to wearing their jeans in this way, as it made it easier for them to conceal weapons. Both of these theories are untrue

have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

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We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your auiated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

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You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there fire two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the Brat to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all” Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distort the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression ‘of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws.

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

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Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances considered democratically structured? Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit.

Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to ace the distinction I am trying to point out.

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willing-

Durags were originally worn by African American women laborers and slaves in the 19th century. In the 1930s, during the Harlem Renaissance and Great Depression, the durag's used to maintain hairstyles.

The real origins of the sagging fad did come from the American prison system, but not as a signal that the wearer was up for a bit of action. In actual fact, prisoners were often given uniforms that were several sizes too big for them and due to suicide prevention efforts behind bars, were not allowed belts.

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ly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

The real origins of the sagging fad did come from the American prison system, but not as a signal that the wearer was up for a bit of action. In actual fact, prisoners were often given uniforms that were several sizes too big for them and due to suicide prevention efforts behind bars, were not allowed belts.

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ly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

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agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

MODELS OF SILENCE

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “An Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.

Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this ‘hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national el-

John Edmond’s series du-rags plays off of the imagery of African American men wearing this icon of black life and culture. He elevated these black models to divine order.

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agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

MODELS OF SILENCE

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “An Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.

Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this ‘hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national el

John Edmond’s series du-rags plays off of the imagery of African American men wearing this icon of black life and culture. He elevated these black models to divine order.

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egy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to 6e solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At fist I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle nomic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses.

The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do-nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.

If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and and if they to support our nonviolent efforts,

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Durags were originally worn by African American women laborers and slaves in the 19th century. In the 1930s, during the Harlem Renaissance and Great Depression, the durag was used to maintain hairstyles.

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egy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to 6e solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At fist I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle nomic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses.

The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do-nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.

If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and and if they to support our nonviolent efforts,

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Durags were originally worn by African American women laborers and slaves in the 19th century.

In the 1930s, during the Harlem Renaissance and Great Depression, the durag was used to maintain their hairstyles.

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millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Neised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides-and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.

And now this approach is being termed extremist.

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks

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Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro.

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of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that an men are created equal ...” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we viii be. We we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime---the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jeans Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some-such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle---have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty nigger lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a non segregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who ‘has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of Rio shall lengthen.

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When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leader era; an too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

I would buy these utilitarian headdresses from the bodegas and beauty shops in my neighborhood in Crown Heights Brooklyn, NY.

After the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s, the durag became a fashion statement among African Americans, worn by rappers, athletes and men of all ages. In the 2000s, wearing durags in public lost popularity in certain areas, but maintained its popularity in others

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

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I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, on Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Walleye gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church.

How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Par from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators”’ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment.

They were too God intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide. and gladiatorial contests.

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community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it vi lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom, They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jai with us.

Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel through the mountain of disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, ham and all over the nation, because the goal of America k freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation-and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

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Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if .you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department. It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handing the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in pubic. But for what? To preserve the evil

When John Muir High School in Pasadena, CA, banned durags as part of a school dresscode policy, the Black Student Union at the school staged a peaceful walk-out in Feb of 2019.

Prison has changed drastically over the years, due to the wave of young inmates now flooding the system. And with that comes less educated and more rebellious, undisciplined spirits. These 19, 20 and 21-year-olds are spending childhoods behind bars. But they’re not letting prison walls keep them from experiencing youth.

system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.

But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right for the wrong reason.”

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I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face Jeering, and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer.

They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My fleets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he k alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty. Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

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If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me.

If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

For God Only (2013) Immaculate John Edmonds

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My earliest introduction to visual art was religious painting. In 2011, I began approaching men on public transit, asking to make their portrait.

I developed and employed my own language of iconography and symbolism through picture making—chiaroscuro, sacred geometry and poetics of the image that referenced religious themes. The title, Immaculate, refers to the light and how it is applied to the body.

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

Aureole (2013) Immaculate John Edmonds

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My earliest introduction to visual art was religious painting. In 2011, I began approaching men on public transit, asking to make their portrait. I developed and employed my own language of iconography and symbolism through picture making—chiaroscuro, sacred geometry and poetics of the image that referenced religious themes. The title, Immaculate, refers to the light and how it is applied to the body.

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

LLOYD (2013) Immaculate John Edmonds

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My earliest introduction to visual art was religious painting. In 2011, I began approaching men on public transit, asking to make their portrait. I developed and employed my own language of iconography and symbolism through picture making—chiaroscuro, sacred geometry and poetics of the image that referenced religious themes. The title, Immaculate, refers to the light and how it is applied to the body.

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

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SHORTS NO ONE KEY SIX TAMPONS COINS ONLY CLEAR BAGS

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8:15 AM 2:45 PM

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BEND & COUGH BREASTS FONDLED DICKS GRABBED GREEN NO BLUE NO SWEATS NO DENIM NO 113

DEVIL ON THE CROSS

Writing By NGŨGĨ wa THIONG’O

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On December 30, 1977, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was arrested. In the middle of the night, bulky Land Rovers and flashing police cars stormed his yard in Limuru, Kenya. They were brimming with men armed with pistols, rifles, and machine guns. As the officers searched his library, Ngũgĩ asked if he was under arrest.

The officers said no. He was simply being asked to accompany them to the police station, where he would be tasked with cataloging the books and pamphlets the officers were plucking from his shelves: titles by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so on. They also confiscated about twenty-five copies of Ngũgĩ’s own play, cowritten in Gĩkũyũ with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ , entitled Ngaahika Ndeenda, or I Will Marry When I Want. The two writers and the locals of a village called Kamĩrĩ ĩthũ had staged the play in a community-built open-air theater. Its five-month run had been immensely popular, drawing large crowds from afar. But on November 16, 1977, the Ministry of Housing and Social Services had essentially banned further performances of the play by withdrawing the license for any public gathering at the Kamĩrĩ ĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre. This, Ngũgĩ assumed, was why, when he reached the police station, he was handed a detainment order signed by the then Vice President of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi. In the early morning hours of December 31, 1977, Ngũgĩ was driven to Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in Nairobi.

He would be kept there without a trial for nearly a year.

Ngũgĩ has detailed his prison experiences in Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary. He lost his name—he became detainee K6,77— and lived in Cell 16 in a block with a handful of other political prisoners. For a time, they were given only one hour of light a day. They took it in a bare compound where they chatted and played chess and sought prophecies in the pages of the Koran or the obscure flights of doves. Mostly, Ngũgĩ says, they moved in “erratic, aimless circles and wanderings, going everywhere and nowhere.... The compound used to be for the mentally deranged convicts before it was put to better use as a cage for ‘the politically deranged.’” Ngũgĩ vividly evokes the temptations

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to derangement during detainment without trial—the isolation, the poor and delayed medical treatment, the hunger for news, the absence of a release date to look forward to: “he can be released after an hour, a day, a week, or after fifty years!” For many prisoners, reading and writing were palliative. Ngũgĩ notes with amusement that he had always found the idea of toilet paper manuscripts “romantic and unreal.” But if the coarse toilet paper at Kamĩtĩ was meant to be punishing, “what was bad for the body was good for the pen.” Ngũgĩ wrote the notes that became Detained on that toilet paper. He also wrote the novel you’re holding in your hands.

Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ, or Devil on the Cross, came into being at a crossroads in Ngũgĩ’s life and in the life of the country that he loved enough to criticize. How did he and Kenya get here? The ways that Ngũgĩ’s biography intersects with Kenya’s history offer insight into the novel, especially when it comes to the question of its politics—to me, an inescapable and intriguing question.

In his well-known collection of essays, Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ says a writer’s handling of reality is affected by “his material base in society”; by “his basic philosophic outlook on nature and society”; and by “that undefinable quality of imagination, a writer’s artistry, which is able to perceive what is universal—that is, applicable to the widest possible scale in time and space— in its minutest particularity as a felt experience.” To understand how these three factors touch upon Devil on the Cross, let us first place Ngũgĩ and Kenya in context.

In 1952, when the Mau Mau Rebellion began—members of the largely Gĩkũyũ Kenya Land and Freedom Army revolted against the yoke of colonial imperialism, sometimes with extreme acts of violence—the British declared a State of Emergency. By the time Ngũgĩ was fourteen years old, the colonial regime had taken over Kenya’s national schools. English, already widely used to enforce submission to colonialism and conversion to Christianity, became the language of instruction. This meant that young Kenyans were introduced to classics of English literature like Shakespeare’s plays. But they were also forcibly exposed to the incongruous, racist, and mediocre works of colonial writers like Elspeth Huxley. In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ provides telling anecdotes about his childhood inculcation in linguistic imperialism. Refusal or inability to speak English was punished in both corporal and psychological fashion: strokes of the cane upon the buttocks; metal plates around the neck saying I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. Each time a student spoke in a mother tongue, they would receive a button; they would hand it on when they overheard the next culprit; at the end of the day, the students would sing the names of whoever had passed them the button; all the offenders would then be punished. In this way, cultural shame was both internalized and self-regulating.

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Ngũgĩ had grown up speaking Gĩkũyũ at home. This was how he first encountered stories, riddles, proverbs, and what he calls the “music of language.” He was the son of a farmer and the brother of a political dissident. His brother, a member of the controversial, militant Mau Mau movement, was killed; another brother, deaf and mute, was shot during the State of Emergency; Ngũgĩ’s mother was held in solitary confinement for three months. Both of these facts of his biography—his class upbringing and his family’s politics—served as marks against him, but Ngũgĩ managed to gain admission to Makerere University College, in Kampala, Uganda, in 1959. There, in 1962, he attended “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression,” a historic meeting of black writers that included Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Es’kia Mphahlele. Ngũgĩ, who at the time went

A segregation cell where a prisoner attempted suicide - St. Clair State Prison located in Springville, Alabama. It’s a state prison outside of Brimingham, AL.

by James Ngugi, had written but not yet published his early novels Weep Not, Child and A River Between. Ngũgĩ was stirred by the debates at the conference. The very first item on the agenda was “What is African literature?” This zombie question—still often raised, never fully dead—naturally led to a discussion of language. Why was most so-called African literature written in European languages?

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These questions haunted Ngũgĩ. As early as 1967, in an interview at Leeds University, he was quoted as saying: “I have reached a point of crisis. I don’t know if it is worth any longer writing in English.” A year later he became involved in the Nairobi Literature Debate about the curriculum at Nairobi University. The statement he put together with two other lecturers read: “We reject the primacy of English literature and culture. The aim, in short, should be to orientate ourselves toward placing Kenya, East Africa, and then Africa at the center.” But Ngũgĩ continued to write and publish novels in English, including A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood, and to teach in English as an associate professor and chairman of the literature department at Nairobi. Ten years later, an old woman in Kamĩrĩ ĩthũ, a village near the suburb where he lived, asked Ngũgĩ to help rehabilitate the local cultural center. Only then did Ngũgĩ begin to write in Gĩkũyũ. The play that sparked his arrest was also his reawakening to his mother tongue. Ngũgĩ calls the Kamĩrĩ ĩthũ experiment an “epistemological break” with his past.

As for Kenya, the country had broken free from the British Empire in 1963, riding what Harold Macmillan called “the wind of change” blowing through Africa. Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the newly independent Kenya, came to power (and stayed there) declaiming an African-flavored, socialism-inflected political agenda, including the important concepts of uhuru (freedom) and harambee (cooperation). As Kenya moved into its second decade, it took steps toward celebrating and cultivating African art and culture. While the Kenyan National Theatre in Nairobi persisted in colonial puppetry, putting on plays like The King and I, the early nineteen seventies saw new productions by traveling theaters in Swahili, which had become the national language. Kenyatta’s Kenya African National Union (KANU) government made the case to UNESCO that rural development be integrated with culture through projects like village theaters.

Ngũgĩ’s theater initiative at Kamĩrĩ ĩthũ was registered as a selfhelp project with the Department of Community Development of the Ministry of Housing and Social Services. The form of the play—which incorporated Gĩkũyũ song, dance, and folklore—and its staging in a community-built theater seemed to suit the new

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Certain people in Ilmorog, our Ilmorog, told me that this story was too disgraceful, too shameful, that it should be concealed in the depths of everlasting darkness.

There were others who claimed that it was a matter for tears and sorrow, that it should be suppressed so that we should not shed tears a second time. I asked them: How can we cover up pits in our courtyard with leaves or grass, saying to ourselves that because our eyes cannot now see the holes, our children can prance about the yard as they like? Happy is the man who is able to discern the pitfalls in his path, for he can avoid them. Happy is the traveler who is able to see the tree stumps in his way, for he can pull them up or walk around them so that they do not make him stumble.

The Devil, who would lead us into the blindness of the heart and into the deafness of the mind, should be crucified, and care should be taken that his acolytes do not lift him down from the Cross to pursue the task of building Hell for the people on Earth. ...

I, even I, Prophet of Justice, felt this burden weigh heavily upon me at first, and I said: The forest of the heart is never cleared of all its trees. The secrets of the homestead are not for the ears of strangers. Ilmorog is our homestead. And then Warĩ ĩnga’s mother came to me when dawn was breaking, and in tears she beseeched me: Gĩcaandĩ Player, tell the story of the child I loved so dearly. Cast light upon all that happened, so that each may pass judgment only when he knows the whole truth. Gĩcaandĩ Player, reveal all that is hidden.

At first I hesitated, asking myself this question: Who am I—the mouth that ate itself? Is it not said that an antelope hates less the one who sees it than the one who shouts to alert others to its presence? It was then that I heard the pleading cries of many voices: Gĩcaandĩ Player, Prophet of Justice, reveal what now lies concealed by darkness. Then for seven days I fasted, neither eating nor drinking, for my heart was sorely troubled by those pleading voices. Still I asked myself this: Could it be that I am seeing phantoms without substance, or that I am hearing the echoes of silence? Who am I—the mouth that ate itself? Is it not said that the antelope conceives more hatred for him who betrays its presence with a shout?

And after seven days had passed, the Earth trembled, and lightning scored the sky with its brightness, and I was lifted up, and I was borne up to the rooftop of the house, and I was shown many things, and I heard a voice, like a great clap of thunder, admonishing me: Who has told you that prophecy is yours alone, to keep to yourself? Why are you furnishing yourself with empty excuses? You'll never be free of tears and pleading cries.

The moment the voice fell silent, I was seized, raised up and then cast down into the ashes of the fireplace. And I took the ashes, and I smeared my face and legs with them, and I cried out:

MODELS OF SILENCE

This story is an account of what I, Prophet of Justice, saw with these eyes and heard with these ears when I was borne to the rooftop of the house... The voice of the people is the voice of God. That is why I have accepted. That is why I have accepted.

But why am I lingering on the bank of the river? To bathe is to strip off all clothes. To swim is to plunge into the river. And it is good so... Come, Come, my friend, Come and let us reason together. The Devil appeared to Jacinta Warĩ ĩnga one Sunday on a golf course in the town of Ilmorog in Iciciri District, and he told

There are suicides, slashed wrists, a man hanging in a cell. A mentally ill prisoner cut himself and wrote on the wall in his own blood.

That prisoner testified about the incident in the trial over the mental healthcare, which a judge found in 2017 to be “horrendously inadequate� conditions.

Victor Russo’s face and upper body with multiple injuries; a swollen cut below his eye, an open gash on his shoulder, streaks of red across his chest.

her—Wait! I am leaping ahead of the story. Warĩ ĩnga’s troubles did not begin at Ilmorog. Let us retrace our steps. . . .Misfortune and trouble had trailed Warĩ ĩnga long before she left Nairobi, where she worked as a secretary (typing and shorthand) at the offices of the Champion Construction Company* in Tom Mboya Street near the National Archives building.

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]Misfortune is swifter than the swiftest spirit, and one trouble spawns another. On Friday morning Warĩ ĩnga was dismissed from her job for rejecting the advances of Boss Kĩhara, her employer, who was the managing director of the firm. That evening Warĩ ĩnga was abandoned by her sweetheart, John Kimwana, after he had accused her of being Boss Kĩhara’s mistress.

On Saturday morning Warĩ ĩnga was visited by her landlord, the owner of the house in Ofafa Jericho, Nairobi, in which she rented a room. (A house or a bird’s nest? The floor was pitted with holes, the walls gaped with cracks, the ceiling leaked.) The landlord told Warĩ ĩnga that he was increasing her rent. She refused to pay more. He ordered her to quit the premises that instant.

She objected, declaring that the matter should be referred to the Rent Tribunal for settlement. Her landlord climbed into his Mercedes Benz and drove off. Before Warĩ ĩnga could blink, he had returned with three thugs wearing dark sunglasses. The landlord stood at some distance from Warĩ ĩnga, arms akimbo, taunting her: “There, I have brought you your Rent Tribunal.”

Warĩ ĩnga’s things were thrown out of the room, and the door was locked with a new padlock. One of the henchmen tossed a piece of paper at the girl, on which was written: We are the Devil’s Angels: Private Businessmen. Make the slightest move to take this matter to the authorities, and we shall issue you with a single ticket to God’s kingdom or Satan’s—a one-way ticket to Heaven or Hell. They all climbed into the Mercedes Benz and disappeared.

DEVIL ON THE CROSS

WE’RE THE DEVIL’S ANGELS 126

MODELS OF SILENCE

127

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

Make the slightest move to take this matter to the authorities, and we shall issue you with a single ticket to the Kingdom of God or Satan. A oneway ticket to Heaven or Hell.�

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Warĩ ĩnga gazed at the scrap of paper for a little while, then tucked it into her handbag. She sat down on a box and held her head in her hands, wondering: Why should it always be me? What god have I abused? She took a small mirror out of her handbag and examined her face distractedly, turning over her many problems in her mind. She found fault with herself; she cursed the day she was born; she asked herself, where can you turn now?

It was then that she decided to go back to her parents. She stood up, collected her things together, stacked them in the next-door room belonging to a Mkamba woman and started to make preparations for the journey, a cauldron of worries seething in her mind. Warĩ ĩnga was convinced that her appearance was the root cause of all her problems. Whenever she looked at herself in the mirror she thought herself very ugly. What she hated most was her blackness, so she would disfigure her body with skin-lightening creams like Ambi and Snowfire, forgetting the saying: That which is born black will never be white. Now her body was covered with light and dark spots like the guineafowl. Her hair was splitting, and it had browned to the color of moleskin because it had been straightened with red-hot iron combs. Warĩ ĩnga also hated her teeth. They were a little stained; they were not as white as she would have liked them to be. She often tried to hide them, and she seldom laughed openly. If by mistake she laughed and then remembered her teeth, she would suddenly fall silent or else she would cover her lips with her hand. Men would sometimes tease her, calling her Warĩ ĩnga, the angry one, because of her lips, which were nearly always firmly pressed together.

But when Warĩ ĩnga was happy and forgot to worry about the fading whiteness of her teeth and about the blackness of her skin and laughed with all her heart, her laughter completely disarmed people. Her voice was as smooth as perfume oil. Her eyes shone like stars in the night. Her body was a feast for the eyes. Often, when she walked along the road without self-consciousness, her breasts swaying jauntily like two ripe fruits in a breeze, Warĩ ĩnga stopped men in their tracks. But she could never appreciate the sheer splendor of her body. She yearned “A student, say. The student doesn’t have a cent to his name.

Their friendship has been a matter of lending each other novels by James Hadley Chase, Charles Mangua or David Maillu. It has been a question of singing songs from the records of Jim Reeves or of D. K. or of Lawrence Nduru. Kareendi, where can you turn now?

“On the other hand, we could imagine that the man responsible for the pregnancy is a loafer from the village. The loafer is jobless. He hasn’t even a place to lay his head. Their love affair has been sustained by guitar playing and evening dances in the village. It has been conducted in borrowed huts or in the open fields after dark. Little Kareendi, where will you turn? The baby will need food and clothes.

MODELS OF SILENCE

“Perhaps the loafer has a job in the city, but his salary is five shillings a month. Their love has been nourished by Bruce Lee and James Bond films—by five minutes in a cheap hotel on their way home by matatũ. Who will wipe away Kareendi’s tears now?

“Or let’s say that a rich man is the father of the child. Isn’t that kind of affair the fashion these days? The rich man has a wife.

The affair has been a question of a rendez-vous in a Mercedes Benz on a Sunday. It has been fueled by small amounts of cash that Kareendi has received as pocket money before returning to school. It has been lubricated by hard liquor drunk in hotels far away from the village.

Writing in blood by prisoner with a mental illness. St. Clair Prison outside of Birmingham, Alabama. (Photo sent to WBRC)

“Student, loafer, rich man—their response is the same when Kareendi tells them about her condition: ‘What! Kareendi, who are you claiming is responsible for the pregnancy? Me? How have you worked that out? Go on and pester someone else with your delusions, Kareendi of the easy thighs, ten-cent Kareendi. You can cry until your tears have filled oil drums—it will make no difference.... Kareendi, you can’t collect pregnancies wherever you may and then lay them at my door just because one day I happened to tease you!’

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“Say Kareendi needs no borrowed tongue. She stands there, arms akimbo, and lashes out at yesterday’s sweetheart. ‘You think you are sugar itself? I’d rather drink tea without sugar. You imagine that you’re a bus? I’d rather walk. You think you are a house? I’d prefer to sleep in the open air. Or the bed itself, perhaps? I choose the floor. I’ve lost my faith in silken-tongued gigolos.’ But Kareendi is only trying to put a brave face on things.

Inside, her heart is dancing with rage.

“Let’s say Kareendi refuses to take drugs. It is appalling that babies should emerge from their mothers’ wombs as corpses. Kareendi has the baby. And she doesn’t throw it into a latrine pit, nor does she abandon it at the roadside or in a bus. Nor does she leave it in the forest or on a rubbish tip. Kareendi places on the shoulders of her mother or her grandmother the burden of bringing up this baby, who has come into this world in spite of the fact that her parents have neither welcomed nor prepared for her arrival. But Kareendi’s mother and grandmother warn the girl not to make a habit of this: ‘Be on your guard from now on, Kareendi. Do not forget that men have stings, vicious and corrosive, the poison of which never leaves the flesh of their victims.’

“And Kareendi now knows only too well that no one repents on account of another’s sins. There is no one who regrets the going as much as the returning. To be smiled at is not to be loved. So Kareendi bites her lips decisively and goes back to school. She makes steady progress and reaches Form Four. She sits the Cambridge or School Certificate and she gets her EACE. “But problems don’t have wings to bear them away. Once again Kareendi’s parents have to dig into their pockets. They pull out the cents that they have been saving, the stick put by in reserve in case they should meet a rat unexpectedly—and now just such a rat has appeared. They speedily enroll Kareendi at the Nairobi Secretarial College so that she can learn typing and shorthand.

At the end of nine months Kareendi can pound a typewriter, thirty-five words a minute, and she is now an expert at shorthand—she has reached the speed of eighty words a minute. The language of the eye is not the language of the ear. Typing and shorthand: Pitman’s certificates for the two skills are in Kareendi’s pocket.

DEVIL ON THE CROSS

“Kareendi now tramps all over Nairobi looking for a job. Armed with her Pitman’s skills, she enters one office after another. In one she finds Mr. Boss, who leans back in his chair for greater comfort. He eyes Kareendi from top to toe. ‘What do you want?

A job? I see. I’m very busy right now. Let’s meet at five.’ Kareendi waits impatiently for the hour to come. She rushes back to the office, panting. Now Mr. Boss smiles at her, and he offers her a chair, and he asks her what her names are, the one she was given at birth and her acquired English one, and he inquires into the things that are troubling her, and he listens with attentive patience. Then Mr. Boss taps the desk top with his finger or with a pen, saying, ‘Ah, Kareendi, jobs are very hard to come by these days. But a girl like you . . . it shouldn’t be too difficult to find something for you to do. But, Kareendi, a matter like this can’t

132

be finalized in the office. Let’s go across to the Modern Love Bar and Lodging to discuss the question more fully.’ But Kareendi recalls the venomous stings of her early years: he who has seen once knows thereafter, and he who has drunk from a calabash can gauge its size. So Kareendi declines all invitations to meetings at hotels designed for love, old-fashioned or modern. The next day she is still combing the city for a job.

“Kareendi is determined to make no beds: she would rather leave her case unsettled. And because God is truly no ugali eater, one morning Kareendi lands a job without having to visit any hotel for modern love. Mr. Boss is the managing director of the firm.

He is middle-aged. He has a wife and several children. On top of that, he is a member of the committee that runs the Church of Heaven. Kareendi carries out her duties meticulously.

“Before a month is up, Kareendi finds herself a Kamoongonye.* The young man is a university student. He holds modern, progressive views. When Kareendi confesses to him that she has a child at home, Kamoongonye silences her with kisses of love.

He tells Kareendi: ‘A child is not a leopard, capable of wounding people. Besides, giving birth is proof that you’re not a mule!’

Hearing this, Kareendi weeps tears of happiness. Then and there, she swears loyalty, with all her heart: ‘Because I am very lucky, and I have looked for and found a Kamoongonye, a young man with modern views, I, Kareendi, will never anger him or argue with him over any issue. If he shouts at me, I will remain silent. I will simply look down like the shy leopard or like a lamb cropping grass. I will help him with his keep so that he can finish his education without trouble and so that together we can make a home that has solid roots. I will never look at another.’

“The other girls, Kareendi’s friends, envy her, and they offer her bits and pieces of advice: ‘Kareendi, you’d better change your ways: the seeds in the gourd are not all of the same type,’ they tell her. Kareendi replies: ‘A restless child leaves home in search of meat just as a goat is about to be slaughtered.’ But the girls tell her: ‘Friend, this is a new Kenya. Everyone should set something aside to meet tomorrow’s needs. He who saves a little food will never suffer from hunger.’ She replies: ‘Too much eating ruins the stomach.’ They taunt her: ‘A restricted diet is monotonous.’

Kareendi rejects this and tells them: ‘A borrowed necklace may lead to the loss of one’s own.’

MODELS OF SILENCE

“Now, just as Kareendi is thinking that her life is running very smoothly, Mr. Boss Kĩhara begins to sound her out with carefully chosen words. One day he comes into her office. He stands by her typewriter, and he pretends to examine the sheets of paper that Kareendi has typed. He says: ‘By the way, Miss Kareendi, what are your plans for this weekend? I would like you to accompany me on a small safari—what do you say to that?’ Kareendi declines politely. Rejection wrapped in civility arouses no ill feelings. Boss Kĩhara waits, hoping that Kareendi will eventually yield. Too much haste splits the yam. One month later, he again accosts Kareendi in the office. ‘Miss Kareendi, this evening there’s a cocktail party at the Paradise Club.’ Once again Kareendi disguises her refusal with polite phrases.

WRITING 136

MODELS OF SILENCE

137

ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

CAGED RAGE

Prisoners annotate photos of themselves.

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In 2011, the artist and photographer Nigel Poor began working with incarcerated men in San Quentin State Prison, a minimum-maximum facility on northwest San Francisco Bay, where more than 4,000 inmates are currently incarcerated, including over 700 men on death row. San Quentin is, in effect, a small town whose population lives alongside those of other Bay Area cities, but remains unseen. The San Quentin Project: Nigel Poor and the Men of San Quentin State Prison, currently at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), begins to make San Quentin — its culture, history, and people — visible.

Today, Poor is widely known as co-creator with inmate Earlonne Woods of Ear Hustle, an acclaimed podcast where listeners drop in on everyday life inside the prison and hear stories of men who live there. With more than 20 million downloads to date, Ear Hustle has been a worldwide success whose popularity contributed to California Governor Jerry Brown commuting Woods’s sentence in 2018. Visitors to the show can listen to the podcast in an adjacent gallery.

But years before Ear Hustle, Poor taught her first course in San Quentin: “Visual Concerns in Photography.” That was in 2011, when she was still teaching from “conventional art photography” — images that she’d had to run past San Quentin officials, who’d initially vetoed each one. It’s difficult to teach photography without photographs, so Poor first offered a three-hour version of her course to prison officials, who afterwards let her use the same images that had been denied.

The following year, a prison official showed Poor nine bankers boxes stored under his desk. They contained thousands of mostly unlabeled four-by-five-inch negatives in yellowed sleeves, photographs documenting life inside the prison from the 1930s to ’80s. An entire culture that would otherwise be lost, captured on film.

The current exhibition at BAMPFA reflects on the fruits of Poor’s course, displaying class materials, including more than 80 black-and-white documentary photographs taken by correction officers over the years that cover seemingly all aspects of life in prison, from Mother’s Day visits to jail cell dummies meant for intended escapes. These photos constitute a decades-long prison archive of images, but with little or no accompanying information. So they require interpretation. And though documentary in nature, the pictures were taken with cumbersome, large-format cameras, resulting in photographs that are aesthetically striking and often quite beautiful.

In 2012, Poor began teaching with the prison photos, asking students to “map” their thoughts, analyses, descriptions, and interpretations directly onto the pictures. The results are arresting, as the writers, who are also men in prison, make anonymous images their own, speaking out of their own experiences, bringing insights and empathy that no outside critic or art historian.

MODELS OF SILENCE

For example, on a photo of a man weightlifting, Harold Meeks’s notes range from banal, “‘Safety First’ by use of a back brace and gloves,” to existential, “In this era staying fit was key to survival behind these walls, if not, you’ll become a victim.” On an image of a Native American pow wow dancer, George “Mesro” Coles-El has drawn arrows to background chimneys with no smoke, noting, “This is not a work day,” while another arrow points to a tower: “Gunner may be watching while all by himself.”

But also, next to the dancer, “His dance seems heedless of location and speaks of freedom.”

In an email, I asked Poor if she considers such notations a kind of art. “Yes those pieces are beautiful creations that honor the original intent of the photograph while comingling it with markings and notes that allow the viewer to reconsider the photograph’s meaning,” she wrote. “And they also become an autobiography of the person who interacted with the image — a kind of unintended collaboration.” They are, in effect, dual portraits between observer and observed.

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Visitors to the show experience the archival photographs the same way men in Poor’s class would have — with no captions or explanations. I admit, this bugged me. I personally enjoy a thorough wall label, but it does force you to work. And by work, I mean look.

Photo after photo lines the walls and early in you’d hardly know these are images of incarceration. Men pose in white shorts, holding tennis racquets; a man with a fishing pole in one hand holds a big fish by its gills in the other; a man with his legs splayed on the grass balances a young child between them, toddler fists resting along his big thighs.

It’s not until well into the gallery that there are pictures of jail cells, knives, staged recreations of assaults, and men’s torsos with stab wounds. I was reminded that these were all photographs from San Quentin State Prison, whether of dead fish or flesh wounds, and that the men in them were probably not asked for their consent. Because there’s almost no documentation, there’s also no way to ask if it’s OK to exhibit them now.

Though there might be ethical objections to showing these archival photos, and by extension the mapping collaborations done with them, there are equally imperative reasons why they should be shown.

WRITING

Harold Meeks and Nigel Poor, “Gym Profile 7-15-75” (2013), inkjet print, with ink notations.

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WRITING

George “Mesro” Coles-El and Nigel Poor, “Indian Pow Wow” (2013), inkjet print, with ink notations.

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MODELS OF SILENCE

George “Mesro” Coles-El and Nigel Poor, “Indian Pow Wow” (2013), inkjet print, with ink notations.

George “Mesro” Coles-El and Nigel Poor, “Indian Pow Wow” (2013), inkjet print, with ink notations.

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MODELS OF SILENCE

George “Mesro” Coles-El and Nigel Poor, “Indian Pow Wow” (2013), inkjet print, with ink notations.

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MODELS OF SILENCE

LETTERS FROM THE INSIDE

Letters from prisoners to loved ones, lawyers, and the outside.

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A few years after returning from his 24-year trek through Asia, Marco Polo was captured while leading a Venetian galley into battle against the rival Italian city-state of Genoa. Confined to prison, the 44-year-old merchant passed the time by regaling his fellow inmates with tales of his journeys in China and his years spent in the employ of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. Polo’s jailhouse yarns caught the attention of a writer and fellow prisoner named Rustichello of Pisa, and the duo eventually collaborated on the book “Description of the World,” more commonly known as the “Travels.” This epic, often embellished travelogue sealed Polo’s legacy as one of the world’s great explorers, and provided many Europeans with their first glimpse into the wonders of the Far East.

He is the one of the many persons who has contributed greatly to the field of prison epistemological literature. Other notable writers include Nelson Mandela, John Bunyan, Sir Thomas Malory, and the Marquis de Sade.

The epistemological concerns which have preoccupied cultural, anthropological and sociological ethnographic practice in the last three decades (see for example Clifford and Marcus 1986), appear to have barely penetrated the field of prison ethnography in the UK. Prison ethnographies have, for the most part, paid scant attention to the ‘crisis of representation’ that has animated those disciplines, and barely engaged with either the ‘postmodernist turn’ or the ‘autobiographical turn’. This is not to suggest, however, that methodological debates regarding researcher and prisoner positionality have been entirely absent.

There is something about sitting down, alone, and writing to someone who you never expect to meet that makes it seem almost ridiculous to lie. When my boss asked if I wanted to start writing letters myself, I jumped at the chance. I’ve had reasonably long exchanges with about eight prisoners since I began.

Often they are off and on as the prisoners go in and out of custody. My longest correspondence is about eight years. On average I tend to get a couple of letters a month from prisoners around the country. I’ve also written personal letters to countless more who’ve written to ask for help. Often people don’t write back, but I don’t think that means I haven’t helped.

What I think really makes a difference is the feeling that someone is listening. There are a lot of men and women in prison who have very few people in their lives, and little experience of positive and stable relationships. Posting a birthday or Christmas card and knowing that it will be the only one that a person receives is bittersweet in a way I never get used to.

There is no internet in prisons. There is a facility to email messages to prisoners, but that relies on the officers, who are always busy, printing off the message and then taking it to the cells. So, we write the old-fashioned way with pen and paper.

MODELS OF SILENCE

This facilitates a very slow-burn build of a relationship that I’m not used to. I was a teenager in the era of MSN Messenger, so getting to know someone through the written word is not new to me, but the experience of only writing once a month was incredibly jarring at first. As well as the naturally slower pace of writing, the letters get held up a lot. One of my correspondents wrote recently to tell me that all the letters at his prison had to be opened and photocopied to try to stop the drug spice from coming in.

The photocopy was given to the prisoner and the original was destroyed – spice is a liquid which can be soaked into paper and later smoked, and the problem had become so bad that no

original paper was being allowed in at all. The letter I sent never reached him – he moved prisons before the system had processed it.

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One man I wrote to for a few years told me how his whole life had been about either gangs or prison, ever since he was a young teenager. He wanted to get out of the cycle of crime and prison and try to live a normal life, but he didn’t know how. In one of his letters he described being so institutionalised and unused to life on the outside that he hadn’t been able to cross a busy road and had a panic attack. He wrote to me for a couple of years, getting increasingly desperate as his release date approached without there being any plan in place for his housing, or the support he needed to live outside. When he was released I thought about him for a long time, and I never deleted his birthday reminder from my calendar. I can’t send him cards, though – he left no forwarding address and I don’t know what happened to him.

I feel as if I know the people I write to very well – I wonder how well they feel they know me. But it’s not really the point of me writing – I view it more like the Samaritans: I’m there to listen to them, it’s not for me. I do drop in the odd detail about my life though – one of the guys I write to knows that I commute to work by bike and he always asks about it. I also have to watch my use of language and not put in too much inappropriate affection, especially if it could be read as sexual. I’ve had to shred a fair few letters over the years because I’ve signed my name with a kiss without thinking. Some prisoners I write to are much more vulnerable than others, and I do get affected by their stories. Not knowing what happens to the prisoners you write to, or being able to intervene, is difficult.

WRITING

“Letter from John� (2013) Inmate at [redacted] County Jail Letter details the need for hearing aids for hearing impaired inmates.

“Letter from John� (2013) Inmate at [redacted] County Jail Letter details the need for hearing aids for hearing impaired inmates.

“Letter from John� (2013) Inmate at [redacted] County Jail Letter details the need for hearing aids for hearing impaired inmates.

“Letter from John� (2013) Inmate at [redacted] County Jail Letter details the need for hearing aids for hearing impaired inmates.

“Letter from Anonymous� (2015) Inmate at [redacted] Federal Prison In this letter to Free Minds, an organization that helps to uplift the voices of prisoners.

The inmate asks Free Minds to publish their letter with an image of the Martin Luther King Jr. Monument.

“Letter from John� (2013) Inmate at [redacted] County Jail Letter details the need for hearing aids for hearing impaired inmates.

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MODELS OF SILENCE

185

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

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MODELS OF SILENCE

187

WRITING

Rapper Tupac Shakur’s famous “Thug Life is Dead” Letter written whilst in the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, United States.

The voice of the people 196

MODELS OF SILENCE

197

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

is the voice of God .

WRITING ON THE WALLS

Photography By MARK PERROTT

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In 2011, the artist and photographer Nigel Poor began working with incarcerated men in San Quentin State Prison, a minimum-maximum facility on northwest San Francisco Bay, where more than 4,000 inmates are currently incarcerated, including over 700 men on death row. San Quentin is, in effect, a small town whose population lives alongside those of other Bay Area cities, but remains unseen. The San Quentin Project: Nigel Poor and the Men of San Quentin State Prison, currently at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), begins to make San Quentin — its culture, history, and people — visible.

Today, Poor is widely known as co-creator with inmate Earlonne Woods of Ear Hustle, an acclaimed podcast where listeners drop in on everyday life inside the prison and hear stories of men who live there. With more than 20 million downloads to date, Ear Hustle has been a worldwide success whose popularity contributed to California Governor Jerry Brown commuting Woods’s sentence in 2018. Visitors to the show can listen to the podcast in an adjacent gallery.

But years before Ear Hustle, Poor taught her first course in San Quentin: “Visual Concerns in Photography.” That was in 2011, when she was still teaching from “conventional art photography” — images that she’d had to run past San Quentin officials, who’d initially vetoed each one. It’s difficult to teach photography without photographs, so Poor first offered a three-hour version of her course to prison officials, who afterwards let her use the same images that had been denied.

The following year, a prison official showed Poor nine bankers boxes stored under his desk. They contained thousands of mostly unlabeled four-by-five-inch negatives in yellowed sleeves, photographs documenting life inside the prison from the 1930s to ’80s. An entire culture that would otherwise be lost, captured on film.

The current exhibition at BAMPFA reflects on the fruits of Poor’s course, displaying class materials, including more than 80 black-and-white documentary photographs taken by correction officers over the years that cover seemingly all aspects of life in prison, from Mother’s Day visits to jail cell dummies meant for intended escapes. These photos constitute a decades-long prison archive of images, but with little or no accompanying information. So they require interpretation. And though documentary in nature, the pictures were taken with cumbersome, large-format cameras, resulting in photographs that are aesthetically striking and often quite beautiful.

In 2012, Poor began teaching with the prison photos, asking students to “map” their thoughts, analyses, descriptions, and interpretations directly onto the pictures. The results are arresting, as the writers, who are also men in prison, make anonymous images their own, speaking out of their own experiences, bringing insights and empathy that no outside critic or art historian could.

MODELS OF SILENCE

For example, on a photo of a man weightlifting, Harold Meeks’s notes range from banal, “‘Safety First’ by use of a back brace and gloves,” to existential, “In this era staying fit was key to survival behind these walls, if not, you’ll become a victim.” On an image of a Native American pow wow dancer, George “Mesro” ColesEl has drawn arrows to background chimneys with no smoke, noting, “This is not a work day,” while another arrow points to a tower: “Gunner may be watching while all by himself.” But also, next to the dancer, “His dance seems heedless of location and speaks of freedom.”

In an email, I asked Poor if she considers such notations a kind of art. “Yes those pieces are beautiful creations that honor the original intent of the photograph while comingling it with markings and notes that allow the viewer to reconsider the photograph’s meaning,” she wrote. “And they also become an autobiography of the person who interacted with the image — a kind of unintended collaboration.” They are, in effect, dual portraits between observer and observed.

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Visitors to the show experience the archival photographs the same way men in Poor’s class would have — with no captions or explanations. I admit, this bugged me. I personally enjoy a thorough wall label, but it does force you to work. And by work, I mean look.

Photo after photo lines the walls and early in you’d hardly know these are images of incarceration. Men pose in white shorts, holding tennis racquets; a man with a fishing pole in one hand holds a big fish by its gills in the other; a man with his legs splayed on the grass balances a young child between them, toddler fists resting along his big thighs.

It’s not until well into the gallery that there are pictures of jail cells, knives, staged recreations of assaults, and men’s torsos with stab wounds. I was reminded that these were all photographs from San Quentin State Prison, whether of dead fish or flesh wounds, and that the men in them were probably not asked for their consent. Because there’s almost no documentation, there’s also no way to ask if it’s OK to exhibit them now.

Though there might be ethical objections to showing these archival photos, and by extension the mapping collaborations done with them, there are equally imperative reasons why they should be shown.

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Amendment*

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Thirteenth Amendment to the United States * The Constitution abolished slavery & involuntary

servitude, except as punishment for a crime. In Congress, it was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on 01/31/1865. It was ratified by the required number of states on 12/06/1865.

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ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

CONTRABAND

Photos By ZORA J. MURFF & EDGAR MARTINS

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The extreme cruelties and systemic failures of the United States’ brutal prisons are, at this point, well known. Far from being a solution, mass incarceration in America has exacerbated profound social problems, widened the gap between the haves and have-nots and set generations back. We’re starting to accept these truths and admit our collective mistakes. We’re starting to think less-and-less of prisons as institutions that solve the behaviors and social dynamics that lead to the state’s need to control; we’re starting to identify them as the problem. Across the country, prisons and detention are now considered a last resort for the disciplining of children.

As criminal justice agencies employ community supervision more and more, monitoring systems are used more and more.

James Kilgore — academic, activist and a man who was once electronically monitored — has described ankle bracelets as “going viral in the criminal justice system.”

In 2005, 120,000 people wore electronic monitoring ankle bracelets; in 2012, the figure was 200,000; and in 2015, we can assume the figure has grown further still. Proportionally, within the 7 million people under correctional supervision in the United States, a larger percentage of youth wear monitoring devices than adults.

Imprisonment is known to negatively impact young minds and bodies far more severely than those of adults and current policy — and carceral logic — deem ankle bracelets a palatable, convenient and more humane alternative. There are some blind-spots to this logic.

Corrections comes at a crucial moment. Electronic monitoring (EM) has come into its own in the age of GPS. Faster, more accurate and more reliable than previously-used radio-based devices, GPS technologies provide the state agencies respon-

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sible for managing sentenced and pre-trial citizens with the rhetoric of control, the vision of the future and assurances to the public of total security.

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EM is presented as a more humane, productive and progressive means of social control. Companies such as iSecure Trac, Secure Alert, Pro Tech, GEO and Omnilink which manufacture ankle bracelets also talk up the cost savings to their state clients.

All this to say, that this moment, in which we as a society are turning ever more faithfully to electronic monitoring, is not based solely on enlightened policy based upon supposed enlightened morals and the prioritization of the humane. No, it is based in large part to salesmanship in growth industries and the rhetorical promise of redemption through technology.

Corrections is an opportunity to reflect upon what is means to rely on widespread, diffuse and near total surveillance to correct antisocial behaviors. Furthermore, it is an opportunity to interrogate the outcomes of such surveillance upon larger society and the problems GPS-powered panopticism purports to address. Do ankle bracelets prevent criminal acts? Does EM propel, distract or compliment our investment in educational, economic and healthcare systems–systems we know improve citizens and reduce anti-social behaviors?

While many of the recent headlines about juvenile justice reform have focused on New York State, California and the South, ankle bracelets are utilized nationwide. It is fitting that Corrections emerges from Iowa, the heartland of America. The young men and women in Murff’s photographs are ordinary children, just like all children are ordinary. And yet, we have a propensity to think of urgent debates about the social contract we share as being those centered around the big cities. GPS tracks kids the same in the Midwest as it does in urban cores; it “knows” geography but does not adhere to our regional stereotypes. Corrections, in its modest way, puts the debate about electronic monitoring of youth into all our communities.

Helping children to modify and understand their behavior is a vital task — a fact Murff acknowledges. Ask any of the teens he monitored and they’d say they were happier being out in the community than locked up. Murff grew close to many of the children through face-to-face contact with youths on a regular basis.

He talks of “watching the youths grow throughout the probation process.” But that does not mean that all the teens evaluate their monitoring as fair or right. Having a clunky box strapped to ones leg can hamper ones feeling of freedom just as much as being locked within a box. This tension–this constant to-andfro about the costs and benefits of EM–is what informs Murff’s photographs, and his images provide some avenues to explore the tension.

If the portraiture in Corrections is artful and poetic, then the studies of objects are pure documentary. Images of standard-issue deodorant, case files, uniforms, bracelets and other accouterments remind us of the regime and remind us of the in-

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The kids in Corrections are anything but armed and dangerous. The portraits came out of collaboration, discussion and sometimes accident. The evasive gesture and posturing of anonymous subjects is, for me, less a metaphor for the youths’ prior furtive behavior, but more a metaphor for our collective unknowing of the mechanism of the monitoring systems that we fund in order that they might inhabit them.

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dustries behind it. A youth writes “I have what I need to be fine,” on a self-assessment form and reminds us of the gulf, often, between what a child in crisis needs and what a caring society might be able to provide. It puts us right there. In tension. By contrast, a beautiful sun-dappled portrait of a youth seems so very far removed from the contested system and its narratives.

Until you notice the ankle bracelet.

(But) seeing the system and understanding the system are not necessarily the same thing. Indeed, the ability to see is a great privilege. GPS “sees” relentlessly. Can Corrections help us understand the psychology and control at play as well as EM purports to understand the needs of youth and community?

Some of Murff’s images fill our gaps in knowledge; others inhabit blind spots in our collective understanding of a legally protected arena. What we learn, mostly, from Corrections is that we’ve more to know about how we’re helping troubled kids. We know that we’re using electronic monitoring more readily. How far will we proceed with this brave, new technology? Some Texas school districts, which include a large number of black and latino students, have expanded the use of EM for kids with histories of excessive truancy.

What does Murff’s documentation of fracture and healing from Iowa tell us about this very 21st Century practice? What is this version of freedom and control? Do we accept it?

One afternoon, Murff was sat in the bedroom of a young man for whom he was responsible for monitoring. The teen was playing his guitar and Murff was making a photograph. Then, a friend of the teen came to the bedroom window. He was confused by Murff, his camera, and the scene before him. Without missing a beat, the teen told his friend that he had just been signed to a record label and that Murff was from Rolling Stone Magazine.

I end with this anecdote because the teen, in spite of his circumstances, was witty and present. And he had agency. Lighthearted moments are harder to come by when people are implicated in the criminal justice system. Corrections is a serious body of work about a serious project, but it has been built on years of very personal interactions. For the protection of the youths, all of Murff’s subjects remain anonymous but that doesn’t mean they are distant.

What we think today affects what we do tomorrow. As you leaf through these pages, think about how you would feel as a kid under monitoring, think about your current attitudes about “delinquent” kids, and think about if those can change. Think about these things today because, certainly, there’ll be more electronic monitoring devices tomorrow.

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Throughout Corrections, Murff is investigating the psychology, the coercion and the effects/costs/benefits of control. We’re dealt a teasing glimpse of how electronic monitoring works for the state and niggles against presumed natural freedoms.

These frictions play out against the hormonal whirl of teenagers trying to find their place in the world.

“By reconsidering the role that I played in the lives of the kids I worked with, I began to acknowledge the burden that comes with tasking young men and women with continued complicity,” writes Murff. “My stance as a consequence kept our relationships in a state of flux ranging from stable to tenuous – a constant motion mirroring the discord that develops between the system’s

intentions and outcomes. Through employing ideas of anonymity, voyeurism, and introspection, Corrections is an examination of youth experience in the system, the role images play in defining someone who is deemed a criminal, and how the concepts of privacy and control may affect their future.”

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Murff provided services to youths who were convicted of crimes and were monitored while on probation.

“Juveniles in my charge were asked to comply with services which may include: electronic monitoring, therapies, drug screening, and community service; it is my responsibility to have continual contact with them to ensure these expectations are met,” he says.

Electronic Monitoring (EM) is becoming more and more common. EM is characterised–by its supporters–as a more humane, less forceful and cheaper alternative to incarceration. However, it’s use and long-term effects (especially for children) have been the subject of relatively little study or public attention.

“These services, which allow juveniles to stay in their homes, show a higher rate of success than strict incarceration. Although community-based services are built to foster a collaborative relationship between juveniles and service providers, attaining the actualization of teamwork becomes problematic when juveniles feel that they have done nothing wrong, are victims of circumstance, or do not fully understand why they have committed a crime,” says Murff.

My essay/introduction focuses on the business practices, markets and language behind the electronic monitoring industry and how this boom sector of criminal justice may or may not be the panacea law enforcement hopes for.

“The system has been put in place to provide rehabilitation, but it is far from being a straightforward process,” writes Murff. “Many influences outside of the youths’ control such as education, socioeconomic status, and race all play a role in whether or not a youth reoffends — all of these factors possessing the propensity to lead them to extended periods of incarceration in the system or to involvement with the criminal justice system as an adult.”

“I want this thing off today … this fucking thing is an invasion of privacy, and goes against my well-being,” said the young boy about his ankle bracelet. He was speaking to Zora Murff, a BFA photography student at the University of Iowa and also a Juvenile Tracker for the Juvenile Detention and Diversion Services (JDDS) of Linn County, Iowa.

It was only when Murff heard this complaint that he began to wonder if he and his camera interrogates the issue of control.

Linn County JDDS provides monitoring and rehabilitation services to youths on probation. Murff has been in the job eighteen months. In mid-2013 he began to photograph his employment.

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“He was angry,” recalls Murff. “The more I thought about his anger, the more I pondered the concepts of privacy and control in the juvenile corrections system and the role that I play inside of those concepts. I interact with these youths at a critical point in their lives where control is an integral part of the day-to-day. My job is to be a consequence, to insert myself into their lives […] while the adolescents themselves are struggling to exert control over their development.”

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Zora J Murff is an MFA student in Studio Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Zora attended the University of Iowa where he studied Photography and holds a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University. His work has appeared in The British Journal of Photography, WIRED, VICE Magazine and PDN’s Emerging Photographer Magazine. Zora was named a LensCulture 2015 Top 50 Emerging Talent, a 2014 Photolucida Critical Mass finalist, and is part of the Midwest Photographers Project through the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Zora is a member of Strange Fire Collective with Jess T. Dugan, Hamidah Glasgow, and Rafael Soldi.

In addition to slinging his camera, Murff works as a “tracker” for a program that provides low-risk juveniles alternatives to incarceration. He coordinates transportation to therapy and counseling sessions, contacts schools to make sure that the juveniles are attending classes, collects urine samples for drug tests, and monitors the juveniles’ locations through data from their ankle bracelets.

“My job is to be a consequence, to insert myself into their lives while the adolescents themselves are struggling to exert control over their development,” says Murff who wanted to capture how juveniles in the system are supervised and monitored, and how the resulting lack of privacy can impact their development.

“Cameras are typically used by the state to surveil,” he says. “I too am recording, but my camera is there in a collaborative capacity. I feel that the people I’m photographing have taken back a level of control.”

Prison Photography (PP): Can you start by describing your work?

Zora Murff (ZM): Tracking is one of the diversion programs that JDDS offers. Diversion refers to the youth being able to stay in the community, rather than being placed in detention or in a different type of placement like residential treatment. My primary responsibility is monitoring youths on probation. I have face-to-face contact with youths on a regular basis to ensure that they are complying with the expectations of their probation.

This may entail electronic monitoring, urinalysis, school follow-up, transportation to therapies (substance abuse, sexual offense, anger-replacement), and other things like completing community service hours. My caseload fluctuates – I believe the lowest number I had was nine youths and I have had up to twenty-one.

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Would you have been able to manage gaining access if it weren’t for your job?

When I pitched the idea to my supervisor, she was very intrigued, but being an insider definitely gave me a leg up, and I was very lucky to have that level of access. My supervisor had a few specific guidelines, but gave me free reign, so I had a wide creative space to work with. I think there was a level of trust there, which made Corrections possible.

How did you come to be studying photography if you’re also a probation service employee?

I started my degree in psychology. My professional background in human services started when I replied to an ad on a campus bus. I needed a job. I started in disability services working with a wide population of people.

Those experience helped me get a job with juvenile criminal justice. I didn’t necessarily have a desire to work in this specific area, but it has been a great experience to watch the youths grow throughout the probation process.

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I love my work but I have always felt I was missing out on a need to create, a desire to teach, and a love of the photograph. That is where my education in photography comes into play.

Juveniles under the control of the state are vulnerable young adults. What sort of assurances did you have to provide for your employer, the children and the parents/guardians?

I have noticed that when working with any population in human services, it all comes down to trust. The real question is how do you build that trust with the people that you serve. I think that this can vary with any worker, but I usually broach this by being available and consistent. Having trusting relationships with the youths that I photographed was key to working on this project. The biggest assurance that I had to provide was anonymity. It was also important to explain my project to them, which isn’t always easy to do, especially when I was starting out because I wasn’t sure where the project was taking me.

Is Corrections a voice for you or for your subjects?

I wouldn’t say that Corrections is my voice personally. The youths are allowing me to show them through their portraits and through some of their writing. My intent was to approach it from an ‘anthropological’ standpoint if you will, almost as if I am a recording device. I felt that it was important to provide a window into this world without editorializing, even though I am embedded in the system.

I feel that when it comes to children on probation a lot of stereotypes are thrown around and it would have been easy to fall into tropes. I want viewers to see inside of the system and draw their own conclusions.

How has the project effected your relationships?

In human services, the work is about the person that you’re serving, not about you, and typically sharing personal information is discouraged. However, I feel that opening up about my passion for and education in photography bought me a little more trust with some of the clients. It was kind of odd, really. The kids were either totally interested and invested in the project, or completely indifferent. When I walk through the detention center, one or two kids will ask if I’m still working on the project or what was my grade in my photo class. I have also earned the moniker, “that guy with the camera.”

Any particular stumbling blocks?

My biggest barrier was not being able to photograph faces – I didn’t want to blur out faces or put bars over them. It almost became a game figuring out how to make faces unidentifiable and have the photographs be meaningful.

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Any pleasant surprises?

A number of the compositions happened by accident – a kid blocking the sun from his eyes, or deciding to sit in a certain spot. There is one photograph of a youth playing guitar in his bedroom. While we were taking the photograph, the youth’s friend came to the bedroom window

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and had a perplexed look on his face when he noticed me with the camera. The youth told his friend that he had just been signed to a record label and that I was from Rolling Stone Magazine. We all had a good laugh about that – and it was a welcome change from the more difficult interactions that I have.

What has been the reaction so far to the work?

So far, reactions have all been pretty positive. I was part a group exhibition for the class Corrections was completed for, and a number of people drew some sort of sentiment from the photographs. I also had a portfolio review at Midwest SPE last year, and the project was received well.

However, I understand that working with a vulnerable population, specifically youths, can be a contentious territory so I have been a pretty hard critic on myself about the work.

Do you plan to continue photography and/or work in criminal justice reform?

I would like to teach photography as a means of creative expression to youths at the detention center, but that is just a lofty idea at this point.

It would be wonderful if you could achieve those types of workshops in actuality.

There are definitely some barriers. The biggest obstacles would be finding the time to teach a course, funding for materials, developing a curriculum, and figuring out when it would work into the residents’ schedule as their day at the detention center is very structured.

What makes you think photography is useful for the youths?

What skills does it teach? What can be achieved with photographic education, particularly to at-risk youth? What else are you up to?

I’ll continue Corrections until I reach a place where I feel that it is as complete as possible, but I am taking a break from it for the time being.

I have an idea for a more intimate project, a case study of sorts, following the story of one individual on probation.

I’m gearing up to start shooting for this project in the next few months, and have a youth interested in being a part of it, so I’m ironing out details.

Is the camera a security device or an artistic tool?

Part of my statement for Corrections is how I, as a Tracker, am required to impose on these youths. This was problematic for me at times because by pointing my camera at them I was imposing upon them in an additional way, but it is important to understand the difference.

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The cameras that we use to surveil youths are all there in a reactionary capacity in order to provide some sort of control. With my camera, I too am recording, but my camera is there in a collaborative capacity – I feel that the youths have taken back a level of control as they have allowed me to portray them and document their experiences.

How did you come to be studying photography if you’re also a probation service employee?

I started my degree in psychology. My professional background in human services started when I replied to an

ad on a campus bus. I needed a job. I started in disability services working with a wide population of people.

Those experience helped me get a job with juvenile criminal justice. I didn’t necessarily have a desire to work in this specific area, but it has been a great experience to watch the youths grow throughout the probation process.

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Juveniles under the control of the state are vulnerable young adults. What sort of assurances did you have to provide for your employer, the children and the parents/guardians?

I have noticed that when working with any population in human services, it all comes down to trust. The real question is how do you build that trust with the people that you serve. I think that this can vary with any worker, but I usually broach this by being available and consistent. Having trusting relationships with the youths that I photographed was key to working on this project. The biggest assurance that I had to provide was anonymity. It was also important to explain my project to them, which isn’t always easy to do, especially when I was starting out because I wasn’t sure where the project was taking me.

Thanks Zora.

Thank you!

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A metal detector commonly used by correctional officers on inmates during inspections, as well as on visitors before entering the visit rooms at prisons.

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An electronic monitoring ankle bracelet used for inmates who are on home confinement or are on parole.

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Urine drug testing kit, which is commonly used to sporadically test inmates and those on home confinement and parole.

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A standard issue prison uniform. Depending on the level of the prison, the state, system, and many other factors the color can vary amongst tones of taupe.

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Standard issue underwear and socks that are given to inmates at the beginning of their time in confinement, and can be purchased at commissary later on.

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Standard issue huaraches which are made from hard rubber. This makes them ideal as leisure shoes, or shower shoes.

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The standard set of toiletries which can be bought by inmates at commissary.

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This deodorant is again, standard issue, and is made by prisoners at various prisons to supply the rest of the nation’s prisoners.

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The standard issue of toiletry items, including tooth past, miniature tooth brush, and carrier. Tooth brushes are small and without handles to prevent them being sharpened and turned into weapons, known as “shanks.�

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FUCK

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I’LL NEVER LIVE LIKE PUT A BULLET BEFORE I THE PEOPLE HATE. FUCK FUCK YOUR SO WHITE

K YOU.

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R FUCKING E YOU. I’LL T IN MY HEAD LIVE LIKE E I FUCKING K YOU AND OCIETY TOO...

TRASH

FORGET ME NOTS

Photos By ALYSE EMDUR

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We expect brightly colored scenes of sun-kissed beaches and snowcapped mountains from cheap calendars and Trapper Keeper binders, but in visiting rooms throughout American prisons, idealized scenes like these serve as backdrops to countless portraits.

Prison Landscapes, a six-year project and new book by artist Alyse Emdur, throws light upon this unexpected phenomenon. The garish murals – and more recently digitally printed backdrops – function in exactly the same way as backgrounds in commercial portrait studios. Aesthetically, they are almost indistinguishable.

“If you weren’t familiar with prisons, you might think these were prom photos or made in community centers," says Emdur of her collected portraits. "They’re very ambiguous.”

The precise history of the backdrop as a common feature of prison visiting rooms is largely unrecorded. Clearly, they grow out of the prison mural tradition – a famous example of which would be the six frieze murals in the dining hall at San Quentin State Prison that depict parts of California's history. Murals in Oregon and Washington State include the Cascade Mountains; Gulf Coast prisons feature beaches; and in New York State prisons – where the majority of prisons are upstate but the prisoners are from New York City – are murals of the Big Apple skyline.

In a digital age, however, murals done in acrylic and enamel paint are slowly being replaced by large, store-bought printed screens.

"In Otisville, New York (10th image), we can see a painted scene of the Statue of Liberty, but in front of it is a digital backdrop of the same scene," says Emdur. "The inmates prefer the photo backdrop to the painted backdrop."

Prison administrators claim the backdrops are for security purposes – using them for portraits obscures any details about the

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prisons that might be used for escape. The murals spare prisoners and families the indignity of a never-changing prison setting; the murals at least offer an alternative. They're so common that many prisoners have never even thought about the backdrops and that they had even forgotten they were there.

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In order to research prison portraiture, Emdur contacted more than 300 prisoners and explained her intent to collect and decipher this widespread but invisible vernacular form of photography. Just over 150 prisoners agreed to be part of her project and 100 portraits made it into the book. During this time, Emdur wrote and received hundreds of letters.

"My act as a photographer is not from behind the lens but as a collector of images," says Emdur. "I see myself as a mediator.

These are people who have had no relationship with the outside world so while Prison Landscapes might be a very small gesture, the people who chose to be involved in this project want to be seen; they have their own agency. They want the outside world to know they aren't the criminals they are stereotyped as."

Relatively late in the project, Emdur resolved to visit prisons herself to photograph backdrops at a wider angle. In the space of two weeks, she gained access to 10 prisons on the East Coast.

Her photographs offer context to the portraits she had already collected. In informal interviews, Emdur was able to get the perspective of the prison administrations, psychiatrists, superintendents, guards - "people who enriched my understanding," she says.

"Prison portraits are very intentionally framed to exclude the surroundings," explains Emdur. "They are hiding what the visiting room actually looks like. For me it is very important to show the viewer, who maybe hasn't been in a prison visiting room, the details, and to place the backdrops in a context."

In their simplest interpretation, prison visiting-room portraits are about familial connection. Emdur's thoughts returned time and time again to the estimated 1.5 million children in America with incarcerated parents.

"These photographs reflect the image that many children will have of their parents," says Emdur. "The collateral damage of – and how families are damaged by – mass incarceration is not an aspect that is at the forefront of people's minds when they think about prisons."

The photos are emblematic of a cultural disassociation from the prison system itself. Just as these backdrops allow prisoners and their families to avoid documenting their own reality of incarceration, so does the U.S. avoid most public discourse about policies and attitudes that allow the country to lock people up at six times the rate of the next most punitive industrialized nation (the United Kingdom) and quadruple the prison population over the last 35 years. At the heart of the enabling is the tendency to reduce each person in prison to a one-dimensional, almost inhuman, caricature of a "prisoner" – something Emdur hopes her project combats.

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"Clearly prisoners are more than their crime," says Emdur "I'm not saying they're not criminals; they are in prison because they were convicted and proven guilty. I am not going around that but it is important to look at these images and consider the rise of the prison industrial complex. The portraits reveal a system and how individuals fit within that system."

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A ROOM WITH A VIEW

Photos By RON LEVINE & JESSICA EARNSHAW

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Seeing human beings behind heavy doors and bars, in person, is a weird thing and difficult to digest. It made me think a lot about the institution of prison and the isolating effects on people when you cut them off from society.

According to Human Rights Watch, the number of people 55 and older serving time in federal and state prisons has tripled since 2007. The majority of those who make up the aging inmate prison population are incarcerated for violent crimes. As a society our general outlook is that people who commit violent crimes are dangerous—but after 30-plus years, are they? I wanted to understand who these people were 30 years ago and who they are now.

When I began contacting prisons across the country, Maine State Prison was the first to grant me access. Beginning in December 2015 and through the spring of 2016, I spent six full days photographing in the men’s prison and three full days in the women’s prison. My days began at 6 a.m. and ended when my subjects were locked in for count at around 7 p.m.

I only understood prison in an abstract way before going inside.

I had spent months researching the topic and knew the facts, but it didn't eliminate my fear before I walked in for the first time.

But when deputy warden Michael Tausek introduced my first three subjects—Steven, Robert, and Albert—my fear dissipated.

Steven, who was working in Industries fixing one of the machines when I came by, shook my hand and greeted me softly.

Tausek had told me that Steven was shy. Robert, a tall man with a big white beard, was sitting in his cell. He shook my hand and looked directly into my eyes as he told me he was “looking forward to being shadowed.” Albert wheeled over to me in his wheelchair, shook my hand, and asked me in a thick Maine accent if I had brought him an Italian sub. I responded no, and he cackled mischievously.

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I wanted to be a fly on the wall photographically and shadow my subjects throughout their day. It turned out to be relatively easy because this aging population has missed so many of the major technological developments in media production and the way we experience news; they had no reservations or self-awareness about being photographed.

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Albert is patted down by security as he arrives in the medical area to get a blood test. He pulls out a small piece of paper with a drawing of a pipe on it and says to the security guard, "What is this?" The guard replies, "That's a pipe!" And Albert cracks up laughing. "What's wrong with you? This is a piece of paper!

After leaving Maine State, I went to Maine Correctional Center in Portland to meet with Norma, 76, the oldest female incarcerated in Maine. The Women’s Center has 200 females in the system. Only ten or fewer are over the age of 55. Norma has served 14 years of her sentence and has another 56 years to go.

She hasn’t had any visitors in this time, and her three children no longer speak to her.

The younger women inside have adopted her as a surrogate mother and grandmother. Most are incarcerated for drugs and have led traumatic lives. Norma encourages them to sign up for classes or earn GEDs. She spends most of her days coloring, doing crossword puzzles, and playing bridge with the ladies (often complaining when she suspects cheating). She was given the only single cell in the facility because of her age, but she often feels outnumbered and anxious, as she is one of the only aging women in the Women’s Center.

When I first met Norma, she had just signed a do-not-resuscitate order and was upset: "I’ve got a death sentence—I’ve got emphysema. I’ve gone through cancer in here, pneumonia all the time. I knew it anyway, but to hear it from somebody else, it really hit me last night; I cried and cried.”

So much life leads up to a crime before it is committed. Hearing their stories, their remorse, their shame, and who they are now, was a lot to process. It was a sobering experience to go from this existence back home to New York. My hope and goal with this work is to humanize these prisoners by knocking away any walls or sensationalism that prevents us from seeing them as human beings.

On my final day, Robert told me that our time together talking had been the best day of his life and also one of the hardest when he went to sleep, as it brought a lot up. Steven, similarly, held my hand as I left and thanked me for caring enough to come in.

These feelings about my visit surely reflect their isolation from the outside world—and a need we all have for connection.

At 82, Albert is the oldest and longest serving inmate in Maine State. He's classified as high risk because he has successfully escaped four times.

PHOTOGRAPHY

When I first met Norma, she had just signed a do-not-resuscitate order and was upset: "I’ve got a death sentence—I’ve got emphysema. I’ve gone through cancer in here, pneumonia all the time. I knew it anyway, but to hear it from somebody else, it really hit me last night; I cried and cried.”

Isolation within the prison system also includes ones family. Many elderly in the system have strained or no relationship with their family on the outside.

283

PHOTOGRAPHY

284

MODELS OF SILENCE

285

PHOTOGRAPHY

Aging in the prison system is navigating a system that does not supply adequate health care and facing death without freedom.

286

MODELS OF SILENCE

287

PHOTOGRAPHY

ABOVE: Christine White, 52. A trans woman incarcerated in a male prison. Because of her gender identity she is confined to solitary confinement as protection.

Being a woman in prison, there is often the demand of working and doing hard labor into old age.

292

MODELS OF SILENCE

293

PHOTOGRAPHY

Robert, 70, looks out his cell window. He has spent nearly 30 years in prison after being convicted of murder. In his free time, Robert mentors younger prisoners who have come in with drug addictions, something he's very passionate about.

Maine State Prison (2016) Aging in Prison Jessica Earnshaw

Every few weeks a new set of adult dogs and puppies come into Maine State Prison. These dogs are from shelters. The men share their cells and train them, in order to give them a better shot at being adopted

A Room With a View (2016) Aging in Prison Jessica Earnshaw

Albert, 82 years old, through his cell window is about to be locked into his cell for the night. As a security guard makes a round of the premise.

Albert grew up in foster care from the age of three to nine years old, and he's been in and out of prison since he was sixteen. "If I wanted something in life at 3 years old I had to take it, if I needed food I had to take it, if I wanted a drink of water I had to take it. It wasn't given to me, you know."

Ben Chavez, 58 (2016) Aging in Prison Ron Levine

I only understood prison in an abstract way before going inside. I had spent months researching the topic and knew the facts, but it didn't eliminate my fear before I walked in for the first time. But when deputy warden Michael Tausek introduced my first three subjects—Steven, Robert, and Albert—my fear dissipated.

Joseph Chapman, 68

(2016) Aging in Prison Ron Levine

Though someone at age 50 would not be considered old in the eyes of the general public, experts say that incarcerated men and women may have physiological and mental health conditions that are associated with people who are much older.

Bill Smits, 56 (2016) Aging in Prison Ron Levine

Federal data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice shows that from 1999 to 2014, the number of state and federal prisoners age 55 or older increased 250 percent. The number of prisoners younger than age 55 grew only 8 percent in the same period.

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MODELS OF SILENCE

305

That which journeys never journeys for another.

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL

That which pecks never pecks for another.

That which pinches never pinches for another.

Where is the seeker who searches for another?

INDEX 306

MODELS OF SILENCE

307

ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE

308

BIBLIOGRAPHY Davis, Angela Yvonne. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable.

For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion.

Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women).

King, Martin L. Letter from the Birmingham Jail. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994. (pg.

68-95) Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in response to criticism of the nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama in April 1963. ...

He begins his letter by calling the clergymen people of “genuine goodwill” and acknowledging the sincerity of their concern, setting a tone of dialogue.

Ngũgĩ, wa T. Devil on the Cross.

1982. Print. (pg. 114-124) This remarkable and symbolic novel centers around Wariinga's tragedy and uses it to tell a story of contemporary Kenya faced with the "satan of capitalism." Ngugi has directed his writing even more firmly towards the commitment that he shows in Writers in Politics and Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary.

The novel was written secretly in prison on the only available material -- lavatory paper. It was discovered when he was released from Colonial Prison in Kenya

Ngũgĩ, wa T. Free Thoughts on Toilet Paper. , 1982. Print. (pg. 108)

MODELS OF SILENCE

Originally published during wa Thiongo's imprisonment he expresses his notions on toilet paper as his only means of writing and expressing himself during his solitary confinement.

Murff, Zora J. Q&A, 2017. Digital. (pg. 220-227) Zora J Murff is an MFA student in Studio Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Zora attended the University of Iowa where he studied Photography and holds a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University. His work has appeared in The British Journal of Photography,

WIRED, VICE Magazine and PDN’s Emerging Photographer Magazine. Zora was named a LensCulture 2015 Top 50 Emerging Talent, a 2014 Photolucida Critical Mass finalist, and is part of the Midwest Photographers Project through the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Zora is a of Strange Fire Collective with Jess T. Dugan, Hamidah Glasgow, and Rafael Soldi.

Emdur, Alyze. Captive America.

2017. Digital. (pg. 252-253) From 2005 to 2013, in addition to making documentary-based videos and drawings, I dedicated myself to what became, Prison Landscapes, a 176-page book that features more than 150 vernacular portraits of prisoners representing themselves in front of prisoner-painted idealized landscape backdrops, large-format photographs of portrait studios in prisons and an interview with incarcerated artist Darrell Van Mastrigt.

Prison Landscapes came from a personal place; it was inspired by a photograph I found of myself at age five posing in front of a tropical beach scene while visiting my brother in Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, NJ. Throughout the run of the project, I corresponded with hundreds of incarcerated Americans and eventually photographed portrait studios in 12 state prisons with a large camera.

PHOTOGRAPHY

COLOPHON

Earnshaw, Jessica

Times New Roman Weights: Regular, Regular Italic

284, 286-287, 288-289

Edmonds, Jonathan

69, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 81, 85, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 97, 99-98, 100-101, 102-103

Emdur, Alyse

252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258-259, 260, 263, 264-265, 266,267, 268, 269

Google Earth

4-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-11, 12, 14, 18-19, 21, 67, 107, 128-129, 131

Hill, Tyler J. 82,83

Levine, Ron

274, 276, 279, 280, 281, 282, 290-291, 292293, 294-295

Martins, Edgar

220-221, 222, 224-225, 226-227, 246-247

Murff, Zora J.

229-229, 230-231, 232-233, 234-235, 236-237, 238-239, 240-241, 242-243, 244-245

Perrott, Mark

192-193, 194, 196-197, 198, 201, 202-203, 204, 205, 206-207, 208-209, 210-211, 212-213

Poor, Nigel

132, 133, 134, 135, 136-137, 138-139, 140-141, 143, 144-145, 146 - 147, 148, 150-151, 152-153

Ross, Richard

23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34-35, 37, 39, 43, 45, 46, 49, 51, 55-54, 56,57, 58, 59, 60-61, 62-63

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Quotes and Subsection captions of this book are set in New Times Roman.

Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration with Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in The London Times's advertising department.

Favorit Weights: Regular, Medium, Bold.

Headlines, subheads, and large scale type is set in Favorit Regular, Medium, and Bold weights.

Favorit is a sans-serif typeface designed in 2013 by Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb of Swiss foundry Dinamo.

The design feels like a standard neo-grotesque but features distinctive tails on the t, j and y that end at right angles. The family is available in four weight.

Suisse Internationale Weights: Book, Regular, Regular.

The body text of this book is set in Suisse International Book at 13 point size.

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Favorit Mono Weights: Regular Captions for this book are set in Favorit Mono Regular.

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REFERENCES