The Carceral Continuum: Interview with Caleb Smith
“The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside. It takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude with the other. It saves everything, including what it punishes. It is unwilling to waste even what it has decided to disqualify. In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offense.”
–Michel Foucault
In his seminal book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault lays out the groundwork for how political movements have sought to reform prisons and their inmates, always starting not from the premise that incarceration is a failed enterprise, but rather that humanist discourses of reform are concomitant with penitentiary practices. The prison was born out of prison reform, and will forever be an institution that is at its very core about narratives of reformation, salvation, and unceasing change.
Following that thread of perceived redemption in the stories we tell ourselves about incarceration, 
and the American Imagination is a startling work that wrestles with how our society’s conceptions of “the criminal,” “the prisoner,” and “the disciplinary institution” have become literally carved into our landscapes and branded on our psyches. The governing ideologies of America’s great systems of control have seeped into the wider social milieu—we are, and have been for centuries, living in a grand carceral continuum. The inmate’s body has become the blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies about space, captivity, freedom, justice, and salvation; the prisoner is caught as both an object of oppression and a subject of freedom. And, as “prison reformers” have always notified us, the way we treat those who are incarcerated is the litmus test for how much we value human rights and liberty. How, then, can we begin to understand the realities and implications of brave statements like Malcolm X’s “America is a prison?”
At the conference at Princeton University this spring, we met up with Caleb Smith to discuss what he calls “the erosion of the hard and fast distinction between what we call ‘inside’ and what we call ‘outside.’”
As we have written before about the architecture of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, prisons were once designed to resemble the dungeons of times past, whereas on the inside, Quaker reformers were constructing a system of punishments that were meant to humanize their charges and lead them to spiritual enlightenment. These gothic nightmarish structures were a reimagining of the individual at the line separating captivity and freedom—the body was segregated from all others, but the mind could wander off to commune with higher beings.
Terror was inspired in the surrounding communities by just the thought of what went on behind the prison walls, and their lack of knowledge about the real goings on led to fanciful beliefs of physical torture and torment as in medieval dungeons. The reformist projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were bound up in these fantasies. From the beginning, our imaginations have led us to political and social myths about incarceration and the dehumanization that occurs under the ever-watchful eye of the state.
“There is a wish among those of us who think there is a prison crisis, that if we can just expose what is happening, bring it into public view that a democratic society, that a humane society would not allow this to happen.” Smith spoke to us about the central paradox of incarceration: inmates are held captive in plain sight, and we as activists, concerned citizens, and scholars of justice have to shine a light on what is already before our eyes. The prison walls have been built in order to separate the incarcerated from the “free,” and yet those walls are our point of contact. The challenge, then, is to make that point of contact into our common cause, to reframe the menacing nature of the prison itself in order to establish meaningful change.
According to Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow, “one in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system—in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issues (or crisis).” Furthermore, America now imprisons a larger percentage of its African American community than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. We are certainly living in the era of “Law + Order,” get-tough-on-crime ideologies, three-strikes laws, zero tolerance, and a whole host of other slogan-ridden policies that have fundamentally shifted how liberty and freedom are parceled out in our society writ large…but not how we think about those concepts. Smith writes in The Prison and the American Imagination that “the ideology of toughness, of retribution, or of mere containment displaces the enlightened, reformist language of mercy and healing.”
It is easy to blame the mass media for the lack of awareness of the injustices of the justice system and our failures to protect civil rights, but that is almost missing the point. As Smith examines in his book, literature, history, and law have become so interwoven that we cannot look at captivity as a problem in need of easy solutions, and returning to reformist ideals may not be our best bet. The gothic battlements of Eastern State Penitentiary, Sing Sing, and Auburn and the Roman columns of New York’s Tombs once signaled the solidity of the carceral presence in our society; today, they prisons have been cast out to the periphery and farmed out to rural areas. Whereas architecture used to cause community members to tremble in fear before the prison walls, today, the popularization of crime in the media has inoculated us to the horror of incarceration. Our imaginative response to the prison as the locus of systems of control has changed. In this post-Guantanamo world, it is vital that we reclaim the humanity of the humans held in our prisons, and reaffirm their subjectivity. We must, in Smith’s words, “discover a language that refuses both the prison’s dehumanizing violence and its captivating vision of human redemption.”
“I haven’t seen the night sky for a decade. During the early sixties in San Quentin, ‘lockup’ meant just that, twenty-four hours a day, all day, a shower once a week, and this could last for months (it’s not changed much). On a shower walk one day in ’63??, a brother called me to his cell for an opinion on this work he was doing on his walls. He had drawn in the night sky with colored pencils and against it, life size, lifelike (he was good), female comrades—some with fluffy naturals like my sister Angie, some with silky naturals like my sister Betsy. He had worked on it for three months. It was enormous—beautiful, precise, mellow. When he finished the last strokes the pigs moved him to another cell and painted over it, gave him a bad-conduct report, and made him pay for the new coat of paint. That brother didn’t draw much any more last time I saw him.”
–George Jackson
Tale of a Walled Town
Ours is a grimy bit of blue;
And very small;
And sunbeams scarce adventure to
O’ertop the wall.
A bird that flutters swiftly by;
A wind that passes with a sigh;
A cloudlet sailing slow and high;
And that is all.
O matins, and O vesper bells,
Toll slowly!
A city of a thousand cells—
A thousand individual hells.
Incarcerated in the in Philadephia in 1916, Clarence Alexander Rae, a convicted book thief, penned the internal experience of a life interupted. The narrative he traces through his book of poems, , follows the path of subjection, the result of inescapable regimes of surveillance and control. Dedicated to “Our Lady with the Lamp,” it is one of the earliest tales of captivity to emerge from the modern prison complex, an outcropping of reformist practices that ultimate strove to control the body so as to free the soul for enlightenment.
In his recent book, The Prison and the American Imagination, calls the prison narrative “the first distinctly American literary genre.” He cites Mary White Rowlandson’s 1682 text, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, as one of the earliest captivity narratives, and perhaps one of the most fascinating. Abducted by what she labels the devilish native peoples and held in slavery while they massacred the settlers of New England, she describes the horrors of being held against one’s will. Her six-year-old daughter dies, and Rowlandson’s madness drives her to hug the corpse through the night until it is torn from her: “I cannot but take notice how at another time I could not bear to be in the room where any dead person was, but now the case is changed; I must and could ly down by my dead Babe, side by side all the night after.” Echoing the work of sociologist Loic Wacquant, Smith concludes that “the captivity narrative has served to reinforce, perhaps even to create, identities in conflict: white against red, or against black, or against shades of brown.” In a strange way, the prison narrative is the most American of all, and the one in which our systems of disenfranchisement and prejudice are erected and enacted.
When a prisoner first arrived at Eastern State after the usual surrender of possessions would, he would be stripped down, his hair shaved close, he’d be numbered, then led to his box of solitude with a hood over his face that obscured all light and sensation. In the early years before they instituted hoods with holes for the eyes, he’d never leave his cell without all of his senses being enshrouded in darkness. There would be no letters or news from his family on the outside, and only the occasional word from a guard could be heard—he was essentially, Smith argues, buried alive and transformed into bare life. The only book that was allowed in the cells was the Bible.
The building itself was the hailed as the perfect system of the time, and its architect, John Haviland, became the prison architect of the 19th century on the backs of this effort. Eastern State accepted its first inmates in 1829, but wasn’t completed until 1836. The radial plan allowed the 450 solitary cells (each with a small skylight) to be policed efficiently—long rows connected the wings to a central command center. Inmates found themselves in a very small, vaulted cell with a bed that was hung from chains, with a small space for their required work. A small peephole allowed the guards to look in whenever they felt the urge, and food and materials relating to their work was passed through a small slit in the door that remained closed when not in use. The real surprise was the water tap and flush toilet in every cell, at a time when many in the city just a few miles south of the walls did not have such luxuries.
There is something distinctly Poe about all of the tales from the inside of this early supermax; the narratives of these inmates is thoroughly gothic with its medieval iron gates, deep shadows, unnatural solitude, and persistent nagging of emerging psychoses. Perhaps Edgar Allan Poe, residing at the time not too far away from the prison walls, wrote in the shadow of Haviland’s much-praised architectural feat. The prison’s first board of directors wrote that the architecture would “turn the thoughts of the convict inwards upon himself, and to teach him how to think.” In effect, the total immersion in solitude would lead the convict to split his criminal mind from his “penitent” mind, and hence our word In the mind of the Quaker reformers who inspired this new prison philosophy, the inmate would eventually wrestle with this split until they reached a state of passivity and contentment—a mythology of resurrection if there ever was one.
While in the 18th century justice was carried out within communities that inspired their own form of punishment (mainly focusing on the Hammurabian eye-for-an-eye style), the turn of that century saw the rise of institutionalized punishment. The Walnut Street Jail was built in 1790 by a bunch of Quakers living in Philadelphia, and was effectively the first prison that was focusing on reforming its inmates. Buildings built for mental and physical torture, these early jails (like New York’s Newgate Prison of 1797 and Auburn Prison of 1816) had moved the hangmen outside but kept the interiors similar to those more medieval-styled sites. Inmates would mingle and live in giant pits of rooms, and the overcrowded spaces essentially gave rise to a population better trained in all acts of criminality. Eastern State, in some ways, was seen as a vast improvement on these earlier conditions, and even the eyes of civilized Europe turned toward the building for inspiration. Charles Dickens famously made a visit to Eastern State during a trip through the States, and the master of sympathy found something he didn’t expect. He wrote that the inmates were “dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair,” and wondered of one prisoner “why does he stare at his hands and pick the flesh open…and raise his eyes for an instant…to those bare walls?”
By the end of that century, the Supreme Court was investigating the mental anguish of enduring long-term solitary confinement, which Dickens surmised was “immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” A century after total solitary confinement was abandoned at the prison, Eastern State shut its doors in 1971, and has since been allowed to degrade into a glorious ruin that perhaps, poetically, mirrors the degradation that occurred in each prisoner’s mental and emotional life. National Geographic’s recent special, , featured some inmates being held in solitary in the Colorado State Penitentiary, and many of them stated how they would act out just to get a hit from a guard’s club. That one touch—no matter how brutal or how much it reasserted the power differential—would remind them that they are at the bottom of it all a part of the human community. And when we read the tales from Eastern State, the lore of the old world, it is easy to see a sort of neuroses that we have toward those who are confined—the hoods, the vaulted ceilings, the rupturing of all ties to the outside, the obsession with reform and the inability to make that happen. There is more to be said about the Quaker ties, and certainly with the Biblical and resurrectionist undertones of much to do with the early solitary confinement set-ups, but it’s worth just drawing it back to today’s prisoners, Eastern State’s legacy.
Listen to a piece from June 2009 by the , which spoke to some inmates being held in solitary confinement, and some of the family members on the outside.
