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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745315386 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2004 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The Birth of a Prison Nation
[T]here was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol ... On the breast of [Hester Prynne's] gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne underlines the hermeneutic allure of this immoderate sign. Since its first appearance this first letter has been read perhaps more closely than any other symbol in American literary history and yet the 'deep meaning' of this article has proved most indefinite. The 'A' has been explicated as 'Artist' and 'Angel', as 'America' and 'Anarchy', as 'Abject' and 'Alienation' and even as an allegory of 'Allegory'. There is a danger in these readings, however, not exactly of interpolation, but of focusing so intently on what the sign does not say that one loses sight of its explicit social signification as a form of punishment. The Puritan letter penalty for adultery, like Poe's 'Purloined Letter', lies hidden in plain view. In Discipline and Punish, his gothic genealogy of the prison, Michel Foucault claimed that modern modes of discipline aim to render punishment increasingly invisible. The aim of this study is to resist that process. Cruel and Unusual will highlight the extent to which punishment has been a conspicuous feature of American history and culture from the Puritan colonies to the present day. Although it is sometimes hidden, although it may not be recognised even when in plain view, punishment has been as intricately woven into the fabric of American society as Hester Prynne's crewelwork.
Hawthorne's preoccupation with needlepoint performs an historical correction. By expunging the practice of branding and tattooing the criminal body the son exculpates his Puritan forefathers. The guilty flesh was often used as folio for an indelible sermon on sin. Given a strict sartorial code that insisted on covering as much skin as possible, Puritan disciplinary mnemonics were typically inscribed on the face and hands. 'A' or 'AD' indicated adultery, 'B' was for blasphemy, 'D' for drunkenness, 'F' for fighting or fornication, 'I' for incest, 'M' for manslaughter, 'P' for prostitution, 'R' for roguery, 'S' for swearing, 'T' for thievery and 'V' for 'venal' or lewd behaviour. One legacy of Puritan stigma was the nineteenth-century practice of tattooing inmates with the name of their prison. A more recent patrimony is suggested by Martin Scorcese's 1991 remake of Cape Fear. As the semi-naked Max Cady exercises in his cell, the camera catechises a body covered in scripture. The centrepiece, on the subject's spine, is a set of scales weighing Justice (a knife) and Truth (the Bible). A detective remarks on this display during a lineup: 'I don't know whether to look at him or read him.' Cady's body might be read as a parodic emblem of the New Puritanism in US corrections and of the vogue amongst prisoners for scarification. It has been estimated that around 60 per cent of white and 85 per cent of Hispanic-American prisoners have ignored the injunction in Leviticus, 19.28: 'You are not to gash your bodies when somebody dies, and you are not to tattoo yourselves.' The significance of the tattoo in contemporary prison subculture is underscored by Oz. The opening credit sequence of this cult prison drama is sutured with shots of a figure, rumoured to be the series creator, Tom Fontana, having 'Oz' tattooed on his biceps. From branding to brand names, from letter penalties designed to enforce ostracism to gang markings that are a badge of belonging, from sadistic wounding to self-inflicted torture that signifies an elision between desire and hurt: a genealogy of punitive signs illustrates that their meanings are far less ingrained than a criminal's tattoo.
Like the scarlet letter, 'punishment' is a protean sign. Hester's judges intended that the 'A' would denote the sinful act which Hawthorne, with a prudery only partly feigned, never mentions by name. According to the letter of Puritan law adultery was punishable by death. By the mid nineteenth century, at the time The Scarlet Letter was published, numerous novels of adultery still registered the perceived dangers of this transgression by dramatising its unravelling of economics and desire. Adultery, of course, is no longer codified in most Western societies as an offence under criminal law, although pecuniary penalties may be incurred in civil proceedings. In ancient Greece, however, the punishment for adultery was decided by the 'victim'. Cuckolded husbands enjoyed considerable latitude, but often plumped for the insertion of root vegetables in the anus of their rivals. Revenge by rhapanidosis was a favourite as radishes, although small, produced a particularly unpleasant burning sensation. Conversely, anal sex between consenting males was not considered a punishable act in ancient Greece or Rome, but was illegal throughout the US until the 1960s and is currently defined as criminal according to sodomy laws in 14 states and the US military.
Even a cursory glance at the history of punishment proves that penal practices vary dramatically between societies and across time. Although the specific forms are constantly changing, the brute fact of punishment itself is immutable. The Scarlet Letter opens with 'The Prison Door' and Hawthorne's insistence that all societies begin by preparing to punish those who pose a threat:
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. (p.47)
Boston established its inaugural 'House of Correction' in 1632, just two years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This key penal institution has since been the subject of a lexical proliferation that foregrounds how difficult it is to contain the meanings of 'prison'. The American prison has acquired a range of formal titles that reflect differences in organisation and philosophy (county jail and state penitentiary, federal correctional and detention facility, reformatory, boot camp and brig) and colloquialisms that capture the regional and ethnic diversity of the inmates (bird and the Big House, the can, the clink and the cooler, the calaboose and the chokey, the glasshouse, the hoosegow and the joint, the pen and the pokey, the slammer and the skookum house). Historical links between America and the Big House predate even the first Puritan prisons. Ogden Nash joked that 'Columbus discovered America and they put him in jail for it'. On his release from Las Cuevas monastery in Seville, Columbus organised a final expedition to a continent which had since been christened after a rival explorer. Emerson bemoaned the decision of Waldseemuller, the German mapmaker, to name the New World after a figure suspected by many of fraud: 'Strange that broad America must wear the name of a thief! Amerigo Vespucci ... in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus, and baptise half the earth with his own dishonest name!' Doing a six-year stretch for burglary between 1946 and 1952, an inmate at Charlestown State Prison renounced his own 'dishonest name' in favour of a symbol, 'X', that signified a 300-year history of theft and imprisonment. Malcolm X, alongside a generation of African-Americans politicised by incarceration, insisted that for his people 'America' had always meant 'prison'.
Enslaved Africans were amongst the first arrivals in the New World for whom the American experience was of imprisonment rather than new-found liberty, but they were not alone. Throughout the colonial period, America received significant numbers of transported convicts, indentured servants, impressed sailors and military conscripts, united by their carceral condition. In Virginia, by 1618, only 600 of the original 1,800 colonists had survived. The early colonial period witnessed acute labour shortages and these were resolved, in part, by the deportation of convicts. Seventeenth-century English law saw a steady increase in the number of crimes punishable by death (including stealing a lady's petticoat or a silver spoon), but a decline in the number of executions. Deportation to the colonies was often the only alternative to death, and this established a long-lasting precedent in American history for the integration of capital and punishment. Despite the profits made by colonial merchants, the prisoner trade was not met with unequivocal enthusiasm. The General Court of Virginia expressed concern about the 'danger to the colony caused by the great number of felons and other desperate villains sent over from the prisons of England'. When Sir John Popham tried to establish a community in Maine, some critics complained that it was made up from 'all the gaols of England'. For much of the seventeenth century in Britain, prior to the revolutionary war, deportation was the most common sentence imposed on felons. During this period, over 50,000 convicts were transported to America, accounting for almost 25 per cent of all British emigrants. When news of colonial resentment at this practice made its way back to England, Samuel Johnson retorted: 'Why they [Americans] are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.'
The attempt to cultivate a New Eden in the Wilderness was itself a response to original deportation from the Garden. As well as acknowledging affinities between early America and the penal colony, it is essential to recognise the punitive caste of the religion which the Pilgrim Fathers took to the New World. For the Puritan sensibility the central sign in Christian culture, the cross, retained much of its significance as an instrument of torture and execution. The Puritan God was a profoundly disciplinary deity. Seventeenth-century sermons embarrass the apocalyptic imagination on display in the Hollywood disaster film: floods and rivers running red with blood; famine, disease and fire; plagues of insects, vermin and reptiles; brimstone and fire raining down on cities; the sacrifice of sons, and mothers ordered to eat their own babies. Alexis de Tocqueville judged that '[t]here is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America'. Whilst the power of the church has waned in most other western societies, religion has remained a potent force in the US and has always been entangled in notions of divine vengeance and earthly retribution. The Heavenly Father, in God's own country, has often been cast as a strict disciplinarian, and according to Thomas Paine, 'belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man'.
Paine's writings helped inspire the push for independence and the Revolution furthered the fledgling Republic's sensitivity to the subject of punishment. In the War of Independence more Americans died as prisoners than were killed in combat. The British held rebels in overcrowded and unhygienic conditions in camps and a flotilla of prison ships. In the wake of the war, the debate concerning the shape and direction of American government returned frequently to the importance of criminal and civil justice. A determination to fulfil the ideals established in the Declaration, and to distance themselves from the tyrannical treatment of prisoners by their former masters, encouraged a reconsideration of penal practice. Alongside programmes to improve transport infrastructure, education and houses of refuge for the poor, the fledgling Republic sought to forge a national identity that was distinct from Old World despotism through humane treatment of the criminal population. One of the signatories on the Declaration, Benjamin Rush, called for the abolition of capital punishment and the establishment of a new penal philosophy founded on the ideal of social and spiritual rehabilitation. Rush believed that 'a prison sometimes supplies the place of a church and out-preaches the preacher in conveying useful instruction to the heart'. Punishment ought, therefore, to be tailored 'according to the temper of criminals and the progress of their reformation'. Pennsylvania, with its sizeable Quaker population, was a focal point for the reforms that Rush requested. It was the first state to abolish capital punishment for all but the most serious felonies, and replace it with hard labour. The Quakers were also instrumental in the evolution of a new form of prison, modelled on the monastery and geared towards the spiritual instruction of inmates. In the 'penitentiaries' that appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, regimes based on solitary confinement, silence and hard work were introduced for the first time. Incarceration was no longer simply a punishment, but an opportunity to redeem lost souls.
These innovations in penal style generated considerable interest in Europe. In 1831 the French government sent two magistrates to investigate and report on the penitentiary system. Alexis de Tocqueville, travelling with Gustave de Beaumont, toured various facilities, including Eastern State and Sing Sing, before submitting On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France. This report was guarded in its optimism. The authors suggested that the penitentiary had developed into a monomania which reformers saw as 'a remedy for all the evils of society'. They went on to conclude that 'while society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism'. Democracy in America, regarded as a seminal statement on the 'extended liberty' enjoyed by US citizens, grew out of de Tocqueville's study of the nation's prison system. Although he was troubled by the failure to realise the ideals of the penitentiary, de Tocqueville remained convinced that the Land of the Free lay just beyond the prison walls. However, when the situation of those deprived of fundamental liberties is considered – the slaves held on plantations in the South, the native Americans coerced onto reservations, the industrial working class corralled in factories, and the women increasingly confined to the domestic sphere – the distinctions between inside and outside are not as clear-cut as de Tocqueville assumed. The legends of 'extended liberty' evolved partly in response to increasing historical pressures placed on romantic ideals at the heart of the Republic's formation. The focus on frontier freedom, for example, cloaked the increasingly carceral experiences of many to the east of this mythical line. As David Rothman notes, the pinnacle of enthusiasm for prison reform coincided with the era of Jacksonian democracy:
At the very moment that Americans began to pride themselves on the openness of their society, when the boundless frontier became the symbol of opportunity and equality ... notions of total isolation, unquestioned obedience, and severe discipline became the hallmarks of the captive society.
A century and a half later, the same disparity is starkly evident. Political and business rhetoric insists routinely on the democratic virtues of small government and the free market, at the same time as an unprecedented lockdown of US citizens is taking place. Since the end of the Vietnam war, the prison population has increased tenfold, from approximately 200,000 to over 2,000,000 inmates. If public works embody the spirit of the age, then the zeitgeist of millennial America is profoundly carceral. When Clinton declared, in 1996, that the 'era of big government is over', he could not have been referring to the Department of Corrections. Between 1990 and 1995, a massive building programme produced 168 state and 45 federal prisons, bringing the total to 1,500, alongside 3,300 local jails and over 5,000 additional correctional facilities. Historically, plans for prison building have been met with vociferous opposition from local communities. In the current climate, however, the same groups lobby feverishly to secure the boost to regional economies promised by a new prison. A maximum-security facility can cost anywhere between $30 million and $75 million. The average cost of a single cell, at around $80,000, now rivals suburban property values. Construction expenditure is quickly dwarfed by operating costs. It takes more tax dollars to send someone to prison than to study law at Harvard, and the education they receive at both institutions helps keep the wheels rolling on the Justice Juggernaut.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Cruel and Unusual"
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Copyright © 2004 Brian Jarvis.
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