† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

 

“PriSchool” ~ Architecture of Oppression

by Kay Whitlock and Nancy A Heitzeg

The thesis looks to address the outflow of prisoners and combat the challenges of recidivism.  This is done through the implementation of a new typology of prison facility that symbiotically merges the program of incarceration and education.  The prison would be a prison for non-violent drug offenders.  The school would be a school of criminology and criminal justice.  – Glen J. Santayana

It’s a prison! And a school! What could possibly be more American in the age of “colorblindness,” privatization and austerity?

Looking like a gigantic set of stacked animal cages and set off  by a dry moat (a new urban iteration of the “ha ha wall”), the so-called (and coyly named)  “PriSchool” is perhaps the most obviously (perhaps unintentionally)  grotesque example of the kind of proposed criminal legal system “reform” being advanced these days. One need not question Glen Santayana’s presumably good intentions in order to challenge the design, and assumptions on which it appears to be based.

Maybe the “stacked animal cages” look isn’t entirely coincidental. The “school” part of the design is twofold: vocational skills – carpentry, cooking, mechanics, beautyshop/barbering, etc. – will be taught to prisoners who, in turn, may obtain a GED and will be studied by “interact with” non-inmate students  pursuing knowledge at the PriSchool’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. In time, former prisoners may be hired as snitches consultants to criminal investigations.

A Behemoth That Ignores the History and Structural Violence of Mass Incarceration

The PriSchool doesn’t actually exist yet, but business and architectural media have been (uncritically) reprinting information about it since January, 2014, when the Harvard Graduate School of Design thesis of Glen J. Santayana, submitted a year earlier, went public. More recently, a Truman scholar waxed enthusiastic about it.

This is how it’s been going lately:  reforms keep being offered that serve some interests, but utterly fail to address any of the actual (and very unpleasant structural) roots of the rise of prisons and explosive growth of the prison industrial complex – growth that is now centered in immigrant detention and the creation of expanded markets in privatized “community corrections.”  However, they do meet the general criteria for unfettered (and unaccountable) free market reforms touted by the Texas Policy Foundation,Right on Crime, and others – problematic proposals too often uncritically embraced by libertarians, liberals, and progressives.

The “Prischool” design/proposal, like many other reform models that promote expanded privatization schemes, is flawed in these essential ways:

• It fails to challenge or even address structural racism that fuels mass incarceration; the racism that has always ensured the disproportionate incarceration of people of color and the growth of the prison system.

• It also fails to challenge or acknowledge the intersections of gender violence, the criminalization of queers, the class-based nature of mass incarceration, the disproportionate incarceration of people with cognitive disabilities, the prevalence of sexual assault, and the psychological and physical dehumanization and violence endemic to the U.S. criminal legal and prison systems.

• It cheerfully builds on a very disturbing history of  prison “reforms” promoted as creating more humane prisons and rehabilitative opportunities – often through architectural innovation – while failing to acknowledge the massive, and almost universal, failure of these reforms.

• It fails to question why “nonviolent drug offenders” should be in any sort of prison at all, but rather channels them into a (presumably privatized, profit-producing) prison hybrid.

• Rather than encouraging investment of more public resources in a good, public education, especially in poor/predominately people of color communities, PriSchool offers a new, prison-connected “solution.”

• Though it promises to slow recidivism to a trickle, PriSchool will obviously depend upon a continual, significant “inflow” of prisoners who will continue to serve as objects of study for students in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

• Promising to turn prisoners (“consumers” who drain public resources) into “producers,” PriSchool emphasizes a free market approach to “addressing the outflow of prisoners.” (Close your eyes for a minute and you can almost hear echoes in your mind of that secret tape made during Romney’s infamous 2012 discourse on “givers and takers” in American society.)

• It strengthens, rather than dismantles, the school to prison pipeline.

For the sake of his thesis, Santayana posits the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in New York City as the location for his prototype.  Why?  In various areas, state prison spending tops $1 million to incarcerate people that come from a single U.S. census block; Brownsville is one of them.

At first glance, the rationale seems sound:  what’s  not to love about a prison-school hybrid that proposes to educate prisoners and constructively connect them to their communities rather than separate them from it?

The devil, as always, is in the details – not simply the noble promises and ideas used to promote various reforms, but in how they actually materialize over time.

If you don’t know the history of the rise and expansion of the U.S. prison system, community corrections, and the profit-centered prison industrial complex, it’s easy to embrace the glittering promises of reform.  But even the briefest glance at the results of other significant criminal legal system/prison reforms – many of them well-intentioned – proves chillingly instructive.

Let’s take a very quick look at just a few of them.  Then let’s look at ways in which PriSchool is a travesty that can only intensify, rather than dismantle, the harms it promises to address.  And it does that by dressing up old dilemmas in new design garb.  The end result: the root problems of mass incarceration will be disguised, and as they are disguised, they are functionally denied.

“Reform”

Most criminal legal system/prison reforms simply accept prevailing racial, gender, class, and other social/economic hierarchies without naming and confronting them directly.  They pretend that by addressing a symptom of the structural violence – the unjust, ineffective, corrupt, and racially biased “war on drugs,” for example – the deeper problem (structural racism) need not be acknowledged or addressed.  Reforms often tinker with policy and program without working openly to dismantle structural inequalities and systemic forms of brutality.  This ensures they will offer little more than cosmetic morphing of the same old violence and injustice into new forms.

Structural/Design Reforms

In fact, the creation of prisons in what is now the United States was considered a humane and liberal reform, intended to replace brutal forms of corporal (and capital) punishment as well as to end the chaos and mayhem of colonial jails.  They were among the first truly “public” structures to be established.  Designed to correct the alleged “moral defects” of those convicted of crime and return prisoners safely and productively to their communities, the two earliest systems focused on creation of environments considered conducive to repentance (hence the name “penitentiary), largely through use of solitary confinement and some sort of rehabilitative endeavor (moral and labor-based).

Championed by religious reformers – especially Quakers and Episcopalians – the Pennsylvania System, showcased by the Walnut Street Prison (built as a jail in 1773, but turned into the state’s holy prison experiment in 1776) and Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) promoted almost total individual isolation in the belief that this would encourage prayer and repentance.  When prisoners were moved, hoods were placed over their heads.  They were known only by numbers, never by name. Work – primarily crafts such as making furniture, sewing, dying fabrics, and making shoes – was done alone in individual cells.  The isolation alone drove many of them mad, and even minor infractions, such as talking, meant such punishments as being sewn into straightjackets, gagged with an iron mask, or taken into a cold courtyard and doused with buckets of icy water.

“I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.” – Charles Dickens, 1842, on the inhumanity of what he experienced during his visit to Eastern State Penitentiary

 

New York’s Auburn System also enforced rules dictating no direct verbal contact by prisoners during the day, but reserved total isolation to the nighttime.  Hard labor was the central feature; prisoners worked silently, in close proximity, to produce products sold by the state.  Many of them went mad, too, engaged in self-cutting, and attempted suicide.

But we know better now, right?

Wrong.  In 1972, new systemic iterations of extended solitary confinement were in use in prisons in Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.  These new “control units” kept prisoners in complete isolation, permitting only an hour for exercise daily or every other day.  By the mid-1980s, about half a dozen such units were known to exist within a larger prison; they were known variously as management control units, departmental disciplinary units, administrative segregation, secured housing units, and similar terms.  By 1997, according to the American Friends Service Committee (pdf), 45 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal prison system, were operating control units, and the same decade saw the explosive rise of the supermax prison (super-maximum security) prison “designed for the universal and permanent isolation of all their inhabitants.”

Whether it’s in a supermax prison or some form of control unit, extended solitary confinement is torture.   Solitary Watch (pdf) estimates that, on a given day, at least 80,000 prisoners are in such extended isolation.

Now, reform is being driven by a desire to cut the state costs of incarceration – not to reduce structural violence – and the push is on to create whole new forms of “community corrections” run by private corporations and nonprofit groups exempt from non-discrimination statutes.

What could possibly go wrong?

Prison Labor and “Rehabilitation”

The idea of work as rehabilitative morphed quickly into convict leasing programs, particularly popular as, in the period following the abolition of slavery, black prison populations skyrocketed.  And while convict leasing was eventually prohibited (reform!), prison labor remains quite profitable for private industry, with the federal government complicit in facilitating this exploitation.

Sentencing Reform

In the mid-1970s, a reform effort to deal with the problems, injustices, and abuses of indeterminate sentencing gained momentum.  Either parole board or judicial determination, always informed by the views of correctional officials, established exactly when a prisoner might be released within a broad minimum/maximum sentence spectrum.  Racial and other forms of discrimination played a significant role in this discretionary determination.  The reform answer?  Certain sentences.

The result?  The rapid proliferation of “truth in sentencing” laws, mandatory minimums, and three-strike laws, all of which became new drivers of race-based mass incarceration.

Apart from racial disparities in sentencing, the closely related problem of race-based policing and profiling remains unaddressed.

Prisons as Schools/Schools as Prisons

The “PriSchool” proposal proceeds on several faulty premises with regard to education and prisons, and claims to harken back to some mythical  happy days when “rehabilitation” was a goal of prisons. Rather than asking the obvious question – why are non-violent offenders in prison at all? , this project presumes, for example, that a vocational education in “trades” will ensure employment upon release, and  stymie recidivism. This great leap fails to take into account the fact myriad collateral consequences of a felony conviction, especially for those convicted of non-violent drug felonies. These include:

• voter disenfranchisement
• denial of Federal welfare, medical, housing or educational benefits,including permanent bars from receiving public assistance such as TANF, Medicaid, food stamps or SSI, federal financial aid for education, and federal housing assistance for drug felons
• accelerated time-lines for loss of parental rights and
• direct and indirect exclusion from any number of employment opportunities, even in states that have Ban the Box.

Please note too that the proposed School of Criminology and Criminal Justice is for “enrolled” students not inmates.  College classes are not for the prisoners, even though any real effort at re-introducing actual education into a prison setting would surely argue for the restoration of access to Pell Grants, which was ended under Bill Clinton’s watch in 1994. Somehow adult inmates, will by osmosis gain “intellectual capacities, a sense of confidence and dignity” by the mere presence of college students. All while they are studying auto mechanics and wood-working.  And what will the enrolled students gain? There is no clear exposition of the curriculum here, but the entire endeavor suggests that students in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice will be studying prisoners – literally captive subjects evocative of earlier eras when prisoners were regularly viewed as a pool of lab rats – “acres of skin”.

Beyond this, the claim that “education is a deterrent to incarceration” has the most meaning before incarceration rather than as a re-entry strategy post-imprisonment. Lack of meaningful educational opportunities in under-resourced hyper-segregated schools plays a role in the pursuit of illegal options. Perhaps most significantly, the “PriSchool” Project ignores the extent to which many schools have already become prisons and are, in fact, designed now to both socialize and facilitate the flow of bodies in the prison industrial complex via the school to prison pipeline. School is Prison – now Prison is School; it is an insidious self-reinforcing web here.  The existence of prison-like schools and a pipeline that funnels a subset of children towards actual prison is never called into question. Rather than focusing on ending this pipeline and choosing education not incarceration, the approach of “PriSchool” Project legitimates, normalizes and reifies the notion of the school to prison pipeline by further blurring the distinction between the two.

So Then…

Are we against any and all reforms because they’re not perfect?  No.  For example, we’d love to restore Pell Grants to people who are incarcerated so they can take college courses.  The eligibility of prisoners for those grants vanished, thanks to a “bipartisan” effort (with the support of President Bill Clinton and Congressman Jesse Helms) to enact the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act.

But we are dedicated to questioning so-called reforms that can so easily morph into new versions of a prison industrial complex that is at home (and structurally racist) in “community corrections” as it is in the constructions and servicing of prisons.  We don’t support reforms that evidence a complete ignorance of the complex histories of structural violence that have produced mass incarceration. We don’t support reforms that fall to question the presumed “necessity” of mass imprisonment or the notion that flawed systems can be “fixed” even as reforms generate more prisoners and more profit.

And neither should you.

• Faith, Profit and Prisons
• Confidence Men & “Prison Reform”
• Con Artists, Profit and Community Corrections
• Smoke and Mirrors?
• The Promise/Peril of This Moment
• Conservative Criminal Justice Reform, A Look Through the Distorted Fun House Mirror
• Liberals Take the Bait and Switch ~ the Myth of “Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform”
  

  

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