Oh, hello there. This is the story of how
people created prisons because they thought
they were good but then it turned out they
were actually bad.
In the olden days prisons were just a place
to put people whilst you were deciding how
to punish them. They were only used occasionally
as a punishment for people who couldn’t
pay fines. Punishment for more serious crimes
was always enacted on the body and was largely
a theatrical display of the sovereign's or
state’s power over its subjects.
America inherited this justice system from
the British and kept it for about a century
after Europe got all into prison reform. Old
prisons were dirty and cramped and often criticised
for being disease ridden and chaotic, and
for the prisoners having easy access to alcohol
and prostitutes. Sometimes as a prisoner you
were free to just go in and out of prison
as you wanted to, and you could eat and drink
what you felt like, providing you could afford
it.
Americans started to get into reforming their
smelly old prisons around the turn of the
19th century. They were quite a way behind,
as Europe had already rolled out their prison
reforms to the colonies in the second half
of the 18th century. Prisons as we know them
today were created from reforms, and reform
has been the name of the game ever since.
The initial prison reforms were motivated
by a few strands of thought, so let's take
a look at some of those:
The enlightenment consisted of some wig men
having stupid ideas. One of these ideas was
seeing individuals (i.e other wig men) as
bearing inalienable rights. Before this it
was hard to see prison as a form of punishment.
Banishment beyond a town's limits would have
made sense, but imprisonment not so much.
Prisons punish you by putting restrictions
on your rights, and that's not really a punishment
when you don’t think of things in terms
of rights.
The old justice system was a bit of a mess
of irrational rituals. There was little consistency
in punishments, and the condemned could be
freed as they stood on the gallows if the
crowd protested loudly enough. The wig men
really loved rationality, so couldn’t really
stand for this nonsense. Instead they sought
to give consistent punishments, aiming to
impose order, classification, cleanliness,
good work habits, and self-consciousness.
This played into the creation and maintenance
of a large orderly urban labour force, seeking
to regulate all people rather than just punish
particularly egregious transgressors.
You can see this regulation in the way prison
sentences came to be calculated in time in
an era where there was a move to the value
of labour being calculated in time and compensated
in money. The new prison system was an important
step in the transferral of power from the
old justice of the aristocracy to the new
justice of the bourgeoisie.
Equally, the new prisons were muchly inspired
by religious ideas of rehabilitation through
solitary self reflection and labour. Whilst
solitary confinement is now thought of as
one of the worst punishments possible, then
it was often considered to have an emancipatory
effect. Through this influence the prison
system became a mix of penitence and punishment,
an attempt to reshape habits and souls.
The first state penitentiary was built in
Pennsylvania in 1790, when part of Walnut
Street Jail was converted. It was built as
a series of single cells where prisoners lived,
ate, worked, read the bible (if they were
literate), and were supposed to reflect and
repent. Most prisons later kept a similar
design but made labour comunal, though still
conducted in silence.
The architecture of the modern prison took
a lot from the structure of monasteries, with
their single cells and focus on silent reflection.
The first panopticon was built in The Western
State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh in 1826.
That fact doesn’t really fit, but I just
thought it was interesting. A panopticon is
a crazy kind of prison where a single guard
can potentially observe any of the prisoners
at any time but they can’t know when, cos
of mirrors and stuff.
Me: I’m going to ask that blob over there
about what it was like down south.
Hello blob creature, could you tell me about
the Black Codes.
Blob Creature: Most certainly. After the abolition
of slavery the south was quick to introduce
the Black Codes which criminalised things
like vagrancy, absence form work, breach of
job contracts, possession of fire arms, and
insulting gestures and acts. But, only for
black people.
Equally, after emancipation many black people
were forced to steal in order to eat. It was
at this time that petty theft was made a felony,
condemning significantly more black people
to prison. These charges of theft were frequently
fabricated. “After emancipation the courtroom
became an ideal place to exact racial retribution.”
(page 44).
Me: So the number of black convicts shot up?
Blob creature: Like crazy. Before the abolition
of slavery 99% of those in Alabama’s penitentiaries
were white. But with the Black Codes this
quickly shifted to being mostly black.
Whilst the penitentiaries of the north to
some extent mimicked the slave system, in
the south they were very much a literal continuation
with the development of the convict lease
system, where black prisoners were rented
as gangs to the plantation owners who would
have previously relied on slave labour.
The convict lease system was kinda a reincarnation
of slavery. Southern whites carried over from
slavery the thought that black people could
only work in gangs under constant threat from
the whip, and applied this to the black chain
gangs of the convict lease system, introducing
methods of intense surveillance and discipline
to the precursors of the prison system.
The conditions in the convict lease system
were often worse than those of slavery. Slave
owners were concerned with the health and
survival of their slaves, as they represented
a significant financial investment, but they
were often quite happy to work convicts to
death in pursuit of profit, as convicts were
leased as a group and a few deaths didn’t
affect profitability.
Here’s a sample of some records of Missisippi
plantations from the 1880s:
“The prisoners slept on the bare floor without
mattresses... Some who attempted to escape
were whipped “till the blood ran down their
legs”, others had a metal spur riveted to
their feet. Convicts dropped from exhaustion,
pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, consumption,
sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds, and
“shackle poisoning” (the constant rubbing
of chains and leg irons against bare flesh).
The convict lease system was an incredibly
efficient way of industrialising the South.
A lot of infrastructure, like Georgia’s
railroads, was laid by black convicts.
Towards the turn of the 20th century the convict
lease system was faded out, but it’s replacements
in the form of chain gangs and prison farms
weren’t much better.
Conditions in these farms were so bad that,
as late as the 1960s, an Oregon judge refused
to return escapees from Arkansas, who had
been apprehended in his jurisdiction, on the
grounds that the farms were just so bad. A
former warden described how men in the Georgia
camps were hung by their thumbs as punishment,
to the point that their thumbs became so stretched
and deformed, to the length of index fingers,
that they resembled the "paws of certain apes."
In the 60s these forms of punishment were
mostly abolished.
Through strict regimentation prison aimed
at the reform and transformation of the habits
and ethics of inmates. Well, this was the
case for men at least. Female criminals were
seen as fallen women who had transgressed
the fundamental moral principles of womanhood.
They couldn’t be redeemed through self-reflection
and labour, so they just had to be kept away
from the general population somewhere. Women
were often punished within the domestic domain,
as they were often not granted rights in the
public sphere, so their punishment was in
the same place as their role.
The 1800s saw campaigns for seperate women's
prisons pick up. People argued that fallen
women could be redeemed through learning domesticity.
They advocated for seperate women’s prisons
where cells were to be replaced by cottages
and rooms which would infuse domesticity into
women criminals. They also argued that a female
custodial staff would minimize sexual temptations,
which they believed were often at the root
of female criminality.
They seemed more worried about that then the
rampant rapes of female prisoners.
The first reformatory for women was established
in 1853 in London following such campaigns.
The US followed suit a little later.
After that women were often given longer sentences
than men for the same crimes since they were
not seen as being punished but being reformed
and retrained. Equally, the eugenics movement
had something to do with it, advocating for
women criminals being kept away from possibilities
to reproduce for as many child bearing years
as possible.
The imprisonment of women was racialised,
because that’s just what America likes to
do. Black and native american women were often
sent to men’s prisons, and black women continued
to be part of the convict lease system in
the South. Reformation and nice little cottage
cells were only really for white women.
From the 80s corporate ties to prisons really
started to get going.You know, they had to
keep up with the latest trends. With this
companies started reaping some major financial
benefits from having a larger prison population,
and thus got rather a lot of incentive to
keep the prison population big. But not to
get too carried away, the vast majority of
prisons are still public and they’re bad
also.
Equally, the media got kinda obsessed with
crime. From 1990 to 1998 the homicide rate
in America halved, but homicide stories on
the three major networks rose almost fourfold.
Super-maxes started when federal correctional
authorities began to send prisoners deemed
to be dangerous to the federal prison in Marion,
Illinois. In 1983 the entire prison was locked
down, with the prisoners confined to their
cells 23 hours a day. This lockdown was made
permanent and from there became the general
model for control units and supermax prisons.
By 2011 there were 80,000 inmates in supermaxes.
In Attica in 1971 there was a prison rebellion
(lots of shouting) . The
prisoners wanted a better diet, better guards,
more realistic rehabilitation programs, better
education programs, religious freedom, freedom
to engage in political activity, and an end
to censorship. In response the governor of
New York ordered in the National Guard who
killed forty three prisoners, and eleven guards
and civilians (gun shots). In the wake of
the massacre public opinion started to turn
in favour of reform. Many of the prisoners
were transferred to Greenhaven, which began
offering college level education in 1973,
and high quality prison education started
to pick up across the country after that.
However, from the 90s onwards these programs
started to be dismantled again, with moves
like the 1994 crime acts which removed Pell
Grants for prisoners, defunding all higher
education courses in prisons. Equally prison
publishing journals collapsed so that only
three remained by 2003. This seemed to be
something of an official recognition of the
shift in the stated function of prisons from
the rehabilitative aims of the early reformers
to prisons just being a place to store people
who aren’t deemed useful to society.
Going into the 20th century women were more
frequently locked up in psychiatric institutes
than prisons. Whilst deviant men were constructed
as criminals, deviant women were constructed
as insane.
The effects of this coming into the modern
day can be pretty horrifying, particularly
within the prison system. Here’s a snippet
from an interview with a native american woman
who was imprisoned in the Women's Correctional
Centre in Montana:
“Haldol is a drug they give people who can’t
cope with lockup. It makes you feel dead,
paralyzed. And then I started getting side
effects from Haldol. I wanted to fight anybody,
any of the officers. I was screaming at them
and telling them to get out of my face, so
the doctor said, “We can’t have that.”
And, they put me on Tranxene. I don’t take
pills; I never had trouble sleeping until
I got here. Now I’m supposed to see [the
counselor] again because of my dreams. If
you got a problem, they’re not going to
take care of it. They’re going to put you
on drugs so they can control you.”
The 80s saw a move away from women’s prisons
focusing on the idea that women could be rehabilitated
by assimilating correct womanly behaviors,
like cooking, cleaning, and sewing towards
more of a separate but equal kind of vibe.
State sanctioned sexual assault is almost
a given in America’s punishment of imprisoned
women, but that’s a topic for my next video.
100,000 black men were in prison, 6 times
the imprisonment rate per 100,000 people for
white men. With such imprisonment rates we’re
almost back at the ratio of black to white
prisoners that we had under the Black Codes.
Felons and some ex-felons are not allowed
to vote, and due to how imprisonment targets
certain portions of the population, this tends
to significantly reduce the voices of certain
demographics. In the national elections in
2012, the various state felony disenfranchisement
laws together blocked an estimated 5.85 million
felons from voting. This is more than enough
to swing an awful lot of elections, especially
as a number of pretty swingy states like Florida
have big prison populations, so it’s a population
which could have changed a few recent elections.
Whoo, end of video. Are you thinking that
prisons are bad and wondering what you could
have in place of them? Good. I’m going to
make some videos about that, so you could
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you’d like to see those. Also, whilst watching
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fixed it, but just to check could you please
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Thanks, bye.
