Setting:
Newport Daily Independent, Newport, Arkansas, January 16th, 1998. “It was a celebration for a new prison complex which brought Gov. Mike Huckabee to Newport Thursday. He said he had mixed emotions about the facility.”
MR. WHINEY
The history of prisons in the State of Arkansas is not pretty, and the history of women’s incarceration in the state is downright reprehensible—
MR. PROVE-IT
(Interrupting.)
—This better not be an attempt to enter back into abstraction, Mr. Whiny.
MR. WHINEY
(Continuing as if uninterrupted.)
—Demarking the space between abstraction and reality is your realm of expertise, Mr. Prove-it, but in this instance, it feels foolish to attempt to represent a facility like McPherson’s Unit divorced of its historical context.
MR. PROVE-IT
I get it. It’s possible that McPherson’s Unit is a better prison than the prisons before it, and still fail’s at being better than nothing.
MR. WHINEY
(Chuckling at MR. PROVE-IT’s stark skepticism.)
Indubitably. McPherson’s Unit, even upon its conception as an understaffed and criminally mismanaged private prison, was leaps and bounds ahead of the historical precedent of women’s incarceration in the State of Arkansas, from statehood until its construction.
MR. PROVE-IT
That’s a big claim for our readers to swallow.
Y’re tossing a helluva accusation out right from the start: “criminal mismanagement.” I love it.
MR. WHINEY
On the contrary… …I think criminal mismanagement is provable as a step up from what came before. It implies that the mismanagement was socially recognized as a crime instead of the legal methodology of handling women who fell outside of social gender conventions.
MR. PROVE-IT
Snap. I do believe they call what you are doing, “throwing shade.”
(It might feel frustrating to MR. WHINEY, but MR. PROVE-It loves the snarky sass that MR. WHINEY has brought to the table, or the tree, or the desk, to set the stage for a serious tear down of what has passed for criminal justice in the State of Arkansas. In a sense, his playfulness is intended as an invitation to the AUDIENCE. It might be time to get out your popcorn.)
But I think you better break it down if you want the weight of yr ideas to pack their punch in full. I can see now why you want to start from the beginning. Please, take it from the top.
MR. WHINEY
Arkansas entered the union of the United States in 1836.
This situated it as a developing state, developing its own criminal justice system on the heels of the great penal reform movements of the early 19th century. These reform movements saw the biggest shifts in criminal justice theory since the beginning of the European Enlightenment. America, being the new world-wide civics project, was a testing ground for social theories and institutions across disciplines, and two models of incarcerations were put into practice here for the first time that would go on to define debates about criminal justice for over a century: the Pennsylvania model and the Auburn model.
The Pennsylvania model, predictably enough, was named after the state that first put it into practice, specifically referencing the carceral model adopted at the Eastern State Penitentiary on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and then shortly after at Western State Penitentiary outside of Pittsburgh. This model of incarceration reflected strong Quaker principles of silent isolated reflection—separating the criminal from the social factors that enabled his…
(MR. WHINEY stops himself mid-sentence as he realizes his use of a gendered pronoun was not unintentional, but a symptom of a larger problem with the theoretical history of incarceration.)
…early prison models all assumed a default male gender of their prisoners. Because sexism yes, but sexism at roots much deeper and more blatant than linguistics or ignorance.
The disciplining of women was a patriarchal duty expected of men: The man was to keep his daughters in line until they were married off and then became the responsibility of their husbands. This is far too significant a factor in the history of women’s incarceration to stash away in a digressive tangent. Hmm…I know that we need to talk about this in much greater detail, but perhaps not in the middle of our previous conversation about prison models that impacted incarceration in the State of Arkansas. Should We—
MR. PROVE-IT
(interrupting.)
—Hold up there, Mr. Whiny! I say this is a damn fine time to discuss the utter lack of thought that went into women’s incarceration in the theoretical construction of how prisons came to be in the United States!
After all, if we waste our audience’s time, explaining both models, and then come to the realization that neither model ever considered women as people, or citizens, who will be incarcerated…well, wouldn’t that make us guilty of suggesting that these “good-ol’-boy” theories are more important to the history than the existence of women as people? That’s some grade-A bullshit for “trying to set a record straight.” What better evidence can we offer for why women’s prisons have historically failed to be anything but disasters of abuse, violence, and “mismanagement?”
MR. WHINEY
Wow, Mr. Prove-it. Touché.
I think you just concisely defined why that should have been our first historical consideration…
(MR. WHINEY pauses a beat to consider again all that MR. PROVE-IT had to say.)
…Now that it is stated, I can think of little more to say…
…except, maybe, we should add that the bondage and incarceration of women was institutionally in practice during the Enlightenment, it was just not a practice of criminal justice. It was practiced through the asylum as medical and moral treatment, because if men were failing in their patriarchal duties to control the women in their lives, they had to construct a physiological reason they could blame women for it. If we center gender in the history of incarceration, it is very clear that the institutional practice of restricting women’s freedoms has been about codifying their status as property. It has occurred at such a fundamental level that it long predates the institution of prison. With a bunch of white men sitting around in ivory towers, it seems an inevitable consequence of patriarchy that women’s incarceration, as a criminal justice issue, would be deliberately hidden for so long.
MR. PROVE-IT
Well, I think that is a pretty important comment to add.
I agree with you that, in a list of institutions designed to control women, the prison is a relatively new one, but you are coming up short on the importance of race in yr story. Women’s incarceration was a carefully crafted and vital part of the slave trade. It specialized in turning black women into raw sexual objects, breeding animals, physical laborers, domestic laborers, and the cohesive glue that held communities of slaves together.
The incarceration of women is bigger than criminal justice and we can’t back away from that. To do so would be letting mainstream white-feminism off the hook for ignoring the messy conversation of women behind bars, AND letting social justice movements off the hook for playing along in a reform game for a criminal justice system designed around the assumption that prisoner’s rights were only ever going to be an issue of what rights white male prisoners deserve.
MR. WHINEY
Look at you Mr. Prove-it, using intersectionality to take both me, and the historical models of prison to task.
Congratulations, sir! And your points are well received:
It is important to consider the realities of women’s incarceration in the United States because the reality of women’s incarceration was not a reality that was ever considered in the theoretical or physical construction of women’s prisons.
Historically this is easily proven, but it is also present in the architectural construction of the Larger McPherson/Grimes complex. The company designing this facility created a mirror model in which two identical facilities were built directly across from each other. One, Grimes Unit, for men, and the other, McPherson’s Unit, for women. It was assumed that, if kept separate, all other aspects of incarceration would be kept equal for both the women and the men—
MR. PROVE-IT
(Interrupting.)
—That “separate but equal” mentality sure is a fuck job isn’t it.
MR. WHINEY
Mhhmm…
(MR. WHINEY has a dissertation he thinks he could probably write about MR. PROVE-IT’s interjection, but decides instead to ignore it.)
…Even if one day humanity finds a method of incarcerating women and men in prison-like conditions that are equally just and effective, it must be considered that that model will not be based off a historical model that only ever considered the needs of incarcerating men.
MR. PROVE-IT
Ok, that is all true.
But you are continuing to ignore the role that race has played in the history of incarceration in the United States and in Arkansas specifically.
MR. WHINEY
Not by intention, and we can change that right now.
Both the Pennsylvania model and the Auburn model were developed at a time when the vast majority of people serving time in state penitentiaries were considered white. This was not necessarily because of an increased criminality of white people, but because very few people that were not identified as white were given the benefits of full citizenship into the United States of America.
Most indigenous people were treated as foreign combatants who were not even subject to the protections guaranteed by the treaties that were signed in their name. White settlers violated the terms of treaties, often with little more than a slap on the wrist, and sometimes in the employment of prominent territorial governors and plantation owners. Indigenous efforts to defend or retaliate against these aggressions were paraded through Colonial to Revolutionary to Jacksonian America as savage massacres that called for overwhelming retaliation. Even the slightest hint of criminal behavior in an ingenious person, group or nation became justification for the forced deportation and slaughter of entire populations. Many of the forts built throughout the territory of Arkansas were designed to serve as concentration camps to control the forced movement of indigenous people through the territory.
Thus, even though Newport, as a city, remained unincorporated at the time of either the Choctaw relocation, which was occurring twenty miles to its northwest through Batesville Arkansas, or at the time of the Creek and Chickasaw removal through the old Memphis to Little Rock military road to its south, the legacy of the Trail of Tears painted the relationship between the white American settlements of Arkansas and the various nations of indigenous peoples that predated those settlements. S0, while the fledgling state was heavily involved in the incarceration and deportation of indigenous peoples throughout Arkansas, it was never for the purpose of serving Justice.
MR. PROVE-IT
And of course, there is the incarceration of slavery.
MR. WHINEY
Yes, it is impossible to talk about slavery and not talk about the incarceration of human beings.
Arkansas was established as a slave state at a time in US history when the institution of slavery was the defining artifact of southern economic and cultural identity (Not just the southern economy, the whole world economy, but no one else but the south was willing to acknowledge it). If the South imagined itself to be a descendent of the European Aristocracy, it was because the plantation filled the role of the fiefdom or noble estate. Slavery was the serfdom that enabled it. After legal ownership, physical bondage is the next most defining condition of slavery, and the ways in which African and indigenous slaves were held in bondage could not be considered anything less than incarceration, even if its horrors might far exceed what the word has come to mean today.
MR. PROVE-IT
In other words, you are saying that forcibly holding folks against their will, in conditions designed to make them question their own humanity, was A part of slavery, but only ONE part of its inhumane practice?
MR. WHINEY
Exactly. How much the practice of slavery impacted models of penal incarceration is debatable up until the time of the American Civil War. After all, judicial prisons were for citizens with certain rights protected by the Constitution, not for slaves. That all changed with Emancipation—
MR. PROVE-IT
(Interrupting.)
—Just like how men, within patriarchy, were supposed to be able to keep their women in line, slave owners were expected to take responsibility for the discipline and punishment of their slaves—
MR. WHINEY
(Interrupting back.)
—Expectations that the white men of a community were going to take personal responsibility for the discipline of everyone except themselves within their communities extended past the Civil War into Reconstruction and beyond the turn of the century in the form of the KKK and organized lynching. Criminal justice in the South has only a limited and recent history of belonging within the confines of governmental authority.
MR. PROVE-IT
(MR. PROVE-IT pauses for a beat to consider all of the ideas that the investigation has put forward together.)
It’s funny…
(MR. PROVE-IT says ‘funny’ like doesn’t mean funny.)
…we started off talking about the role of prisons in the history of capital-J “Justice,” and how it feels like folks have this idea that prisons have been THE institution of social order for forever. But when we look at American history, and especially the history of “Justice” in the South, the prison over time has had only a nominal role in serving justice, and a much bigger role in preserving economic and racial order.
MR. WHINEY
Which is why discussions about the relatively recent rise of rates of incarceration in America, starting in the mid-1970s onward, can be so misleading.
The expectation that prisons were going to serve as a deterrent to criminal behavior, instead of clandestine, and often racially motivated, mass violence, is also a relatively recent social phenomenon.
MR. PROVE-IT
(Attempting a more enlightened tone.)
You know, its starting to sound like we’re arguing that—compared to history—prisons might not be the most terrible means of enforcing justice.
MR. WHINEY
Well…certainly the people who have advocated for them throughout history would agree with that position.
It may come as a surprise to learn, but prison reformers have been considered radical philanthropists and humanitarians at the time they were advocating for their ideas.
For example, both the Pennsylvania system and the Auburn system…
(Mr. WHINEY realizes that this is the third time that he has mentioned the Auburn system and he has still never explained it. He pauses for a moment to consider laying it out now, but decides to hold off, hoping that, eventually, MR. PROVE-IT will notice the absence and bring it up himself.)
…well, early models of incarceration, were designed specifically to accommodate the needs of white male citizens, and what institutions of corrective oversight would push them back into the mold of a model citizen, which of course was white and male. It should be pointed out though, that it was a pretty radical idea at the time that criminality was not an innate trait and that it could be addressed through corrective actions at all.
MR. PROVE-IT
Ah, come on, it couldn’t have been that radical.
Isn’t Christianity a religion based upon the concept of forgiveness? Civilizations around the world have had legal codes that allow for guilty parties to make amends for their crimes and continue to function as productive members of society. The idea of a criminal justice system based upon reforming criminals ain’t no American invention.
MR. WHINEY
Fair enough, but prior to the Pennsylvania model, judicial incarceration was either an act of holding criminals until they faced judgment and punishment—basically the role of jails today—or else they were workhouses, galley ships, or places where prisoners were to economically work off their debts to society.
While that concept of economic restitution is still present in many of today’s prisons, and was enshrined, in part, in the Auburn system…
(MR. WHINEY smiles as he finds a reason to attempt to explain the Auburn system that feels natural and not forced.)
…the two American models were the first to institutionalize and architecturally situate the reformation of a prisoner’s soul into policy and stone.
MR. PROVE-IT
Maybe now that we’ve talked the shit out of the historical failings of prison theory to address issues of gender and race, it is time to finally layout those Pennsylvania and Auburn models for our audience?
(MR. WHINEY smiles and lets out a laugh.)
—Wait, what is so funny?
MR. WHINEY
(Mr. WHINEY’s ignores MR. PROVE-IT’s question, leaving the answer as unspoken joke shared only with the AUDIENCE.)
Well…actually I think you are speaking in hyperbole if you claim that this brief and unsubstantiated conversation about the historical failings of prison theory is “talking the shit” out of the issue.
But you might be correct that we may have given as much insight as our amateur and fragmented perspectives will allow. Our culture’s continued insistence that models of social order that are rooted in the oppression of specific groups can be easily universalized and “solved” with equity and justice for all is one of the fundamental aspects of our problem. Especially when those answers revolve around deciding there is nothing that can be done about them and we should just go along with how they have been done before.
MR. PROVE-IT
I can’t argue with that, but we keep name dropping something we haven’t explained.
I bet our editorial self is gonna make us present some kinda concise and organized version of these two models much earlier in this investigation, or stick them in an appendix or some shit, despite the fact that we’ve given clear reasons why we’ve refused to do so thus far. You know what, fuck that! Fuck you…editor voice…that insists on remaining invisible and changing things without anyone’s knowledge! We are not going to explain those systems here at all.
(MR. WHINEY’s previous plan to sneak in his explain the Auburn system has come crashing down around him. MR. PROVE-IT has made the issue personal and MR. WHINEY knows he will look like a pawn of the man if he tries to make a case now…But just to be sure…)
MR. WHINEY
We are not?