Setting:
The curtain has closed but the voices continue.
MR. WHINEY
When I review the case of Christina Riggs, the only truth that leaps out at me from the complexity of her life and situation is that the greatest crime a woman can commit in the state of Arkansas is to be responsible for the death of her children.
Her family, the extended victims of her crime, never pushed for the death penalty. And, with her children dead, she never posed a future threat to anyone except herself. To what end could anyone have felt that the death penalty was the most fitting crime for a woman like Christina?
MR. PROVE-IT
I don’t know, and I don’t disagree with yr skepticism about the necessity of the death penalty for any social or preventative purpose.
But given that it’s what she wanted, I can’t help but think that in a sick sense, this outcome was probably more humane to her than forcing her to live out a life in prison or make her try to find some other way to get herself killed behind bars. A God-fearing Christian concerned for Christina’s mortal soul might claim that her case worked out just the way God wanted it to. After all, suicide is a mortal sin in Christianity. A repentant mother put to death just might have a shot at an afterlife with the children she thought she was saving from future torments.
In a very sick, very southern, brutally Evangelical sense, there is an inescapable logic to putting Christina Riggs to death isn’t there? I mean, I can hardly think of a more appropriate plot for a Faulkner-styled southern Gothic tale.
MR. WHINEY
I can’t believe you would suggest such a thing Mr. PROVE-IT. You, of all of us, should be sensitive to the fact that Christina Riggs was a real person, not a tragic literary heroine.
She was suffering from chronic and intense depression and, by her own account, post-traumatic stress disorder. She needed help, and she needed it long before she took the lives of her children. It is disgusting to suggest that it was anything but grotesque negligence on the part of the state for shaping a collective narrative out of her life.
Christina Riggs cannot be made into a representative metaphor for the consequences of failing in some sacred duty of motherhood. It is despicable for us as investigators to try to sit here and make judgements of Christina or the social circumstances that led her to commit her horrendous crime. Whether society wants to declare that this was the vilest crime imaginable, or a tragedy of social failing, her execution accomplished nothing but reinforcing that the consequences of failure as women to fulfill the roles of wife or mother in a patriarchal world will be death.
MR. PROVE-IT
Why don’t you tell us how you really feel, MR. WHINEY?
MR. WHINEY
I think I just did.
We set out on this investigation hoping to look deeper into a real brick and mortar building—to dig into its mysteries and make visible the nearly impossible task of enforcing a system of criminal justice in a world where social justice is sorely lacking. It should hardly be surprising to anyone that we were destined to fail long before we ran into official obstruction.
We set out believing that with observational transparency and an identity fractured to allow us the luxury of openly questioning our own assumptions, we were going to be entering this project free of bias and capable of focusing on issues that need to be approached without depending upon institutionalized political positioning. We wanted to avoid the kinds of formal structures of research and reporting that create either/or models of knowledge-making, that look at every new issue as one with an easy answer just waiting for a white man to solve it.
Arkansas built a prison at 302 Corrections Drive in response to decades of corruption, neglect and deliberate injustice that has been directed at an intersectional class of human beings, “women prisoners.” A group that has experienced some of the most awful conditions imaginable. Certainly, looking deeply into the past of the incarceration of women—in the world—in America—in Arkansas—it is difficult to claim that McPherson’s Unit is not leaps and bounds better than what came before it.
And yet…the gross and violent aspects of incarcerating women continue to manifest regardless of legal reform and public outcry. Sexual violence, negligent health care, undertrained guards making poor decisions in the face of exigent pressures, are all consequences of our society’s conceptual approach to justice as much as to our attempts at its practical application.
MR. PROVE-IT
The more we expect our prisons to do, the greater the risk that our expectations will clash irreconcilably.
MR. WHINEY
Yes, Mr. Prove-it, that is remarkably concise.
How can any one institution simultaneously hope to:
– Punish all the bad people;
– Correct immoral and anti-social behavior;
– Isolate violent predators from those they would seek to harm;
– House the homeless;
– Provide mental health care and facilitate substance abuse recovery;
– Enforce the social boundaries and expectations of sex, race, class, gender, and sexuality;
– And provide a counterbalance through which the rest of us define the scope of our freedoms?
Maybe the real question about what purpose we hope our prisons can serve should be redirected. Maybe the real question is: what services have we allowed ourselves to assume can only be provided by the most brutal and authoritarian institutions of the state? And how can we do a better job of meeting the needs of a pluralistic society by abandoning systems of justice designed to oppress marginalized people and work towards adopting systems of justice that focus on restoring both the personal and the community-based needs of all of us?
MR. PROVE-IT
Maybe we should stop trying so hard to justify our need for prisons like McPherson’s Unit, and start looking for ways we could live together without them?