I couldn’t get these statistics out of my mind. And when I moved back to New York to take a job as an English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a branch of CUNY where the bulk of the students are preparing for careers in law, social services, and other justice fields—and where I’d be teaching interdisciplinary courses about race, crime, and culture—the philosophical questions that consumed me now made their way into my classroom.
At the same time, letters from prison were making their way into my office. Penned by people who read my articles or saw my films, the letters were lengthy and handwritten: lives on paper, unasked-for confessions, intricate handmade cards. One of them came from the president of Latino en Progresso, a prisoner-run organization at Shawangunk Correctional Facility, and contained an invitation to be the speaker at their annual luncheon. I accepted.
I’d been in a prison visiting room before, but it was my first time visiting a prison as a volunteer, engaging in serious intellectual work with human beings living behind bars. I gave a talk about the social construction of race, reading excerpts from James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and others. Then I put my notes down and opened the floor to dialogue. Questions came at me with full force, a barrage of thoughtful critiques informed by learned references. The hours flew by, and too quickly it was time for the men to return to their cells and for me to exit the prison gates to freedom.
When I made that exit into the frosty air of upstate New York, a heavy burden weighed down my heart. I wasn’t surprised that some of America’s best and brightest were behind its bars. But for the first time, I felt irrevocably pained by this reality. I am not naive; I know that many of these men in green uniforms committed awful acts. But still I saw among them vast possibility, a collection of potentially great contributors to society. Why would we allow our greatest resource, our own brilliant citizens, to languish away in prison cells?
Around the same time, I was regularly trekking up to another facility to visit a friend spending his entire twenties in prison. He was practicing Judaism there, and I devoted many an hour to convincing prison officials that yes, prayer shawls are on the “permitted items” list. Visiting rooms became added to the list of things about prison around which I could not wrap my brain. That ugly barbed-wire-and-cinderblock structure, cruelly plunked in the midst of a Norman Rockwell-esque country landscape. The families mechanically lining up to show their IDs in exchange for time playing Scrabble with their fathers or husbands. The smell of the visiting room (ham sandwiches and nachos from the vending machines, heated up in a dated microwave); the sound of the visiting room (muffled echoes of change being deposited, sodas being cracked open); the surreal scene that is the prison visiting room: lockboxes of human emotion, thoroughly abnormal blends of the painfully public and the passionately private. I could not get over the bizarreness of the whole experience.
My initial curiosity, my instinct that something was very, very wrong with all of this, turned to gut certainty. I started to think, ferociously, about the institution of prison itself.
My students usually took it for granted. “Do the crime, do the time,” they’d say. Prison is just a normal consequence of wrongdoing, like losing your voice if you yell too often. But actually prisons are relatively new inventions. Technically they’ve been around for centuries, but until the nineteenth century they were short-term holding pens for those awaiting trial or people facing minor charges; incarceration was a path to justice as opposed to justice itself. Mass incarceration, meanwhile, is only as old as the 1970s.
During months in the John Jay library I continued the research I’d begun while working on the documentary years earlier. Every revelation left me shaking my head more vigorously. How had I known so little about the evolution of a vital social institution, about pre-prison-era approaches to justice?
Israelites, I discovered, had a beth ha-asourim (house of chains) for holding debtors and those awaiting trial. Ancient Greeks and Romans called it a carcer privitus; during the Middle Ages a carcer was the monastery’s room for delinquent clergy. The iconic jails erected in Europe—houses of correction in Amsterdam and Rome, Paris’s Bastille, London’s Bridewells—were primarily holding pens without distinctive prison architecture. Justice came in other packages, sometimes versions of the biblical eye-for-an-eye approach. In Athens, this meant confiscation of property, stoning, binding to a stake, consigning offenders to the gods via ritual cursing, or barred social interaction. Sub-Saharan Africa dealt with morality breakers by way of beatings, banishment, poison, or reparations of property, but the focus was on victims getting compensated, not offenders being punished. Among the Kikuyu in East Africa, for instance, nine sheep or goats was the price for committing adultery or rape, while one hundred sheep or ten cows was the cost of homicide. Banishment was a centuries-old justice vehicle. Many Africans exiled those who threatened the well-being of the whole community, like accused witches or habitual offenders. Europe made use of penal colonies across the globe. In colonial America, the stocks and the pillory were popular, as were the ducking stool and public whippings; all reflected a focus on public shaming as a form of justice, like the famous scarlet letter worn by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional Hester Prynne. China, until the third century, employed beatings and executions, while France, as late as the 1970s, subjected many of its criminals to the guillotine, which turned death into a well-oiled machine and executions into flamboyant spectacles.
During the late eighteenth century, things changed radically. Capitalism was born. Industrialization meant urbanization, which meant poverty and thus more crime. Thanks to the American Revolution, England lost a penal colony. Lawyers, writers, and freethinkers, filled with faith in humanity’s capacity for engineering change, envisioned a radically different form of punishment, one that was neater, more contained, more rational—more in line with the so-called Age of Reason. They used the language of hospital reform, also popular at the time, speaking of crime as a contagion that could be methodically, scientifically cured. In the 1750s British magistrate and novelist Henry Fielding proposed “correction of the mind” instead of the body, arguing that solitude and fasting would bring “the most abandoned profligates to reason and order.” In 1790 philosopher Jeremy Bentham submitted a vision of an efficient prison called the panopticon to the British parliament. He described a circular, tiered honeycomb of open cells placed around a tower through which residents are perpetually watched; such architecture would allow those running the prison to constantly monitor labor forces. As French philosopher Michel Foucault concludes in his landmark book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the world changed spectacularly when it was suddenly “civilized” for those who committed crimes to pay in time and isolation, not physical pain.
This thing we now call prison was very much a product of its era. Like capitalism’s temple, the industrial factory, it demanded a distinct architectural look; Bentham’s panopticon was in fact modeled after a factory his brother designed for Russia’s Catherine the Great. Like capitalism, the prison system hinged on regulation of the body and the strict ordering of time, which came in monetary-like increments, meted out to fit the crime.
Freshly independent, avidly capitalist, and eager to prove itself more progressive than its former colonizer, America keenly lapped up such radical European ideas. And a grand irony was born. The birth of democracy was intricately bound up with the birth of the prison—freedom and the lack thereof in paradoxical union, in the new United States. Thomas Jefferson himself made some of the earliest prison drawings.
On our shores, theory was fast put into practice. During the 1820s the modern prison was truly born, as two competing American models opened their doors. Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia brought Bentham’s panopticon to life and employed a “separate system,” which meant prisoners were in perpetual solitary confinement. In New York’s Auburn Prison, the “silent system” was used. Laboring in factorylike settings, prisoners were whipped if they spoke, just like
slaves. Here was another vile irony. Prison slavery was thriving just as the North was fighting to end slavery in the South. After all, the Thirteenth Amendment does not outlaw slavery, but rather makes it illegal except as a punishment for crime.
Having perfected its prison model, America exported it. Nineteenth-century European scholars made prison tours a vital stop on their visits across the pond. Fredrick William IV of Prussia was one of these prison tourists, followed by rulers of Saxony, Russia, and the Netherlands, and commissioners from France, Austria, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden. Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens were the most vocal visitors to US prisons, broadcasting the horror of what they saw there. Dickens called the American prisoner “a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.”
And so prisons weaved their way into the fabric of global culture, throughout Europe and, via its colonies, around the world, from Spain to Colombia, China to Japan and India—all imitating the American model. Which brings us to the modern era, easily encapsulated by two words: mass incarceration. Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. How this dramatic shift happened is no great mystery; sociologists trace it back to the 1970s and the war on drugs. In 1980, nineteen of every thousand people arrested for drugs were sent to prison; by 1992, 104 of them were. Criminologist Todd Clear sums up the three trends that produced and sustained prison growth during the 1980s: reduction in the use of nonprison sentencing alternatives, increase in sentence length, and increase in the rate of return to prison for those under community supervision. Growth came in three phases. Phase one involved sending more people to prison; phase two, increasing the length of time they stayed there; phase three, ensuring that they served their full time via what’s known as truth-in-sentencing legislation. Age, gender, race, and place, Clear explains, were critical factors. The “war on drugs” criminalized drugs associated with poor minority communities, specifically young black men in devastated neighborhoods, far more than it did “white” drugs, such as cocaine. Thus this “war” was less an attack on substances than a violent assault on racial progress made during the civil rights era, and an effective way to divert the public’s attention from growing income inequality. Between 1979 and 1996, after all, 95 percent of wealth went to the richest 5 percent.
Trekking through prison history was a sobering expedition, leaving me feeling as if I’d encountered some insidious, and very expensive, worldwide plot. The United States spends more than $50 billion on corrections. In the past two decades, money spent on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education; it costs $88,000 per year to incarcerate a young person—more than eight times the $10,653 to educate her. States spend upward of a million dollars each year incarcerating the residents of certain city blocks, dubbed “million-dollar blocks.” Ultimately, money spent on the correctional system exceeds the gross domestic product of 140 foreign countries and is steadily bankrupting several states, which now face government mandates to reduce their prison populations.
Knowing all of this, it became impossible not to do something about it, even if it was a very small something. How could I know and not act? So as the invitations to return to the prison in which I’d given that first talk kept coming, I kept saying yes. And this turned into my starting an unofficial education program there. I taught one-off classes whenever I could, inviting interested colleagues to do the same. I came to know Ramón, the head of that prison Latino organization, quite well. He was an elegant, poised intellect from the Dominican Republic, and he told me at one luncheon that when he entered prison at the age of sixteen, he spoke no English whatsoever. This stunned me, considering I’d just seen him stand at a podium adorned by a Che Guevara poster and deliver a dazzlingly fluent twenty-minute oration about change, growth, and revolution. Ramón also told me that he spent three years in solitary, something I could not begin to comprehend.
While I chatted with Ramón, internally mourning the fact that yet again, here was a man whose tremendous gifts society has denied itself, a superintendent from Otisville Correctional Facility approached me.
“Why doesn’t John Jay have a college program in any prison?” he asked.
I took the question home with me and posed it to Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College.
“I’d like to start one,” I told him. He granted me permission. In 2011, John Jay’s Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP) was born. It provides college courses and reentry planning services to incarcerated men within five years of release. These men begin their college journey behind bars and then, upon returning home, are guaranteed a slot in the City University of New York, where they complete degrees and embrace a new community. The idea is to make college the centerpiece of their new lives on the outside, so they can benefit from everything that a campus has to offer, from education to network building and free health, counseling, and tutoring services.
I teach English classes in the P2CP program and serve as its academic director. When I first started that job, I had little idea of what I was getting myself into. Running classes inside was in many respects the easy part. My students were so intellectually hungry that being their professor was nothing short of pedagogical heaven. What I was unprepared for was the psychological roller coaster that comes with this work; sometimes the ups and downs hit me with a force that left me emotionally leveled. When my students were denied parole, when they came home and had nowhere to live, when they were rearrested or even shot: these were traumatic events. But seeing a student on campus scurrying to class, when not too long ago he’d been my student in an altogether different setting—there is no greater joy.
Prisons lodged themselves at the heart of my emotional and intellectual universe. Yet still plenty of people in the world around me didn’t seem to realize that, quite simply, there is no evidence that they work. It’s this simple: prison populations in America have grown steadily since 1973 and do not correlate whatsoever with crime rates. And why should prisons work? Studies in probability theory and psychology reveal that deterrence is an illusion. Few people stop committing crimes because prison exists; the reality of its existence hardly factors into their thought process while criminal acts are occurring. As for incapacitation, prisons are schools of crime, and though they may lock people away from the general public, they also eventually return them to the community further criminalized and/or deeply marginalized, socially and economically. This is a recipe for an increase in crime, a fact that explains a 2014 NPR headline so counterintuitive it’s delicious: “Crime Falls as U.S. Locks Up Fewer People, Attorney General Holder Says.” Indeed, between 2007 and 2012, the states with the largest decreases in imprisonment rates had a 12 percent average reduction in crime. This is because of what Todd Clear and others call the “collateral consequences” of incarceration on urban communities. Prison, Clear writes, “has broken families, weakened the social-control capacity of parents, eroded economic strength, soured attitudes toward society, and distorted politics.” Children of people in prison have been shown to be more likely to go to prison themselves. And prison time profoundly damages one’s social capital and social networks. Can we really expect the manufacturing of such citizens to produce safer communities?
And what of the third justification, the word everyone exalts, rehabilitation? In 1954 the American Prison Association changed its name to the American Correctional Association, and prisons became Correctional Institutions. But programs that “correct” have grown few and far between. Only 6 percent of corrections spending is used to pay for prison programming. Between 60 and 80 percent of our prison population has a history of substance abuse, yet drug-treatment slots inside have declined by more than half since 1993; in 2012, the waiting list for drug abuse treatment in prison was 51,000 applicants long. Between 2004 and 2005 only about one-quarter of people in state prisons were involved in educational programming, fewer than a third were inv
olved in vocational training, and about two-thirds had work assignments. Higher-education programs like mine, dramatically correlated with lower recidivism rates, were decimated in 1994, when incarcerated students were made ineligible for federal and state financial aid. Prison college programs, once numbering around 350, dropped down to seven in the span of a single year.
I knew all of this. I bemoaned it. Yet the thing about curiosity is that if you dwell on it for too long, it can lose its force. I felt this happening. Some of prison’s bizarreness had begun to wear off. I was so routinely there and so often immersed in analyzing prison issues, I worried that my thinking had grown stale and that I was beginning to lose perspective. During one conversation with a funder, I caught myself using the words “at home” to describe how I felt in the classroom at Otisville. This appalled me. Did I really feel “at home” in a place once so alien to me?
I decided I needed a shock to the system, to unseat basic truths, to ask myself what I used to get asked all the time, before my world became overwhelmingly filled with people who shared my passions and premises.
Why care so passionately about the so-called wrongdoers of the world?
The plan unfolded in my mind’s eye. I would find fresh answers to this question globally, seeing prison anew by seeing it around the world. And seeing the world by seeing its prisons. Invoking Dostoyevsky, Nelson Mandela famously said that “No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
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