Everybody

by Olivia Laing

  That was the last time Peter ever saw his father. In October there was a flu outbreak at his school, and he was sent home to Ilsa’s house in Sheffield, Massachusetts. On 3 November, the phone rang. When he heard his mother crying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’ he knew at once what had happened. Reich had been found dead on his bed, fully dressed. ‘His heart had stopped’, Peter wrote. ‘I wanted to know if it made him wake up or if it just happened.’ They played ‘Ave Maria’ at the funeral and afterwards poor Peeps lay on the floor in his father’s study and whispered into the carpet a child’s prayer: ‘Come back, come back.’

  *

  The saddest element of Reich’s life is surely that he died alone in a prison cell. But the fact that his lifelong struggle for freedom culminated in imprisonment is hardly a tragedy confined to him. Anyone who attempts to enlarge the freedoms of the body has to reckon with the institution of the prison, one of the state’s most formidable weapons for limiting and curtailing emancipation movements of all kinds, and itself the focus of centuries of activism and reform.

  To say that Reich was in Lewisburg because he’d broken an injunction explains the reason for his confinement but not its aim, a much more complex and contested issue. Should prison serve as a painful punishment or a deterrent, as a container to seclude dangerous individuals from society at large or as a space in which wrongdoers can be rehabilitated? And does it have a relationship with freedom, apart from to take it away? Is there any truth in the pervasive belief that confinement can serve, like Reich’s paradoxical box, as a space of transformation, or does the institution of the prison only compact the forces of oppression that already make so many bodies into prisons in themselves?

  The odd thing about prison is that, as Foucault famously observed, it is already the result of a substantial reform in how nations discipline and punish their citizens. Prior to the eighteenth century, imprisonment was not considered a punishment in its own right. The gaol was simply a holding bay, generally crowded and unpleasant but only a precursor to true retribution, which was often corporal, enacted on the body. (Discipline and Punish opens with a grisly twelve paragraphs detailing the sort of physical horrors this might entail; further stomach-churning examples drive Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy.) It wasn’t until the Enlightenment, when the rights of the individual were first articulated, that prison could be understood as a viable punishment in and of itself. As soon as liberty is regarded as a human right, it becomes a possession that can be confiscated or rescinded. It’s the same basic dynamic of Sade’s libertine novels, which were written in this moment of seismic change.

  In the 1770s, as Sade himself was repeatedly incarcerated in French prisons, the British prison reformer John Howard visited hundreds of correction houses, mad houses, debtors’ prisons and gaols across Europe. He was appalled by the conditions of the British prisons in comparison to their counterparts abroad. Fees governed every aspect of life, and abuse and extortion were endemic. Men and women mixed freely, rich prisoners could purchase food and alcohol, while the poor were tortured and starved, often to death. In 1777, he published The State of the Prisons, an account that brought about a major shift not only in how prisons were designed and maintained, but also in what they were configured to achieve.

  Howard thought the purpose of prison should be repentance and rehabilitation, not punishment, and he was concerned that the crowded, debauched conditions served as a breeding ground for vice. His advocacy, along with campaigners like Jeremy Bentham and Elizabeth Fry, helped to transform and restructure the corrupt, chaotic, disease-ridden edifice of the past into the highly organised, rational, surveilled space of modernity. Over the next seventy years, nearly every prison in England was torn down and rebuilt.

  One of the fundamental features of Howard’s vision was that inmates should not be held together but kept in individual cells. These days we think of solitary confinement as the ultimate punishment, but Howard was a Quaker and his insistence on solitude arose from a belief in the necessity of direct, unmediated contact with God. He imagined the prisoners in their cells like monks in a monastery, silence and seclusion driving the work of moral renewal. He thought work too was a route to liberty, giving people a future outside of crime. One of the many ways of reading Sade’s novels is as a satire of these supposedly liberatory Enlightenment ideas, exposing the modern prison as an authoritarian system for generating docile bodies: a disciplined, biddable new workforce servicing capital without choice or recompense.

  The systems of imprisonment that arose in the nineteenth century preserved the rigours of Howard’s vision but dispensed with the uplifting ideals. In the Pennsylvania or separate system, formally inaugurated at Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829 and quickly taken up in Britain too, the prisoner was kept in total isolation, labouring and living alone. When Oscar Wilde was sentenced to hard labour for gross indecency in 1895, all three of the gaols in which he served his time – Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading – were designed and run on the separate system. In his letters to the Daily Chronicle and in his poems, Wilde testified to an existence of unrefined misery.

  Each man was kept in a tiny cell with a hard plank bed and no plumbing. The air stank of sewage, and the food was likewise rancid, a near-starvation diet that in Wilde’s case induced life-threatening diarrhoea. Days were spent on pointless, painful, repetitive activity. For the first month he was tied to a treadmill for six hours a day, with five minutes’ rest after each twenty-minute uphill slog. After that he picked oakum, unravelling strands of old tarred rope until his unaccustomed hands split and bled. When he exchanged a few consoling words with a fellow prisoner in the exercise yard, he was punished with three days on bread and water. Stripped of all contact, it wasn’t surprising that people’s sanity began to erode. The main reason the separate system fell out of use was because under its uncompromising rule, prisoners lost their minds.

  The alternative was not much better. Founded in 1818 in Auburn Prison in New York State, the silent system established a mode of confinement that would become endemic across America and Europe right up to the present day, including the wearing of uniforms and the architectural innovation of double lines of cells off a main corridor, so that inmates couldn’t see their fellows. Convicts lived in solitary and spent the entirety of their time in silence, as Howard had enjoined, but worked ‘in congregate’, making products for the prison to sell for profit; not as a form of rehabilitation, as Howard had hoped, but explicitly as punishment. They were watched constantly, living under what one approving contemporary commentator described as ‘unceasing vigilance’ – humiliated bodies in grey striped uniforms, marching in lockstep, eyes averted, under constant threat of the whip.

  In 1825, a female prisoner in solitary confinement at Auburn became pregnant and was subsequently flogged to death by a male guard, prompting a public scandal. The grand jury trial that followed made whipping for female prisoners illegal and paved the way for housing incarcerated women separately from men, as Howard had enjoined. But the problem with arguing against the morality of punishment, overcrowding or squalid conditions was that many people didn’t think prisoners deserved the rights of human beings. By the early twentieth century, reformers were trying a different tack. Just as the sexual liberationists of the 1920s used eugenic arguments to make their case palatable to conservatives, so the prison reformers began to focus on the failures of punishment in terms of recidivism rates. What if rather than brutalising criminals, they could be converted into upstanding, fiscally useful citizens? Perhaps education was the royal road to ending crime.

  The institution in which Reich served his time was the embodiment of this new reform movement. Built in 1932, Lewisburg was the most modern and influential prison of its day, and the standard in American design for the next forty years. It was set high above the Susquehanna river, its cloisters and tree-lined courtyards giving it the impervious, slightly sinister appearance of a de Chirico painting. A monastery, you might think, or a small, e
xclusive college. Shortly after it opened, the Bureau of Prisons issued a booklet celebrating Lewisburg as the epitome of its changed vision of incarceration, observing that ‘in prison, all work and no play leads to brooding, plotting, perversions and riots. Deprived of recreation even the normal individual becomes morose and irritable, his nerves dangerously on edge.’

  The lavish facilities, unthinkable in today’s stark carceral landscape, included a theatre, a baseball diamond, ten classrooms and a library. Because of his heart condition, Reich was assigned to work in here, borrowing Emerson’s essays and Sandburg’s four-volume biography of Lincoln to pore over later in his cell. If he’d happened to glance up, he would have seen a ceiling decorated with stucco reliefs of open books, meant to symbolise the liberatory power of education, though not perhaps to a man whose life’s work had just gone up in flames.

  The progressive prison was designed to change lives and there’s no greater testament to its possibilities than The Autobiography of Malcolm X, though the transformations it charts were not quite those envisaged by the Bureau of Prisons. In 1946, a young hustler and pimp called Malcolm Little was sentenced to ten years in Charlestown State Prison in Boston for fourteen counts of crime, including larceny and breaking and entering. Not quite twenty-one, not even shaving yet, self-declaredly so evil-tempered and aggressive that his nickname inside was ‘Satan’, he might have spent the entirety of his sentence getting high on nutmeg and smuggled Nembutal, cursing guards and starting fights if it hadn’t been for Bimbi, an old-time burglar, tall as Malcolm, who refused to kowtow to anyone and whose alluring self-possession was plainly the fruit of education.

  Although he was clearly bright, Malcolm had dropped out of high school in eighth grade, the legacy of a childhood annihilated by racism. His father, the Reverend Earl Little, had been an organiser for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, and was a target for Ku Klux Klan attacks. When Malcolm’s mother Louise was pregnant with him in Nebraska, Klansmen on horseback had come to the house with flaming torches to drive the family out of town, smashing all the window panes with rifle butts (‘His welcome to white America’, the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin observed drily in his review of The Autobiography for the New York Herald Tribune). The Littles’ next home in Lansing, Michigan was torched. Malcolm’s earliest memory was of waking to pistol shots and the smell of smoke. The family managed to escape just before the structure collapsed, only to discover white police and firemen were standing by, looking idly on as it burned to the ground.

  In 1931, when Malcolm was six, his father was killed in what was almost certainly a lynching, his skull staved in and his body dragged to the streetcar tracks, where it was cut nearly in two. Five of Reverend Little’s six brothers had also been killed by white men. Louise was left alone with eight children to feed. Her husband had life insurance, but the company refused to pay out, insisting he had killed himself. There was little money, and Louise became entangled in a long-running battle with the welfare service, who wanted to put her children into foster care. She refused to accept charity, and they began to call her crazy when she turned down a gift of pork, though it was prohibited by her religion as a Seventh Day Adventist. After she fell in love things became more stable, until the man in question jilted her and her sanity unravelled.

  She talked to herself and stopped cooking or cleaning. ‘Our anchor giving way’ was how Malcolm described it as an adult, during a long night of pacing back and forth, remembering all the buried details of Louise Little’s unhappy life for his book. In the end she had a breakdown and was committed against her children’s will to the state mental institution in Kalamazoo, Michigan, seventy miles from the family home, where she would remain for the next twenty-six years. After she was taken away, the Littles were made wards of court and scattered among foster homes by a local judge. ‘A white man in charge of a black man’s children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery – however kindly intentioned.’

  In the wake of this shattering, Malcolm was expelled from school and sent to a detention home in Mason, twelve miles from Lansing. He was so helpful there and so obviously intelligent that he was allowed to attend Mason Junior High rather than going to reform school with all the other detention home kids. He was one of only two or three non-white students, and though he was top of his year and the class president, he always understood that he was a mascot, ‘like a pink poodle’. The cheery, relentless racism wore away at him and when a favourite English teacher balked at his idea of becoming a lawyer and told him he should find a more realistic goal – a carpenter, perhaps – he left school for good, moving to Boston and drifting into a ‘groovy, frantic’ life of small-time crime.

  In prison, he had time to realise what had been sacrificed. With Bimbi’s encouragement, he took correspondence courses in English and then in Latin, recovering the basic knowledge that had grown fogged and foxed during his years on the streets. Several of his siblings had become involved with the separatist Nation of Islam, and they introduced him by way of letters to the electrifying ideas of its leader, Mr Elijah Muhammed, who preached that the white man was the devil and the black man had been brainwashed to forget his true history. Later, Malcolm would become disenchanted with Mr Muhammed, but at that moment his teaching represented the salvation of mind and soul alike.

  In 1948, his sister Ella managed to secure his transfer to the progressive, experimental, rehabilitative Norfolk Prison Colony, thirty miles south of Charlestown. Built five years before Lewisburg, Norfolk likewise possessed an extraordinary library, which had been the personal collection of a local white millionaire, Lewis Parkhurst, who had a special interest in history and religion and who had collected an abundance of abolitionist and anti-slavery materials. It was in this room that Malcolm X became a reader, driven by his frustration at being unable to convey and discuss Mr Muhammed’s astounding teachings with the limited street slang he possessed. He gained a vocabulary by the simple expedient of copying out the dictionary in its entirety, though at first he was so unaccustomed to writing that he could barely scrawl the letters. A page each day, each new word unlocking another portion of the world, until he had two hundred thousand of them and for the first time felt truly emancipated by knowledge. Now the books he borrowed made sense. He no longer needed to skim or skip or guess. He read constantly, insatiably. Will Durrant’s Story of Civilization, H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, Gregor Mendel’s Findings in Genetics, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation. Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

  The prison placed so much faith in the rehabilitative power of reading that any prisoner who showed an interest was encouraged to borrow extra books. Day after day, Malcolm X lay on his bunk, reading his way through the past. He read about slavery (‘I never will forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slavery’s total horror’), Nat Turner’s revolt, Herodotus, the Opium Wars, the British in India, Mahatma Gandhi. Was the white man a devil? The history of the world attested: yes. After lights out at 10pm, he would sit on the floor by the cell door, using the glow from the corridor to carry on through the night in fifty-eight-minute increments, jumping into bed as the guards made their hourly patrol. He was so absorbed that he never once thought about his sentence. ‘Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned’, he wrote two decades later. ‘In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.’

  What had set him free was knowledge. Each book he read revealed another aspect of the entrenched, occluded history of racism. His entire life had to be reconsidered in this stark new light. What had once seemed like tragedies or missteps, from the loss of his parents to his own presence in a cell, were emerging as consequences of the global, trans-historical system of white supremacy, the grotesque, forced dominance of one kind of body over another. It was the same type of revelation that Andrea Dworkin had when she read Sexual Politics for the first time. Confined to a cell, Malcolm was able to see th
at he had been in prison since he was born, and to consider the possibilities of fighting back.

  A revolutionary analysis of racism was not the kind of rehabilitation the Norfolk Prison authorities had in mind, and Malcolm was returned to Charlestown for the final year of his sentence. The diminishment of privileges didn’t bother him. He spent the time passing on the knowledge he’d acquired to every black prisoner he thought might be capable of receiving Mr Muhammed’s ideas. Already he’d made the transition from student to teacher that would become so emblematic of civil rights organising in the decades ahead.

  *

  Prison was where Malcolm X became free, but that didn’t mean he approved of it as an institution. On the contrary,

  Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars – caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.

  What do those bars actually do, in the memory or the mind? What is the effect of prison, not on recidivism rates, but on the person held in a cage? While Malcolm X was reading his way through the library at Norfolk Prison Colony, an essay was published by Reich’s old friend and colleague, Edith Jacobson. It’s one of the first attempts by a psychoanalyst to discover what the psychological effects of incarceration were on the prisoner – certainly the first to be written by an analyst who had herself been in prison.

  Jacobson was part of Reich’s inner circle in Berlin in the 1930s, and was particularly close to his wife Annie. Before she arrived in the city she’d hardly given politics a thought, but at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute she encountered the Kinder, the second-generation analysts who’d become politicised while treating working-class patients. She joined Sex-Pol and was part of the splinter group that met at Reich’s apartment on Schwäbische Strasse to discuss the future of psychoanalysis in the face of fascism. They even spent weekends at the beach together.