by Olivia Laing
By 2016, 2.3 million people were held in prisons in America, 20 per cent of the world’s incarcerated population. A quarter of them had not been convicted or sentenced, mostly because they could not afford bail, and well over half had not committed violent crimes. Furthermore, the racial composition of the prison population did not reflect that of the nation as a whole. Based on calculations made by the Prison Policy Initiative using data from the 2010 census, African-Americans made up 13 per cent of the US population but 40 per cent of the prison population, while Hispanics made up 16 per cent of the population but 19 per cent of the incarcerated population.
2.3 million imprisoned bodies. Where do you put them all? The new generation of model institutions were not furnished with libraries and baseball diamonds. Instead, they prioritised surveillance, punishment and sensory deprivation. So-called problematic or difficult inmates could be held in solitary confinement, known euphemistically as ‘indefinite administrative segregation’, for years, even decades at a time. These supermax prisons and special management units were not built to reform souls or start new lives. They were in the business of generating unreformable bodies, which served no purpose other than to justify the escalating arduousness of the conditions in which they were kept.
As the abolitionist and civil rights activist Angela Davis observes in Are Prisons Obsolete?, no one likes to imagine the reality of prison, or how it might feel to be confined inside one. It’s a source of terror, and so we prefer to ‘think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the “evildoers”.’ But if the stories of Reich and Malcolm X, Jacobson and Rustin tell us anything at all, it’s that any human body can be criminalised by the state, not because of a crime that’s been committed, but because that particular body has been designated criminal in its own right. Davis again: ‘Are we willing to relegate ever larger numbers of people to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion that produce severe mental instability?’ The transformations that Reich envisaged did not involve the tearing down of prisons, but it’s hard to know how a shared freedom can be achieved while they exist in their present form, silos for bodies that were never dangerous in the first place.
7
Block/Swarm
IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, when I was eleven, I went on my first protest march, with my mother and her friends. Pride is very corporate now, but back then there were no floats sponsored by banks or airlines or the police. We swept past the Houses of Parliament, a sea of bodies surging across Westminster Bridge chanting, ‘Two, four, six, eight, is your MP really straight?’ A Thatcher drag queen climbed up a lamppost in Parliament Square, handbag dangling from her elbow, conducting a vigorous round of ‘Maggie Maggie Maggie, Out Out Out’. Section 28 of the Local Government Act had just passed into law, we were seven years into the Aids crisis, and thirty thousand people were on the march that year.
Did I write about it in the obligatory Monday morning school essay on ‘My Weekend’? Probably not. Section 28 was designed above all to limit the visibility of gay families, and it applied especially to schools. It came into existence as the result of a moral panic about a children’s book by the Danish writer Susanne Bösche. Using staged black-and-white photographs, Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin illustrated an ordinary weekend in the life of a gay couple with a small daughter. Shortly after it was published in English, it was swept up in a sustained tabloid attack on the so-called ‘Loony Left’ (Labour-run councils and their diversity initiatives, which included such madcap ideas as rape crisis centres and refuges for Asian women). Multiple newspapers reported that it was being handed out in junior schools as part of a campaign to indoctrinate children into perverted lifestyles. The Sun ran the story on the front page, under the headline ‘Vile Book In School: Pupils See Pictures Of Gay Lovers’. In fact, a single copy had been purchased by the Inner London Education Authority, as a resource for teachers, not students. The panic and misinformation were not so dissimilar to reporting around trans children now.
Like every other pupil in Britain at the time, I never saw Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, despite living in a bona fide lesbian household. Looking at the British Library copy now (it did own two, but one has been stolen or mislaid), it’s not hard to see what so unsettled conservatives. Eric and Martin are two handsome, tousle-haired young hippies, often bare-chested or in leather jackets. They spend a lot of time lounging around in bed. On one page, Martin is dozing under his duvet. Eric lolls beside him, apparently naked, while Jenny snuggles in his lap with her doll. It’s all very European, attesting to a casual bodily ease that if not actively erotic remains anathema to certain kinds of English sensibility. On subsequent pages, the family fix a bike puncture, argue about who will cook the supper and do their laundry. Racy stuff.
While walking home from the laundrette, towing Jenny in a cart, Eric and Martin are harangued by a female neighbour. ‘You gays! Why don’t you stay at home so the rest of us don’t have to see you? Ugh!’ she hisses. Jenny is terrified. Back home, she asks Eric why the woman was so angry and he explains that some people don’t understand two men loving each other. Get some chalk, he tells her, and draws an explanatory cartoon on the paving stones in the back yard. A stick woman shouts at two stick men holding hands but this time she’s corrected by her stick husband, who tells her about his own gay relationship and explains kindly, ‘It can never be wrong to live with someone you are fond of.’
Hard to disagree with that unassuming ‘fond’ but by 1987, 74 per cent of British people thought homosexuality was mostly or always wrong; an increase of 13 per cent over five years that was largely the product of negative reporting around Aids. Jenny was raised in the House of Commons by several MPs, including the Education Secretary Kenneth Baker, who decried a permissive society and promised to clamp down on sexual deviance of all kinds, from homosexuality to abortion. At the Conservative Party Conference in October 1987, the Prime Minister herself attacked what she euphemistically described as ‘positive images’ in her keynote speech, adding: ‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. All of those children need a sound start in life.’
Section 28 was proposed as an amendment to the Local Government Act less than two months later. It forbade local authorities from promoting or publishing material about homosexuality, and from promoting the teaching in state schools of ‘the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. It became law on 24 May 1988, and wasn’t repealed until 2003. Like Paragraph 175 of the Prussian Penal Code or Executive Order 10450 in Eisenhower’s America, it had tangible, material consequences (including the cutting off of funding to gay youth groups and helplines, more crucial than ever in the years of Aids) and it generated a hateful atmosphere.
By insisting that there could be no positive discussion of homosexuality in schools, it ensured the opposite. Homophobia spilled up unchecked. Poof, lezzer, I hope you die of Aids: the torrent of playground language to which any gay or gender non-conforming kid was subjected. I can still feel my school years in my body, every muscle clamped and clenched, defended against discovery of the so-called family situation, let alone my own sense of being at odds with my gender; not a girl at all, but something in between and as yet unnamed. Looking back, this unhappy legacy might have been why Reich’s notion of body armour hit me so hard.
But the feeling of all those marching bodies on Westminster Bridge stayed with me too. One of the odd things about Section 28 was that in denying queer visibility it also served as a lightning rod for queer activism. It was my gateway into understanding that essential Reichian dynamic: that the political world can make bodies into prisons, but that bodies can also reshape the political world. Twice in 1988, lesbian campaigners breached the newly reinforced barrier against visibility, literally thrusting their way onto the news. On 2 February, four women snuck into the House of Lords the day the cha
mber voted on the bill. Seconds after the verdict was announced, two of them abseiled down from the public gallery on a washing line bought from a local market and smuggled in beneath a donkey jacket, a dyke staple of the time.
On 23 May, the evening before the bill passed into law, another quartet of women broke into the BBC News studios during the live transmission of the Six O’Clock News. One handcuffed herself to the camera, which wobbled ominously. You could hear thumps and muffled cries of ‘Stop the Clause!’ as Sue Lawley continued to read from her teleprompt. Eventually she interrupted herself to apologise for the noise, ‘but I’m afraid we rather have been invaded.’ In the background, the other newscaster, Nicholas Witchell, audibly rugby tackled one of the women and tried to drag her away, tricky since she was handcuffed to the desk. We watched it recapped all night in joyous disbelief. The Daily Mirror’s headline the next day was ‘BEEB MAN SITS ON LESBIAN’.
That abseil line must have imprinted itself more deeply than I’d realised. By the time I was eighteen, I was immersed in the environmental direct action movement. For the most part, non-violent direct action meant physically occupying contested space. We lay in front of cars outside arms fairs (the first time I did this, tight-chested with adrenaline, I was picked up and slung bodily into railings by two policemen). We climbed on the roofs of oil companies and set up camps in the path of road building projects. As Rustin observed, the power of this kind of civil disobedience is directly indexed to the body’s physical vulnerability. It was apparent that the more dangerous or precarious a position the protester took, the more powerful its effect, both in terms of the publicity it generated and the cost of their removal.
I became so involved in road protest that I dropped out of university altogether. My new home was an arboreal camp of treehouses in a beech wood due to be demolished for a bypass, from which I had to abseil thirty feet to get my breakfast cup of tea. The line was black and green, like a cartoon snake. ‘It is not in the role of an artist to worry about life – to feel responsible for creating a better world’, Agnes Martin once said. ‘This is a very serious distraction.’ All very well to say, but I did feel responsible for what was happening to the planet and it was intoxicating to believe that by putting my body where it wasn’t supposed to be I might help to create a better world – or at least preserve the tarnished one that was already there, to roll back the oncoming apocalypse of climate change.
It astounds me now, the lengths to which people went to try and protect the earth, in a period just before internet usage became pervasive, when climate science was far less well known or believed. Road protests ran all through the 1990s, camps springing up in imperilled woods all over the UK. Solsbury Hill, Fairmile, Twyford Down, Newbury. The community was tight-knit and tribal, experimenting in low-impact, close to the earth living, cooking on fires and living under canvas. During the three months it took to evict the camps strung along the nine-mile Newbury Bypass site, protestors locked themselves to oil drums filled with concrete, set on rickety platforms in the canopies of trees. At Fairmile in Devon, another ancient woodland, they dug a labyrinth of narrow tunnels forty feet into the earth, punctuated by sealed doors, and it took a team of potholers armed with radar a week to ferret them all out. The undersheriff complained that the tunnellers had used rotten wood to shore the passageways, but precarity was the point. At a camp in Stringer’s Common, a Site of Special Scientific Interest on the outskirts of Guildford, I once spent a day digging in one of those unshored tunnels, worming my way underground in a space barely bigger than my body, ten feet of sandy soil directly above my back, an experience too terrifying to repeat.
This kind of activism was made more complicated by the passage of yet another formidable law. As with Section 28, the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act had its origins in a tabloid panic, this time concerning the biggest illegal rave in UK history. In May 1992, local police prevented a group of New Age travellers from holding the annual Avon Free Festival, part of a long-running campaign to curtail nomadic, wandering lifestyles of all kinds. After being shunted from county to county, the ragged convoy of travellers and hippies in painted ambulances and buses was funnelled onto Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire, where, thanks to extensive media coverage, it was rapidly joined by dozens of sound systems, followed by around thirty thousand ravers in bucket hats and Umbro hoodies, who spent the sunny bank holiday weekend dancing in Dionysian abandon, off their faces on ecstasy and speed in the sublime landscape of the Malvern Hills.
Because Castlemorton was common land, the police lacked the power as well as numbers to move people on. Local residents, understandably horrified by the invasion, not to mention ninety-six hours of non-stop techno, muttered to TV cameras about calling in the army. The tabloids revelled in describing the dirt, drugs and noise. Ecstasy, one cor-respondent explained, made people instantly defecate where they stood. ‘Hippy tribes put village under siege’, the Telegraph reported, while according to James Dalrymple in the Times ravers had killed and eaten a horse (his piece also referred queasily to the leaders of the rave as a ‘black American man and a beautiful mixed-caste girl’, adding a spot of racial othering to what was already a febrile mix of tabloid tropes, though one of the things that distinguished Castlemorton from the commercial festivals that followed was that there was no central organisation at all).
It’s an odd feeling, looking through those papers now. Convoys of New Age travellers had been a staple on West Country roads since the 1960s. I spent my twenties living like that and now I can’t remember the last time I saw a traveller vehicle rattling down a motorway, a welded-on chimney poking from its roof. Castlemorton was the last hurrah, the jubilant tail-end of a way of life that venerated both meanings of the word free: freedom of movement and doing things without a profit motive or charge. Its inadvertent marriage of subcultures was swiftly exploited by a Tory party limping in the polls and anxious to regain authority.
The 1994 Criminal Justice Bill, written in the wake of Castlemorton, gave the police fresh powers to prevent unauthor-ised camping and trespass, and created the new offence of aggravated trespass, which would soon be used widely in the policing of road protesters, hunt saboteurs and strikers. The section concerning raves became infamous for its attempt to criminalise the music itself, defined as ‘the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. It might have sounded ridiculous but it licensed the police to disperse open-air gatherings and meant organisers risked fines and prison sentences for putting on parties. There were plenty of commercial dance events in the years ahead, but no more free raves at the old Ovaltine Dairy or in the Black Mountains, to the sound of Spiral Tribe, Circus Warp and Circus Normal. No more temporary autonomous zones at Canary Wharf or in the Roundhouse, the beats going on for a full week, running off a power socket that belonged to British Rail. No more enraptured bodies sweating in an abandoned warehouse or underneath the stars, without the need to purchase a ticket or build the kind of barricaded fence you get at Glastonbury.
I don’t mean to sound nostalgic. I was never a raver but I was immersed in protest culture and though I’ve long since relinquished the army boots and rainbow sweaters that were as much a uniform as the grey skirts and maroon blazers I wore to school, I remain susceptible to the abundant seductions of that time. The smell of wood smoke brings it all back: the storybook pleasures of living under canvas and up trees, the yips that sounded as we walked back into camp, the spells for hexing capitalism, the witchy mood that permeated everything. I know those things were only part of the story, the penny whistles and pantomime cows always teetering on the verge of an Ali G parody. Nor have I forgotten the widespread reliance on giros and Special Brew. No, what I really miss is hope. The larger truth of road protests is that they existed at a time when it still seemed possible that climate change could be averted, and my grief at the willed foreclosure of that future has only grown larger and more painful with the years.
After the Criminal Justice Bill passed into law, thing
s became more violent. Protest marches and street parties were nearly always accompanied by the sight of riot buses gathering on a side street. Watch out, someone would say, it’s kicking off. The police would come out, a black phalanx inching shoulder to shoulder in riot masks and shields. The boys in black from Class War would pull bandanas over their faces and jog to the front, to start lobbing bricks. My friend Simon had his leg broken by security guards at Newbury, who held him down and smashed it with a fire extinguisher. People were paranoid about police spies, who, it turned out years later, really were everywhere, concealed by false identities: dating your friends, making suggestions in meetings, lobbing bottles, even assisting in writing the McLibel leaflet, a critique of McDonald’s that initiated one of the most famous British court cases of the 1990s.
I found an article recently in which locals bemoaned the filth of the protestors at Stringer’s Common, saying our presence there scared away the birds and small mammals we claimed to care so much about. Two decades on, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the Extinction Rebellion protestors gathered in Trafalgar Square in 2019 as uncooperative crusties with nose rings in ‘hemp-smelling bivouacs’. We were dirty, it’s true. We washed in buckets if we washed at all, but as each new story of poisoned rivers and oceans full of plastic has come to light, it’s become evident that lives which looked immaculate on the surface were actually causing degradation and despoilment on a massive scale. New clothes, new cars, washing machines, factory farms, all of it at an incalculable cost somewhere down the supply chain.