Francesco Landolfi on Reiko Hillyer’s *A Wall Is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States*

In the history of the modern Western prison system, the treatment of the prison population can inevitably be considered as one of many factors in assessing the level of social status that a civilized society has managed to achieve both beyond and behind prison walls. Prisons, in fact, are never a system completely detached from the historical context in which they are located and, as a result, prisoners are also more or less involved in the social and cultural changes in which they live.

Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, French politician Alexis de Tocqueville and British writer Charles Dickens described during their travels in the fledgling United States: the terrible conditions of old-style prisons. They were “more unhealthy and more corrupting” than “a dungeon that recalled the barbarism of the Middle Ages,“[1] in which inmates “are brought out to die” by the time “All beyond the pitiless stone wall, is unknown space,”[2] as the early American system was aimed not at rehabilitation but “to isolate offenders from the tempting vices of urban life.”[3]

As is very often the case, a writer’s willingness to write a book is based on the need for analysis of a personal experience, which for author Reiko Hillyer concerned her professional collaboration for Temple University at the Inside-Out Prison Program as an “emancipatory space”[4] for inmates at Columbia River Correctional Center in Portland, Oregon, in the possibility of their social reintegration.

Dividing the book into three main topics, the author introduces the first issue concerning the gubernatorial clemency on the possibility, for example, of converting life sentences into releases for good behavior by state institutions within the two specific examples of Louisiana State Penitentiary or Angola and Mississippi State Penitentiary or Parchman Farm as places that have always been dominated by the Jim Crow system, even as it affected the daily and personal lives of the governors of these two southern states.

Angola and Parchman Farm both came into being in the early twentieth century near the Mississippi River and became from their origin places  the realization of the “patriarchal benevolence” of the respective governors of Louisiana and Mississippi “as an alibi for labor extraction”[5] by the inmates, who necessarily began to rehabilitate themselves through work at the governors’ own mansions. In this way, institutional paternalism in these two specific states can be interpreted as an early attempt at the “interruption of a racist criminal justice system”[6] in favor of the rise of the principle of civil rehabilitation especially toward African-American prisoners.

If between the 1960s and 1970s gubernatorial clemency was used as a tool to consolidate the process of racial desegregation and social integration vis-à-vis the African-American ethnic community (thanks in part to the so-called 10/6 rule), in the 1980s it became a pivotal principle of political austerity for mandatory reductions in public spending, which, however, failed to solve the problem of prison overcrowding and thus provoked numerous cases of “malnutrition, poor health care, violence, and other indignities.”[7] As civil rights in favor of prisoners decreased over the past 40 years, so did the number of clemency and commutation of life sentences by governors who, still in the 1960s and 1970s, regarded them as an “essential mechanism to improve the quality of the criminal justice system, remedy deficiencies, exercise benevolence, or acknowledge a prisoner’s rehabilitation.”[8]

The second issue, on the other hand, is based on the importance of the tool of conjugal visits for inmates to reduce their “sexual privations,” which very often result in “sexual frustration, violence and homosexuality.”[9] While as early as the 1950s, conjugal visits within Parchman Farm were tolerated because they were seen as “an inducement for producing cotton,”[10] in prisons in the progressive state of California it was only noted that inmates could meet with their respective wives or girlfriends just to talk or have lunch, until Governor and future US President Ronald Reagan promoted the Family Visiting Program at the California Correctional Institute in Tehachapi in 1968 regarding the need to expand conjugal visits to include sexual purposes.

It is also important to point out that the opening up of civil rights to the prison population in California was mainly due to the African-American activism of the Freedom Riders who, by becoming inmates, turned the inmates themselves into political activists for the vindication of those principles of civil tolerance defined, on the one hand, as rights for the inmates and, on the other hand, as privileges for that conservative wing of the American people that always continued to regard them as irredeemable.

As early as 1971, 75 percent of Americans were convinced that “decent prison conditions suggested a tolerance for lawlessness,”[11] while in the following decade conjugal visits were seen as a purely exclusive reward for inmates who maintained good behavior, even as it is necessary to begin to crack down on the spread of the AIDS virus including through the distribution of condoms. The phenomenon of political austerity is embodied in prison through the enactment in 1995 of the No-Frills Prison Act and the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the elimination of TVs, air conditioning, electronic devices, hot meals, clean clothes, gym workouts or college courses in art and music, so as to inevitably exacerbate the social conditions of prisoners’ daily lives.

Finally, the third issue addresses furloughs as a prime example regarding the vocational and educational rehabilitation of inmates, which, however, already begins within state-of-the-art prisons through the willingness to reinterpret their spaces by making them more humane, thereby increasing “natural lights, visual stimulation, privacy, recreational areas, and personal space.”[12] Following the 1967 publication of the federal report The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration, federal authorities came to regard furloughs as a necessity that “would enhance public safety by acclimating prisoners to life in the free world.”[13]

On this point, mention must be made of the so-called ‘Massachusetts experiment’ through Governor Francis Sargent’s ratification in 1972 of the Omnibus Corrections Reform Act, which granted furloughs to all prisoners for up to 14 days per year in order to enhance their integration within American civil society and “to demonstrate their capacity for self-determination.”[14] Due in part to some serious crime cases, furloughs began to decline from the 1980s onward as the American public became aware of the excessive laxity regarding the minimal level of social security that the country had now achieved after the reformist civil rights process during the previous decades and viewing them as “unacceptably risky”[15] at the time when their failure was fully evidenced.

From the modern prison in the early nineteenth century structurally founded on the basis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, perfectly defined by Michel Foucault as “a marvellous machine,” a “royal menagerie,” an “apparatus for supervising,” a “laboratory of power” or a “cruel, ingenious cage”[16] having the purpose of protecting criminals from social evil in a kind of forced exile, we come to the early twentieth century when the Jim Crow system by state institutions continued to persist in the prisons of the southern states under the unconstitutional (Fourteenth Amendment) and segregationist ‘Separate but Equal’ principle first enshrined in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 by the Louisiana Supreme Court itself.

The turning point of the triumph of civil rights in US history, as well as in the history of the US prison system, came between the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the emergence of protest movements, which led to widespread improvements in prison conditions regarding especially the three most significant issues of clemency, conjugal visits and furloughs. On the contrary, the development of neo-liberalism between the 1980s and 1990s only returned the daily lives of inmates to an earlier situation due to a general deterioration of social services no longer considered as a discounted benefit but as an exceptional reward within those prison walls that, to quote the film The Shawshank Redemption (1994), day after day, slowly ‘institutionalized’ the inmate’s soul: “First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them.”

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I (Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 2010), p. 409.

[2] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, vol. I (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 204-205.

[3] Hillyer, p. 153.

[4] Hillyer, p. 3.

[5] Hillyer, p. 29.

[6] Hillyer, p. 41.

[7] Hillyer, p. 56.

[8] Hillyer, p. 217.

[9] Hillyer, p. 98.

[10] Hillyer, p. 92.

[11] Hillyer, p. 131.

[12] Hillyer, p. 179.

[13] Hillyer, p. 177.

[14] Hillyer, p. 187.

[15] Hillyer, p. 199.

[16] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, Random House, 1977), pp. 202-205.