Extreme Punishment

Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement

Keramet Reiter, Alexa Koenig, Keramet Reiter, Alexa Koenig

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137441140
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137441157
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This ground-breaking collection examines the erosion of the legal boundaries traditionally dividing civil detention from criminal punishment. The contributors empirically demonstrate how the mentally ill, non-citizen immigrants, and enemy combatants are treated like criminals in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.

1

Fear Suffused Hell-holes: The Architecture of Extreme Punishment

Yvonne Jewkes, University of Leicester

Is Hook at last heading for Hell? Abu Hamza to be moved to top security jail.... ‘Hell’ is what they call the fearsome jail where the soul-destroying isolation has driven some of America’s toughest prisoners to suicide (Leonard 2012).

Prisons tend to reflect the society that oversees them; they are physical manifestations of a state’s aims and approaches for dealing with offenders (Johnston 2000; Wener 2012). In recent years, the prison has been analogously compared to transportation and slavery (Davis 2000; Alexander 2010) and the urban ghetto (Wacquant 2002) and used as a means of understanding state power and security apparatuses in post-9/11 societies (Drake 2012). In these analyses, imprisonment is explicitly linked to wider processes of racial discrimination, criminalization, and extreme punishment. A further analogous framework by which prisons might be viewed and understood, both structurally and experientially, is that of Hell.¹ This chapter draws on images of Hell from Dante’s Inferno, the cultural purchase of which, it is suggested, remains undiminished 700 years after it was written.

Informed by the early findings of a comparative study of prison architecture, design, and technology,² together with the published findings of fellow prison ethnographers, the chapter focuses principally on case studies of architectural design in the UK and US and briefly contrasts these with penal design elsewhere in order to examine and explain how physical contexts influence fear and violence within and around high-security prisons. The chapter argues that the ‘fear-suffused’ environments (Hassine 2011) of contemporary high- and maximum-security prisons resonate with Medieval imaginings of eternal damnation and represent a form of barbarity that is out of place in 21^st century civilized societies.

In making this claim, the chapter is premised on two related propositions. The first is that both the US and UK imprison many thousands of people unnecessarily, and many thousands more for dramatically over-extended periods of time under exaggerated and superfluous security conditions. The second proposition is that over the last two decades, crime and security have become the major battlegrounds on which political entrepreneurs have staked their hegemonic power, and prisoners have become expedient tools for politicians wishing to look more tough on crime than their opponents. Of course, some crimes challenge the beliefs of even the most fervent abolitionists. Nonetheless, the actions of an individual (whether a particularly horrible or newsworthy offense or a security breach, for example an abscondment from prison) can be a fortuitous catalyst for those who seek political gain by introducing more oppressive security and control measures across the prison estate, catching all inmates in a tightening carceral net (Drake 2012).

The result of these interlinked processes is that we appear to have returned to pre-Enlightenment, expressive forms of punishment, where penal strategies of excessive and unprecedented punitiveness are implemented and enacted in the pages of the popular press, for an audience perceived to be hungry for excessive displays of retribution (Loader 2009). Politically advantageous discourses of crime and incarceration have thus become culturally embedded, recasting offending ‘folk devils’ as ‘evil monsters’ and generating widespread tolerance for subterranean, infernal hell-holes as the most fitting repositories for the permanently excluded prisoner (Dolovich 2011).

The contemporary relevance of Dante’s vision of Hell

Now moans, loud howls and lamentations echoed through the starless air, so that I also began to cry. Many languages, strange accents, words of pain, cries of rage, voices loud and faint, the sound of slapping hands—all these whirled together in that black and timeless air, as sand is swirled in a tornado (Alighieri & Kirkpatrick 2006, 3: 22–30).³

Dante’s Inferno frames this analysis because it contains themes and motifs of a subterranean, multi-layered vision of Hell that lends itself particularly well to contemporary cultural ideas about the prison or penitentiary. Underpinning the collective imagination via novels, computer games, art, television, and film, Dante’s imagining of Hell has become part of the common stock of knowledge, informing ideas about justice and punishment, about what places of punishment should look and feel like, even among those who have not actually read Inferno. Dante thus offers an enduring analogy of perpetual suffering for the increasing numbers of individuals regarded as deserving extreme punishment.

Widely regarded as being as important as Homer and Shakespeare in literary history, Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) wrote Inferno as a three-part work (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) collectively titled Commedia, offering a vision of Hell and Heaven from the perspective of an observer who witnessed a period of almost constant war, political conflict, and corruption in his home city of Florence. Revenge and retribution were the stuff of everyday life and inevitably shaped Dante’s view of the universe and informed his writing. Part satire, part novel, and part journal (it is narrated in the first person), the Divine Comedy, as it is now usually known, was intended to be read aloud to an audience who would recognize the historical and political allusions that underpin what is essentially a gripping story. For dramatic effect, Dante creates a dialogue by introducing a companion on his journey to the ‘horrid hole of Hell’ (Alighieri & Kirkpatrick 2006, 32: 6); the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC) fulfills the roles of tourist guide, mentor, and protector.

Dante specified that Hell is a deep conical indentation, the lowest point of which is precisely at the center of the earth. The poor, tormented souls consigned to everlasting suffering occupy nine vast circular terraces that descend, in decreasing size, to the earth’s core (Burge 2010). At the outer edge of the abyss is an area occupied by those who have committed no sin except that they were morally neutral and did not act or speak out against others’ wrongdoings. Illustrating the statement later attributed to Edmund Burke (1729–1797) that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,⁴ the punishment suffered by these ‘neutrals’ might seem harsh to a contemporary reader. However, Bauman and Donskis have mapped the symbolic geography of evil through numerous modern atrocities and underline that evil is not confined to totalitarian ideologies: ‘Today it more frequently reveals itself in failing to react to someone else’s suffering, in refusing to understand others, in insensitivity and in eyes turned away from a silent ethical gaze’ (2013, p. 8). Although writing principally about the Holocaust, Bauman and Donskis’ words might be equally applied to carceral atrocities. Indeed, in the penal context, the more extreme the punishment, the more likely it is to recede from the public gaze and conscience, as this chapter will illustrate in its discussion of prison architecture and design.

The unfortunate occupants of the edge of the abyss observed by Dante and Virgil swirl in their masses moaning into the howling wind, naked and surrounded by attacking flies and wasps as their faces run with blood. Following this is the descent down through the nine circles of ‘that profound pit of pain filled with the howl of endless woe’ (Alighieri & Kirkpatrick 2006, 4:1). The field notes of two contemporary prison researchers, the first written inside a prison in Russia and the second as the writer emerged from the gloom of an American jail, contain powerful echoes of Dante’s medieval vision of Hell, while at the same time suggesting that, at their most extreme, carceral environments are timeless and universal:

I’m not sure I feel safe tonight. It’s midnight. The noises from inside the zone are getting louder… It sounds like dogs yelping but it’s not. It’s prisoners moaning and swearing… It feels really creepy… [I] actually feel too scared to move (Piacentini 2005, p. 201).

Shock of the daylight, the sun, the fresh air… I drive silently straight to the beach [of Santa Monica], to wallow in fresh air and wade in the waves, as if to ‘cleanse’ myself of all I’ve seen, heard, and sensed…but my memory is seared by what I’ve seen… Every time my mind drifts back to it, it seems like a bad movie, a nightmare, the vision of an evil ‘other world’ that cannot actually exist (Wacquant 2002, p. 381).

In the study from which the first quote comes, Piacentini (2005) describes her experience of ‘deep immersion’ in decaying Russian prisons, whose roofless buildings, crumbling walls, and rusting fittings challenge the aesthetic idea of the prison as a secure, sanitized environment. Stating that Russian prisons resemble a mutated, fantastical form of the Soviet ideal, industrial zones where daily life is divided between work and rest, Piacentini also reflects on the very specific melancholia and darkness that incarceration can instill. The abiding image of the Russian prison, she tells us, is one of a hostile and austere environment of multi-cells, acute overcrowding, faceless voices, appalling squalor, and death on a massive scale from freezing temperatures or from industrial accidents (Piacentini 2005).

Evoking similar notions of deep entombment in a cold, industrial wasteland, Wacquant’s research diary records the ‘overpowering feeling of emerging from a dive into a mine shaft…[a] murky factory for social pain and human destruction, silently grinding away’ (2002, p. 381). These field notes, written on Wacquant’s first day in the Men’s Central Jail (part of Los Angeles County Jail), vividly capture the author’s relief at breaking out of the hellish physical environment of a jail which comprises ‘seven mega-houses of detention’ holding more than 23,000 inmates (Wacquant 2002, p. 371). In an obvious echo of Dante’s conical and subterranean rendering of Hell, the Men’s Central Jail is organized into five floors, two of which are underground, and inmates are crammed in dormitories where up to 150 men live cheek by jowl on bunk beds, which form a human filing cabinet in ‘conditions that evoke the dungeons of the Middle Ages’ (Wacquant 2002, p. 372). Wacquant highlights three aspects which combine to form his vision of Hell: the noise (‘deafening and disorienting’); the filth (both of the trash variety, which attracts rats and roaches, and promiscuity which, in this communal living environment, is ‘pushed to the point of obscenity’); and the total absence of natural daylight, which leads Wacquant to describe the facility as ‘a tomb. A subterranean grotto. A safe for men buried alive far away from society’s eyes, ears, and mind’ (2002, p. 373).

If he were writing about the jail now, Wacquant might add to his list of hellish experiences suffered by inmates at LA County the deplorable conditions under which prisoners with mental illnesses are kept, which have led to a dramatic rise in suicides; the horrifying abuse meted out to inmates by staff; and corruption on the part of management, which included a special hiring track—called FOS, or ‘Friends of the Sheriff’—for friends and relatives of department employees, even if they themselves have criminal records.⁵ More than a decade after Wacquant described his shock at what he saw there, the facility has been the subject of several critical reports by the US Department of Justice, and in December 2013, federal officials announced that 18 current and former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were under investigation for offenses including alleged ‘unjustified beatings of jail inmates and visitors, unjustified detentions and a conspiracy to obstruct a federal investigation into misconduct at the Men’s Central Jail’ (US Attorney’s Office, Central District of California 2013).

The unpleasant sensations described by both Piacentini and Wacquant in their field notes, and the graphic news reporting of prisoner despair in the face of staff cruelty and corruption in one county prison system, echo Dante’s experience as he descends into Hell and describes slamming gates, vile odors, ditches full of excrement, suicides, mutilations, many languages and strange accents, brutal and sadistic guards, pain and rage, anguished cries for help, voices loud and faint, deviant sexual practices, and other degradations. Once again reminding us of the freezing conditions of post-Soviet confinement, Wacquant details how inmates at LA County are permitted one outing per week on the caged roof of the jail, which is

the residents’ only chance to see the sky, to know whether it’s sunny, rainy or windy, to breathe for two hours outside of the cold draft of the air-moving system that operates round the clock (to contain the risk of tuberculosis)… The inmates commonly complain…about the cold: in many tiers, the ventilation is set too high and the units are swept by gusts of chilly air; in the disciplinary cells, the atmosphere is downright frigid (2002, p. 374).

This truly is the lowest level of Hell; the ninth circle of the Inferno is freezing cold, an icy waste in which the atmosphere atrophies the soul. As Dante puts it, ‘I did not die but I was not living either’ (Alighieri & Kirkpatrick 2006, 34: 25).

The architecture of prison Hell

There are some prison administrators who stress the need to create small maximum security facilities for the most troublesome offenders—‘maxi-maxi’ institutions. Their plans read like the design of the inner circles of hell (Morris 1974, p. 88).

From Alison Liebling’s British male prisoner respondent who describes the hell of being ‘behind the slab’ at HMP Whitemoor (2011, p. 538), an evocative phrase with both physical and experiential dimensions, to Eleanor Novek’s (2005) exploration of the American female inmates who experience confinement as a living hell with no redeeming potential (especially for the incarcerated women who are forced to relinquish their babies just a few days after giving birth while restrained by handcuffs), images of Hell are never far from the surface of ethnographic studies of imprisonment. But arguably it is in prisoners’ (auto)biographies, poetry, journalism, and creative writing that the hell of incarceration is most vividly conveyed, and where descriptions of poorly ventilated, putrid-smelling prisons have a distinctly Dantean quality. Here, foul g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Fear Suffused Hell-Holes: The Architecture of Extreme Punishment
• 2. The Limits of Punishment
• 3. Immigration, Detention, and the Expansion of Penal Power in the United Kingdom
• 4. (Im)migrating Penal Excess: Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Case of Maricopa County, Arizona
• 5. A New ‘Ecology of Cruelty’? The Changing Shape of Maximum-Security Custody in England and Wales
• 6. Seclusive Space: Crisis Confinement and Behavior Modification in Canadian Forensic Psychiatric Settings
• 7. Normalizing Exceptions: Solitary Confinement and the Micro-Politics of Risk/Need in Canada
• 8. Making Visible Invisible Suffering: Non-Deliberative Agency and the Bodily Rhetoric of Tamms Supermax Prisoners
• 9. Punishing Mental Illness: Trans-Institutionalization and Solitary Confinement in the United States
• 10. Between Protection and Punishment: The Irregular Arrival Regime in Canadian Refugee Law
• 11. From Man to Beast: Social Death at Guantánamo
• Afterword
• Index