The Punitive Turn
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The Punitive Turn

New Approaches to Race and Incarceration

Deborah E. McDowell, Claudrena N. Harold, Juan Battle, Deborah E. McDowell, Claudrena N. Harold, Juan Battle

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eBook - ePub

The Punitive Turn

New Approaches to Race and Incarceration

Deborah E. McDowell, Claudrena N. Harold, Juan Battle, Deborah E. McDowell, Claudrena N. Harold, Juan Battle

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About This Book

The Punitive Turn explores the historical, political, economic, and sociocultural roots of mass incarceration, as well as its collateral costs and consequences. Giving significant attention to the exacting toll that incarceration takes on inmates, their families, their communities, and society at large, the volume's contributors investigate the causes of the unbridled expansion of incarceration in the United States. Experts from multiple scholarly disciplines offer fresh research on race and inequality in the criminal justice system and the effects of mass incarceration on minority groups' economic situation and political inclusion. In addition, practitioners and activists from the Sentencing Project, the Virginia Organizing Project, and the Restorative Community Foundation, among others, discuss race and imprisonment from the perspective of those working directly in the field. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the essays included in the volume provide an unprecedented range of perspectives on the growth and racial dimensions of incarceration in the United States and generate critical questions not simply about the penal system but also about the inner workings, failings, and future of American democracy.

Contributors: Ethan Blue (University of Western Australia) * Mary Ellen Curtin (American University) * Harold Folley (Virginia Organizing Project) * Eddie Harris (Children Youth and Family Services) * Anna R. Haskins (University of Wisconsin–Madison) * Cheryl D. Hicks (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) * Charles E. Lewis Jr. (Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy) * Marc Mauer (The Sentencing Project) * Anoop Mirpuri (Portland State University) * Christopher Muller (Harvard University) * Marlon B. Ross (University of Virginia) * Jim Shea (Community Organizer) * Jonathan Simon (University of California–Berkeley) * Heather Ann Thompson (Temple University) * Debbie Walker (The Female Perspective) * Christopher Wildeman (Yale University) * Interviews by Jared Brown (University of Virginia) & Tshepo Morongwa Chéry (University of Texas–Austin)

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1 Punishment in Historical Perspective
A genealogy of the contemporary prison regime awakens both the historical memory and the sociopolitical logic of the Middle Passage. The prison has come to form a hauntingly similar spatial and temporal continuum between social and biological notions of life and death, banal liberal civic freedom and totalizing unfreedom, community and alienation, agency and liquidation, the “human” and subhuman/nonhuman.
—DYLAN RODRIQUEZ
The overweening, defining event of the modern world is the mass movement of raced populations, beginning with the largest forced transfer of people in the history of the world: slavery…. The contemporary world’s work has become policing, halting, forming policy regarding, and trying to administer the movement of people.
—TONI MORRISON
“Please Hear Our Cries”
The Hidden History of Black Prisoners in America
MARY ELLEN CURTIN
How should historians approach the history of the imprisoned, and how should the parameters of research be defined? A field largely dominated by social scientists, prison history remains fairly new terrain for historians who still seem to lack a central set of questions to explore or a methodology to employ. Is prison history the story of institutions or of convicts? When does it begin—at the moment of incarceration or the moment of arrest and trial? And when does it end—upon release or later? Should historians also attempt to trace the ripple effects of prison life on communities and families? What about the effects of prison on state and local economies, not to mention unemployment rates? From the perspective of convicts, how they became prisoners, and their life afterward, is as central to their story as their experiences as prisoners, but only rarely is this perspective included in institutional histories. Since the 1970s, detailed studies of African Americans, the law, vagrancy, peonage, and involuntary servitude have been penned by pioneering scholars such as Pete Daniel, William Cohen, Carl Harris, Mary Frances Berry, and Christopher Waldrep, to name but a few. Their work has transformed how scholars have come to understand the limits of emancipation, and the use of law as a tool of racial coercion.1 Yet with some notable exceptions, the literature on modern prisons has tended to focus upon institutions; legal history, crime history, police history, and prison history remain largely separate fields of inquiry.2
Focusing on an individual’s life story can illuminate the linkages in these fields. One person whose life demonstrates the complexity of American incarceration in the early twentieth century is a black Texan by the name of John Ed Patten. Patten’s story includes a dubious conviction for attempted murder, a trial before a white jury, a rejected appeal, and then a lengthy sentence to work on sugar plantations operating under state control. He survived and was released back to his home in Houston, Texas, where he lived as a dealer in rags and junk. He refused to go to church, and most of his family regarded him as an eccentric loner. The one exception was his youngest granddaughter, to whom he remained particularly close until his death in the late 1950s. Patten’s might seem a sad but unremarkable story were it not for the fact that this granddaughter grew up to be one of the greatest orators and best-known African American politicians of the twentieth century. Her name was Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman from the South elected to Congress. Her relationship with her grandfather, and his story of imprisonment, illuminates the tantalizing connections that undergird the hidden history of black prisoners in modern America.3
The legal enforcement of segregation in the South created a continuous tension between white police and black citizens that led to a lopsided number of black arrests and an overwhelmingly black prison population. And, as Patten’s experience illustrates, African American victims of crimes found it nearly impossible to gain justice. At the time of his arrest in Houston in the spring of 1918, John Ed Patten was a thirty-nine-year-old migrant from rural east Texas. Married with three children, he owned a small shop in the city’s Fourth Ward, a poor black neighborhood adjacent to the thriving, lively hub of downtown Houston. Patten was closing his store one evening when a stranger entered and took money from the register. Patten grabbed his gun, ran after the suspect, and chased him into the street. In the confusion, Patten was shot through his left hand. He picked up his weapon, took aim at a shadow, fired, and missed. Still, that misfire held dire consequences because the figure he shot at was a white police officer. Instead of chasing a criminal, Patten became the criminal: he was charged with attempted murder. The ordinary life of the man Barbara Jordan later knew as “Grandpa Patten” was turned upside down.4
Those in authority never seriously questioned Patten’s intentions. They assumed that the white officer had been the store owner’s intended target, even though Patten had no criminal record or motive. Enormous racial fear skewed judgment against him. It was well known that the police in Houston controlled black residents through humiliation, violence, intimidation, and arrests for petty crimes. But that pattern of power was momentarily disrupted during August 1917, when a fresh phalanx of black soldiers arrived at Camp Logan in Houston for training. These men had fought in Mexico; they were not from the South, and they were appalled at the rough treatment police meted out to black Houstonians and to black troops. One evening after the police had arrested and beaten a black woman and then also had arrested several black soldiers who had tried to intervene, 156 black soldiers responded with an unprecedented armed riot aimed at the local police. Four soldiers, four policemen, and a dozen civilians were killed in what the historian Robert Haynes called “a night of violence.”5 A total of nineteen black soldiers were executed.
The effect of the riot lingered, putting all black Houstonians under a cloud of suspicion. Several months later, John Ed Patten was arrested and tried; during the trial, his own victimization and even the injury to his left hand were ignored. His attorney and his witnesses could not persuade a white judge or jury that Patten had acted in self-defense and had not meant to harm the officer, let alone kill him. After a lengthy appeal, Patten received a ten-year sentence for attempted murder and was sent to a network of deadly state-run prison plantations to serve his time.
Patten entered the Texas prison system during a period of transition. After 1910, Texas began to phase out the convict-leasing system, in which prisoners were handed over to private contractors in exchange for revenue. This change began a route toward much-needed reforms. It is tempting to see the end of the leasing system as the start of something better. And yet, as Robert Perkinson has recently shown in his remarkable prison history Texas Tough, the Texas penitentiary system of the twentieth century set new standards in state-sanctioned cruelty.6 Conditions remained uniquely bleak, especially for black and Mexican convicts, who were segregated to work on state-run plantations, mostly growing sugar for profit. Fewer guards and funds, a growing prisoner population, and the pressure to earn money led to new forms of institutionalized abuse and horror.7 Physical force and torture were routine.
Despite the passage of new legislation that in theory limited working hours and improved treatment, the core of the old system in Texas remained intact well into the twentieth century. Racial segregation in prison was strengthened, and black prisoners remained at work in the fields. Guards were labor overseers as well as prison disciplinarians. They employed the “bat”—a long, thick leather whip—liberally and routinely. Prisoners rolled to fields “in cages mounted on flatbed trucks,” shackled together by metal chokers fastened around their necks and legs attached by chains. Labor discipline depended on violence as “state authorities sought to wrest maximum exertion from convicts.”8 The workday began at sunup and ended at sundown. In Texas, state control of prisoners created an extensive network of prison plantations dedicated to keeping the largely black and Mexican labor force at work and under control for the least cost.9
Some of the worst abuse happened after the workday, when men were sent back to overcrowded shelters with dozens of bunks stacked close enough to touch. In these cramped “tanks,” guards left the discipline to prison “tenders”—convicted men given the authority to rule. Tenders possessed weapons and exercised control through violence and rape. While the tenders established “order” inside, paid white prison guards stood outside and watched for escapees, who were summarily returned. Even the food was abysmal. At Ramsey State Prison Farm in 1927, a month of meals per prisoner cost the state $6.59, or 22 cents per day. Prisoners ate sow belly, peas, and spoiled cornbread. Slurry called stew—hard beans and moldy bread—was daily fare. The monotony and the filth spurred many riots over food, but such uprisings just encouraged more use of the bat. Brutal work, violence, humiliation, and fear characterized this system that remained largely unchallenged in its daily operations until the 1960s. After the end of leasing, according to Robert Perkinson, the lives of prisoners “scarcely changed—and sometimes for the worse.”10
John Ed Patten survived. Between 1918 and 1924, he worked in a succession of four Texas sugar plantations. When he was pardoned, he returned to his home and family in downtown Houston. Sadly, his youngest son was dead, but his wife and daughters had earned a living by taking in boarders. John Ed began a fledgling business dealing in rags and junk, and looked on as his daughters grew up and married. He kept to himself until one gleam of hope entered his life: the birth of his granddaughter Barbara in 1936. The future congresswoman’s first major attachment in life was to a man called a felon and an outcast by the outside world but who cared for her like no other person. “My mother tells me that she could leave me with him as a baby and I wouldn’t whimper…. [S]o that attachment was formed at the beginning.”11
John Ed Patten influenced Barbara Jordan in so many ways that it is difficult to imagine her character and personality without him. The rest of her family was extremely devout, while Patten never went to church. Jordan’s father loved big cars and had many middle-class aspirations, but John Ed was frugal and valued his independence more than money. Jordan’s mother and father wanted their daughters to be obedient and docile, but Grandpa Patten told her never to take a boss and to be skeptical of marriage. In their weekly talks in his junkyard, her grandfather’s message, Barbara Jordan recalled, was overwhelmingly one of self-sufficiency. “Grandpa was saying the message of Jesus is: Don’t get sidetracked and be like everybody else.” The congresswoman’s notably deep voice also bears traces of the older man’s influence. Jordan’s biographer, Shelby Hearon, observed Jordan as she described her memories of her Grandfather Patten. “Each time that Barbara recounts him, recreates him, brings his presence back into her own, the cadence and the timbre is what is known as ‘the Barbara Jordan voice.’ How did you learn to talk that way? At my grandfather’s knee.”12 This ex-prisoner left a powerful legacy in his granddaughter.
Grandpa Patten’s experiences also left Jordan to consider some hard truths about power and race in a nation that prided itself on its ideals. In her televised speech before the nation during the 1974 House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the Watergate scandal, Jordan forced the nation to recall that until recently, the rule of white supremacy always trumped the rule of law”: “When that document [the Constitution] was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that ‘we the people.’”13 Jordan’s limited understanding of her grandfather’s ordeal brought home to her the violence endured by his generation. “I heard that he’d killed a white man,” she said, “but I also know that back then he couldn’t have killed a white man and lived. Now we know that. That would have been the end of him and I never would have known my grandfather.”
Although privately Jordan felt proud of her grandfather, she was astute enough to know that she should not discuss his past wi...

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