#american prisons

[angelnumber27]

This is a prison cell in Norway

These are prison cells in the United States

These inhumane living conditions are unnecessary.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The first U.S. prisons emerged in reaction to the overcrowded, violent, disease-infested jails of the colonial era.

Prisons as we understand them today – places of long-term confinement as a punishment for crime – are relatively new developments. In the U.S. they came about in the 1780s and 1790s, after the American Revolution.

Previously, American colonies under British control relied on execution and corporal punishments.

Jails in America and England during that period were not themselves places of punishment. They were just holding tanks. Debtors were jailed until they paid their debts. Vagrants were jailed until they found work. Accused criminals were jailed while awaiting trial, and convicted criminals were jailed while awaiting punishment or until they paid their court fines.

Consequently, early American jails were not designed for long detentions, even if people sometimes stayed for months or longer.

The physical structure of these unregulated local facilities – often run by sheriffs or private citizens who charged room and board fees – varied. Jail could be a spare room in a roadside inn, a stone building with barred windows or a subterranean dungeon.

Fear of disease

Disease, violence and exploitation were rampant in these squalid American colonial and British jails.

John Howard, a British aristocrat whose ideas influenced American penal reformers, became concerned about living conditions in these “abode[s] of wickedness, disease, and misery” when he became a sheriff. In a 1777 book, Howard recounts smelling vinegar, a common disinfectant of the era, to protect against the revolting smell of the jails he visited.

Howard warned readers that jails spread disease not only among inmates but also beyond, into society. He recalled the so-called Black Assize of 1577, in which prisoners awaiting trial were brought from jail to an Oxford courthouse and “within forty hours” more than 300 people who had been at court were dead from “gaol fever” – what we now call typhus.

He also wrote of infected prisoners who, once released, brought diseases from jail into their communities, killing scores.

Disease also shaped Howard’s understanding of how criminality spread.

He described how young “innocents” – the children of people jailed for debt or those awaiting trial for a petty offense – were seduced by dashing bandits’ stories of crime and adventure. Thus “infected,” they went on to become criminals themselves.

America’s first prisons

Howard’s ideas, particularly the realization that jails posed a threat to the public, were brought to the U.S. by Philadelphia reformers like Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Following the recommendations in Howard’s book, American penal reformers pushed for new jails designed to ward off disease, crime and immorality of all kinds.

Howard envisioned new facilities that would be well ventilated and cleaned daily. Clothing and bedding should be changed weekly. There would even be an infirmary staffed by “an experienced surgeon” who would update authorities on the state of prisoner health.

American reformers followed Howard’s advice that “women-felons” should be kept “quite separate from the men: and young criminals from old and hardened offenders.” Debtors, too, should be kept “totally separate” from the “felons.”

Prisoners should be separated from one another, ideally in cells. Crowding should be avoided. All this would prevent the spread of disease and enable the prisoners’ repentance – and thus their rehabilitation.

Using Howard’s book as their guide, Rush and his colleagues transformed Philadelphia’s aging and overcrowded Walnut Street Jail into one of the country’s first state prisons by 1794. The Walnut Street Prison model was soon adopted nationwide.” - Ashley Rubin, “Prisons and jails are coronavirus epicenters – but they were once designed to prevent disease outbreaks.” The Conversation. April 15, 2020.

[hugtheteadrinkthekitten]

It turns out lethal injection is actually HORRIFIC

They can't use doctors, because doctors have sworn to do no harm

They in fact can't use any kind of medical professional

Doctors aren't even involved in designing the process to make sure the drugs work

They have literal amateurs stabbing people in the arms (and necks and groins and feet)

The drugs they use are incredibly painful and traumatic

One of these incredibly painful drugs does absolutely nothing for the inmate whatsoever, it's just there to make the onlookers feel better

None of the drugs relieve the pain

The inmate is CONSCIOUS THE ENTIRE TIME

This is actual torture. People are being tortured to death.

Please watch the video (it's John Oliver so there's a healthy dose of black comedy along with the horror).

Please reblog.

[westborofascistchurch]

I was given meat in prison and I was like "y'all I'm vegetarian" and they laughed but I explained I've never eaten meat before and that the couple times I accidently ate trace amounts, that I got violently sick because my stomach can't process it. So they were like okay touche, write a letter to the chaplin and he'll approve the meal change... like my dietary health was a religious issue. Anyways, I asked for a pen and they were like yeah okay later. And like two days later, eating nothing, I asked for pen and paper again, and they were like "since you're refusing your meals so you're on suicide watch so we can't give you sharp stuff like a pen." So I was like "okay how do I get off suicide watch?" And they were like "you gotta eat." And I was like "I can't eat because I can't even get fruit without gelitan mixed into the jello fruit cup." They were like "write a letter" and I looked at them like WITH WHAT PEN? So I when the nurse checked on me she was like "you're bp is low," like no shit I haven’t eaten in days so she gave me a Boost drink and a Gatorade. The next day she gave me some saltine crackers, few days later I got an apple and another boost. Anyways, this continued for 11 days while my friend scrounged up enough to bond my ass outta there. I got a bill in the mail for Gatorade, Boost and crackers a month later. Anyways I lost three pounds, and they stole my glasses.

Update:

Y'all this happened in 2015, chill tf out. Thanks for caring tho 💖

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“By the mid-1920s Hulbert could boast that over 75 percent of the prisoners at Jackson were gainfully employed, half of them on projects outside the prison walls. The mainstay of prison industry at Jackson was the binder twine plant, originally established in 1907 as an experiment in state-account production. A new mixture of sisal, manila, and hemp made the quality of Jackson twine extremely competitive in the early 1920S, and Hulbert ran the plant "night and day" to produce 14 million pounds a year. Most of this was sold out of state, through agents and consignments across the northwest, and, while there was significant annual variation, profits averaged around $90,000 a year. Hulbert expanded the brush shop, producing over fifty kinds of brushes and brooms for sale to hardware stores and wholesale suppliers; he started up a tombstone and marker shop, expanded production in the chair factory to over three hundred kinds of furniture, and added a cot factory, manufacturing the steel frames for folding beds. He developed an aluminum stamping operation, making utensils for sale to institutions across the country; he started up a brick and tile works at Onondaga and took over control of the Chelsea Cement Plant, which with the boom in highway construction was earning a profit of $180,000 by 1925; he expanded the output of the cannery, marketing over four hundred thousand cans of vegetables a year to groceries and institutions, and added a cider works that made vinegar for commercial sale. Under Hulbert's hand Michigan took a lead in that new, now universal staple of prison production, the manufacture of license plates and road signs for the state; he invested over $60,000 in new stamping and enameling equipment, and, while output was largely for "state use" in Michigan, he stood ready to take orders from states as far away as Vermont. But it was the textile plant upon which Hulbert lavished most hope, attention, and capital. After a visit to Pennsylvania in 1922, Hulbert convinced his superiors of the potential for making cotton cloth and turning out shirts, sheets, toweling, and other staples both for state institutions and for sale on the open market. He even explored the possibility of a direct trade between Michigan and prison systems in the South that raised cotton with convict labor, exchanging raw materials for finished goods. By the end of his tenure Hulbert had invested nearly $150,000 in plant and equipment for textile production. 

In all of this Hulbert was quite in step with national trends. Binder twine, textiles, and license plates emerged, along with commercial farming, as the leading lines of prison production across the country by the early 1920s. Hulbert took to attending national conferences as an expert on prison industry, extolling-at times rather incoherently-the innovations and successes of the Michigan system. As he described them, the problems he faced were familiar ones to his colleagues in the American Prison Association: finding product lines that did not compete too openly with local or state industries but for which there was a good market; developing operations that did not require complex machinery or skilled labor; and establishing a method of bookkeeping that covered the cost of mate- rials and equipment, provided for the upkeep of the labor force, and paid some sort of wage to inmate workers as well as salaries to super- visors, guards, and sales staff-without dissolving all profits into overhead. There were tricky trade-offs here, which Hulbert, for the most part, finessed with various kinds of accounting fraud and legerdemain. His "main thought," he said, was "to put inside of prison walls factories that would be a profit to the state."

But there was a good deal more: "My dear Governor," he wrote in making his case for a textile plant, 

there is a great possibility of expansion in this industry and at any time that you want to talk with me, I would be very glad to go over the situation with you as I think we can put Michigan's prison industries on the map so that when you leave office the state will look up to you as doing something that no other Governor ever did.

What Hulbert had in mind was to insure that Jackson prison was able to pay for itself. As we have seen, the dream of self-sufficiency was widely shared among early advocates of prison industrialization in the 1920s; their model was the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, which was the other leading producer of prison-made binder twine in the country, as well as of farm equipment, and which made claims of profitability that were legendary in the profession, though never adequately documented. There was nothing particularly outrageous in Hulbert's ambition; Jackson prison had managed to cover expenses from industrial profits off and on for years and, most recently, during Simpson's wartime administration. The trick that Hulbert had to turn was to sustain a rapid expansion of profits in step with a burgeoning inmate population. Groesbeck was apparently always skeptical of Hulbert's lavish promotions and blatant ambitions, but he had no reason to refuse Hulbert enough leeway to chase his dream of a self- sustaining penitentiary. In 1921 the governor struck a deal with his warden: the state would provide $300,000 from the General Fund for operating Jackson prison in each of the next four years (1922-25), and Hulbert agreed to meet the balance of operational expenses from the profits of prison industries. 

This gave Hulbert, briefly, in 1922, 1923, and 1924, a virtual carte blanche to pursue his dreams. His superiors on the commission, knowing that he had the governor's endorsement, made him head of Michigan Prison Industries in 1923, a post that doubled his income and expanded his powers, and they approved all the equipment purchases and improvements of facilities that the warden recommended. There was no sign in these years of an impending move to a new prison, as Hulbert invested $450,000 in developing the plant and equipment of the old prison facility, actually spending more on industrial buildings than on additional dormitories for the growing inmate population. And there was a general inclination in Lansing to ignore a rising chorus of complaints about Hulbert's energetic efforts to boost sales. A former warden of Stillwater prison was hired as sales manager for binder twine, earning $25,000 a year in salary and commissions to develop markets out of state. Although the man was clearly an "expert" in the field, not a few Michigan Republicans felt they had been cut out of a lucrative post. More troublesome was the grumbling of businessmen around the state as they ran across the new competitor in town: food and hardware wholesalers complained that Prison Industry salesmen were undercutting their markups by going straight to retailers with lower prices; grocers complained that some competitors were being allowed to carry extensive credit (including the husband of one of Hulbert's secretaries, who opened a grocery in Jackson on what amounted to a subsidy from prison industries); two hard- ware stores in one small town protested that they had both been given "exclusive" rights to prison-made utensils and brushes on con- dition that they place a large order.129 There was nothing illegal in any of this: the state was in business, and good business often involved deals at the expense of loyal taxpayers and Republican voters. Thus, when Mack and Company of Ann Arbor made inquiries about furniture prices from Prison Industries, in connection with a big sale to a  fraternity house, and then found that a salesman from the prison had gone straight to the fraternity house and sold the furniture at a better price, Mack and Company could not complain about the business practices of Prison Industries, but it could insist, through political channels, that the prison keep out of its business. 

Hulbert's business antics were the result not only of his personal ambition and braggadocio but of his deal with the governor. Ultimately, this proved his undoing. While his efforts to foster jobs made him, in the eyes of the Prison Commission, an ideal warden -"the discipline of the prison has been excellent. No outbreaks, mutinies or riots have occurred" - his financial arrangement with Groesbeck forced him into a heedless expansion, committing more and more resources to prison industry in order to boost output and sales. Yet he could never keep up with his obligations. The rapid increase in prison population after 1922 drove up the annual cost of maintenance, from $675,000 in 1922 to $840,000 in 1925. At the same time, Hulbert poured nearly $300,000 into new equipment and another $150,000 into structures for his expanding industries. Perhaps inevitably, start- up delays plagued the textile plant, which lost $63,000 in its first three years of operation, while a statewide boycott of bricklayers, responding to appeals from private manufacturers, brought production at the Onondaga facility to a standstill in 1925. Hulbert met his obligations in 1922, but, thereafter, industries at Jackson failed to come up with its share of operating costs until 1926, when it paid $148,000 against an accrued deficit to the General Fund that now totaled over $1.3 million. This was the biggest operating debt the prison had ever sustained. Hulbert's financial difficulties angered the governor, who wrote the resident commissioner at Jackson, Mark Merriman, that "the business end of this institution has not been properly looked after." Under political pressure from his enemies, as we have seen, Groesbeck was forced to conduct an audit of prison industry books. What the accountants found was a "real mess," and, while nothing was ever said officially or publicly, Robert Davidson, the accountant in charge, attributed the mess to a "willful manipulation" of the accounts. After meetings with the auditors in Detroit and several heated exchanges with Hulbert, Groesbeck let his warden know that "his resignation was looked for." The governor was engaged in a salvage operation, trying, as we saw, to protect his political position against the sniping of his enemies; by removing Hulbert as warden, he prevented a legislative investigation or legal proceedings and probably salvaged Hulbert's reputation. But the warden had him- self also been engaged in a cover-up; he had launched an ambitious expansion of prison industries and promised great profits, yet he was unable to meet his obligations under the operating agreement with the governor. Trying to show a profit while explaining his inability to pay forced the warden to "cook" his books, and in a prison it was not hard to find experts skilled in juggling accounts and fixing the books. The inmate in charge of industrial records, an accountant by profession and a convicted embezzler, could of course explain the elaborate ploys of double bookkeeping-twine sent out on consignment was designated "sold" and entered as profit, the nonexistent cash was entered as accounts relievable or unpaid, and merchandise recovered from the jobber was then logged as inventory on hand-but, on balance, he had to admit "the whole accounting system was a fraud and a delusion."

Always running just ahead of the game, Hulbert carved out a good career for himself and made his contribution to three Groesbeck electoral victories. When he finally tripped up, it was not because the goal itself was discredited but because Groesbeck had lost faith in Hulbert's methods, or, more exactly, was no longer able to shield those methods from hostile scrutiny. Locked in a close primary fight, the governor had to avoid the taint of corruption or waste. But he still needed Hulbert and so transferred him down the road to the new prison project that the warden had begun in 1924 largely as an extension of his efforts to keep his retainers and charges fully employed. The scale of this project, and its annual budget, was a good deal larger than Prison Industries, and, while Hulbert took a cut in salary when he gave up his posts as warden and director of Industries, he had, as we saw, ample scope in the construction project for his rest- less energies and ambitions. From what we know of his activities on the site, Hulbert did not slow down or change his habits in the least. His instincts for empire building were fully engaged on the building project and quite in step with, and of use to, Groesbeck in his battle for political survival during 1925-26. 

Yet, while Hulbert's conduct at the new construction site expressed both his continuing personal ambitions and his determination to serve his longtime political mentor, his drive to build a bigger and better prison may have also been an effort to solve the problems of profitability that he had encountered at the old prison and that had wrecked his deal with Groesbeck. Hulbert forged ahead with his dream of a completely industrialized, self-sufficient penitentiary. Indeed, to his way of thinking the failure to meet his obligations under the pact with Groesbeck had been due entirely to the rapid rise in the operational costs of the old prison. The growing number of inmates had strained the capacity of the old facility and had forced him to distribute his population to the farms, dormitory annexes, road camps, and factories outside the walls, thus greatly increasing the costs of guarding and feeding his charges. Moreover, the effort to expand productive facilities and jobs within the old main prison had run up against limitations of space and antiquated structures, raising at every turn the start-up costs for new operations. Even with these impediments to success, and despite the rigidities of his deal with Groesbeck, Hulbert could claim that Prison Industries had managed to make a total profit of nearly one million dollars under his direction and, from these proceeds, to finance entirely the purchase of new plant and equipment for expansion. Such a return from an old, dilapidated prison gave fair promise that a new prison might be able to sustain itself, provided enough land, labor, and machinery could be brought together and used effectively. There was no necessary limit to the size of such an operation. Indeed, in an era when Henry Ford was achieving notable efficiencies and highly publicized economies of scale at his mammoth new River Rouge plant, it was not difficult for Hulbert to conclude that a larger facility and greater concentration of men and equipment might serve the ends of economy and even, eventually, of self-sufficiency. Reasoning in this way made the grandiose seem practicable.

It was also politically persuasive. We may consider Hulbert foolish or blindly ambitious to commit himself to creating a self-supporting, industrial prison. But, ultimately, as the terms of his deal with Groesbeck make clear, he never claimed that the prison did, or even would, pay for itself, only that it ought to try. It was (if the word is not too solemn to apply to Harry Hulbert) his aspiration to make the prison a productive enterprise, and it was this that resonated politically. His goal was entirely in step with the role of punishment in the prohibition era. What, after all, was prohibition all about, if not to salvage and harness the energies of labor for production, to steer the shiftless into the orderly and disciplined ways of industrial life? What better use could prison make of the rising number of convicted bootleggers and mobsters, tavern keepers and moonshiners, than to put them to productive work? Correction or reformation was not the crux of the matter here, although Hulbert could talk a progressive line when called upon; at issue was the creation of a carceral practice that affirmed, through punishment, the social priorities of sobriety and industrial discipline and anchored the legitimacy of authority not in the policing of drunkards but in the construction of orderly and productive institutions capable of serving the people with efficiency and the most up-to-date methods. Cost-effective and businesslike administration were the perennial slogans of Groesbeck's campaigns. 

The new prison at Jackson was thus, in many ways, a monument to Harry Hulbert's persistent ambition and Alex Groesbeck's needs of the moment. The dreams of self-sufficiency, which served so well the ideology of punishment under prohibition and which seem to em- body the presumptive links between profit and uplift, and the requirements of patronage, which continually expanded outward the networks of obligation necessary to sustain competition for power at the center, joined to fashion this white elephant of corrections. Even the fiercest critics of Hulbert and Groesbeck had to admit that "the taxpayers of Michigan need not fear faulty design, workmanship, or  construction, as the work built to date is superfine." It was easy enough to complain that the single-man cells with hot-and-cold running water and "push button control vitreous china water closets" sported "more conveniences than in the rooms of some of our finest hotels." And the terrazzo floors and glazed brick walls seemed unnecessarily ostentatious for a penitentiary. Yet critics waxed wistful before the enormous walls that, however grandiose, would "be admired by those who know a beautiful piece of work when they see it." Ambition and self-aggrandizement had combined with the calculations of patronage and the pressures of political competition to produce high quality from great waste. As with some great enterprise of the ancien regime, the corruption that surrounded the construction of the new prison reflected, on the one hand, the expanding resources of the state and, on the other, the inadequacy of its institutional apparatus to control or manage the tasks it had undertaken. Graft and venality filled the gaps of incomplete state formation, and, while Fred Green might attack the corruption of the Groesbeck administration and Harry Jackson might shake his head at the heedless and high-handed ways of Harry Hulbert, the epigoni were not essentially different from their predecessors, reapplying the same appeals for efficiency and administrative accountability and replaying the same rules of political combat with, perhaps, a little more caution and a little less flamboyance.”

-Charles Bright, The Powers That Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the “Big House”, 1920-1955.Lansing: University of Michigan Press, 1996. pp. 84-93.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Prisons are secret places. The public is, lamented one prisoner, "utterly void of all knowledge as to what is being done in their name inside prison walls." In fact, the walls faced two ways, keeping the prisoners in and shutting the public out. Their main purpose was to establish and maintain the separation, the physical and social divide, between the universe of the prison and the world outside. Theorists and managers of prisons have always insisted that this enforced segregation was, at once, a form of therapy for criminals and of protection for the public. The less the public knew about prisons, or the more that enforced social distance allowed the manipulation of mediated images about the criminal and his fate, the more imprisonment could be used to terrorize and deter; wrote one circuit judge in 1922, "to my mind, the prison should be inaccessible to the public, nothing should be known of its workings and among criminals generally it should be regarded as equal to, or worse than, a death sentence."

We may wonder just how separate the prison world really was, even in the heyday of the "big house," and we may debate the deter- rent effects of imprisonment upon would-be criminals, but enforced social distance served both the practical needs of prison management and the larger intent of incarceration in the industrial penitentiary. When Harry Hulbert enforced an oath of secrecy on new employees, he was less interested in striking fear in the hearts of the guilty than in making sure that "the public is kept in ignorance of what is going on Prison Property." And this was less because the public would regard what he was doing as improper than because public scrutiny, in whatever form, would constrict his autonomy as warden. And it was this autonomy that was fundamental. Without it he would be less able to run the institution in the brawling manner he preferred or to use his position as warden so blatantly for political purposes. Nor would he be able to enforce that claim to an excess of penalty beyond the sentence so central to a rehabilitative discipline; social distance imposed a firm distinction between what was done to inmates after incarceration and the criminal acts that landed them in prison in the first place. 

For historians the practical effect of contemporary ignorance is that we know precious little about life inside Jackson prison during the 1920S. What information comes to us is fragmentary and, at this distance, unverifiable. In fact, the bulk of material in the state archives was collected by a certain Robert Reece, onetime employee at the prison, who either resigned or was fired in the early 1920s and spent the next several years trying to ruin Harry Hulbert. Reece was convinced that it was possible to buy a parole from Jackson prison, and it was upon this "pardons mill," as he preferred to call it, that he focused his attention. With the energy and determination of the wronged or the self-righteous, he built a case against Hulbert and, more particularly, against the prison chaplain, William Hopp. He interviewed former prisoners, collected sworn statements, and tried to interest the courts in undertaking a formal investigation. Apparently, sometime in 1925, a preliminary grand jury hearing was held on the question of parole peddling, but it led nowhere; according to one of Reece's informants, the Jackson attorney who was called to testify, and who was widely believed to have a hand in the "pardons mill," laughed it off: "You are on the right track," he said, "there is plenty of it, but you can't get it." 

But Reece did not give up. Along the way, at first incidentally and then more systematically, he began to amass material on other matters, such as brutality at the prison, official corruption, and the sale of drugs. As his investigation branched out, he made trips to Chicago to track down and interview parolees who, at greater distance, might be more willing to talk. He also gained an important ally in the editor of the Jackson News; the paper circulated a citizens' petition in 1925 to initiate grand jury proceedings. In January 1926 Circuit Judge Benjamin Williams was moved to constitute himself as a one-man grand jury to investigate waste and corruption at the prison. We do not know if there were political motives behind this probe or what became of it, but during the summer of 1926 Reece made several unsuccessful efforts to publicize his findings. The chairman of the Prison Commission alerted Hulbert: "Our mutual friend Reece came here a few days ago and went to the Lansing State Journal, spent several hours with them and tried to get them to come out with a lot of the slush that he has been peddling for a number of years." Happily, "Carl Sheil of the Journal came to me this morning and said he had simply refused to print anything that Reece had given him." Later, in Chicago, Reece turned over evidence he had collected on the prison "dope trade" to federal authorities, but when a representative of the Narcotics Bureau confronted Groesbeck with it, the governor "laughed the matter off" and told the emissary that "Reece was crazy." In July Hopp filed charges of slander against Reece. By then, with the primary in full swing and Groesbeck's political fortunes on the line, Reece had become a political menace, and Fred Green, who was naturally interested in anything that might discredit his enemy, openly welcomed Reece's investigation. After the election Green assigned an assistant attorney general to develop the evidence, and Reece turned over all his files to the state. The inquiry soon fizzled, as Groesbeck's appointees were swept from office and the whole point of an expose was lost; but Reece's documents found their way into the state archives, and there remain the only opening through which we can hear, however faintly, the voices of inmates. 

The material Reece gathered is, of course, doubly suspect. He was, himself, on a rather peculiar personal campaign against "the whole administration," and his reports suggest a rather narrow, moral, straight-laced man, undoubtedly honest but also obsessed with his mission and, we may surmise, rather easily fooled. More- over, his main sources of information were paroled prisoners. This is not a prima facie reason to disbelieve them. But they were not speaking for themselves; they were responding to questions put by Reece, and what they said was then crammed, again by Reece, into a stilted format that bore all the marks of a non-lawyer trying to compose a document that would carry legal weight. Moreover, there was no reason why parolees should want to talk to Reece; he carried no official title or sanction, and he could offer neither reward nor protection for those who cooperated with him. For the most part those who talked to Reece shared with him a desire to "get back" at the prison and its warden. A comradeship of grievance would not necessarily produce falsehood -and there is no reason to construe fabrication - but it certainly could be selective and mutually self-reinforcing in what it chose to remember or to record. 

This said, we need not therefore discount the reports. If a large number of former prisoners tell of similar, or the same, practices and remember the same events, we may take it to be, at the very least, their truth and fruitfully place it in the context of what we otherwise know. This is particularly the case if we bear in mind that prisoners in the 1920S were only beginning to learn the new rules for parole or conditional release, and the game must have appeared somewhat mysterious. Explaining exactly how someone got out of prison when the procedures were as yet unclear and decisions in individual cases were made entirely in secret could easily produce stories of a "pardons mill" - indeed, the very term they all used suggests the vagueness of the process in prisoners' (and Reece's) minds, for parole was not a pardon, while an executive pardon had in the past been about the only way to gain release before the expiration of the full sentence. 

Moreover, the kind of stories prisoners told involved, as we shall see, cash and connections. For such stories to have currency, and especially to enjoy widespread credence, there must have been a lot of money circulating in the prison and lots of opportunities for inmates to earn it; further, there must have been a "culture of corruption" - guards know to be on the take, officials reputed to be "available," outside "doormen" ready to open the parole gates for a fee - in short, ways of doing and getting things through informal and illegal networks. That such avenues were open, or at least accessible, at any time should not surprise us, but in the 192os the context in which the prison was located proved peculiarly conducive to the sort of activities described by Reece's informants. Harry Hulbert was himself a freewheeling patronage master who was relying more heavily upon work and job placements to control the prison; not only was the state economy booming, but the prison world itself was rapidly expanding, generating surpluses of all kinds that, however marginal, were available for illicit accumulation. We must attempt to see the sale of paroles and drugs as the deviant end of a whole network of otherwise "normal" relations inside the prison, just as these relations were, in their turn, both an extension of and a constituent element in the routine political relations of the state. 

Were paroles for sale? It is impossible to say. The prisoners certainly thought so. What is clear is that money was taken by several officials in exchange for a promise of parole, and on many occasions, though not all, release soon followed. "The truth is that when a prisoner announced that his friends have been able to raise some money, we know he will leave us in a short while." Said Roy Beebe, "If you want to be paroled, work for Chaplain Hopp." He was at the center of most of the stories. A seedy Lutheran cleric from Detroit who, according to prison gossip, had lost his pastorate after sleeping with a parishioner, Hopp was widely regarded as a dissolute and immoral man. Many inmates were convinced that he pursued and seduced their wives, and it was widely said that he owned controlling interest in a Detroit whorehouse. Hopp apparently kept close tabs on prisoners with money, regularly checking inmate accounts to see if anyone showed signs of affluence and approaching wives and other relatives with offers of services in exchange for cash. When Roy Daniels showed six hundred dollars in his account, Hopp approached his wife with a proposition for parole, at five hundred dollars; Ms. Daniels haggled him down, and her husband got his parole for three hundred dollars. Blackie Henderson's wife, reputedly a "madam" in Detroit who saw Hopp regularly, sold a ring for twelve hundred dollars to get her man released. The price Hopp quoted varied according to capacity to pay and other considerations; he seems to have been a rank opportunist, using what openings were made available through his job to milk prisoners for whatever he could get. 

Exactly how Hopp secured paroles for his clients is not clear. As chaplain, he was ostensibly a friend and confidant of inmates, and his good word presumably carried weight with the governor. Moreover, he and Hulbert were reportedly "as thick as thieves" and frequently made joint recommendations for parole. According to one inmate, Hulbert boasted about Blackie Henderson's parole that "there is a fifty-fifty split in this for me," and it is not inconceivable that Hopp, whose appointment was in the warden's gift, shared proceeds with him on a regular basis. It also appears that there were other, rival conduits for purchasing release: a Senator Riopelle from Detroit would use his contacts for a fee and had "never double-crossed anyone," while Bernie Brower, the state senator from Jackson, was a close friend of Fred Janette, the parole commissioner in Lansing, and occasionally took money to arrange paroles. In securing parole for Arthur Henderson, Brower reportedly got $850 in installments from the prisoner's wife; Hopp urgently pressed them both to learn how much Brower was charging for his services, and at least one of these interrogations took place in the presence of Hulbert's successor, Harry Jackson. In each of these cases the statements of inmates cannot be independently verified, but recurrent patterns are plain. In a period when, on the one hand, paroles were not easy to secure and the support of influential figures imperative and, on the other, the practices of job placement under patronage made it normal and acceptable for incumbents to "develop" the possibilities of their position, it would hardly be surprising if, at least on some occasions, certain officials exchanged their endorsement of parole for cash. 

The sale of paroles indicates a general availability of contraband cash. Although Chaplain Hopp apparently worked the "outside networks" for income, it is also clear that a lot of money was circulating inside the prison and that one had to have a good deal of it on account to get the chaplain's attention. The money circulating behind the walls came in through the "underground passage" in the pockets of guards. These couriers, who usually took 25 to 40 percent off the top for their services, dealt only with particular prisoners, the so-called go-betweens, who in turn did business, for a further cut, with other inmates. Cash was mainly used inside to sustain gambling and to buy drugs. The prison was "infested with dope and drugs," mostly cocaine and morphine. According to prison reports, there were three main conduits: the binder twine plant, where supervisor John Kline would sell just about "anything" to prison workers; the Inmate Store, run by Hulbert's brother-in-law, E. D. Deane, which was sup- posed to sell soap, groceries, and other amenities but apparently added drugs, syringes, and droppers to its inventory; and Chaplain Hopp, whose weekly Sunday visits to his flock also resupplied his clerks for their dope runs through the institution. Charlie Morono knew at least seventy-five active addicts in prison, and Roy Daniels claimed to have made three regular buys a week and to have sustained his habit from the proceeds of his gambling ring. But cash could also be used to purchase work and cell assignments from the deputies, to establish internal trade in contraband or loan-sharking, and to secure passes for "outside" details in Jackson or even Detroit. 

The circulation of cash went hand in hand with a quite extraordinary movement of goods. Jackson prison in the 1920s was wide open. The dispersal of prisoners at various, often temporary job sites, working in close proximity with free labor and under the supervision of venial guards, made it difficult, if not impossible, to prevent collusion. When W. A. Hunter took charge of the Ypsilanti Road Camp, he reported that "inmates were allowed to come and go as they pleased and were allowed to have all the money they wished." There was plenty of liquor and drugs in the camp, and prisoners were in the habit of "going down the road" for food from the local grocery or visits with local acquaintances. There was also a considerable traffic in state property. "The fact is," wrote one prisoner, "that half the people within a radius of 10 miles of a road camp are supplied with gas, oil, tires, auto parts, flour, sugar, coffee, hams, army blankets, etc. from state supplies. These are sold through officers and free men working in collusion with convicts." Not only did large amounts of prison goods and property simply disappear from the farms and the road camps, flowing into the outside world with the help of prisoners and guards, but contraband of all kinds got behind the walls and circulated through the entrepreneurial networks of inmates inside. Movement in and out of the old main prison was only loosely monitored; prisoners came and went, and outside contractors and their employees had routine access to the institution. The flow of drugs, liquor, food, tools and utensils, sheets, blankets, pictures, dirty magazines, and cash was continuous, and, as contacts, messages, deliveries, and visitors moved back and forth across the forbidden zone, guards were routinely paid to serve as intermediaries or to look the other way as prisoners conducted their business. This continuous current of contraband into and through the prison, and the differential ability of various inmates to control both the movement and the dispersal of goods inside, fostered hierarchies and alliances among prisoners that were, in turn, attached to the custodial staff by complex patterns of reciprocity and dependency. Access conferred and confirmed power. 

With everything for sale, from necessities to luxuries to jobs, even release, inmates were pushed into a kind of primitive accumulation, devising schemes to turn a profit and defensive alliances to protect advantages. An internal cash economy established the imperatives of survival and the everyday preoccupations of prisoners and forced them into collaborative collusion with the custodians. Since street money was at once essential to life inside and yet a form of contraband, its accumulation was inevitably subjected to informal "taxation" by guards, who had the power to conduct shakedowns and cell searches at any time-and often did so as a form of extortion. Prison staff were thus both instrumental and parasitic to the economic life of prisoners, providing essential services, taking cuts from profits, and wielding the powers of discipline and punishment that could be used with calculation to insure custodial access to and control over inmate enterprise. At the same time, the petty profiteering of prison guards and civilian employees bound them more securely to the warden, who not only provided them with jobs but was usually able to protect them, through his political connections, as they exploited the opportunities provided by their positions. Inmates and custodians alike thus developed a stake in the system, using each other to tap the resources made available by a permissive warden and a rapidly expanding prison society. Far from discouraging such activities, Hulbert probably considered the petty graft of his subordinates as a form of flattery and often took a cut for himself. In all events what was important was that the flow of contraband and the expanding horizons of opportunity at the prison organized life behind the walls and nourished hierarchies of mutual interdependency among keepers and kept that were, ultimately, tied to the warden himself. 

We may note here the new instrumentalities of carceral control that Hulbert was engineering: the manipulation of work and parole. As warden and head of Prison Industries - and, after 1924, chief of construction at the new site - Hulbert exercised almost unchallenged authority over the distribution of all prison jobs for civilian employees and inmates alike. Custodial staff and the "free" labor force employed in maintenance work and construction served at the warden's plea- sure; not only did he control hiring and firing, promotion and demotion, but he also set the pay scales and could thus manipulate the rewards structure in more subtle ways. And if a guard's hope for advancement lay entirely at the warden's discretion, so did a prisoner's dream of release. This was the most powerful incentive in the warden's gift. Under the new administrative procedures established by Groesbeck, the governor and his parole commissioner usually granted paroles on the direct recommendation of the warden, and, in a period when parole was becoming more difficult to obtain, the advocacy of the warden (or his chaplain) was indispensable to a prisoner's hopes. If the threat of the sack kept the civilian staff compliant, the threat of prolonged incarceration and the hope of "promotion" to the free world fostered caution and obedience among all but the most long-term inmates. 

Inside the institution, moreover, a good work record was not only a prerequisite to a parole recommendation, but particular job assignments, especially outside the walls, were often crucial for the conduct of illicit prison business. For those without hope of parole, the warden's control over job and cell assignments could place them at the critical junctions and entrepots of prison society and, in effect,  invest them with social power. Giving his favorites positions of leverage enabled the warden, in turn, to monitor and control the activities of other prisoners. As the jobs and employment opportunities in the prison expanded, and especially as outside details multiplied, Harry Hulbert was able to rely more heavily upon his command of jobs to control the prison and insure his personal ascendancy over keepers and kept alike. 

It is important to emphasize, however, that the reorganization of the prison around industrial labor in the 1920S was anything but a move to consolidate panoptic discipline in Foucault's sense. Not only did the congregate labor of the shop floor produce new arenas of inmate sociability, but the workplace in prison was actually less closely monitored, movement less regulated, and spaces less closely ordered than the cell block-home. It is striking how quickly the workplaces of the prison became sites of other activities, unassociated with the labor process or production. It was in prison industries and the numerous work sites outside the walls that illicit activities were concentrated-the stills, the stashes of contraband, the drug dealing, the sources of supply, the business negotiations and peace conferences, as well as the fights. It was in the movement to and from the workplaces, in the unmonitored halls, passageways, and paths across the yard or out into the fields and road camps, that plans were laid, information exchanged, goods and weapons passed. The industrial prison offered rapidly expanding opportunities for pilfering-tools, utensils, clothing, canned goods, the spare parts and raw materials of contraband weapons and possessions. Moreover, in their effort to maximize output and win inmate collaboration in the productive process, prison managers under Hulbert's direction tacitly permitted a proliferation of illicit activities and winked at the compromises of carceral discipline that followed as inmates took advantage of avail- able opportunities. 

We may think of all this as the "tolerated illegalities" of the industrial prison. While the scope of such activity may have been greater at Jackson than in other penitentiaries of the day, the fact of this widespread and full-blown inmate self-activity indicates how far the industrial prison expanded openings for inmates to take and organize parallel spaces and to construct networks of exchange and remuneration beyond effective surveillance or custodial supervision. These activities were not oppositional in the sense of challenging work processes or conditions of labor; there is no hint of trade unionism nor, certainly, of confronting authorities directly. Hulbert's control of the prison was never in question. Rather, inmate effort focused on the creation and reproduction of counter-events, carried on among them- selves in the name of sustaining or improving the quality of their lives. This prison version of Eigensinn produced the parallel worlds behind the walls that mimicked, tested, and evaded the formal structures of custody. These were the social constructions that Clemmer and other sociologists of the prison then discovered and studied. 

The fact that these illegalities were so broadly tolerated suggests, in turn, that prison authorities, whatever their public rhetoric about the aims of punishment, were less concerned with the consistent and unbroken application of discipline than with appearances. It was less important that prisoners actually stepped up to the mark, learned regular work habits, and reformed themselves than that they seemed to do so. In exchange for the appearance of compliance in a smooth-running institution, moreover, prison officials were prepared to cut a little slack and give prisoners space to pursue parallel agendas. This was, as we saw, a gritty, uneven, continuously tested and contested standoff, and, from within Foucault's self-sustaining logic, the effects added up to the reproduction of domination, in that it did not much matter whether someone pretended to conform or really meant to. But the fact that prisoners were not so much reformed as invited to appear so does point to a certain "lie" at the heart of discipline. Prisons were no doubt expressions of the disciplinary intent and character of the well-ordered, industrial society, but they also embodied the lie of noncompletion, of partial compliance, of cynical, self-interested, and resigned consent that also continued, in the same moment, to express resistance, noncompliance, and a refusal to cave in or be overwhelmed. Everyone inside Jackson prison knew this. On the outside appearances were kept. The prison thus sustained, in the lie of compliance, an illusion that discipline was in place. If this suggests that, pace Foucault, the microcircuits of power in free society that organize consent, internalize self-judgment, and render the disciplined speechless are, in fact, deeply flawed and incomplete-even, perhaps, an elaborate confidence trick-it may also amplify the implications of our insistence that, in prison at least, the objects of discipline are, at once, both compliant and complaining, outwardly conformist and inwardly subversive.”    

- Charles Bright, The Powers That Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the “Big House”, 1920-1955.Lansing: University of Michigan Press, 1996. pp. 93-103.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Two Yield In Jail Siege,” The Globe and Mail. May 11, 1979. Page 13. --- Inmates Carl Harp, Robert Washburn are searched after 225 convicts occupied state penitentiary yard at Walla Walla, Wash. Ten hostages were seized and held for 12 hours. Bricks were hurled at guards.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Notorious Prison Vacated,” The Day. February 10, 1936. Page 09. “The last prisoners from notorious Welfare Island prison - the New York city penitentiary - are pictured as they left the institution to be housed at Riker’s Island, location of the city’s new penal institution.  The 110-year old prison, called a ‘black smirch’ on the New York penal system, will be demolished (Associated Press Photo).”