“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.