by Barry Lopez
I’ve long been drawn to prisons, both as symbols of punishment and as monuments to injustice (as well as justice). Here is where we house wrongdoers, however that category might be defined in any particular age. Prison buildings serve a legitimate social purpose, but they also stand, metaphorically, for a kind of social confinement that many who live in restrictive or repressive societies experience every day. In a culture in which invasions of privacy are routine or where human rights violations are common, people not actually living in prisons nevertheless sense that they are. They feel ill treated by indifferent people in positions of power and believe that their ordinary movements and activities are unreasonably restricted by bureaucrats. They feel violated by security cameras, by drones, and by the incessant mining of their smartphones, computers, laptops, and other electronic devices for the personal information that creates Big Data, warehouses of particularized fact that in turn make surreptitious intrusions into our private lives possible. And they feel, further, that their voices of ethical objection directed at government and businesses are repeatedly ignored by ideologues and by the entrenched corrupt in power.
Having inspected several abandoned colonial penal colonies and spent time visiting a couple of modern prisons, I’ve come to understand more clearly the somewhat facile metaphor of feeling imprisoned in a free society. I’ve also thought about how people living outside a prison environment, people who are denied certain of their basic freedoms, nevertheless believe they are living in a state of unfettered freedom.
One would like to think that in an enlightened time prisons would exist largely to rehabilitate those criminals who can be rehabilitated, to isolate the violent and psychopathic from the rest of society, and to punish those guilty of serious crimes. But that is not always the case. Among the incarcerated in many countries, including my own, are many who would be better off cared for in mental institutions, as well as first-time offenders, charged with only minor crimes, who are left to fend for themselves with professional criminals and predatory gangs. Moreover, in most countries allocations for the education of prisoners—the single most effective way to reduce the rate of recidivism—are paltry to nonexistent, in both government-run and for-profit prisons.
Prisons, then, can be understood to represent some of society’s deepest unresolved problems: racism, the cultural capacity to inflict unnecessary cruelty on others, and ambivalence about how to deal with sociopathic personalities in public life. Prison buildings themselves easily provoke questions for me about whom society really wants to be rid of, and about how various political and religious forces within society combine to impose harsh judgment here, frequently on those without influential advocates or competent legal counsel. If wisdom and equity played a larger role in these matters, justice generally would look very different from what currently is in place. Prisons remind us of more than the inevitability of terrible human failure, of social intolerance, political totalitarianism, and the seemingly ineradicable presence of injustice. Importantly, they also remind us of how easily one’s admirable instinct to be empathetic can perish when faced with the realities of daily life in prison. If prisons are awful places—violent, mind-numbing, and unsafe—then, obviously, prison reform is called for; if people are imprisoned who shouldn’t be there, then social reform is called for.
Prisons seem to me, and perhaps to others, like canaries in the proverbial mine shaft. In a free society, we must always ask, Who exactly is to be placed in them? And how is someone to look after their own salvation in such places? And do prisons symbolize, even in free societies, malignant intolerance—the inability of judges and others with discretionary power, for example, to empathize? To create a better social order, one must accept what prisons reveal about the full spectrum of human nature (the incorrigible behavior of the career criminal or the psychopath’s incapacity to empathize) and disown the naïve belief that those incarcerated represent a class of people that poses a great threat to social stability. A greater threat, in my view, are those who deny or ignore the reasons for refugee diasporas, the collapsing populations of wild animals, and the neurosis of consumerism, all in an effort to ensure their own financial well-being.
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MOST OF THE ROOFS in the one-story whitewashed cellblocks on Île du Diable have caved in, and the cells themselves, along with the corridors connecting them, are heavily overgrown with tropical vegetation. Wild fig trees have entirely sealed off the entrances to some cells, and their massive trunks block a number of passageways. Even with sunlight pouring in and the jungle actively reclaiming the site, however, one can easily picture the bleakness that once characterized this compound—the regimentation of daily life, the petty acts of humiliation by the guards, the prisoners’ despair, and the accommodation of pathological perversions on the part of both prisoners and guards. Dreyfus, wrongly convicted of treason (partly because he was a Jew), was eventually exonerated; many others sent here for punishment, however, had done little more than incite the wrath and indignation of the powerful. The illegitimacy of their convictions, frequently around issues of religious belief, social class, and political philosophy, eventually led to widespread condemnation of these particular prisons. Most of them were closed or torn down before the end of the nineteenth century.
The impulse behind the establishment of the colonial prison, however, the impulse of nations to rid themselves of criminals, idlers, and those who criticize government, did not end with the termination of colonialism. The too-aggressive pursuit of criminal justice easily led—and still leads, in some totalitarian regimes—to the realization that the prison compound offers a solution for neutralizing political foes, a place where such foes can be silenced and effectively buried.
Opposing opinions about how to design a just prison system—whether to punish, on the one hand, or to rehabilitate and forgive on the other—are difficult for most people to balance. What I found moving through the derelict buildings on Devil’s Island and sitting awhile in some of the cells, looking at the evidence around me, was great sadness at the way we behave toward one another. How wretched it must have been, having indifferent strangers designating precisely which spaces you would be permitted to occupy, strangers who also had the authority to arrange the order of your every waking minute, and to be made to accept, every day, the denial of your own instincts for self-preservation.
Whoever ended up in these colonial prisons was treated like a faulty appliance—dropped off at a repair shop, struck with a ballpeen hammer to make it work properly, and thrown back on a shelf at night.
I sat in the empty cells on Île du Diable in the same way I sat in front of the empty dwellings of the Thule, wondering where the path to safety lies in our time. Wondering about the fate of those who, uneasy, are increasingly raising their voices. Wondering, considering the many apparent threats we can see on the horizon, whether what is to emerge for us is an unimaginable darkness of social disorder and ecological disaster or the fully imagined landscape of a second, a very different, Enlightenment.
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THE WORK ON Skraeling had a pleasing order to it. We proceeded each morning to a partially worked site and took up again the task of collecting, accessioning, and speculating. We sifted the thin soil searching for anything relevant—a flake of gray chert or dark argillite, a shriveled thread of sinew—and worked the entire ground near us methodically, measuring, cataloging, making sketch maps. The work never seemed tedious. Birds flew over, calling. Cirrus clouds scudded west on a prevailing wind. Our concentration was focused so narrowly that we hardly spoke to each other, unless it was to further the task at hand or to share an occasional insight. If we were far from camp, we’d each eat the lunch we’d brought and I’d go to work on my notes, or ask the others about what it was they were doing, and what images they’d formed of the people whose dwellings we were so respectfully, I thought, taking apart.
Occa
sionally I saw something I wanted to pocket, but I never acted on the impulse. One of Peter’s great fears, he tells me, is that artifacts from four thousand years of human history are scattered everywhere across the ground here, and the only thing that keeps people from walking off with one of the more spectacular objects—an ivory carving, a spearpoint—is the great difficulty of getting here and the basic honesty of those who do come.
In many of the archeological sites I’ve visited, the overriding apprehension—after anxiety over inadvertently damaging the site or its contents—is the same: thievery. When thieves arrive, it is not just the objects themselves that are lost. The continuity of the record of human occupation is destroyed, and the sense of who we are and where we might be headed is compromised. It’s codexes pulled from a library’s shelves to fuel an itinerant’s campfire.
It is discomforting to consider thievery in such a remote and pristine setting. But anyone who works in archeology today knows incidental and professional thievery thrive in every environment where the question is not Where have we come from? but, What is it worth?
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A VISITOR TO Les Îles du Salut today is meant to appreciate the contrast between the barred cells on Île du Diable, with their thick walls, iron doors, and porthole windows, and the patrician appointments of the prison commandant’s manse, across the water on Île Royale. The commandant’s quarters enjoy unobstructed views of the sea in every direction. Fine linens are here, a silver coffee service, closets with many changes of clothing. The screen doors in this spacious dwelling are lightly sprung, and its mahogany shelves are laden with memorabilia and curios. The visitor is reassured: the innocent must always be protected against the machinations of the malcontent, the evildoer. One might as easily leave here, however, with another impression: the insidious nature of social oppression, and the many ways in which those who dwell in the manses continue to create such places, securing in the cells opposite those who threaten the social order that those in charge prefer.
What resonates for me in this place, and other places like it, is not so much the past. The unavoidable and dangerous question for the traveler here is: Who now occupies the commandant’s house? Who prefers that you do what you are told? Who is it that calls for you to be silent? These questions go back a dozen millennia for us, to the rise of now-obscure people like the Abu Hureyra, in Syria in 13,500 BCE, and to the people of Karaca Dagˇ in Turkey a thousand years later, and after that to the era of the first cities and the rise of complex societies. The difference now is that so much of what we depended on back then—wood, fish, freshwater, arable land—is now much diminished. The cities have increased in number and size. And the fear of living a life of real impoverishment in the future is spoken of in every café.
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EMPATHY FOR EACH OTHER’S predicaments, it seems to me, is the starting point for any system of justice in our time. The caution here—as the prior of a monastery once put it to me—is to understand that justice without liturgy is barbarism, and liturgy without justice is sentimentality. I took him to mean that to pursue justice outside an ethical framework (the Bible, the Qur’an, the Constitution of the United States) would be intolerable in a society that enshrines its ethics; and to imagine that evil is not a force in the organization of human societies is to remain unenlightened.
I was able to ask archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu once about prisons, how he viewed them in the context of the disintegration of apartheid. He said something I thought oddly in accord with what the prior had said to me. With an end to that murderous and racist regime in South Africa, he said, you had two choices as you addressed the challenge of rebuilding: pursue justice at the expense of peace, or pursue peace at the expense of justice. The answer he and his colleagues found was Truth and Reconciliation, a legal process that established a middle ground, the very hardest ground to establish and then to hold. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, those who had been harmed were asked to describe what was done to them, and those who had caused the harm were asked to tell the truth about what they had done. Both spoke in the same courtroom at the same session, seated in front of each other. The result of these hearings, said the archbishop, was reconciliation. Having the ones who were harmed describe what was done to them and the ones who harmed them acknowledge in detail what they’d done, and explain why they had caused harm, ensured both a measure of justice and a measure of peace. Those in the courtroom charged with passing judgment on the accused sought to locate and encourage within themselves a capacity for empathy.
Only the very worst offenders were sent to prison.
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ABANDONED COLONIAL PRISONS like Devil’s Island are teachers in my mind, monuments to the immorality behind imperial thinking and to the unilateral power of those rulers who enforce compliance with their wishes. The effort behind colonial imprisonment was neither to rehabilitate, to socialize, or to educate. It was to punish, relentlessly and heartlessly, and to thereby create, it was hoped, loyal citizens, those who would become the servants of empire. The system was driven by resentment and pettiness and it was enabled by social indifference (and, too, by the political impotence of those few who objected).
The threat of its full resurrection, in my mind, is never far off.
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PETER AND THE OTHERS returned from Haa Island late that afternoon, pleased with what they’d found—some very large Thule dwellings, which they would later describe as the last major Thule encampment in the “crossroads to Greenland” region of Ellesmere Island. Along with these dwellings, they discovered artifacts that told them these particular Thule were hunting inland for caribou and muskoxen, probably in and around Sverdrup Pass. The four of us began discussing how unusual this evidence was. Thule are commonly described as “whale hunters” or “marine mammal hunters.” Peter also wondered whether Thule people like these might have occasionally built their winter villages near the site of a beach-cast bowhead whale. It would have provided them with enough protein and building material to get twenty or thirty people easily through a long winter. The carrion might also have drawn in polar bears for them to hunt.
That evening in my tent I listened to classical music on a small battery-powered cassette tape player, the music rising up through my pillow. This was my usual habit on such trips, and this time I’d chosen, with no originality, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose melancholy music fits the stony barrens and stretches of tundra here. I’d also brought some of Bach’s chamber music, the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, and a few of the Beethoven symphonies. I find the mood in Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela and the evocation of the forested landscapes of Finland in his Tapiola transporting. Tuonela, the land of Death in Finnish myth, is encompassed by a river of black water upon which a white swan floats, singing. Bach’s Partita for Violin no. 2 includes many variations on a single theme, suggesting the infinity of meaning that might be drawn from something that, initially, seems quite simple.
That particular evening I was listening to the Beethoven Fifth Symphony and drifting through the events of my day—looking inside the fox trap, catching the image of a perfect reflection of the lowland cliffs in the flat water of Alexandra Fjord, feeling the heft and spring of the narwhal tusk the pilot had retrieved. Recalling my emotions in some of these scenes, I envisioned the bow moving rapidly over the strings of a cello. The musical phrases increased the intensity of the events I was recalling, opening them up to an unexpected degree. The music sharpened my comprehension of what had happened that day.
Once when I was talking with the American composer John Luther Adams about the way music might pry something ineluctable out of a particular landscape, and about how certain geographies can increase the intensity of certain pieces of music, we realized that the enthusiasm we each felt for certain landscape paintings
was stimulated by qualities in the paintings similar to those that composers use in creating successful music. In music, purity refers to a lack of diffusion, while in painting, purity is a measure of saturation. Harmony and timbre compare in painting with the hues of a color. Loudness compares with visual brightness. The totality of patterns present in a piece of music—melody, harmony, timbre, rhythm, texture—the landscape painter achieves with the purity, amplitude, and hue of her colors. Adams calls these patterns in music and painting “ecologies.” In many of Adams’s twentieth-century compositions, these ecologies limn the subtleties of specific landscapes, including the sonic components and patterns of those places. Landscape painting, more obviously, does the same, creating realistic or abstract interpretations of moments—or even years—in such places. Astonishing to me is that it is possible to find in the “totality of patterns” of a particular piece of music a unity that compares with the unified biological, geological, and geographical ecologies of a landscape, many of which specifics a composer might actually be unaware of.
The music I listened to those nights on Skraeling brought the land in closer, deepened it to my senses. The music conjured, to my way of thinking, the prior residents. It beckoned to the Thule hunters and their families to become known.
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IN THE MORNING the helicopter came again, and the four of us and the pilot flew east together, tracing the northern boundary of Johan Peninsula. Along the way we put down to examine two Thule polar bear traps, built, curiously, only about twenty feet apart on a stone shelf some five feet above the water. The traps were constructed of stone slabs, braced and reinforced with boulders. The low-ceilinged tunnels inside both traps were about eleven feet long. In order to reach the bait at the far end of the tunnel, a bear was forced to inch forward on its belly. Tugging the bait loosened a wedge and the door slab slammed down. Stretched prone in this position, the bear lacked leverage. It couldn’t use its great strength to break free.
