Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

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  Were there places where prison guards didn’t feel devalued? In Prison Worlds, an ethnographic study of the prison system in France, the anthropologist Didier Fassin found that many guards were so embarrassed about what they did for a living that they avoided talking about it. “I never tell anyone what I do … it’s too shaming,” one guard said. “I don’t tell my friends,” another confessed. Most of the guards in Fassin’s study hailed from small provincial towns and working-class families. Many compared themselves unfavorably to police officers, sensing that the latter regarded them as “sub-professionals.” Far from taking pride in the uniforms they wore, the guards felt “contaminated by the conditions in which they carry out their work,” Fassin found. In other words, like their counterparts in places like Florida and Colorado, they felt like dirty workers who performed a demeaning and morally discredited job, notwithstanding the fact that the conditions they worked under reflected the public’s wishes and priorities. (Another study of prison guards in France asked “why the image of the correctional officer is so negative, when all he does is carry out the task society sets him,” suggesting that the answer could be traced to “the process of displacement,” whereby society’s “bad conscience” about the deplorable conditions in France’s prisons were projected onto the figure of the guard.)

  But while such feelings were pervasive, they were not inevitable. In 2015, the journalist Jessica Benko toured the grounds of Halden Fengsel, a maximum-security prison in Norway. Located in a bucolic landscape of pine trees and blueberry bushes, the prison housed 251 people, more than half of whom had been convicted of violent crimes. This did not prevent Halden’s proprietors from allowing them to live in furnished rooms with no bars on the doors. The prisoners at Halden were encouraged to attend classes and permitted to circulate unmonitored by surveillance cameras, a philosophy known as “dynamic security,” which sought to reduce violence through trust and social interactions rather than coercion and control. Halden had only one isolation cell reserved for unruly individuals, equipped with a restraining chair that had never been used. A skeptic might note that such a prison would probably cost more to run than a maximum-security prison in the United States, which was true, and that the data on whether more humane prisons succeeded in reducing the recidivism rate was inconclusive. But reducing the recidivism rate was not the only goal. Equally important was creating an institution in which Norwegians could take pride, a sentiment the staff at Halden appeared to share. “I have the best job in the world,” the warden of the prison told Benko, mentioning that his officers liked their jobs and hoped to finish their careers there. As the comment suggested, it wasn’t only the dignity of incarcerated people that was at stake in changing the brutal conditions in America’s prisons. It was also the dignity of the staff, who didn’t use fear and threats to enforce their authority and didn’t seem to feel contaminated by the conditions in which they worked.

  At the very beginning, Bobby actually did take pride in his job. He wanted to make a career of it, he told me. The low pay and rampant corruption made this impossible, he’d concluded, conditions he wasn’t holding his breath for “good people” in Florida to change. The same critics who rushed to blame the guards at CCI for killing Matthew Walker after hearing about it on the local news would just as quickly forget that the prison even existed, he predicted, likening the level of awareness about the conditions in Florida’s prisons to the level of awareness of the landfills where the public’s trash was dumped. “You put your trash out, the trash gets taken away—you don’t care about the landfill,” he said. “The only time you care is when it’s full and you gotta pay for a new landfill.” For most Floridians, it was the same with the DOC, he told me at the restaurant where we met, which had begun to fill up for happy hour, the customers trickling in for beers and margaritas served at a bar flanked by TVs tuned to golf and baseball. “Nobody cares about the DOC until something hits the newspaper,” Bobby said, tugging on the brim of his Home Depot cap as he glanced over at the scrum of patrons by the bar, “and then the media’s gonna blow it up to make it sound like, you know, we’re a terrible group of people.”

  3

  Civilized Punishment

  As in most states, prisons in Florida are not easy to access. They’re not even easy to find. Without exception, the DOC facilities that I visited were situated in remote areas, off backwoods roads, in fenced-off compounds surrounded by woodlands and swamps. You had to drive a good distance to reach their entrances, past the beaches and theme parks, the golf courses and vacation resorts, the palm-lined boulevards and oceanfront condos that drew throngs of tourists and snowbirds to the Sunshine State every year. The closer you got to the gates of a prison, the more the traffic thinned out, and the spottier the cellular coverage generally got. On several occasions, I zoomed past the facility I’d set out for, only to notice later that my GPS had stopped working and that I’d gone too far. Other than marshes and fields and some unwelcoming signs—UNANNOUNCED PERSONS WILL BE PROSECUTED—there was little else around.

  Along with their remoteness, the prisons I visited were notable for their drab architectural style: featureless, box-shaped buildings arrayed across sterile compounds that projected a bland orderliness. Squinting at them through rows of security fencing and the harsh glare of the Florida sun, I rarely saw much in the way of human activity: the rec yards were empty, the grounds still. Aside from the occasional squawk of a bird circling overhead or the buzz of a mosquito that landed on my arm, I heard few sounds. Nothing eventful was happening here, the dull facades of the generic-looking buildings suggested, certainly nothing disturbing or violent.

  Prisons have always been geographically isolated and visually lackluster, I assumed after these visits, the better to avoid attracting unwanted attention from outsiders. As I subsequently learned, this assumption was wrong. During the Jacksonian era, “Americans took enormous pride in their prisons, were eager to show them off to European visitors, and boasted that the United States had ushered in a new era in the history of crime and punishment,” notes the historian David Rothman. Among the visitors invited to see the early prisons of the new republic was Charles Dickens, who toured the grounds of Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842, chatting freely with convicts as he passed from cell to cell. “Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view,” Dickens wrote in his American Notes, “and every piece of information that I sought, was openly and frankly given.” In both America and England, prisons in the nineteenth century tended to be built in prominent places that were exposed to the public. Some boasted soaring turrets and stone arcades and were likened to palaces.

  As the sociologist John Pratt has documented, it was only later that the architectural style grew more spartan and that prisons started to be built on the “unobtrusive margins” of society. Why did this happen? One explanation is that prison administrators learned from experience not to open their doors to observers like Dickens, who praised the officials in charge of the Eastern State Penitentiary for their good intentions but lambasted the system of “Prison Discipline” they had devised, which confined people to total isolation. The regimen of solitude would cultivate introspection and self-discipline, reformers of the Jacksonian era believed. Dickens was unpersuaded, describing solitary confinement as a “dreadful punishment” that was all the more insidious because its ravages were cloaked and camouflaged. “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body … because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh,” Dickens wrote. At the time, America’s penal system was shaped by a belief that prisons could be designed to foster moral uplift and turn chastened offenders into law-abiding citizens. By the 1980s, a more punitive philosophy had taken hold, which made prison administrators and public officials all the more inclined to limit access to their grounds.

  But the shift to the margins of society coul
d also be attributed to something else. In Pratt’s view, it reflected the triumph of “civilized punishment”—civilized not in the conventional meaning of the term, but in the sense that Norbert Elias described, whereby distasteful and disturbing events were removed from sight and pushed “behind the scenes of social life.” At first glance, Elias’s work appears to bear little relevance to the study of punishment. His two-volume 1939 work, The Civilizing Process, a study of European manners that traced the evolution of table etiquette and other behavioral norms from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, scarcely mentions the subject. But in recent years, scholars of crime and punishment have drawn on Elias’s insights to explain some of the ironies and contradictions of contemporary penal practices. At the core of the “civilizing process” was the rise of internal inhibitions that led social actors to suppress the more “animal” aspects of human conduct and to hide such behavior from others, Elias argued. Bodily functions (spitting, farting) came to be seen as offensive and to be banished from polite company. “Disturbing events” such as the carving of dead animals—an activity once performed at the table before festive meals—were hidden in deference to the rising “threshold of repugnance” among members of the courtly upper class.

  Though Elias did not examine how this shift in sentiments might have altered the landscape of punishment, his argument that concealment was a central part of the civilizing process seemed strikingly relevant to another set of “disturbing events”: the torture and execution of criminal offenders. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, crowds routinely gathered to watch wrongdoers get marched to the gallows, where they were mutilated, burned, and hanged. During the nineteenth century, these so-called spectacles of punishment grew increasingly rare, and many of the practices that had long been theatrically displayed (floggings, beheadings) were outlawed, not least because elites had come to regard them as repellent. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argued that the transition to the more refined technologies of punishment in the modern era—most notably, the prison—was driven by the desire to control and observe the bodies of criminals, rendering them docile and obedient. Criminologists influenced by Elias have emphasized another rationale, arguing that the shift was propelled by a desire to hide these bodies from respectable citizens who no longer wanted to glimpse the sordid business of punishment with their own eyes.

  The fact that corporal punishment came to be viewed as sordid was, in theory, a sign of progress. Yet as Elias’s disciples have noted, the “civilizing process” he outlined did not suggest that brutal violence would cease, only that it would be relegated to more private spaces. According to the scholar David Garland, who introduced Elias’s work to the sociology of punishment, violence would not offend civilized sensibilities so long as it unfolded behind closed doors or could be sanitized. (The state’s monopolization of violence was a major theme in The Civilizing Process, a development that coincided with an emphasis on self-restraint that deterred ordinary citizens from engaging in unlicensed displays of aggression.) In his book Punishment and Modern Society, Garland presented a genealogy of “civilized sanctions” that bore out this theory. Hanging criminals on the scaffold was uncivilized, everyone in contemporary America agreed. But executing them by lethal injection—a more discreet method of killing—was legal in many states. Flogging prisoners clearly violated the “threshold of repugnance” among modern Americans. But caging them in hidden, segregated “isolation units” did not. The fact that solitary confinement’s “ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye,” as Dickens had observed in 1842, was precisely why so many people failed to find it offensive. “Routine violence and suffering can be tolerated on condition that it is discreet, disguised, or somehow removed from view,” observed Garland. What mattered was not the level of brutality, but its visibility and form. Viewed in this light, the remoteness of Florida’s prisons was not an accident. Throughout the Western world, “the civilized prison became the invisible prison,” Pratt observed, hiding the system’s violence and making it that much easier for “good people” to ignore or forget about what was happening behind the walls.

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  In fairness, not everyone in Florida put this out of mind. Between visits to penitentiaries, I made my way to a coffee shop one day to meet Judy Thompson. An African American woman from Baymeadows, a suburb of Jacksonville, Thompson was the former coordinator of a leadership academy at the Mayport Naval Station. She was also the founder of an organization that advocated fairer sentencing policies and more humane conditions in Florida’s prisons. Thompson came to our meeting with a stack of letters that had been sent to her by incarcerated people who’d heard about her organization and had written to relay stories about the mistreatment they’d endured. The letters arrived faster than she could open them, she said. The ones she’d brought to show me had all been sent to her in the previous month.

  Composed by strangers, the letters touched a nerve in Thompson, who had six sons. In 1999, the second youngest of them, Chris, was arrested for participating in a robbery. No one was hurt during the crime, Thompson told me, and Chris, who was twenty-one, had not been armed. Even so, he was sentenced to thirty years. Until that moment, Thompson hadn’t thought much about the punitive laws that had turned prisons into one of Florida’s largest growth industries. “It just wasn’t part of my world,” she said. Afterward, she started reading about the wave of punitive measures that had caused the prison population to surge both in Florida and in the rest of the country. Among the books she later came across was The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, a law professor who depicted the war on drugs and other supposedly color-blind policies (mandatory minimum sentences, stop-and-frisk programs) as pillars in a racial caste system that was as pervasive and pernicious as the segregation laws to which Blacks had been subjected before the civil rights movement. The New Jim Crow highlighted the devastating costs, becoming a runaway bestseller and reshaping the debate about mass incarceration. Judy Thompson devoured the book, which appeared in 2010. A year later, she launched her organization, which she called the Forgotten Majority, because, she said, “those behind the walls are truly forgotten” and because, in some cities, a majority of young Black men were ensnared in the criminal justice system. In 2019, Blacks made up 17 percent of Florida’s population but nearly half of the state’s prisoners (Latinos comprised an additional 40 percent).

  Thompson was under no illusions that changing the system in which her son was penned would be easy. Yet she soon discovered that doubts about mass incarceration were emerging in some surprising places. Not long after she formed the Forgotten Majority, she paid a visit to Greg Evers, who chaired the Criminal Justice Committee in the Florida Senate. Senator Evers was a conservative Republican from the Panhandle with an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association. Thompson went to see him to tell him about a petition she was circulating to make it easier for felons who she felt deserved a second chance to be eligible for parole, which Florida had effectively abolished in 1983 by enacting a truth-in-sentencing law that required all offenders to serve 85 percent of their prison terms. Among the prisoners she believed should be granted relief from this law was her son Chris, who had used his time in prison to become an accomplished jailhouse lawyer, dispensing legal advice to other incarcerated people. (They called him “little Johnnie Cochran,” she told me with pride.)

  Senator Evers received Thompson in his office. As she made her pitch, he nodded. Then he told her, “Judy, you’re preaching to the choir. It’s costing us too much money to lock all these people up.” Across the country, conservatives who’d spent decades championing law-and-order policies were coming to a similar realization, unsettled by the fiscal costs of building the world’s largest prison system, if not by the moral costs. A year later, Thompson attended an event at the Governor’s Mansion, in Tallahassee, to honor Black History Month. Before leaving, she spotted Florida’s governor, Rick Scott. She walked up to him, told him about her organization, and said t
hat she found it impossible to enjoy Black History Month when so many Black men were languishing in Florida’s prisons “without hope.” Rather than take offense, Scott, a Republican who in a few years would become a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, invited her to set up a meeting. Afterward, Thompson assumed that she would never hear from him again. Several weeks later, her phone rang. It was an aide to Governor Scott, calling to follow up. On her next trip to the Governor’s Mansion, Thompson hauled along several garbage bags filled with signed petitions calling for a restoration of parole. Changing the law was up to the legislature, Governor Scott told her, but Thompson left the meeting heartened that he’d listened to her.

  At long last, policy makers were beginning to reckon with the calamitous effects of mass incarceration, it appeared, not only in Florida but across the country, where liberals and conservatives started to forge alliances to promote less punitive sentencing policies that could reduce the prison population. In the years to come, numerous states would curtail or eliminate mandatory minimum statutes and give judges greater discretion over how to sentence convicted felons. In 2016, Florida repealed the “10-20-Life” law, which had imposed draconian sentences on anyone armed with a gun during a crime. But persuading politicians like Rick Scott to put fewer people in prison, which cost between twenty thousand and thirty thousand dollars a year, was one thing. A less punitive approach could save taxpayers money. Making the case that prisoners should be treated more humanely—by hiring better-trained staff, by providing adequate mental health services, by increasing oversight and monitoring, all of which stood to cost money—was another matter entirely. As James Forman, a law professor at Yale, pointed out, critics of mass incarceration often focused on the ravages of the drug war and other policies that drove up the number of nonviolent offenders behind bars. Missing from this indictment was the fact that even if all nonviolent drug offenders were released, America would still have the world’s largest prison system—a system that stood out as much for its brutality as for its size.