#academic quote

Bates’s 1937 Prisons and Beyond offered one reconciliation of the tensions. Bates championed scientific understanding of every prisoner, the abolition of county jails, restorative justice, and a “more or less permanent” isolation of “incorrigible criminals” from society. He wanted effective parole and probation—a humane regime of “constructive discipline” that avoided “brutality on the one hand and sentimentality on the other.” Hardly a work of reactive expediency, Bates’s tract depicted the prison as a social constant, a fixture of the future, its core functions eclipsing historical particularity. Bates optimistically anticipated technocratic discipline, which had already defeated the draconian vagaries of antiquity. With “the failure of the British colonial penal ventures” now behind, “we have discovered much about sanitation, hygiene, and protective medicine,” Bates enthused. The world was made smaller by the “telegraph and radio” and there remained “no inherent reason why a prison colony should be a place where cruelty abides.” Bates enthusiastically envisaged the “prison of the future!” freed of the need for “silent, lonely” guards carrying firearms “at great expense to the taxpayers,” for the “institutions” might be “protected entirely by science.” Bates’s prison was liberated not only from history but also from materialist political economy, with disciplinary “public-work projects, labor camps, and opportunities for individual or group service” shorn from such considerations as unfair competition with free labor. Prison labor’s purpose was to provide prisoners with meaningful work.

Bates rejected brutality but eschewed the very notion of leniency, defending reform on disciplinary grounds. Restitution would prevent lax justice. Inmate psychiatry did not imply coddling. Bates’s ideal deputy warden was an “absolute monarch” who must “decide as justly as he can” whether inmates violated rules so as “to mete out punishment. He must be neither too soft nor too harsh.” Even Bates’s defense of parole venerated the punitive state. Far from lessening reliance on punishment, parole would augment and ensure it. Parole violations had loose standards of due process that could easily ensnare the guilty and afford “a higher degree of protection to the public.” Parole thus meant longer prison sentences. In sum, Bates’s harsh vision was not reactionary but visionary. His carceral utopia of discipline and redemption in reciprocal reinforcement, freed from its premodern and economically grounded past, was already on its way.

Bates even started sounding different on Alcatraz. Once a critic of its lack of rehabilitative functions, he now argued that even with the strictest “discipline” in the federal system, Warden Johnston ensured “that no brutality or inhumanity shall be practiced.” Bates’s change of mind pleased Cummings, who, now retired, was defending the prison against media depictions of torture and mistreatment, and criticisms from his successor, Attorney General Frank Murphy. Cummings vented: abolishing this “symbol of the triumph of law and order” would be a “tragedy.” Bates shared Cummings’s distaste for the “selfish and ill-timed” press reports and agreed that the institution was “humanely and efficiently administered” and its inmate treatment gave no “cause for concern.”

Whereas in the early 1930s Cummings and Bates represented distinct strains of New Deal penology, their carceral liberalism now converged on Alcatraz. While Bates defended rehabilitation for serving discipline, Cummings defended his unforgiving prison on reformist grounds. Cummings’s 1939 defense of Alcatraz turned on the dyad of control and humanity—mirrored in his depiction of Bates as a “career penologist of long experience . . . both a scholar and a realist.” Cummings stressed Alcatraz’s decency: Its prisoners enjoyed designated time to “talk freely” and smoke cigarettes. They could choose between “light” or “heavy” portions of the “good and wholesome” mess hall offerings, although they had to finish their plates unless sick. And despite its housing the 300 of the most seemingly dangerous inmates out of 17,000 federal prisoners—despite a founding purpose of unremittingly detaining the irredeemable—“even some of those in Alcatraz may sometime reform,” Cummings conceded. Consulting with Bates, he had transferred some prisoners from Alcatraz to other prisons. In other words, security and redemption were like yin and yang, each containing a seed of the other.

In response to his piece, Cummings received reassurance that Alcatraz would survive its public relations stumble and would serve “an essential public need through the years.” One letter hailed Alcatraz’s “stringent discipline without brutality,” which secured “humane treatment for the other nine tenths of society.” For the sake of “honest men crushed . . . by inexorable circumstances,” America should “stiffen her back against the brigand and racketeer in high places as well as low” and “let hardened criminals have the hard rock.” Bates applauded the diplomatic tone of Cummings’s article, which he guessed was “a little more dignified than you would have liked it to be.” Roosevelt responded with encouragement that “no one is in in a better position to explain the purpose” than its architect Cummings, but stayed neutral on the controversy between his attorneys general. Despite internal disagreements in the war-on-crime coalition, the island prison was secure in the New Deal state. It would stay open until 1963.

...

But carceral liberalism was not mere synthesis of discipline and reform— it contained one more paradox, a critique of itself, a radical dissent that legitimated the whole. The minority report lived in Howard Gill, author of volume 5 of the Survey of Release Procedures, published in 1940. Gill, once a superintendent at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, issued a scathing indictment of prison growth. Gill lamented the increasing reliance on prisons. The public were told “that only with high walls, steel bars, and cage-like cells were criminals kept from breaking forth to murder, rob and rape law-abiding citizens,” but prison construction “created a vicious circle.” The system fueled “as much desperation and degradation as it has sought to restrain.” Incarceration had become blunt and indiscriminate, sometimes allowing “the most dangerous criminals” more “freedom” than lesser offenders. Prison design harmed prisoners and poisoned their will. Subjecting virtually all prisoners to “interior cell blocks, originally designed as punishment cells” was in fact “unnecessary, expensive, and detrimental to health and morale.”

Interestingly, volume 5 included the most radical indictment of carceral systems, focused as it was on prisons themselves. And yet the radicalism of its critique barely extended to the problem of race, which would come to define the penitentiary in future years. Here and there Gill mentioned segregation and racial discrimination, but only in several passing mentions, such as noting that Texas prisons “usually separated” the races, as did Mississippi’s. Gill also gestured toward the strange racial practices of carceral discipline—but with very little commentary. He noted the curiosity that in Missouri’s “prison farms . . . a dozen white inmates act as unarmed guard-foremen over negro crews working in the fields.” In this respect Gill embodied the colorblind conceit of carceral liberalism. As he leveled the most adamant criticism of any of the volumes, he spent little time on the long-term racial consequences of the system that the national government was building in cooperation with the Jim Crow South and the discriminatory North.

Nevertheless, volume 5 dissented from the dominant ethos of prison discipline, articulated by Bates and Cummings in defending Alcatraz. In prisoners “the maintenance of discipline” remained “only skin-deep while underneath there smolder the fires of revolt, kept hot by the demands of those in authority.” Prison order relied on a myriad of “rules and regulations, not only for inmates but for guards and officers alike”—rules enforcing good manners, banning unpatriotic behavior, and much else. Unwritten rules were potentially tyrannical. The relationship between officer and prisoner resembled that between India’s higher castes and “untouchables.”

But Gill’s outlook was fatalistic. The need to shield society “from the depredations of the abnormal, sub-normal, or vicious criminal” made prisons necessary, however evil. This short-term pragmatism accompanied a long-term pessimism; searching the American history of incarceration for “rehabilitation, moral, physical, intellectual or industrial, does not incline one to an optimistic conclusion.” Volume 5 marked the radical boundary of carceral liberalism, simultaneously building and lamenting the instruments of repression."

drinking hot tea on a freezing day.

sitting outside alone at night looking at the moon.

going to bed after finally finishing an assignment.

getting an answer right and knowing things at school.

talking to someone about a shared passion.

In the first place a man was brought before me with a complaint that he had gone on board one of Mr. Spurrier's vessels, prevented the crew from working and beat two of them and threatened the master - his sentence was to receive 39 lashes at the usual place of punishment - but the morning the punishment should have taken place nearly the whole of the Irish servants came to Mr. Morris (a merchant here) and offered £150 rather than it should be executed (the punishment) - but they had said before should the prisoner be brought to the place of punishment, they would shed some blood and take him away by force - Some other cases of the same nature, and equally as bad, have now come before me - when the people have threatened to take the life of the first constable that should attempt to apprehend the offender.

The magistrate viewed this incident as involving much more than simply a protest against whipping. He portrayed it as the outbreak of a serious challenge to the social order which only the presence of the Royal Navy could extinguish:

The Irish servants (which are very numerous) are at this time absolutely in a state of mutiny and without some armed force be stationed here, the lives of the inhabitants are in danger. Probably on account of their wages they may be kept within bounds until the expiration of their time of servitude (20th October) but, when they become their own masters, I could not answer for them. If His Excellency therefore would have the goodness to station one of His Majesty's Schooners here for the Winter, it would have an excellent effect and I have not a doubt but that regularity and good behaviour would, by that means be kept in this district.

So long as servants were kept under contract, they were seen as controllable, but the justice of the peace dreaded the prospect of facing masterless men. Like his predecessors in the eighteenth century, he saw the Royal Navy as the vital safeguard of authority."