#prison administration

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“Authored by some of “the best minds in American corrections,” the ACA manual sought to reorient carceral systems toward the administration of political warfare. The organization advised prisoncrats to maintain well-equipped riot squads capable of “splitting up the rioters into manageable groups,” detailed maps of the physical layout to facilitate the tactical reassertion of control, and updated logs of available weapons and supplies. Based on the theory that all rebellions contain elements of leadership, the manual stressed that rebel leaders should be swiftly identified, “eliminated or rendered ineffective.” It also advocated the use of psychological warfare, instructing prisoncrats to be at least as concerned with controlling the public’s perception of riots as they were with controlling the riots themselves. As such, it urged administrators to cultivate “mutual confidence and understanding” with media outlets to achieve sympathetic coverage. It further indicated that public perception, and not a regard for human life, should be the primary determinant in dealing with hostage situations. Although “a reckless disregard for a hostage’s life would not be excused by the public or by his fellow employees,” the ACA stressed that prison guards accepted the same risks associated with being a police officer or a soldier. Therefore, determinations about the fate of captured guards should be based on political rather than moral calculations. Published in 1970, the manual reflects the insinuation of counterinsurgency into the normalized routines of prison management, a process that would only intensify over time.”

.... ...coercion is not the only weapon in the arsenal of this carceral war machine. Authors of counterinsurgency doctrine stress the imperative of calibrating terror-inducing violence with solicitous reforms. ... Without an understanding of this critical aspect of counterinsurgency theory and practice, weaponized reforms will continue to thwart the development of revolutionary and abolitionist projects as well as their analysis and historicization. ...

... [These are] struggles in which both sides are compelled to respond to the symbolic as well as the overt content of the gestures of antagonism that gather around their points of contact. The apparently trivial tray—the only thing the prisoner can get his hands on—takes on a charge of defiance. This is a “power struggle,” as prison workers often say. But in what sense? The control prison is already structured around an intense form of power. These struggles indicate a certain “extra,” a surplus generated at the point where the full force of institutional domination meets the oblique resistance of the prisoner. Both prisoners and officers can be seized by the possibility of engaging one another’s attention in this way, as though this surplus power exerts a kind of uncanny hold on them. Each side, obeying its respective “code,” moves forward with a sense of inevitability to “make the statement” that affirms the boundary between them.

A control unit does produce a “tame” prisoner, in the sense that it is difficult for him to affect the world beyond his cell no matter what he does inside it. The plan put forth by Bentham and the architects of the silent prisons was intended to make this taming effect reach all the way into the prisoner’s mind and soul—to change him—though the strategy did not necessarily work. The question of whether this is still the prison’s purpose—and whether, if it happens, it constitutes rehabilitation or what prisoners call being “institutionalized”—haunts the contemporary prison and will come up repeatedly in this account."

"....the Long Attica Revolt was a revolutionary struggle for decolonization and abolition at the site of the US prison. Although Auburn Penitentiary was a key zone of this struggle, it has been largely forgotten, and what little scholarly literature exists reflects the state’s deceptive framing of the event. This framing largely confines the rebellion to the eight-hour period during which the rebels held hostages; imposes a partial understanding of their demands; and treats the confrontation as a relatively minor prelude to the much more well-known rebellion in Attica, which has also been memorialized through a counterinsurgent historiography that fixates on the spectacle of anti-Black violence that repressed the rebellion, while ignoring the forms of abolitionist worldmaking that made it such a threat.

The content of this new rhythm, this new genre of human being, to use theorist Sylvia Wynter’s formulation, was not determined in advance but was, rather, actively produced through the process of collective struggle. The Auburn rebels wrote extensively about their multifaceted Revolt and did so through the rubric of protracted war. But unlike the state-initiated war to which they were responding, theirs was a war of becoming. Elucidating this point through prose conditioned by violence, Charles Leon Hill wrote:

“We are engage in protracted struggle at Auburn Concentration Camp. Often clashes of force, verbal confrontation, but never retreat, open conflict, war till the death. Either we who dare to fight, to resist, to demand human treatment or succumb to the wrath of tyranny and forsake the cause of human dignity or our bodies will be crushed but our spirit prevail. For we maintain no illusions of superhuman victory behind these walls we but keep aflame the spirit of the freedom fighter.”

Excerpted in the New York Times, Leon’s intervention clarifies the stakes of the rebellion while demonstrating the salience and inseparability of the various terrains examined in this chapter. Auburn was a life and death contest that unfolded simultaneously on corporeal and discursive terrains. The physical “clashes of force” are only legible because captives were also engaged in a struggle to narrate these clashes. Both were shaped by such a profound asymmetry that achieving a decisive victory seemed beyond the rebels’ physiological capacities as earthly beings. And yet, fully aware that their bodies would be “crushed,” they continued to resist. In doing so they struggled on a third terrain, one that nurtured a being beyond the body, a “spirit,” a social consciousness, an affective state that is largely beyond representation. Although Leon demanded “human treatment” and “human dignity,” he noted that his spirit burned for a form of freedom that the captors had no ability to grant, a freedom that could only be taken, or more accurately, one that had to be invented. And invent they did. As Fanon explains, a “new humanism is written into the objectives and methods of the struggle. ....

And what the ruling power, the administration of the penitentiary, and the reactionary newspapers have published must be considered as ‘war communiques,’” wrote the French-based Prisons Information Group, adopting the analysis of imprisoned revolutionaries in the United States. This methodological intervention demands that analysts interpret dominant narratives, not as reflections of Truth, but of power, as propaganda intended to “fulfill some tactical exigencies” and “serve a specific purpose.” ... For several months after their tactical surrender, the Auburn rebels waged a discursive insurgency that ruptured the narrative incarceration of their praxis. It started slowly, with few, if any, letters reaching their intended recipients for nearly two months. Between January and May of 1971, however, their letters reached family members, federal judges, and community organizers. They were subsequently published in a variety of left outlets, including Palante, The Black Scholar, the Village Voice, and Right On. Six months after reporting that Auburn was “quiet,” even the New York Times was forced to concede that the prison remained “turbulent”: their offices were overwhelmed with what a journalist described as “hundreds of letters that pour forth weekly from the isolated galleries,” some of which were penned in blood.

In response to the captives’ desperate calls for support, a Marxist group called Youth Against War and Fascism launched the Prisoners Solidarity Committee (PSC), an explicitly abolitionist formation. Established in February of 1971, the PSC functioned, in one member’s words, as

a vehicle whereby the prisoners themselves could speak to the people outside, could generalize their struggle, fuse their grievances and their hopes into the main current of rebellion that is rising in the country as a whole.

Comprised mostly of white university students and activists, the PSC provided the rebels with invaluable financial, moral, and legal support; created a transportation program to convey family members from New York City to Auburn; and organized protests outside the Cayuga County Courthouse, the site of the rebellion’s legal aftermath. They even managed to infiltrate the prison by getting one of their members assigned as a legal assistant for the Auburn 6, who were indicted for their role in the November takeover. ... After regaining control, Warden Fritz enacted a plan to isolate, silence, and punish the rebels. Declaring a “state of emergency,” he placed the prison on total lockdown, indefinitely suspending all programming, visits, internal movement, and correspondence. Eleven of the thirteen “ringleaders” were transferred to Attica and immediately sequestered in solitary confinement. The remaining two suffered the same fate in Green Haven. Out of the four hundred “black militants” believed most active in the rebellion, Fritz isolated eighty captives within a gallery of “Special Housing Unit” (SHU) cages on the top floor of Auburn’s cellblocks, also known as “the roof.” The remaining malcontents were kept in twenty four-hour isolation in the general population, pending transfer to Comstock, Clinton, and other maximum-security prisons once more SHU space could be made available.

Rebel letters authored during this period are saturated with meditations on communicative failure: the limitations of the epistolary form, the vicissitudes of illegal prison censorship, and the impossibility of conveying the scope and intensity of the violence they endured. “If I were to relate even some of the major deprivations suffered and still continued in this letter then you would never receive it,” wrote one captive. “To put my situation on paper is impossible because things keep building up each and every day, leaving nothing to my imagination,” wrote another. Besieged by inscrutable terror and dehumanization, their letters marked an existential rupture with dominant systems of knowledge production and representation, puncturing state-imposed silences without fully transcending them.

We are the voices of Black inmates who have been relegated into the obscure microcosm of ultra-punitive segregation (the roof) behind the iron curtains of Auburn Prison. Nobody beyond these iron curtains, shaded by a huge wall, can hear the constant cries echoing our agonies because the racist penal ‘brutocracy’ (i.e., Rockefeller, Oswald and Fritz) has insidiously concealed the atrocities inflicted on us daily.

“In a confidential DOCS [Department of Correctional Services] report, an investigator concluded that his “diligent search” yielded no evidence that the rebellion was “the brutal outcome of months or years of sadistic treatment, of color discrimination, of bad food, of senseless withdrawal of privileges and of denial of proper civil rights.” And yet according to rebel letters, even as this investigation was taking place the population was enduring arcane forms of racial terror. They wrote about being stripped naked, beaten, and made to endure the freezing cold; of gassings, macings, and forced druggings; of being sprayed with water hoses; of being starved or alternatively of being served food that was intentionally contaminated with dead insects, feces, phlegm, poison, and shards of glass, sometimes from a wagon also used for hauling garbage.

Exposing the radical insufficiency of terms like “solitary confinement” and “punitive segregation,” they wrote of being forced into “dark cells” and “strip cells”: barren concrete enclosures with no lights, plumbing, or furnishings, in which denuded men were suspended in space and time until they “barely exist,” as one victim of this practice explained. Conceptualizing the prison as a space beyond legality, another wrote, “So many crimes have been committed by the officials hereof that we no longer even know whether or not the United States Constitution is the Law of Amerrikkka, or the martial decrees arbitrarily enforced by Harry Fritz and his agents.” Within and against this “iron clad atmosphere of racist hate,” captive rebels engaged in autopoetic experiments that narratively engendered radical mutations of their being.”

- Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. p 53-54, 57-58, 59-60, 61-62.

Early-twentieth-century observations of sex between prisoners were shaped by a burgeoning sexological literature whose conceptual categories proved useful in understanding and mapping prison sexual culture. But heightened attention to prison sex in the 1920s and 1930s, on the part of penologists, prison administrators, and prisoners themselves, is not explained simply by the availability of a new conceptual template. While sexologists puzzled over the etiology of same-sex practices performed by apparently "normal" people, those practices would have been more easily and readily comprehended in urban working-class communities of the period.

George Chauncey has documented the visibility of queer life in early-twentieth-century New York City and its integration in working-class and immigrant communities. In that world, Chauncey writes, "the fundamental division of male sexual actors... was not between "heterosexual' and 'homosexual' men, but between conventionally masculine males, who were regarded as men, and effeminate males, known as fairies or pansies, who were regarded as virtual women, or, more precisely, as members of a 'third sex' that combined elements of the male and female.

Prisons were enclosed communities that gave rise to and perpetuated their own distinctive cultures, but they were far from hermetically sealed. The attribution of sexual deviance or "queerness" to the gender transgression of "fairies" and the possibility of conventionally masculine men having sex with them without compromising their status as "normal" found an echo in men's prison populations. Prison vernacular, especially the terms used to denote participants in prison sex, overlapped closely with working-class vernacular and the roles and expectations it delineated, no doubt reflecting its importation into prisons by a disproportionately working-class inmate population and perhaps its exportation into working-class communities as well.

Prison sexual vernacular was part of a prison argot that attracted considerable attention more generally, from both prison insiders and outsiders. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer and prisoner Hi Simons was fascinated by prison language that seemed to him "full of swagger and laughter, because of the vivid if often violent and vile poetry that streaked through it.... To use it," Simons wrote, "made us feel bold and free." Simons acknowledged that "except for a few terms from the I.W.W. vocabulary," incarcerated labor organizers "added nothing" to the specialized vocabulary of prisoners, but he worked to compile a dictionary of "prison lingo" he learned while an inmate of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth and published it in 1933. Others in this period published glossaries of prison terms as well, testifying to the emergence of a collective consciousness and shared culture among prisoners.

Central to prison argot were the coded terms that delineated sexual types and declared expectations about sexual acts and roles, offering a vernacular analog to sexological taxonomies. Noel Ersine included eighteen terms referring to same-sex sex among the fifteen hundred entries in Underworld and Prison Slang, published in 1933. Simons imagined that "a complete prison dictionary" would constitute "an encyclopedia of all imaginable sexual deviations," rivaling the sexologists' ambitions in cata loging sexual variance."

Prison constituted a unique transfer point between expert and vernacular sexual discourses, the terms of one often inflecting the other. Those men typed by sexologists as "pseudo-homosexuals" or "semi-homosexuals" were known to male prisoners as "wolves" and "punks." Those were men whose participation in same-sex sex was presumed to spring not from their nature but from the exigencies of circumstance. Wolves, sometimes also referred to as "jockers," were typically represented as conventionally, often aggressively masculine men who preserved (and according to some accounts, enhanced) that status by assuming the "active," penetrative role in sex with other men. As Victor Nelson made clear, "The wolf (active sodomist)... is not considered by the average inmate to be 'queer' in the sense that the oral copulist... is so considered. " In contrast to many accounts by penologists and some prison officials who blamed fairies for prison seduction, those most familiar with prison life typically credited wolves with initiating sex behind bars.

That initiation was often aggressive. As their name suggested, wolves were understood to be sexual predators, wooing, bribing, and sometimes forcing other men to have sex with them. Wolves were "always on the lookout for a handsome boy with a weak mind, who had nobody to send them in some food and money," sociologist Clifford Shaw wrote in his 1931 case study of a young juvenile delinquent." Berg described the process by which the wolf secured a sexual partner as "a campaign in which all the luxuries of prison - candy tobacco, sweets, and choice foods - are pressed upon the newcomer." Once the object of the wolf's affection accepted the goods offered, "he is quickly given to understand that he must repay the favor in kind." Sometimes seduction by wolves was described as a deliberate and cold-hearted maneuver of engaging a younger inmate in a relationship of indebtedness, which could be repaid only by sex. Others offered examples of more heartfelt and romantic courtship. Nelson recalled "Dreegan," the "champion "wolf" at Auburn Prison," who

outrageously flattered the objects of his lust; he gave them cigarettes, candy, money, or whatever else he possessed which might serve to break down their powers of resistance; and otherwise courted' them exactly as a normal man 'courts a woman. Once the boy had been seduced, if he proved satisfactory, Dreegan would go the whole hog, like a Wall Street broker with a Broadway chorus-girl mistress, and squander all of his possessions on the boy of the moment.

Wolves may not have been motivated by "true" homosexuality, in the understanding of contemporaries, but the relationships they forged in prison were often far from casual. Jealous rivalries and violent confrontations among inmates were credited to the passionate feelings of some wolves for their partners. Inmate-author Goat Laven described "brutal fights," some fatal, that arose from sexual jealousies: "It means a kick in the back to steal another man's kid." Louis Berg seconded Laven account. "The unwritten law of the prison forbids any 'wolf" to make approaches to another's 'boy friend' once he is wooed and won," Berg observed. "But it is not to be expected that men who break the laws for lesser urges will hesitate when they are driven by passions that rock them to the roots of their being. Fights occur between 'wolves' over some boy which are sanguinary and even end in murder."

Berg went on to recount the murder of "Mildred," an inmate at Welfare Island, by her jealous ex-lover. "From all accounts, Berg observed, "Mildred' was the victim of jealousy caused by 'her' unfaithfulness. That 'she' paid with 'her' life partner. shows the seriousness with which such prison marriages' are regarded." To some, the jealous violence that prison relationships could spark testified not only to depth of feeling but also to their similarity to heterosexual relationships. In a disturbing comparison, Berg concluded that Mildred's murder "proves how completely such relationships are identified with the normal ones between men and women." Charles Ford described jealousies among female inmates that resulted in fist fights, "hair pullings," and "every other conceivable type of trouble making activity" and that were even more real than husband-wife jealousies."

One theory explaining the existence of prison wolves, enshrined in inmate lore by the early twentieth century, proposed that "a 'wolf' is an ex-punk looking for revenge!" The object of wolves' and jocker attentions were known as "punks" and "kids," often identified as younger inmates, unfamiliar with life behind bars and unable or unwilling to defend themselves physically. A type recognized in prison argot at least the early twentieth century, punks were understood to be "normal" men, vulnerable to sexual coercion by other inmates because of the combination of small physical stature, youth, boyish attractiveness, and lack of institutional savvy. A few accounts suggested that punks were potential homosexuals whose latent desires were nurtured and realized the prison context, but most saw them simply as the unfortunate victims of wolves.

The punk's fate was often attributed to naïveté and, especially, his ignorance of the inmate code and the consequences of indebtedness. Charles Wharton wrote in his 1932 prison account of a fellow inmate, "a mere boy" who "seemed to have come direct from a farm" who had "all the bewilderment of a child thrust into strange, frightening surroundings." The youth soon became the object of "pretended interest and sympathy" from other convicts, who showered  him with presents, "silk hose, fancy underwear, food stolen from the kitchen, and best of all, cigarets [sic], the gold standard of prison barter." In the process, Wharton wrote, the boy "became a wretched victim of the most vicious circle in Leavenworth's convict population.

Punks also suffered as a result of their youthful good looks. Jim Tully, author of the many books on his experiences on the road as a hobo and time in prison, recalled Eddie, a young inmate "with yellow hair and wondering hazel eyes" who was "too beautiful to be a boy." Eddie's life in prison as a result "was made a constant hardship by sex-starved men." Berg wrote that prison populations always include "boys at that uncertain age where they have a good deal of the feminine in them." Such boys, Berg wrote, "are in most prized in jails and prisons as virgins." Berg also attributed the fate of punks to "biologic inadequacy (another name for lack of guts)."

Whether understood to be the victims of their own attractiveness, their youth and small stature, or their cowardice, punks were never depicted as wholly willing participants in sex with other men. Although there was little attention to overt sexual violence in early-twentieth-century prison writing, many acknowledged that some form of coercion was often involved in sex in prison, in men's prisons especially. Like wolves, punks were also understood under the rubric of "acquired" homosexuality - they participated in sex with other men not because of a constitutional condition but because of the unusual circumstances of prison life. "Had they never gone to prison," Berg wrote ruefully, "most of them would today be normal men."

Prison sexual vernacular and the culture it delineated overlapped particularly closely with that of itinerant laborers, tramps, and hoboes who traveled the country's highways, rural byways, and railroad arteries in the early decades of the twentieth century. The association between tramping and homosexuality was strong enough by 1939 for a textbook on prison psychiatry to warn of "the possibility of homosexuality in prisoners of the vagabond type," since "this tendency among them appears to be very widespread." In his 1923 study The Hobo, sociologist Nels Anderson characterized homosexual practices among homeless men as "widespread and described relationships between older men, known as wolves or jockers, with younger men, referred to as punks, kids, or "prushuns." In transient communities, young men partnered with older, more experienced men who promised to protect them and teach them how to survive life on the road in return for domestic and sometimes sexual favors.

Judging from many accounts, those relationships were often predatory and abusive. Jim Tully, whose experiences as a "road-kid," hobo, circus worker, prisoner, and professional prize-fighter provided the material exper for his twenty-six books, characterized the jocker as "a hobo who took a weak boy and made him a sort of slave to beg and run errands and steal for him." Punks, he reported, "were loaned, traded, and even sold to other tramps."  John Good recalled that the "criminal tramps or yeggs" who were his companions on the road in turn-of-the-century Denver "needed a boy to beg and steal for them, and to listen around for information." "These boys are degraded to unnatural uses," Good reported, "as well as trained in the arts of pickpocketing and sneak-thieving." Josiah Flynt, an early participant-observer of transient life, also described relationships between boys and their jockers, in which "abnormally masculine" men take "uncommonly feminine" boys as partners." Those attachments sometimes lasted for years, and boys remained with their jockers until they were "emancipated."

Men who lived on the road and on the economic margins were vulnerable to arrest, and incarceration in jails and prisons was a nearly inevitable experience for hobos, tramps, and transient workers. It is not surprising. then, that the vocabulary of prisoners would borrow closely from that of hobo culture, another nearly uniformly single-sex world populated by working-class men. Some prison terms revealed a direct etymology between hobo and prison terminology. When Jack London was arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls in 1894, he was locked up in the "Hobo." "The Hobo," he explained, "is that part of a prison where the minor offenders are confined together in a large iron cage. Since hoboes constitute the principle division of the minor offenders, the aforesaid iron cage is called the Hobo." Hi Simons defined the term "Bo" as both a "hobo" and "boy, catamite" in his dictionary of prison argot. The direction of influence was probably two-way, and some prison terms were no doubt ported into hobo and working-class vernacular as well.

The importation of sexual vernacular, customs, and assumptions about same-sex practices from transient men as well as from a larger ur-working-class world meant that some prisoners were familiar with the sexual culture they found behind bars. Fiction writer Chester Himes, who was sentenced to the Ohio State Penitentiary in 1928, claimed "that nothing happened in prison that I had not already encountered in outside life." Himes grew up in a middle-class African American neighborhood in Cleveland, but youthful desire for excitement drew him to the city's rougher side. In prison, he wrote, "all sex gratification derived sodomy, and I had encountered homosexuals galore around the Matic Hotel and the environs of Fifty-Fifth Street and Central Avenue Cleveland." The many incarcerated men with transient pasts would've been similarly familiar with wolf-punk relationships in prison, which mirrored man-kid relationships on the road.

But while prisons, then as now, were by disproportionately populated by working-class inmates, they drew prisoners from other demographic groups as well, some of whom were unfamiliar with prison sexual terminology and the roles and assumptions it described. The persecution of political radicals under the Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during the First World War and in the wake of the Palmer raids of 1919 resulted in the incarceration of activists in the 1920s, many of whom became vocal and articulate critics of the American prison system while behind bars. These spokespeople for the working class often betrayed their own distance from and naïveté about working-class sexual life in their prison writing, and many were shocked by the sexual life they witnessed behind bars.

Alexander Berkman, for example, was candid in detailing his own prison sexual education in a chapter on an encounter with another prisoner, "Red," a hobo who worked alongside Berkman. When Red announced to Berkman, "you're my kid now, see?" Berkman claimed not to understand him and asked him to explain. Bewildered by Berkman's naiveté, Red exclaimed, "You're twenty-two and don't know what a kid is! Green? Well, sir, it would be hard to find an adequate analogy to your inconsistent maturity of mind." When Red explained to him the practice he termed "moonology," which he defined as "the truly Christian science of loving your neighbor, provided he be a nice little boy," Berkman professed not to "believe in this kid love," and was deeply shocked, protesting that "the panegyrics of boy-love are deeply offensive to my instincts. The very thought of the unnatural practice revolts and disgusts me." The pedagogical question-and-answer structure of this chapter allowed Berkman to tutor his readers in "moonology" while maintaining claims to his own sexual innocence. He may also have intended to contrast Red's perverse sexuality with his own presumably platonic love for another inmate that he described later in the memoir. But Berkman was far from alone among early-twentieth-century inmate narrators in professing innocence of same-sex sexuality before life behind bars.

When attorney and former Illinois state congressman Charles S. Wharton was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth penitentiary in 1928 for conspiracy in armed mail robbery, he acknowledged his own pre-prison innocence.  Prefacing his discussion of "the worst of all phases of prison life," which he attempted to describe "as delicately as possible," Wharton wrote that, "looking back, I felt that I had been everywhere, seen everything, done about all which the average man-about-town is expected to do, and I held that impression until Leavenworth made me feel like a country yokel staring slack-jawed at his first sight of urban sin."

Socialist and anti war activist Kate Richards O'Hare was similarly shocked and appalled by the homosexuality she witnessed as an inmate of the Missouri state penitentiary in Jefferson City in 1919-20. Scoffing at O'Hare's estimate that 75 percent of her fellow inmates were "abnormal" as "entirely too high," Fishman speculated that she was "naturally led into such an exaggeration because, having no previous personal knowledge of prisons, she was swept off her feet to find that such things existed. She was utterly amazed when I told her that homo-sexuality was a real problem in every prison."

Eugene Debs, who was convicted of violating the Espionage Law in 1918 and sentenced to ten years in prison, lamented that "every prison of which I have any knowledge... reeks with sodomy" and wrote with dismay about "this abominable vice to which many young men fall victims soon after they enter the prison." "I shrink from the loathesome [sic] and repellant task of bringing this hidden horror to light," Debs wrote. "It is a subject so incredibly shocking to me that, but for the charge of recreance that might be brought against me were I to omit it, I would prefer to make no reference to it at all."  Debs wrote in near-apocalyptic language about the fate of the boy "schooled in nameless forms of perversions of mind and soul" and prison sexual practices that "wreck the lives of countless thousands and send their wretched victims to premature and dishonored graves."

Whether shocked or inured, prisoners of all stripes acknowledged sex in both men's and women's prison as nearly ubiquitous and its roles and customs elaborated to the point that it constituted a culture unto itself. That culture occupied a curious status in early-twentieth-century prisons. Officially, sex between prisoners was unequivocally forbidden. Prisoners who were found engaging in sex were punished, often by placement in solitary confinement and extension of their sentences. Some prisons took harsh and sometimes draconian measures to distinguish homosexual prisoners from the general population in order to humiliate them and punish their behavior. In the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, inmates were reportedly forced to wear a large yellow letter D (designating them as "degenerate") if they were discovered having sex. 

The superintendent of the Ohio prison at Chillicothe boasted to the director of the Bureau of Prisons, in response to a question about how he handled the problem of "sex perversion" at the institution, that he had found a way to deter such practices through the use of humiliation. "By this I mean that all known perpetrators or anyone anyway connected with sexual perversions be been compelled to sit at a certain table at the mess hall."  A report from Kentucky noted that inmates convicted of sexual offenses had one side of their heads shaved to identify them. These practices of marking prisoners as homosexual were forms of punishment for sexual transgression; they also suggested the need for the production of a legible marker of homosexuality that ran counter to the notion that homosexuals, inside and out, were easily identifiable by their gender transgression.

Homosexual prisoners were also dealt physical punishments. A photograph from a Colorado prison depicted two African American prisoners wearing loose dresses, perhaps as another form of stigmatizing market of sexual deviance, and pushing wheelbarrows filled with heavy rocks as a form of punishment for same-sex sex. Kentucky physician F. E. Wylie proposed sterilization and "emasculation" that would "make it impossible for degenerates to commit sex crimes," adding that "surgery might even be used as a punishment" for homosexuality. The authors of an investigation of the Oregon state penitentiary in 1917 moved further to argue that "in cases of congenital homo-sexuality in the penitentiary," the more radical surgery of castration was necessary, to deprive offenders not only of the ability to procreate but of their libido as well. By the 1920s, more than half of the United States had adopted sterilization laws and some targeted "moral degenerates and perverts" specifically. Those laws were most easily and readily applied to people in prisons, mental asylums, and other carceral institutions.

Sex in prison was officially prohibited and sometimes harshly punished. But because of the difficulty of detection and the belief in its inevitability, prison officers often seemed to take it in stride. Joseph Wilson and Michael Pescor criticized prison officers who "regard homosexual practices as only another kind of dirty joke" and wrote that it was "essential that "this question shall always be considered gravely-never with smiles smirks, and a shrug of the shoulder" in their 1939 text on prison psychiatry, suggesting that this was often precisely how it was treated. Berg confirmed that to officials at Welfare Island, "the 'fairies' were, for the most part, simply the butt for lewd jokes. When they spoke of perverts it was with the kind of indulgence that one uses toward children whose peccadillos are amusing rather than serious." He added that "sex indiscretions" were "rarely detected and still less frequently punished." 

If prison guards could not be relied on to maintain a properly vigilant and condemnatory attitude regarding prison homosexuality, the some hoped, prisoners themselves would rise to this role. "Only the co-operation of the decent element will ultimately weed them out," Sing Sing warden Lewis Lawes speculated in 1938. Wilson and Pescor went so far as to suggest that if homosexuals "received a reasonable dose of violence" at the hands of prisoners "known to be aggressively heterosexual," it would "help build up a correct prison community attitude towards this question."

But the community attitude in men's prisons, to the extent that it is possible to generalize, seemed often to be characterized by a rough tolerance, even by those who presumably did not participate in same-sex sex. Samuel Roth, who spent several years in prison for publishing what was considered obscene material, noted that "one thing happened immediately," on his incarceration; "I lost my horrors of [homosexuality] as a vice." He was far from alone. Recalling his experience on a Georgia chain gang in the 1930s, George Harsh had "too many other things to think about to care what two consenting adults do between them." "Under the conditions," Harsh wrote, "I think such a situation was inevitable, and I could understand it and condone it." Indeed, the institutional culture of some prisons recognized the established place of prison fairies. Though fairies were segregated in Welfare Island's South Annex, they were allowed to stage a bawdy Christmas show called the "Fag Follies." In later decades, prisons would sponsor football and baseball games that pitted queens against jockers.

It’s all just business. I’ve watched it. Whenever there are a few empty beds around here, you wait. You'll see a bunch of guys getting violated. They got to keep the place full. They get paid by the convict. You watch it. They fill the place up by bringing guys back in, then they go to legislature and get more money to build anew prison.

Though the prisoners’ view of how the system works is somewhat distorted, it is based in reality. Prison systems are big businesses, and many groups, such as guards’ unions, architects, construction companies, prison hardware manufacturers, and prison professionals, have an economic interest in expanding prison populations. Prisoners understand this and have developed a profoundly cynical view of the operation, which they see as corrupt and unjustly exploitative and oppressive.

There are some profit-making practices in the prison operation that directly affect prisoners and are seen as particularly corrupt and exploitative of them and their families. The most blatant of these is the telephone policy. In California prisons, pay telephones are located in all housing units and are readily available to prisoners. Prisoners may only make collect calls from these phones, which are installed and maintained by a private company, which charges an extra fee of $7 per call. This fee is paid by the person (usually a family member) receiving the call. This fee is split by the private company and the CDC. The CDC’s share goes into the state’s general fund. In the year 2000, California earned $36 million from this source. Prisoners feel that this is gross exploitation of them, their friends, and their families, who are usually poorer people and less able to pay this fee. Several prisoners told me that they believe that the CDC unscrupulously delays their mail to encourage phone use. At present, a letter may take as long 21 days to be delivered to a prisoner. Moreover, prisoners must pay an added 10 percent fee for every item they purchase through the canteen or any other source. This fee goes into the Inmate Welfare Fund along with any other money prisoners possess. This fund totaled $10.1 million in 1998, at which time some California prisoners sued the state to receive the interest from this money. The state informed the courts that the money held in the Inmate Welfare Fund had not been deposited in interest-earning accounts. Litigation continues on this issue, and prisoners in other states have filed similar suits. Regardless of the outcome of these cases, California prisoners feel the state has cheated them or has earned money on their money. As California prisoners’ attorney Herman Franck views it, the state is stealing from the prisoners, and though each convict is losing only a few dollars, when you consider the vast number of prisoners, “150,000 small thefts becomes one big, fat theft.”? In addition to aggravating prisoners’ sense of injustice, these practices corrode the administrators’ claims of moral superiority and reduce prisoners’ sense of moral inferiority and responsibility."

On November 14, 1929, a serious prison strike nearly broke out at the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert. Only by the narrowest of chances was the plot discovered by staff and the strike averted. Two of the strike leaders, Ashton and Jones, referred to themselves in furtive notes as “sweethearts” and “lovers” - they dreamed of escaping to be together. Two hatchet-men from Ottawa were sent to clean up, senior officers of the penitentiary were dismissed, and the whole affair hushed up, save for a few reassuring stories in the newspapers. This is part of my earliest efforts to understand the origins and course and impact of the 1930s ‘convict revolt’ in Canada, and other issues related to criminality and incarceration Canadian history. (More here.)

“Except in unusual cases, inmates must expect that the return to control by authorities will mean, at least in the short run, a return to much worse conditions of life than before the rebellion: a lockdown, angry guards, less freedom, damaged facilities, lost and destroyed personal property, and possible administrative or criminal prosecutions and penalties. Whether there are long-term improvements is another matter. A riot can be said to have failed if these penalties are severe and benefits are few, and to have succeeded if penalties are mild and benefits are great. (Of course, "success" means something quite different to those inmates for whom a riot is primarily an opportunity for retribution, predation, or recreation.) In the riots under study, the legal penalties (as opposed to the casualties of the riot and its termination) were mildest at Attica and at New Mexico.

In both cases, riot prosecutions mostly collapsed. In part, this was a product of the intensity of the riots. Evidence was destroyed in the course of the riots and recaptures; the state did not have the resources or competence to collect it all, and at Attica the crimes committed by the forces of the state irretrievably contaminated the prosecutions. Moreover, public attention was focused on the cases, particularly on the Attica defendants, and legal talent was attracted. There may also have been less willingness by inmate witnesses to cooperate with the state in New Mexico than in Michigan, after the lesson in what can happen to "snitches." It is easier to get the goods on publicly identified leaders of more orderly riots, such as that at Moundsville. It is tempting to suppose that riots will be most successful when inmates are well organized, resourceful, rational, in control of themselves and, because of these attributes, can force officials to agree to their demands. This would follow logically from the resource mobilization perspective, which emphasizes the importance of resources and skill for both the initiation and success of collective action. However, it does not follow that the greater an adversary's skill, resources, capacity for rational thought, the stronger its bargaining position. It is the paradox of the bargaining situation, as Schelling has pointed out, that the very lack of rationality and organization can give a party power to compel concessions. The weak can credibly threaten, "Improve our conditions, or we will injure ourselves, our surroundings, and our blood will be on your hands." Groups more in control of themselves, less disposed to "irrational" self-injury, do not pose the same threat. Prison officials fear most of all another New Mexico-type bloodbath. The officials in West Virginia, with "better organized," more "rational" inmates, had less to fear. Officials will do a lot to avoid a New Mexico; they are less inclined to respond deeply to a West Virginia. Thus, we should not expect a one-to-one correspondence between a riot type and riot success. While the riots at Attica and New Mexico did effect profound changes, these same riots, in more conservative or leaner times or states, may have unleashed a backlash of anti-inmate sentiment. It seems unlikely that the West Virginia riot would have brought about deeper changes had there been more New Mexico- or Attica-style killings.

On the other hand, there is some (unmeasurable) chance that additional death and destruction would have created a consciousness of emergency in the court system or even in federal agencies, resulting in the allocation of more funds to the West Virginia system. Another factor may be as simple as the belief by the public and officials that riot organizers and hostage-takers should be punished, not rewarded, for their actions. If identifiable, rational inmates negotiate a riot settlement without getting themselves killed, then prison improvements may be seen as impermissibly rewarding their riot, even legitimating it. But if the rioters are "punished" enough, as at Attica, in the course of the recapture, then perhaps the state can move on to deal with the prison's problems. Or, if the rioters are seen as a faceless, irrational mass, as at New Mexico, it is mentally easier to see prison improvements as "solving a problem" rather than caving into inmate demands. From a different perspective, "effectiveness" can be thought to involve not only concrete concessions (e.g., better prison conditions), but how the activity transforms the participants themselves and those who model their behavior after the participants. Even if one agrees that the most successful riots are the least organized, one can still suspect that a "success" like New Mexico teaches no useful lessons. The notion is that this sort of violence and disorder are debasing to the individual and the (inmate) collectivity.” - Bert Useem and Peter Kimball, States of Siege: U.S. Prison Riots, 1971-1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. pp. 223-225.

At one point our data give us a clue. Judging from observations and interviews, inmates not infrequently react with nonconformity to decisions that appear unpredictable. We discussed this in some detail earlier in this chapter, as well as in Chapter 4. Owing to the feeling that decisions about matters vital to inmates are unpredictable, the inmate does not know what standards to comply with. 

Inmates also seem to react with nonconformity to unpredictability as a more conscious protest'against such distribution of rewards and punishments. When the decision-makers seem (as one inmate expressed it) to ‘flip a coin’, or when decisions are interpreted as based on ‘antipathies and sympathies’, inmates seem to protest by disorderly behaviour. Such ‘revolt’ is not likely to be a permanent adjustment on the part of the individual. Yet it seems to happen often enough to create'great problems for staff members. 

In short, a predictable world and system of distribution - not to the point of dullness but to the point of security - seems to be an important condition for conformity among inmates. Perhaps it is a condition general to many types of social system.”