Incarceration: Scapegoat 7 (Scapegoat, Fall/Winter 2014) 1505247209, 9781505247206

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Incarceration Fall/Winter 2014

Scapegoat 7 Edited by

Nasrin Himada and Chris Lee

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Incarceration

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Contents

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Editorial Note

Beyond Prisons: On Practices of Abolition and The Carceral Imaginary 13 29 39 47

Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition by Liat Ben-Moshe Architecture, Activism, and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign by Raphael Sperry Ricochets of Empire by Jenna M. Loyd Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre by Magdalena Milosz

Prison Cities 77 83

99 105 119

Generic by William Orr The Cultural Work of Decommissioned Carceral Sites: Representations of Confinement and Punishment at Kingston Penitentiary by Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché and Kevin Walby Pop-Up Lock Down by Christopher Alton Dislocations and Relocations: Designing for Prison Cities by Lynne Horiuchi Change of Scenery: The Architectural Reach of Electronic Monitoring by Lisbet Portman

Against Punishment, Against Criminalization 157 161 165 183

Agit-Prop Against HIV Criminalization by FUCKLAWS Collective Towards an Architectural Explosion of the Oubliette by Eileen Wennekers Undocumented: The Achitecture of Migrant Detention by Tings Chak Due Time by FATS, George Frison, William Jones, Erica R. Meiners, James Piggues, Sarah Ross, Johnny Taylor, Devon Terrell, Fereshteh Toosi, and Alan White. 3

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Contents

From inside 207 217 233 245 249 253 255 259 269

Testimonials from Inside The Pathology Of Rehabilitation by Peter Collins Letter to the ACLU by Derrick Quintero If My Journey Was A Book Title by Derrick Quintero Prison Outside the Box by Harold W. Nichols Untitled by Ojore Lutalo Rethinking Illinois’ Truth-In-Sentencing Law, Joseph Dole The Chicago Police Department: at the Pinnacle of Police Corruption, and a Menace to Society by Joseph Dole Prison: A Roundtable Conversation With Lifers with Gee, Kato, and Just Another Number

Reviews 285 289 295

Illuminating the Margins: Engaging with the Carceral Image within an Abolitionist Framework by Margarita Osipian Mass Incarceration and the Book Cover by Josh MacPhee Capadocia: The Place Where Women are Buried Alive / Without Forgiveness by Irmgard Emmelhainz

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Contributors

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Books taken from cell of George Jackson, A-63837, following Adjustment Center incident at San Quentin

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Editorial Note This issue of Scapegoat addresses the design and construction of spaces of punishment from an abolitionist perspective, insisting emphatically on the abolition of all forms of incarceration as a key component in the struggle against wider systems and practices of domination. We hope that this edition will address some of the persistent questions of how to understand incarceration, and how and why to realize its annihilation. This issue was conceived to advance this discussion not only for architects, scholars, and activists, but also for prisoners, families, friends, and other allies. It was composed from a selection of open-call submissions and regrettably does not manage to cover the full spectrum of voices of those who are deeply and directly affected by incarceration, particularly the voices of women in prison. Despite these gaps, our hope is that this is an issue that has something for everyone concerned. Prison abolition is a highly misunderstood and scandalizing proposition, and we hope that there are enough entry points here to contribute in some way to broadening the understanding of these issues, to cultivating alliances, and implementing tactics and strategies of transformative justice. Beyond Prisons: On Practices of Abolition and The Carceral Imaginary The carceral imaginary is a recalcitrant part of the prison infrastructure and a major challenge to building a broad movement for the realization of abolition. As much as the disciplinary obscenity of the prison cell is intensified and insulated by layers of security, it is also propelled outward by persistent narratives that validate institutions and practices of punishment. Liat Ben-Moshe’s piece looks at the precedent of deinstitutionalization and the movement to abolish institutions like psychiatric hospitals in the US as a model for prison abolition today, while Raphael Sperry continues to intensify the call for architects to disengage from the design and construction of spaces of torture, such as solitary confinement. Jenna M. Loyd locates violent bordering practices that exceed and blur sovereign territories but put into relief the ”ricochets“ of imperialism. Similarly, Magdalena Miłosz 7 Nasrin Himada and Chris Lee

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visits the Toronto South Detention Centre to trace the architectural and programmatic iterations of this disciplinary site while marking the reverberations of capitalism, and the persistence of incarceration and colonialism materialized in prefabricated concrete cells. In addition, the carceral imaginary projects violence outward through narratives of tourism, construction and collaboration, reform, and generalization, among others. For example, Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché and Kevin Walby look at the way prison tourism and the popular discourse around it sensationalize incarceration and continue to reinforce the carceral imagination even after the closure of a prison. Re-mapping the temporary holding cells constructed during the 2010 G20 gathering in Toronto, Christopher Alton recalls the transformation of the city into a battle zone, and the police violence that ensued. In an excerpt from her forthcoming book Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, Lynne Horiuchi casts the design and construction of prison cities for Japanese and JapaneseAmericans as a broad composition of material, legal, military, and cultural systems and practices that make up a devastating facet of the canonical oeuvre of American architecture. Meanwhile, Lisbet Portman writes of the prison’s dispersed presence and force through the technology of electronic monitoring, and its detrimental implications for the struggle for prison abolition, and William Orr reimagines the Parisian banlieue as a peripheral super-structure encircling the city of Paris, staging a generic perspectival view at what was once a definite zone of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, Margarita Osipian presents two visual strategies employed by artists and designers to visualize, contemplate, and mitigate the tendency to obscure discrete carceral sites, as well as the pervasive networked presence of the prison in our cities. Against Punishment, Against Criminalization This section includes work that addresses and confronts the architectural and narrative obfuscations of incarceration’s monstrosity, created and transmitted through interfaces with outside allies who insist on the support of those inside in order to make 8

Editorial Note

visceral the immense challenges facing prison abolition. As a strategy against punishment, prison abolition seeks to imagine and implement transformative justice tactics, and to bring attention to the violent effects of criminalization. This section spans a wide and vibrant range of concerns: The FUCKLAWS Collective brings attention to the criminalization policies of the Canadian state against HIV-positive people in the form of persecuting what is now known as ”HIV non-disclosure.“ Eileen Wennekers, Peter Sherratt, and Patrick Casey construct a space that inverts the invisibility of the prison cell by building a transparent replica in public space as a tactic of retrieving prisoners from oblivion. In an excerpt from her recently released graphic novel Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention, Tings Chak links borders, prison cells, and their overwhelming ramifications for migrant mobility. Writer and political activist Peter Collins brings to this issue content from inside and analyzes the failures of rehabilitation in Canada.  This is followed by direct contributions from prisoners in the US and Canada. First, activists, artists, writers, and scholars from inside and out bring us a collective writing piece entitled ”Due Time,“ which examines experiences of temporality across the carceral continuum of punishment and confinement. Issue 07 also features work by artists and writers Derrick Quintero, Harold Wayne Nichols, Ojore Lutalo, and Joseph Dole. Their artwork and critical writings examine the struggles from inside prison walls, and illustrate the differences in modes of resistance that challenge the repressive regimes of the carceral system. A pair of timely reviews closes out the edition. Josh MacPhee journeys through a collection of book covers, reading them as artifacts expressing a particular evolution of attitudes, perceptions, and ideologies of incarceration. Irmgard Emmelhainz reviews Capadocia, a Mexican television series about a women’s prison that echoes and stages the intersections between discourses of race, class, social responsibility and security, militarization, and privatization that are shaping Mexican politics today.

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Nasrin Himada and Chris Lee

Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition Liat Ben-Moshe When Decarceration Happened The premise of the meditation below is that the deinstitutionalization movement in the fields of mental health and developmental disabilities (in the U.S.) can be used as a lightning rod for current prison abolition struggles. Similar kinds of dismissals have been launched against both movements: that closing psychiatric hospitals and ”institutions for the mentally retarded“ was utopian; that it will never happen under current conditions; that even if it is the moral thing to do we must wait until conditions are right; and if it does happen it is irresponsible and dangerous for many of the inhabitants of these total institutions, as well for as those who do not reside in them. But despite all these critiques, deinstitutionalization did happen, and is still happening right now in many states in the U.S. It can therefore be used as a historical precedent for all movements interested in decarceration efforts. Defining Deinstitutionalization Deinstitutionalization can be defined as the movement of people with psychiatric, intellectual, or developmental disabilities from state institutions and hospitals into community living situations, as well as the closure of large (mostly state-sponsored and funded) institutions and hospitals for people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. In the U.S., and varying from state to state, the deinstitutionalization of people who were labelled as mentally ill began in the 1950s, and the deinstitutionalization of people labelled intellectually and developmentally disabled gained wider prominence in the 1970s. The movement of people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (I/DD) from large facilities to smaller communal residences is demonstrated by the fact that in 1977, an estimated 83.7 percent of people with developmental disability labels who were receiving residential services lived in residences 13

1 Sheryl A. Larson, Amanda Ryan, Patricia Salmi, Drew Smith, and Allise Wuorio, Residential Services for Persons with Developmental Disabilities: Status and Trends through 2010 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, Research and Training Center on Community Living, Institute on Community Integration, 2012). 2 David Braddock, Richard Hemp, Mary Kay Rizzolo, Laura Haffer, Emily Shea Tanis, and Jiang Wu, The State of the States in Developmental Disabilities: 2011 (Boulder: University of Colorado, Department of Psychiatry and Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities, 2011). 3 Bernard E. Harcourt, “Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons from the Deinstitutionalization of Mental Hospitals in the 1960s,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 9, no. 1 (2011): 53-87.

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of 16 or more people; by 2009, an estimated 86.4 percent lived in community settings of 15 or fewer people, and 73.1 percent lived in residential settings with 6 or fewer people.—1 The trend towards deinstitutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities also resulted in the closure of large state institutions across most of the U.S. By 2011, 11 states had closed all of their state-operated institutions for people with I/DD.—2 Needless to say, these 11 states still have residents with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities, but they attempt to accommodate their needs outside of the institutional framework. An accompanying shift occurred in the field of mental health with the establishment of community-based mental health centres in the 1960s and the closure of large, state-run mental hospitals in most major cities in the U.S. In 1955, the state mental health population was 559,000—nearly as large on a per capita basis as the prison population today. By 2000, it had fallen to below 100,000.—3 I am not suggesting that institutionalization, hospitalization, and imprisonment in jails and prisons are the same. Rather, I am suggesting that those who want to achieve a non-carceral society should examine one specific historical precedent of decarceration in the U.S. to utilize insights, avoid potential pitfalls, and recognize the strategic moves used during deinstitutionalization that made it successful. Who Can Be Decarcerated? The most challenging question often raised in the context of abolition of prisons and institutions is what to do with those deemed as having the most challenging behaviours. In prison abolition circles this discussion is known as ”what to do with the dangerous few,“ and in the realm of developmental and psychiatric disabilities it is the question of ”what to do with the most significantly/profoundly disabled.“ In both cases the general assumption is that these are the populations that will not be able to ”make it on the outside“ and therefore will always require some sort of segregation and restraint, either for their own good or the public’s. However, there is significant debate in both arenas as to whether this assumption is indeed true. 14

Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition

Some prison abolitionists advocate for transformative justice and healing practices in which no one will be restrained or segregated, while others believe that there will always be a small percentage of those whose behaviour is so unacceptable or harmful that they will need to be incapacitated, socially exiled, or restrained, and that this should be done humanely and not in a prison-like setting. In the field of developmental disabilities and anti-psychiatry, a similar debate arose alongside early discussions of deinstitutionalization. To those deemed ”radical inclusionists“ (especially in the field of education), everyone deserves to belong, to be educated with their peers, and to live in a community. For proponents of this attitude, segregation is never a viable response, even for those whose behaviour is challenging and ”disturbing“ to others. The goal is to make people with and without disabilities aware of social norms (such as raising one’s voice, touching others without permission, etc.), but simultaneously challenge social views and attitudes that construct normalcy in particular ways (for instance, having to regulate one’s body and behaviour to fit specific cultural expectations). It also entails changing public policy, the education system as a whole, housing and other infrastructure to make them accessible and inclusive to all. In the field of anti-psychiatry such attitudes also involve opposition to psychiatric hospitalization, even of those labelled ”psychotic,“ in favour of treatment or support in the community, among one’s peers, and without coercion. Robert McRuer has described Crip Theory as a combination of disability/crip and queer studies, both reclaiming the positions of crip and queer as critical (as opposed to derogatory) positions and subjectivities. Crip theory, therefore, draws ”attention to critically queer, severely disabled possibilities in order to bring to the fore the crip actors who […] will exacerbate in more productive ways the crisis of authority that currently besets heterosexual/ able-bodied norms.“—4 By ”severely disabled,“ McRuer is not merely referring to the level of impairment a person is presumed to have, but as a queer position, a position that questions, a mark of defiance. By reclaiming severe as ”fierce“ or defiant, McRuer reverses ablebodied standards that view people with severe disabilities as those who will never be integrated (reflecting the adage ”everyone should 15 Liat Ben-Moshe

4 Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 31.

5 Steven J. Taylor, “Thoughts and Impressions on Institutional Closure,” IMPACT (Feature Issue on Institution Closures) 9, no. 1 (1995/6): 8-9.

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be included, except for…”). From their marginal state, ”severe disabilities“ and queer subjects are positioned to re-enter the margins and point to the inadequacies of straight and nondisabled assumptions. Translated to praxis, some prison abolitionists and activists in the fields of developmental disabilities and anti-psychiatry indeed begin their promotion of alternative social arrangements from the positionality of ”severe“ cases. It is partially this debate that prompted those advocating for community inclusion to begin with the most ”severe“ cases when calling for and implementing the move out of institutions. A lesson learned from successful institution closures is, therefore, that those labelled as having the most significant needs should move to community placements early on in the process. If left to the end, such people would most likely be placed in segregated settings because of a lack of skills, experience, ability, or desire in the community to support them. For example, those deemed the most violent and dangerous youth became deinstitutionalization advocate Jerome Miller’s symbol as he closed juvenile facilities in Massachusetts in the 1970s, and were the first to be decarcerated. With regards to prison abolition, the work of Fay Honey Knopp is especially relevant here. After working to draft the abolitionist manual Instead of Prisons, Knopp sought to engage with the ”toughest“ cases, and she devoted the rest of her life to working with so-called sex offenders and sexual abusers. The thought behind this commitment was that if she can demonstrate the ineffectiveness of prisons for this segment of the imprisoned population, there will be no doubt that prisons should not be the response to lesser criminalizable acts, like property or drug offenses. Swift Changes Versus Attrition as the Best Way to Decarcerate Reflecting on the process of deinstitutionalization in the field of DD in the 1970s and onward, Steven Taylor—5 suggests a few successful strategies used in closing institutions in the past and present. The first is to announce the closure far in advance, making sure the move has support from the local community and professionals (this strategy 16

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was used in Vermont—6 for example).—7 A riskier strategy, but one with many benefits, is a swift and massive system change from within. Jerry Miller, then the director of the Department of Youth Services in Massachusetts, emptied all but one juvenile facility in the state in three years. Miller’s method—8 was to create swift changes, thus preventing professionals and those in positions of power to revolt against his closure efforts. Miller was concerned that a lengthy reform period would only invite opposition from the staff and parents, as well as judges who could send more ”juveniles“ into the school, thus preventing it from closing. Miller closed juvenile corrections institutions without seeking the approval of the legislature and with no real cooperation of any other agencies, except for specific individuals with whom he had good working relations. The plan was to initiate group homes as alternatives to incarceration of youth in Massachusetts, and once they were set up with federal funds, the state would divert money from the empty institutions and reform schools into the new units. This was done solely under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, a move that raised much animosity from politicians and policy makers both outside and inside the department. Another, more subtle, strategy used for deinstitutionalization was the gradual depopulation of an institution to the point where it was no longer cost effective to keep it open (this tactic was used in New Hampshire).—9 This strategy could be characterized as ”abolition by attrition,“ as described by Knopp et al. with regards to prisons.—10 According to the attrition model, the function and power of prisons would be slowly worn down. One component of abolition by attrition is to decarcerate or release as many prisoners as possible, such as those who are deemed psychiatrically or mentally disabled, those who have a drug or other substance dependency, and young offenders. The second component is to excarcerate (create mechanisms that prevent and avoid incarceration) by establishing community probation programs, and decriminalizing whole categories, such as crimes without victims. The point is to decarcerate prison populations one by one—first the young, then the mentally ill, and so on. Canadian abolitionist Ruth Morris critiques the attrition model by asserting that it is indeed an aggressive reform effort, but a reform effort nonetheless.—11 The 17 Liat Ben-Moshe

6 This strategy was used in the closure of Brandon Training School, Vermont’s only public institution catering to people with developmental disabilities, which opened in 1915 and closed in 1993, after 20 years of legal and advocacy battles. 7 See Bonnie Shoultz, Pam Walker, Kathy Hulgin, Bob Bogdan, Steve Taylor, and Charles Moseley, Closing Brandon Training School: A Vermont Story (Syracuse: Center on Human Policy, 1999). 8 Jerome G. Miller, Last One over the Wall: The Massachusetts Experiment in Closing Reform Schools (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991). 9 Taylor, “Institutional Closure,” 8-9. 10 Honey Fay Knopp and The Prison Research Education Action Project, Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists (Syracuse, NY: Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976). 11 Ruth Morris, Penal abolition, the practical choice: A practical manual on penal abolition (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1995).

12 Harcourt, “Reducing Mass Incarceration.”

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problem of chipping at the margins of the system is that the centre remains intact. According to Morris, gradual decarceration and excarceration will lead to deepening a retributive system by means of programs billed as ”alternatives to incarceration,“ such as boot camps and parole sanctions. Another critique of the attrition model can be found in the backlash to deinstitutionalization in its aftermath, by those who claim that people who have been deinstitutionalized often find themselves inappropriately placed in other institutions like prisons and jails. This builds on arguments heard by various activists and organizations such as NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness), that people with mental health issues are over-represented in the prison system and should not be placed in jail or prison in the first place. Too often what such calls end up doing is suggest that people with disabilities or mental health issues are inappropriately placed in prisons and jails, which implies that there are others who are somehow appropriately placed there. In other words, it re-inscribes the notion that there are those who really need to be placed in spaces of incarceration, while those who are young and/or disabled do not. In relation to the attrition model, we can see this as another example by which the calls for decarceration of one specific population do not necessarily lead to abolition of the system and its mindset, and ends up strengthening the logic and net effect of the carceral system. Deinstitutionalization and the Rise in Incarceration In the public’s eye, the first half of the twentieth century is conceived as an era of relative stability in terms of incarceration, with a later explosion in the growth of prisons and jails, a phenomenon commonly referred to as ”mass incarceration.“ However, as Harcourt suggests, if mental hospitalization and institutionalization were also covered in such analysis, the ”rise in incarceration“ would have reached its peak in 1955, when mental hospitals were at their highest capacity.—12 Put differently, the incarceration rates in U.S. prisons and jails today (about 700 of every 100,000 people) are less or equal to the levels of incarceration during the early part of the twentieth century, when over 600 of every 100,000 people were in psychiatric 18

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hospitals alone. This relationship, of a reversal of trends between the mental health and the criminal system, is hardly new, however. As early as 1939, Penrose suggested that social control evolves from incarcerating people to treating people, therefore suggesting an inverse relationship between mental health and the prison system.—13 Since then, this hypothesis has been tested numerous times with inconsistent results. Overall, studies suggest that in relation to arrests, this hypothesis may be corroborated, as the percentage of mental patients with prior arrests increased from the 1940s to the 1970s. But studies of imprisonment seem more inconclusive, suggesting that some inmates end up in jail after being arrested, but not as often in prison.—14 Taking incarceration in its broadest terms, i.e. in relation to both prisons and institutions, would also entail deconstructing the categories that are used by criminologists, psychiatrists, and social scientists. The point is not to try and find the most accurate way of measuring ”the mentally ill“ in prisons and jails, but to ask questions that take into account the blurry line between criminality and medicalization—and the constructed nature of both. I do not agree with the public outcry following deinstitutionalization (heard by sociologists, activists, and the media) that most people, particularly those labelled as mentally ill, became homeless and were increasingly re-incarcerated in jails and prisons in urban areas in the U.S. I believe this narrative reduces a much more complex process and puts the blame on an easy target—deinstitutionalization—instead of neoliberal policies that led simultaneously to the growth of the prison system and to the lack of financial support for disabled and poor people to live in affordable and accessible community housing. In addition, the assumption that these are the same people, i.e. that people were deinstitutionalized and ended up in prison, should also be challenged, as the demographics of these populations are quite distinct. Over the years, the gender distribution of inmates in mental hospitals tended to be either equal or tended towards an over-representation of women. However, in terms of imprisonment, the majority of those newly imprisoned are male. There are differences in terms of age and race as well. Although 19 Liat Ben-Moshe

13 Lionel Penrose, “Mental disease and crime: Outline of a comparative study of European statistics,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, 18 (1939): 1-15 14 Liska, Allen E., Fred E. Markowitz, Rachel Bridges Whaley, and Paul Bellair, “Modeling the Relationship between the Criminal Justice and Mental Health Systems,” American Journal of Sociology 104, no. 6 (1999): 1744-75.

15 Henry J. Steadman, John Monahan, Barbara Duffee, Eliot Hartstone, and Pamela Clark Robbins, “The Impact of State Mental Hospital Deinstitutionalization on United States Prison Populations, 1968– 1978,” Journal of Crime, Law & Criminology 75 (1984): 474. 16 Bernard E. Harcourt, “From the Asylum to the Prison: Rethinking the Incarceration Revolution,” Texas Law Review 84, no. 7 (2006): 17511786. 17 Burt Blatt, Robert Bogdan, Douglas Biklen, and Steven J. Taylor, “From Institution to Community: A Conversion Model,” in Educational Programming for the Severely and Profoundly Handicapped, ed. E. Sontag, J. Smith and N. Certo (Reston, VA: Council for Exceptional Children, 1977). 18 Ibid.

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there is some evidence to suggest that during deinstitutionalization the proportion of those identified as non-whites had increased for those admitted to mental hospitals, they only compromised about a third at its highest point.—15 As should now be clear to anyone at least somewhat familiar with the prison system in the U.S., non-whites are extremely over-represented. Conversely, in general terms, the inmate population in mental hospitals tended to be more white, older, and more equally distributed by gender than those incarcerated in prisons.—16 Therefore, we are not speaking about the same population or group of people (who exited hospitals and institutions and entered prisons), but of ways in which the social control function of incarceration retained its importance, but for differing populations. The Need for Conversion Plans while Decarcerating Creating new and meaningful uses for the evacuated buildings after their closure is paramount. In the 1970s, Blatt et. al. pushed the idea that for deinstitutionalization to be successful, a full conversion model from an institutional to a community-service model should be achieved.17 There are unfortunately many examples in which former developmental centres and psychiatric hospitals closed down as part of the deinstitutionalization movement were converted into prisons shortly afterwards. Some facilities created smaller units on the grounds of the old institutions in which people with the same disability labels lived. Such examples illustrate the need to explicitly determine what will happen with the physical remains of the closed institutions, as well as the involvement of activists and the community in such decisions. Conversion plans also have to take into account fiscal matters. In the case of state-run institutions and mental hospitals, there are two compounding issues at play. The first is that states are often reluctant to close institutions since they are funded by municipal and state bonds.18 Secondly, even when they close down, the budget of each institution does not seem to go directly into community services. This of course creates a budgetary issue, as monies that were utilized for the care of people with disabilities either disappear from the budget altogether or go to the upkeep of institutions, even those 20

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with a very small number of residents. Miller claims that in New York State and Pennsylvania, while thousands of patients were left with little housing or treatment options in the community, the budget for the depopulated hospitals actually increased at the beginning stages of deinstitutionalization. He sums up the situation by remarking that although most ”mental patients“ left the institutions in past decades, the staff, resources, and budgets remained institutionalized.19 Closure Does Not Mean Abolition The closure of repressive institutions such as mental hospitals and prisons can be conceptualized as a necessary but insufficient action on the road to abolition. The most important element in institutional closure is to ensure that people do not end up re-incarcerated in other institutions. The mere closure of prisons and large state institutions for people labelled intellectually or psychiatrically disabled did not necessarily entail a radical change in policy, attitudes, or the lived experiences of those incarcerated. In this light, closure in itself is still embedded within the same circuits of power that created such institutions, unless there is an epistemic shift in the way community, punishment, dis/ability, and segregation are conceptualized. Elsewhere, I have suggested that the forces of incarceration of disabled people should be understood in relation to the prison industry and the institutional-industrial complex, in the form of a growing private industry of nursing homes, boarding homes, for-profit psychiatric hospitals, and group homes.—20 As an example, figures show that there is no correlation between the increase of the nongovernmental institutional-industrial complex and the percentage of those ”needing“ these services. Between 1977 and 2009, the total number of residential settings in which people with developmental disability labels received residential services grew from 11,008 to an estimated 173,042 (an increase of 1,472%), while total service recipients increased from about 247,780 to an estimated 439,515 individuals (77.4%).—21 Because most of these newer settings are much smaller than the massive institutions of previous decades, they are not typically counted as ”institutional“ placements, but due to their size as well as 21 Liat Ben-Moshe

19 Miller, Last One over the Wall, 159167. 20 Liat Ben-Moshe, “Disabling Incarceration: Connecting Disability to Divergent Confinements in the USA,” Critical Sociology 39, no. 3 (2013): 385-403. 21 Larson et al., Residential Services, 2010.

22 Self Advocates Becoming Empowered, http://www. sabeusa.org/ wp-content/uploads/2014/ 02/POSITIONSTATEMENTInstitutions.pdf

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daily routines and other aspects of life in these settings, many people with disabilities, family members, and advocates consider them to be ”smaller institutions“ within the community. Institution as Mindset Instead of incarcerating people and segregating them, certain movements such as anti-psychiatry, deinstitutionalization, and prison abolition propose radical new ways of treatment, care, and governance that do not require the segregation of people from their peers. I contend, therefore, that deinstitutionalization could be characterized not only as a process or an exodus of oppressed people outside the walls of institutions and into community living, but as a radical anti-segregationist philosophy. In a similar vein, Self-Advocates Becoming Empowered, a national advocacy group of people with developmental disabilities, states that: ”An institution is any facility or program where people do not have control over their lives. A facility or program can mean a private or public institution, nursing home, group home, foster care home, day treatment program, or sheltered workshop.“—22 For those who have been incarcerated, an institution is not just a place, but a mindset. The goal of a non-carceral society is not to replace one form of control, such as a hospital, institution, or prison, with another, such as psychopharmaceuticals, nursing homes, or group homes in the community. The aspiration is to fundamentally change the ways we interact with each other, the ways we respond to difference or harm, the ways normalcy is defined, and the ways resources are distributed and accessed. Abolition Versus Reform Earlier criticisms of institutions and hospitals included various scholarly accounts and exposés by journalists, professionals, and scholars from the early 1960s: Senator Robert Kennedy’s unannounced visit to state schools; Blatt and Kaplan’s damning photographic depiction of institutional back wards for people labelled mentally retarded, which was published as Christmas in Purgatory and 22

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also in Look Magazine; and Geraldo Rivera’s exposé on Willowbrook State School, which attracted national coverage. In addition, several influential books were published in the early 1960s that exposed mental hospitals as coercive warehouses for the indigent, such as Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), and Erving Goffman’s Asylums (1961). A year later, Ken Kesey’s bestselling novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest came out to widespread acclaim. Although a fictional portrayal, it was this novel above all, and its subsequent film adaptation in 1975, that instigated the popular critique of psychiatric hospitals. These exposés and depictions showed that institutions were beyond reform and presented them as inhumane warehouses, often alluding (in this post-WWII era) to concentration camps in their imagery and textual references. Overall, however, these early exposés did not do much to change the fate of those institutionalized, at least not immediately. Blatt and Kaplan published Christmas in Purgatory in 1966, and in 1979 Blatt revisited these institutions and found no great improvement; they were just mildly cleaner ”snake pits.“—23 In his book Acts of Conscience, Steven Taylor constructs a historiography of mental institution exposés from the turn of the century, focusing on the 1940s onward. He presents the work of such well-known reformers as Dorothea Dix and Clifford Beers, who brought on the beginning of the mental hygiene movement, which resulted in the construction of mental health hospitals. Later, such exposé-driven reforms resulted in a change in the degree of squalor presented in the institutions, but the institutions essentially remained intact.—24 It was not until the shift was made towards the elimination of such institutions that a real change in the institutional mindset was effected. It was the coupling of these exposés with the ideology of normalization, self-advocacy, and anti-psychiatry that ultimately led to a change in perspective—from an institutional to a community-based model—and eventually calls for the closure of all such institutions. The resistance to institutionalization and psychiatric hospitals arose from a broader social critique of medical authority and a new understanding of human value—especially with regards to people with disabilities—as seen in the principles of normalization, anti-psychiatry, the ex-patients’ movement, and the People First or 23 Liat Ben-Moshe

23 Burton Blatt, Andrejs Ozolins, and Joe McNally, The Family Papers: A Return to Purgatory (New York: Longman, 1979). 24 Steven J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: World War II, Mental Institutions and Religious Objectors (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009).

25 Wolf Wolfensberger, The origin and nature of our institutional models. (Syracuse, N. Y.: Center on Human Policy Syracuse University Division of Special Education and Rehabilitation, 1974); Erving Goffman, Asylums; essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates (1st ed.). (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961). 26 Judi Chamberlin, On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System (National Empowerment Center, 1977).

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self-advocacy movement. The anti-medical view of mental ”illness“ propounded by Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing was reaffirmed by social scientists such as Thomas Scheff and others who supported ”labelling theory.“ It is also echoed in the writings of sociologists such as Erving Goffman and Wolf Wolfensberger, who showed that once a person had been placed in an institutional setting they will act accordingly—25 (i.e. disabled, institutionalized etc.). Of course, the most vocal critics of psychiatry were those who had been psychiatrized themselves, including those who self-identify as psychiatric survivors, or consumers or ex-patients (some identify as all, some only as one category, although they are often lumped together), as well as anti-psychiatry activists. While all these critics share an understanding of the constructed nature of mental illness, some advocates would take this critique to its absolute: the abolition of psychiatry. For instance, activist Judi Chamberlin critiques the mantra that is often cited by activists and professionals that ”mental illness is like any other illness,“ or that the way to combat the oppression of those psychiatrized is in fighting against stigma. Given current laws in relation to involuntary hospitalization, mental ”illness“ cannot be characterized as being like cancer or a heart attack, according to Chamberlin. Rather, altered states such as anger and pain should not be characterized as illness, but as a consequence of a system of power and inequality that denies people their basic human needs. In addition, stigma is not perceived by Chamberlin to be the force that most oppresses those who are psychiatrized. Psychiatry itself is that force.—26 Another example of the shift in perspective from reform to abolition is the establishment of The American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization (AAAIMH) in 1970 by Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman, and George Alexander (then Dean of the Law School at the University of Santa Clara in California). Szasz, more than any other scholar and perhaps most activists in the anti-psychiatry movement, was never really interested in reforming psychiatry as a medical field, but rather in its total abolition. He claimed that there is no such thing as voluntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital because you are not the person who decides when you get out. Once you are committed, your release is always determined by 24

Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition

medical experts, regardless of how you entered the hospital. So if you cannot get out voluntarily when you choose, how can it be called voluntary commitment? Thus, for Szasz, modern psychiatry always stands for coercion. In the literature on deinstitutionalization of individuals with labels of ”mental retardation,“ it seems that no theory or concept was more influential in the 1960s and 1970s than the principle of normalization.—27 The concept of normalization came from Europe, especially Scandinavia, where it was originally suggested by Niels Erik Bank-Mikkelsen and Bengt Nirje, and popularized in the U.S. by Wolf Wolfensberger. Nirje defined normalization as: [M]aking available to the mentally retarded patterns and conditions of everyday life, which are as close as possible to the norms and patterns of the mainstream of society. This principle should be applied to all the retarded, regardless whether mildly or profoundly retarded, or whether living in the homes of their parents or in group homes with other retarded.—28 The idea that people with developmental disabilities should be raised in and live in normalized settings resembling those of their peers, as suggested by the principle of normalization, may seem trivial to us now, but it was an idea that was fiercely resisted at its time, and is not universally accepted to this day. It was a paradigm shift that seemed almost unimaginable in the 1960s and early 1970s because the prevailing solutions of the era were focused on improving or reforming institutional living by creating smaller settings that are better managed or geographically less remote, or by diverting more money to segregated housing and special education programs. The notion that people with disabilities should not be segregated in the first place was a tremendous paradigm shift in the field. In other words, reform-based approaches to deinstitutionalization focused on improving overcrowded conditions, calling for more money in the budget for hospitals and developmental centres, hiring more staff, or making institutions and hospitals more liveable. Although such efforts are still pervasive in the ongoing debate over deinstitutionalization, professional opinion and most of 25 Liat Ben-Moshe

27 One critique of the principle of normalization is that it focuses too much on trying to change the individual so that she will fit into societal standards, which makes this more of a “principle of assimilation.” See, for example, M.J. Oliver, Capitalism, Disability and Ideology: A Materialist Critique of the Normalization Principle (1994). But, in the original formulation proposed by Bengt Nirje (1969), the environment is what needs to be changed into being as normalized as possible, not the person. 28 Bengt Nirje, “The Normalization Principle and Its Human Management Implications,” in Changing Patterns in Residential Services for the Mentally Retarded, ed. Robert B. Kugel and Wolf Wolfensberger (Washington DC: President’s Committee on Mental Retardation, 1969), 181.

29 Thomas Mathiesen, The Politics of Abolition (New York: Halsted Press, 1974), 1. 30 Avery Gordon, Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004).

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the public opinion started demanding the closure of these institutions and devoting all the money and strategic thinking to their alternatives. But it was not until the pendulum swung towards abolition, when professional opinion moved to community living instead of reform (especially in I/DD), that massive deinstitutionalization became possible. Although these ideological shifts did not solely bring about deinstitutionalization and the closure of psychiatric hospitals and large state institutions nationwide, I believe that any significant decrease in institutionalized populations would have been impossible without them. Decarceration in the Present Tense Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen conceptualizes abolition as an alternative in the making: ”The alternative lies in the ‘unfinished,’ in the sketch, in what is not yet fully existing.“—29 By definition, then, abolition and decarceration cannot wait for a future constellation when appropriate alternatives are already in place. In fact, this is inherently impossible because alternatives cannot emerge from the existing order but from a process of change that will come as a result of a massive transition. According to Mathiesen, abolition as a goal and a mindset is in fact necessary to come up with new alternatives. Avery Gordon further asserts that the core of abolitionism is its refusal to wait. Slaves or prisoners, and those fighting for their freedom, cannot wait for a new world order to be free of incarceration or bondage. They cannot wait until the right conditions emerge and the desired future begins.—30 This sense of urgency enables abolitionism to become a model for political activity in the here and now. Emancipation is ongoing work and cannot wait until the time is ripe for it. This characterization of abolition could also be seen in the case of deinstitutionalization activists who insisted on a noncarceral and inclusive world before alternatives to institutionalization were in place in all locales (or anywhere, for that matter). This ideological stance may create a dilemma concerning whether deinstitutionalization proponents should wait until there are sufficient community placements before advocating for institutional closure, or go ahead regardless based on the principle that no one should 26

Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition

live in an institution at any time. Even though concepts like ”harm“ and ”quality of life“ cannot be defined, especially from above by professionals, advocates such as Steven Taylor believe that bringing up such ethical questions would lead one to realize that institutional living is unjustifiable if one cares more about those institutionalized than about cost-benefit analysis, even if community settings are imperfect at the present time.—31 The goal of those advocating for community living and community mental health programs, as well as other institutional alternatives, was to close down institutions and refute the institutional and segregationist mindset while the alternatives were not ready-made and indeed could not have been, as such a framework did not exist at that time. Their detractors used it to critique and halt the process of deinstitutionalization, since there were not sufficient placements for people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities in the community; budgets for community mental health centres were miniscule if available at all. But deinstitutionalization and anti-psychiatry activists contended that until hospitals and institutions closed down, such alternatives and their accompanying budgets would never be transferred to alternatives. By insisting that the time for closure is now, or in other words that there is never an optimal time to make such a change, deinstitutionalization became a reality on the ground.

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31 Taylor, “Institutional Closure,” 8-9.

Architecture, Activism, and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign Raphael Sperry Let’s start with the numbers: in 2014 the United States incarcerated 2.4 million people, almost one percent of the total U.S. population; the annual spending on incarceration is over $79-billion,—1 with over $2-billion for prison and jail construction.—2 This population is housed in, and this money is spent on, an archipelago of 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and seventy-nine Indian Country jails, as well as an uncounted number of military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centres, and prisons in U.S. territories.—3 This is an aberration—historically, internationally, and morally. Historically, the U.S. per-capita incarceration rate was generally 0.1 percent of its population, until a rapid climb that began in the mid 1970s. Mandatory minimum sentences, the ”War on Drugs,“ and three-strikes laws are the proximate causes of the prison population boom. Internationally, the United States has far and away the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world—we incarcerate more people than the entire European Union put together.—4 Even compared to authoritarian countries with manifestly unjust legal systems, such as Russia or many Persian Gulf states where political speech may be a crime, for instance, an American is more likely to be jailed, most likely for a drug crime. Morally, mass incarceration—the ”carceral state“ or the ”prison industrial complex,“ names that indicate the significant dimensions of the political economy of incarceration—is founded on jailing people who pose no significant public safety risk. Up to half of U.S. prisoners are jailed for non-violent offenses, especially minor drug crimes, of which marijuana offenses are the largest share. In many jurisdictions half of prisoners are mentally ill; county sheriffs routinely describe their jails as de facto mental hospitals.—5 Structural racism pervades the criminal justice system as people of colour are disproportionately targeted for police stops, tougher charges, more frequent conviction, and longer sentences.—6 The spectrum of skin 29

1 2010 state and local expenditures of $72.5-billion, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, www. bjs.gov/index. cfm?ty=pbdetail &iid=4679, plus $6.6 billion for the 2012 Federal prison system, according to the Department of Justice budget, www.justice.gov/ jmd/2013 summary/pdf/ budget-authorityappropriation.pdf. Smaller players such as juvenile detention, Indian, military and other jails are not included. 2 As per the 2013 forecast of $2.4-billion in combined jail and prison construction, www.correctional news.com/ articles/2013/01/3/ prison-and-jailconstructionreport-givessnapshot-industry, and the $1-2billion recent annual average in state prison construction alone, www.bjs. gov/content/pub/ pdf/scefy8210.pdf (see Figure 3). 3 Prison Policy Initiative, “Mass Incarceration, The Whole Pie,” http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/ pie.html. 4 “The High Cost of Corrections in America,” The Pew Charitable Trusts, www. pewstates.org/ research/datavisualizations/ the-high-cost-ofcorrections-inamerica85899397897.

5 Nicholas Kristof, “Inside a Mental Hospital Called Jail,” The New York Times, February 8, 2014, www.nytimes. com/2014/02/09/ opinion/sunday/ inside-a-mentalhospital-calledjail.html. 6 See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2012), for an extensive discussion of racism in the criminal justice system. 7 “Death Penalty Facts,” Amnesty International, www.amnestyusa. org/pdfs/DeathPenaltyFactsMay2012.pdf. 8 Marc Mauer, “Can We Wait 88 Years to End Mass Incarceration?” The Huffington Post, www. huffingtonpost. com/marc-mauer/ 88-years-massincarceration _b_4474132.html. 9 The author is currently president of ADPSR and has been a board member since 2003. The organization’s web site is www. adpsr.org.

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colour darkens as one goes deeper into the system, from minimum security to maximum to solitary confinement to the execution chamber. Returning with the ”tough on crime“ wave of the Nixon era, the death penalty exemplified the system’s underlying racial dynamics: almost no white perpetrators are sentenced to death for killing black victims, while black killers of white victims are the prototypical targets of execution. The death penalty further reveals the U.S. as an international outlier: the U.S. executes more people than all but four other countries each year, while two-thirds of the world’s nations have abolished state execution.—7 While the total prison population has decreased since 2010, and more than half of U.S. states have decreased their prison populations, careful observers have noted that only New York and New Jersey have had significant decreases in the number of incarcerated people driven by sentencing reform.—8 Much of the total state-level decline comes from California alone, which reduced its state-level prison population largely by expanding the use of county jails for low-level offenders who had formerly been sent to prison— a combination of devolution of power and creative accounting. In response to complaints of an unfunded mandate from county-level sheriffs, California is providing hundreds of millions of dollars for new jail construction (with an under-used option for counties to use the money for alternative programs instead, such as expanded probation). Prospects for Prison Design Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR—9) has contended since the launch of our Prison Design Boycott/Alternatives to Incarceration campaign in 2004 that an appropriate design response to mass incarceration is to refuse the design commission of prisons and jails. We have argued that investments in prison infrastructure should instead go to community health infrastructure: clinics, schools, affordable housing, parks, etc. While ADPSR’s absolutist position helped to mark out one pole of debate (and has also evolved—see below), prison design and construction have continued apace over the past decade, and with 30

Architecture, Activism, and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign

new refinements. More sensitive prison designs, especially when delivered in a strongly modernist aesthetic such as the Halden Prison in Norway and the Justice Center Leoben in Austria, posit a humanizing role for architects in transforming incarceration into a therapeutic endeavour. This trend has correlates in the United States, as in new jails proposed with rooftop gardening opportunities, extensive visiting facilities to promote family ties, and operational concepts filled with individualized plans and programming such as the Juvenile Detention Center in Union County, N.J.—10 But even the best-intentioned designs for rehabilitative prisons can go wrong, and often do. One of the most heavily promoted and innovative recent prison designs is the California Healthcare Facility (CHCF), a 1,700-bed prison hospital in Stockton, California. Touted both as a major new source of employment in an economically depressed region and as a solution to the unconstitutionally poor medical conditions in the California prison system, the facility was built with unprecedented speed and employed some of the best prison designers in the country (HOK was the lead design firm). Yet before the facility was fully opened, it was already failing, and a court ordered a halt to further admissions. (Of course, fully opening was itself a major challenge, as the Stockton area did not have enough trained medical personnel of the various types needed to staff the medical side of the massive facility.) The level of neglect in operation was shocking: prisoners were left to sit in their own feces and given broken wheelchairs (this in a brand-new facility); there was also an outbreak of scabies and at least one death on site in the first six months of operation.—11 The impact of the CHCF failure should not be underestimated. The project was supposed to solve constitutional problems established in over a decade of litigation and monitored by a well-funded, court-appointed Special Master. The design and construction team met an incredibly aggressive schedule while exceeding minority hiring goals (an important local economic criterion), and broke new ground in humanizing the prison environment. (Of course, they were starting from a very low standard with the California system: the designers considered adding short-cropped grass to the landscape design to be a major victory.) The construction of the project 31 Raphael Sperry

10 “Union County Juvenile Detention Centre,” Ricci Greene Associates, www. riccigreene.com/ project_desc.php ?pid=112&type_ id=1&p=f. 11 Paige St. John, “Admissions Halted at Problemplagued Stockton Prison,” The L.A. Times, February 4, 2014, articles. latimes.com/2014/ feb/04/local/la-meff-prison-stockton-20140205.

12 Paige St. John, “Gov. Jerry Brown Calls on Feds to Give Up Oversight of Prisons,” The L.A. Times, January 8, 2013, articles.latimes. com/2013/jan/08/ local/la-me-prisons-brown20130109.

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allowed the governor of California to declare (prematurely) that ”the prison crisis is over in California.“—12 But the crisis is far from over, and improved prison design did not solve the problem. This may just be indicative of the peculiarities of California, where prisons have been seen for many decades through the all-or-nothing lens of prison gangs and prison-guard killings, where the corrections department is run more by the guards’ union than by staff responsive to voters or elected officials, and where independent media are largely banned from visits and interviews. It may also indicate a failure due to scale, as some advocates of prison reform believe that any prison intended to hold 1,700 people will engender neglect and abuse (these advocates often place the appropriate size of prisons at 200-300 people, or fewer). In time, the CHCF may become a better place, but it certainly indicates the limits of redesigning physical facilities to improve conditions without challenging the underlying dynamics of mass incarceration. Evolution of Activism Perhaps the most telling evolution of prison design during the era of mass incarceration is not ”more humane“ prisons but ”supermax“ prisons—large-scale facilities intended for solitary isolation. As state-level prison systems have grown from one or a few prisons into a network of large prison complexes, ”the hole“ went from the small disciplinary portion of a larger prison to an entire unit of the network, a freestanding prison-within-a-prison with respect to the larger system. (Each prison or jail site also tends to have its own isolation areas, officially referred to as ”segregation“ and still sometimes called ”the hole“ or ”the box.“) In line with the usual perversity of prison dynamics, court restrictions on the use of other methods of harsh punishment have bolstered the use of isolation, so that now over 80,000 people are in solitary on a typical day across the U.S. The return of the death penalty coupled with a lengthy appeal process (at least in most states outside Texas and Virginia) has similarly led to the perverse expansion of death rows housing people awaiting execution—to address the ”overcrowding“ of death rows. Special units have thus been constructed for just for this purpose; predictably, and despite the additional legal scrutiny given to death 32

Architecture, Activism, and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign

row cases (which among other things leads to a shockingly high rate of exonerations of condemned prisoners, and can result in preexecution incarceration times measured in decades), the conditions on death row are often de facto solitary confinement, as if death itself was not punishment enough. ADPSR has focused on challenging these harshest forms of punishment—solitary confinement and the death penalty—through a confluence of design and advocacy. On the design side, both death chambers and supermax prisons or ”segregation units“ require specialized design participation to be realized and are identifiable as unique spaces within the broader context of prisons. Death chambers have been reshaped by recent court rulings requiring that legal observers (from the victim’s family, the offender’s family, and representatives of the public) have adequate space, light, viewing angles, and separation from each other. Supermax prisons are similarly conditioned by court rulings over minimum amounts of space and light per person, although many details have never been litigated. They are extremely complex buildings designed with stringent security specifications and requiring the integration of a large range of specialized systems: remotely controlled doors and locks, electronic sensors, surveillance cameras, panic buttons, etc. The kinds of plumbing, hardware, lighting, and even concrete and steel used are closely scrutinized to determine their resistance to an anticipated long-term assault by the buildings’ occupants. Which is to say, all these spaces require architectural expertise and participation. ADPSR’s identification of execution and isolation as human rights violations allows for a broad base of support for our work. Even the AIA Code of Ethics includes support for human rights in principle,—13 and ADPSR is currently petitioning the AIA to realize this principle by specifically prohibiting the design of spaces intended for execution or prolonged solitary confinement. On the one hand, the human rights approach may seem too limited in the relief it can provide for those unjustly caught within the system of mass incarceration, the great majority of whom are not sentenced to death or spending years in isolation. On the other hand, we believe that challenging the legitimacy of harsh punishment opens the door to challenging the legitimacy of other aspects of the criminal 33 Raphael Sperry

13 It states that “Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors” in the American Institute of Architects’ “Code of Ethics & Bylaws,” www.aia. org/about/ethicsandbylaws/index. htm. Note that unlike ethics code “rules,” “ethical standards” are not enforceable.

14 Among others, see the ADPSR’s website for a full list of endorsing organizations and their positions: www. adpsr.org/home/ endorsements1.

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justice system as well. Execution and solitary confinement reveal the racism, fallibility, and vengefulness that underlie the ”tough on crime“ mentality. The struggle to abolish these practices creates an arena where larger visions of abolition can enter. In this arena, ADPSR’s reliance on human rights as a frame comes with assets and limitations. Human rights have powerful legitimacy to most Americans and are seen as mostly non-partisan— even Republicans will go to war in support of human rights (despite the inherent contradictions of such an approach to human rights protection). Working with human rights discourses gives access to powerful allies, as seen in endorsements of ADPSR’s campaign by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture.—14 And the limitations of human rights are themselves of benefit to some participants. In discussions with AIA chapters, one of the objections most often raised to ADPSR’s proposal is that it may open the door to proposals to prohibit other types of unpopular projects (animal research labs, abortion clinics, etc.). But the fact that no other building types involve a clear intent to violate wellestablished interpretations of international human rights standards has reassured many AIA members. On the other hand, human rights discourse primarily highlights individual abuses and is limited to extreme cases: mass incarceration itself is not a clear-cut human rights violation if each prisoner can be shown to have actually broken a law and to have received due process in court. Human rights discourse is thus not an effective tool with which to critique the excessive criminal sentencing laws and drug policies driving mass incarceration (at least at present). Nor does it lend itself to critiquing the economic interests within the prison industrial complex; it is largely silent on the deeply troubling phenomenon of prison privatization, for instance, despite the clear corruption involved. On balance, though, by opening the door to the abolition of execution and solitary confinement, human rights can help raise the larger question of whether other odious criminal justice practices might need to be abolished.

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Architecture, Activism, and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign

The Future of Abolition

Architects are, for better and worse, an unrelentingly positive and future-oriented group, for whom virtually every problem is a design challenge. Thus, strategies to engage the profession in struggles over the shaping of incarceration must have a design dimension to have relevance.—15 When the question becomes one of designing ”better“ prisons, prison abolitionists should be wary; but conversations over the choice between designing prisons and other forms of public investment in community health and safety can have far more transformative outcomes. There are opportunities for design and planning exploration here, such as in the reuse of prisons for other purposes, or holding community design charettes to investigate alternative projects when jail or prison construction is proposed. The growing realization that the vast majority of people with mental illness are held in jails rather than treated in mental health facilities is one way to sharpen the focus on the choice between different kinds of buildings.—16 At the local level, proposals for jail construction are meeting opposition in many areas and bringing up the same contrast. In Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, local activists defeated a planned $20-million expansion of the county jail and replaced it with community programs aimed at keeping people out of jail.—17 Similarly, ADPSR is part of a coalition in San Francisco working to replace a planned jail project with community health infrastructure such as transitional and supportive housing for our vulnerable populations struggling with homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse (not to mention affordable housing more generally). Public processes of capital planning and program budgeting generally look at criminal justice (sometimes called ”public safety“) and public health as detached categories, without understanding the connections between the two. In a sadly common scenario, jail and prison ”needs assessments“ are conducted by construction companies, as in Los Angeles County, which hired construction management firm Vanir to assess jail needs in 2013. To no one’s surprise, the result was a range of jail construction options with price tags ranging from $1.3-billion to $1.6-billion.—18 Slightly 35 Raphael Sperry

15 With a few exceptions. The ADPSR’s insistence that “better design” of execution chambers is simply not possible often gains acceptance among architects; the possibility of “better” design for solitary confinement, however, tends to provoke design speculation. 16 “Jails House 10 Times More Mentally Ill Than State Hospitals,” The Washington Post, April 8, 2014, www. washingtonpost. com/national/ health-science/ report-jailshouse-10-timesmore-mentallyill-than-statehospitals/2014/ 04/08/96 b22836bf04-11e3-9ee702c1e10a03f0_ story.html. 17 James Kilgore, “Reflections on the Campaign to Stop Jail Construction in Champaign County (IL),” Freedom Never Rests, February 3, 2014, www. freedom neverrests.com/ 2014/02/03/ reflections-on-thecampaign-to-stopjail-constructionin-champaigncounty-il. 18 “Los Angeles County Jail Plan: Independent Review and Comprehensive Report,” Vanir Construction Management Inc., file.lacounty. gov/bc/q3_2013/ cms1_197361.pdf.

19 See, for instance, the excellent work of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, such as “Prison, Police and Programs: Evidence-based Options that Reduce Crime and Save Money,” www. wsipp.wa.gov/ ReportFile/1396/ Wsipp_PrisonPolice-andProgramsEvidence-BasedOptions-thatReduce-Crimeand-Save-Money_ Full-Report.pdf. 20 See the work of the Los Angeles Economic Roundtable, which includes potential criminal justice cost savings from better care of the homeless population in Los Angeles, as a rare example of this muchneeded kind of analysis. They also document that providing housing to the homeless would result in even greater health system savings than the substantial criminal justice savings possible.

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better-informed approaches use demographic data to project jail population trends, but even these analyses generally fail to look at alternatives to current criminal justice policies. More progressive participants in the criminal justice system can generally propose pretrial diversion, bail reform, community courts, and other alternatives to incarceration to offset projected jail or prison expansion plans. Among this range of options are many strategies that can be tailored to various jurisdictions and can often be shown to be far more costeffective than further expansion of mass incarceration.—19 In most cases, however, the consideration of alternatives is viewed as shifting resources from one component of the criminal justice system, such as corrections, to another—the courts, police, or probation; alternative investments in public health infrastructure are almost never considered.—20 Abolition has long been concerned with achieving real public safety for all communities, with the recognition that the most heavily policed and imprisoned communities generally remain the most dangerous for residents. Elements of a public health approach to violence reduction exist in proposals for harm reduction as an alternative to the ”War on Drugs“ and in epidemiological analyses of street violence, but are not connected to each other, nor do they express a broader view of social needs. What is needed is a planning approach that brings together the criminal justice and public health fields, so that communities can assess their assets and needs together. Geography is a key factor in this approach: strategies and investments must be targeted in particular areas and with a finegrained spatial logic. Planners and design professionals are a necessary (but not sufficient) component of these analyses. At the fine-grained level, the design of individual pieces of new community investments is important to their success, especially when dealing with traditionally under-served communities that may have special needs with regard to language or cultural practices. This might be the design of a new community centre, health clinic, housing complex, etc. In this context, a community-design model of practice engaged with local residents is essential to doing this work well, which can be a natural outgrowth of a broader community-planning process that would identify facility needs to begin with. Public health and criminal 36

Architecture, Activism, and Abolition: From Prison Design Boycott to ADPSR’s Human Rights Campaign

justice agencies will also be part of these processes. This is the brightest prospect for architecture and abolition: to insist on envisioning a future where building a healthy community is seen as the appropriate response to crime and violence, to advocate for the resources for that vision, and ultimately to shape what is missing to realize the vision.

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Ricochets of Empire Jenna M. Loyd [Figures 1–5, pp 69–70] Spanish and Farsi graffiti crisscrossed the walls of the single-platform train station in a small Greek border town. No one else was here on this December morning, and the fog made it impossible to see across the Evros river valley into Turkey, so I turned my attention to the large and small letters that marked people’s movements. ”Ecuador“ was emblazoned along one wall, ”Salvador“ on another; the words suggested welcome to future migrants whose presence I would not have expected there. These walls carried on a conversation, as bold swastika strikes bluntly replied to messages in faint Perso-Arabic script. At the time I was in the Evros river valley in December 2011, the region had become a significant place of entry for migrants to the European Union. Border patrols in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas had temporarily reduced boat entries, forcing migrants to attempt overland crossings from Turkey into Greece and Bulgaria. Entry by sea was highly dangerous, as governments were known to sink migrant boats in a practice called ”push-back.“—1 Migrants had also died trying to cross from Turkey into Greece, where patrols by the E.U.’s external border agency Frontex, the fast-flowing river, cold winter temperatures, and landmines from World War II and subsequent conflicts created dangerous conditions. I had made my way there to do research on shifting patterns of offshore border policing and onshore immigration detention. Greece’s detention and asylum system was widely known to be ”disastrously dysfunctional.“—2 Common European asylum policy proclaimed ”burden sharing,“ or equitable distribution of asylum seekers among E.U. states, but the 2003 Dublin II Regulation stipulated that asylum claims would be made in the first country of entry. This policy created conditions for concentrating migration crises in nations forming the E.U.’s external boundary.—3 These proximate and longstanding geopolitical conflicts 39

1 Pro Asyl, “‘The Truth May Be Bitter, but It Must Be Told’: The Situation of Refugees in the Aegean and the Practices of the Greek Coast Guard,” 2007, www.proasyl.de/ fileadmin/proasyl/ fm_redakteure/ Broschueren_pdf/ GriechenlandDoku_dt_klein.pdf. 2 Ian Traynor, “EU Border Police ‘Turning Blind Eye’ to Abuse of Migrants in Greece,” The Guardian, September 21, 2011, www. theguardian.com/ world/2011/sep/21/ eu-border-policebline-eye-migrantabuse. 3 Alison Mountz and Jenna M. Loyd, “Constructing the Mediterranean Region: Obscuring Violence in the Bordering of Europe’s Migration ‘Crises,’” ACME 13 no. 2 (2014): 173–195.

4 Irina Contreras, “Descado en Los Angeles: Cycles of Invisible Resistance,” in Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, ed. Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 325–336. 5 Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 6 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). 7 Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Duke University Press, 2005). 8 Ibid.

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are profoundly consequential for migrants and their advocates. But as an American citizen, I was struck to find myself in the ”ricochets“ of American empire.—4 Refugees from Afghanistan had become the largest population seeking asylum in Europe (28,000 claims in 2011) since the U.S. commenced its war in 2001. In line with the trend since the 1990s to keep refugees within their region of origin,—5 this number pales in comparison to the over three million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan and Iran in 2011. Many others were fleeing Iraq and Pakistan, other places where the U.S. was conducting military operations and drone strikes. While Greece (among other states) had become a border guard for Europe, it also was engaged in an implicit project of containing the effects of U.S. imperial violence. In short, the fact that the United States resettled 410 Afghan refugees in 2011 is related to the precarity faced by tens of thousands of asylum seekers in Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere. My quest to understand detention and boundary enforcement in the Greece-Turkey borderlands as elements of American empire is indebted to Walter Benjamin, whose materialist approach to history brings the asynchronous past and present into a constellation, ”to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.“—6 As Ian Baucom writes, taking responsibility for this ”relational constellation of now-being with what-has-been“ engages Benjamin’s understanding that the ”‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule.“—7 Édouard Glissant built on Benjamin’s writings, insisting that: We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumulation of sediments. The poetics of duration […] reappears to take up the relay from the poetics of the moment. Lightning flashes are the shivers of one who desires or dreams of a totality that is impossible or yet to come; duration urges on those who attempt to live this totality, when dawn shows through the linked histories of peoples.—8 For me, taking responsibility for this history means showing how these ricochets and relays have accumulated in dispersed 40

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constellations of bordering and carceral practices. Political theorist Wendy Brown takes up the question of the apparent paradox of the worldwide trend toward border walling at a moment of heightened transnational economic integration. For Brown, these efforts represent attempts to shore up state sovereignty. The ”seemingly physical, obdurate“ architecture of border walls ”would seem to embody precisely the power of the ‘no,’ physically proclaiming and enforcing what is interdit.“—9 The border creates a sense of national space even as border regulation is shifted offshore through patrols in international waters, passport and visa checks, and bilateral agreements (such as that between Italy and Libya) for less powerful nations to carry out border-control measures on behalf of their wealthier neighbours. Moreover, Brown continues: [T]he new walls would seem to signal a problem usually identified with sovereignty’s external face—enmity, rather than order—and run it through the whole of society, producing pockets and islands of walled-in “friends” amid walledout “enemies.” The fantasy of an “us here/them there” cannot be sustained amid the barricaded and checkpointed landscape of postapartheid South Africa, the wall-carved cities of Baghdad and Jerusalem, or the interior checkpoints and gated white communities north of the U.S. border with Mexico.—10 While Brown correctly draws attention to the blurring of citizens, military, and the police within domestic territory, her analysis too easily attributes this blurring of interior and exterior spaces to the neoliberal crises of sovereignty embodied in the ”new walls.“ Focusing our critical attention on border walling is necessary, but treating this political moment as exceptional does not help us to understand the accumulation of geopolitical entanglements relaying between Afghan asylum seekers and me in the Greece-Turkey borderlands. Moreover, Brown’s emphasis on newness suggests that the historical production of settler colonial sovereignty through enclosure and territorial containment has also not been one of continuous crisis. If we begin instead from historical efforts to territorialize 41 Jenna M. Loyd

9 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 10 Ibid.

11 Dylan Rodríguez, “‘I Would Wish Death on You...’: Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime,”  The Scholar & Feminist Online 6, no. 3 (2008): sfonline. barnard.edu/immigration/drodriguez_01.htm. 12 Ibid. 13 Jenna M. Loyd, “Where Is the Border?: Chasing John Brown from New York to Arizona,” In Deep Routes: The Midwest in All Directions, ed. Rozalinda Borcilă, Bonnie Fortune and Sarah Ross (Chicago: Compass Collaborators, 2012), 189–201. 14 War Department, Surgeon General’s Office, Report on Barracks and Hospitals with Descriptions of Military Posts (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870).

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American empire, we see the simultaneous roll-out of whitesupremacist prison walls and military fortifications. This analytical starting point is suggested by Dylan Rodríguez, who writes: ”The U.S. prison is a global statecraft, an arrangement and mobilization of violence that is, from its very inception, already unhinged from the delimiting ‘domestic’ (or ‘national’) sites to which it is presumptively tethered.“—11 That is, Rodríguez continues, ”the arrangement of juridically coded bodily violence that is coordinated and institutionalized by the U.S. prison regime generates a logic of (anti)social formation that fundamentally exceeds the national geography within which it is nominally situated.“—12 One of the first places that I came to understand the mutual construction of colonial enclosure and the prison was at the site of a minor Civil War battleground in the Rio Grande Valley south of Albuquerque in what is now the U.S. state of New Mexico.—13 Fort Craig was a United States territorial fort and prison, which served as the base for executing the Indian Wars, including the pursuit of the Chiricahua Apache resistance leader Geronimo (born Goyathlay). After Geronimo’s 1886 surrender in Skeleton Canyon, just north of the U.S.-Mexico boundary between Arizona and New Mexico, the United States transported him and his band to a military prison at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. They were subsequently held as prisoners of war at Fort Sill, another military post established to prosecute the Indian Wars, in the Oklahoma Territory. During World War II, Fort Sill was used as an enemy alien internment camp for Japanese Americans. As I wrote this essay in 2014, it was being used to confine children from Central America who have been captured in the Rio Grande Valley attempting to cross into Texas from Mexico. The guardhouse at Fort Craig also served as the territorial prison. An 1870 Surgeon General Report on Barracks and Hospitals with Descriptions of Military Posts tells us, ”the underground cells at Fort Craig are probably the most discreditable example of prison construction found in the Army.“—14 It continues: The prison-rooms are poorly lighted and ventilated, the last mentioned having only a few small holes near the roof and chinks around the door for the admission of fresh air. The guard room 42

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and room occupied by white prisoners are warmed by open fireplaces; but there is neither fireplace nor stove in the room occupied by colored prisoners. The prison-rooms had, during a period of three years, an average of sixteen men confined in them—the greatest number reached was thirty-two. In one corner of the guard-room is a trapdoor opening upon a stairway which leads down to the cells where prisoners are kept in solitary confinement. The cells are six in number, three on each side of the passage way. Each cell is 5 feet 7 inches long, 2 feet 10 inches wide, and 4 feet 10 inches high, giving a cubic space of 76 feet; width of passage way 3 feet 7 inches. […] The whole amount of air and light, admitted into the dungeons passes through an opening beneath the guard-room steps, not to exceed in area one square foot. This is the only opening, except the trap door, which is always closed at night. […] The men, with seldom more than a single blanket, sleep upon the earthen floor, which, from being frequently sprinkled to lay the dust, contains much moisture. Colds and rheumatism are frequent among the inmates, and, if not removed at once to the hospital for treatment, are very difficult to treat.—15 It is unclear from the report who was confined in these dungeons. What is clear is that this guardroom prison built the codes of post-bellum white supremacy into the ground where the U.S. was seeking to establish its sovereignty. Rodríguez’s observation that the U.S. prison regime exceeds its national geography is evident in the confinement of the Chiricahua on a military base in Florida (on what had been a fort established by the Spanish and later held by the English) that was also used to dispossess Native peoples, and in colonial territory in what would subsequently become the state of Oklahoma. Moreover, the imprisonment of Japanese American citizens relayed the legal history of racial ineligibility for citizenship to this 43 Jenna M. Loyd

15 Ibid.

16 On racial ineligibility for citizenship, see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 17 Guy GoodwinGill, “The Right to Seek Asylum: Interception at Sea and the Principle of NonRefoulement,” International Journal of Refugee Law 23, no. 3 (2011): 443–457. 18 Rachel Donadio, “Italy Seeks to Use Forces to Halt Illegal Immigrants from Tunisia,” New York Times, February 13, 2011, www.nytimes. com/2011/02/14/ world/europe/ 14boats. html?_r=0.

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site, an operation that would again interiorize the globally expansive geographic imagination of U.S. white supremacy.—16 The ricochets of American empire that I felt through the cold fog in Greece were not only in the layers of violence accumulated at the border, in detention facilities, and through xenophobic attacks in the streets of Athens. They were also in the practice of interception as a means of preventing asylum claims. In 1981, following the arrivals on the Florida coast of 125,000 Cuban and 25,000 Haitian asylum seekers over a six-month period, the United States established a twopronged strategy to deter future ”immigration crises“: imprisonment (legally, and euphemistically, called ”administrative detention“) and territorial denial through policing at sea. The U.S. practice of interception, according to international law professor Guy GoodwinGill, would become ”the model, perhaps, for all that has followed.“—17 Goodwin-Gill recounted this history to a European audience in 2011 soon after Italy announced it wanted to send soldiers to Tunisia (where people had overthrown the government, setting off what came to be known as the Arab Spring) to prevent a mass exodus by sea.—18 As in the early 1980s, governments vocally upheld their commitments to asylum and humanitarian protection, but simultaneously established restrictive asylum procedures and offshore policing practices that would make these commitments hollow. My mapping of the ricochets of American empire from the Greek border to U.S. military forts in contested colonial territories, to Coast Guard interdictions in the Caribbean Sea illustrates the blurring of military, civilian, prisoner-of-war, and refugee operations, categories that defy any sense of a securely domestic space. The intertwining of prison and military spaces in the territorialization of the United States does not support a simple operation of sovereign enclosure. Rather, the repeated use of these dual-purpose spaces to forcibly relocate and confine ”internal“ enemies points to the exteriorization of these subjects through the exercise of military power. In this way, we might better understand contemporary bordering projects as also being tightly tied to projects of expulsion, and not simply exclusion. Given that the history and architecture of bordering is one of imprisonment and militarization, challenging these violent practices will mean retying genealogies of abolition and anti44

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colonialism to contemporary political idioms of abolition, freedom of movement, and anti-imperialism. Acknowledgements Portions of this research were supported by the National Science Foundation under Award #0847133 (Principal Investigator: Alison Mountz). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

45

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Figures

↓ Ricochets of Empire, pp 39–45 ↓

Figure 1: Apache prisoner-ofwar cemeteries marker, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 2014 (Photo: Jenna Loyd)

Figure 2: Guard house and sally port, Fort Craig, New Mexico, 2009 (Photo: Jenna Loyd)

Figure 3: Train station graffiti, Orestiada, Greece, 2011 (Photo: Jenna Loyd, courtesy Island Detention Project) 69

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Figure 4: Train station, Orestiada, Greece, 2011 (Photo: Jenna Loyd, courtesy Island Detention Project)

Figure 5: Train station graffiti, Orestiada, Greece, 2011 (Photo: Jenna Loyd, courtesy Island Detention Project) ↓ Ghosts of Prisons Past . . . pp 47–67 ↓ Figure 6

70

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre Magdalena Miłosz We wait over an hour to get into the new prison, lined up with more than a hundred other curious visitors in a queue reminiscent of a well-frequented amusement park. The aim of our slow approach is a glass-box lobby fronting a hulking, beige-coloured structure; the two together epitomize the devious interplay of transparency and opacity in modern corporate architecture. This grey day in October is the last chance for the public to enter the maximumsecurity facility before the prisoners are shipped in—unless you later happen to become one of them. The Toronto South Detention Centre (TSDC), an adultmale ”superjail,“ was completed in 2013 with considerable private investment through a public-private partnership (P3). It is the largest prison—1 in the province of Ontario and second in Canada only to the Edmonton Remand Centre, which opened the same year. The complexity of the TSDC’s design and construction was managed by Infrastructure Ontario, a crown corporation, through a design-buildfinance-maintain (DBFM) model. The choice to develop the new prison in this way has entangled the provincial government with a plethora of private businesses in a global network of capital. The DBFM aspects of the TSDC were executed by Integrated Team Solutions (ITS), a consortium of private companies headed by a joint venture between investment firm Fengate Capital and construction giant EllisDon Corporation. The building was designed by the local Zeidler Partnership Architects and built by EllisDon, whereas financing was amassed from a variety of sources, including major banks and insurance companies, both locally and abroad. A facilities management contract was established with Brookfield Johnson Controls, which will be responsible for operating the building for the next 30 years. Through the P3 arrangement, the Ontario government will make annual payments to the DBFM consortium throughout the entirety of the contract. One of the most impressive and unsettling aspects of the 47

1 The province of Ontario divides its carceral facilities into three categories. “Jails” or “detention centres” (such as the TSDC) are entry points into the institutional system and house those on provincial or federal remand or those serving shorter sentences of sixty days or less, with the former representing “older, generally smaller institutions originally established by counties or other municipalities;” “correctional centres” are for those serving sentences of sixty days to a maximum of two years less a day; and “treatment centres,” staffed by medical professionals, are for prisoners with clearly identified problems such as substance abuse. Canadian federal facilities, on the other hand, are for prisoners serving sentences of two years or more and are predominantly referred to as “institutions” or, especially historically, “penitentiaries.” A conventional distinction between jails as local or provincial facilities and prisons as federal facilities is thus complicated by contemporary terminology and a recent tendency, represented by the TSDC, for provincial institutions to appear in the form of “superjails” architecturally more akin to large federal prisons than the older, smaller jails. For

these reasons, as well as the correspondence between the words “prisoner” and “prison” and the normalization proposed by terms like “detention centre” (which I am actively trying to resist in this text), I use the terms “jail” and “prison” interchangeably in this article. See Ontario Ministry of Community Safety & Correctional Services, “Facilities,” April 3, 2007, www. mcscs.jus.gov. on.ca/english/ corr_serv/ adult_off/ facilities/facilities. html, as well as Correctional Service Canada, “National Facility Directory,” March 31, 2014, www.cscscc.gc.ca/inst itutions/0010020001-eng.shtml. 2 Tindall Corporation, “Corrections,” www. tindallcorp.com/ corrections.

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TSDC is its prefabricated construction, which was a major selling point in the ITS consortium’s pitch to Infrastructure Ontario. The architects worked with the South Carolina-based Tindall Corporation, a concreteproducts manufacturer, to design the jail cells. The company’s website boasts that ”Tindall-engineered cells have housed more than 62,000 inmates and detainees.“—2 Constructed in Atlanta, Georgia, the concrete cells were transported 1,600 kilometres by rail and assembled into this sprawling structure in a industrial area of west Toronto. As we approach the front of the line, worries about not getting in are dispelled for some, while others are sent away by the correctional officers managing the crowd. Those who remain get a visit from the local OPP canine unit team, an officer and a German Shepherd named Vinnie. The pair provide a diversion until we enter the building. In the light and airy lobby, all cell phones, cameras, and other electronics are relinquished for safekeeping, to be returned after the tour. We are then herded into the public waiting area for debriefing [Figure 6, p 70]. The TSDC is designed to hold 1,650 prisoners, in addition to the 320 serving primarily weekend sentences at the Toronto Intermittent Centre (TIC) next door. [Figure 7, p 71] Intermittent sentences are sometimes given to those with sentences of ninety days or less who have significant responsibilities that a judge deems should be continued during the sentence. Although the TIC and the TSDC are separate institutions, they are physically connected through the shared services of the kitchen, laundry, and maintenance area, as well as staff areas. The TIC’s transparent lobby with large, exterior canopy and tall, slender columns is a miniature version of the main TSDC entrance. The bright, fully glazed foyer where we wait is brimming with visitors and administrators, as well as correctional officers recruiting those interested in working at the provincial prison. The busy hum and walls of glass belie the rigid, opaque quality of the structure beyond. Like a mask not quite adequate to conceal the identity of its wearer, the transparent blip of the public area facing the street is an unconvincing disguise tacked onto the bleak mass of the prison. Its ”unbearable lightness“ stems from the oxymoronic contrast between the public ”openness“ suggested by the large glass walls and the closed, coercive privacy of the inmates’ sphere 48

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

beyond.—3 In a material sense, this contrast is emphasized by the use of bricks manufactured at the Ontario Brick and Tile Company, one of the TSDC’s carceral predecessors on this site. The bricks make up an interior wall opposite the glass frontage—an assemblage of inmate labour from times gone by, brought into the present to become part of the newest iteration of jail reform. The implied public transparency of the institution is further undermined by the ”video visitation“ area just past the lobby. Here, the public will ”visit“ prisoners via video conferencing, using the many monitors and handsets arranged in long rows. Inmates will use similar units in their ”living area“ to interact with family, friends, or lawyers in Skype-like fashion, rather than in person (even if only through glass). Only prisoners, staff, select professionals, and volunteers will be allowed beyond the video visitation space upon the commissioning of the institution. The distinction between a provincial prison such as the TSDC, used for remand prisoners or those with sentences of less than two years (see note 1), and a federal prison, for those serving sentences of two years or more, dates back to legislation enacted in 1842. Similarly, the TSDC is underpinned by a 127-year history of institutions previously occupying this site [Figure 8, p 71], all linked by a synergy between capitalism, incarceration, and colonialism whose ideological echoes still reverberate today. Although it is no secret that the TSDC site has a long carceral history, these historical underpinnings tend to be minimized in the face of each new institution. Prior to the TSDC, another prison stood here, and other institutions preceded that one. Every successive phase in the life of this place possesses an iterative quality, different from and yet somehow similar to what came before it. An investigation of the TSDC’s prehistory, before a single prefabricated cell was installed, clears away the aura of novelty to reveal the deep material and ideological roots of the institution. This more inclusive view of the TSDC, taking into account its many antecedents, suggests that, in its core purpose of imprisoning people, it is not new at all. These histories collectively act as a counterpoint to the novelty stressed in official depictions of the new prison. 49

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3 Jeffrey Monaghan and Kevin Walby use Milan Kundera’s concept of “unbearable lightness” to describe the architecture of the new CSEC building in Ottawa. Jeffrey Monaghan and Kevin Walby, “New Camelot: The Unbearable Lightness of Canada’s TwentyFirst-Century Security Architecture,” Scapegoat: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy 5 (Summer/Autumn 2013): 218.

4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 25. 5 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1962), xiii.

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”The Development of a True Man“: Victoria Industrial School for Boys, 1887–1935

The site of the TSDC was first operative in 1887 as the Victoria Industrial School for Boys (VIS). In the decade before this original institution was built, the site, not far from the shores of Lake Ontario, was a parcel of government land surrounded by farms [Figure 9, p 71]. The fledgling town of Mimico was just to the east, and nearby lots to the west belonged to Daniel F. Horner, likely the namesake of the site’s Horner Avenue address. In the middle was the Victoria ”school,“ an institution along the same genealogical lines as the various others that were to follow it. The location’s storied past is an invisible dimension of the new TSDC, mostly forgotten in order to permit the perpetuation of a more publicly acceptable practice of ”‘corrective’ detention,“ developed in the nineteenth century.—4 Proponents of reform projects in this era believed that separation from society in tandem with labour or other enforced activities could rehabilitate everyone from wayward boys to adult criminals, mental health patients to sexually independent women, as well as Indigenous children, to be ”cured“ of their culture through assimilation at Indian residential schools. In all cases, administrators sought a transformation of the inmate, believing that the environment of the institution and its routines were the ideal means to this end. The Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman termed such places ”total institutions,“ which he defined as: [Places] of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws.—5 Goffman’s concept applies to various institutions, including voluntary, open ones such as boarding schools, religious cloisters, and army barracks (barring conscription), as well as closed, coercive ones such as industrial schools, work camps, and prisons. Beginning 50

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

with the VIS, it is exclusively with the second type that the histories of the TSDC site are concerned. Industrial schools were developed in the context of efforts to expand state-run education in the second half of the nineteenth century, but they emerged as something between regular schools on the one hand and prisons on the other. According to the British architect E.R. Robson, industrial schools existed ”on the border land between vice and virtue,“ often employing methods of penality associated more closely with prisons than with schools.—6 For instance, many inmates of the VIS were ”sentenced“ for various criminal offenses.—7 In 1901, a ten-year-old boy was sentenced to a six-year term at the school for stealing. In 1903, four Aboriginal youths from the Mohawk Institute, an Indian residential school in Brantford, were sent there after confessing to burning down the Institute’s main building, barns, and playhouse. They received sentences of three to five years at the VIS. The irony of transferring these boys from one coercive total institution to another was clearly lost on bureaucrats. The inmates of the VIS were brought into the institution for other reasons as well, including truancy, or even for ”corrective“ purposes by parental request.—8 The school stressed discipline and moral reform, which were to aid its ultimate goal of ”reclaiming“ working-class boys from the fringes of society and guiding them towards roles as upstanding, productive adults in the industrial economy. A news article from 1891 sketches a generalized portrait of an inmate at the school: But after he has grown to think that besides tobacco and profanity there is another manly attribute that he must affect, the shifting of his own tasks on to the shoulders of his neighbors, his bright activity is changed to a languid cunning. With this comes laziness and general stagnation and the descent is easy to crafty evasion and theft. To rescue the boys who have thus fallen and to restore them to that condition of bright, active boyhood that portends the development of a true man is the work of the 51 Magdalena Miłosz

6 Edward Robert Robson, School Architecture (New York: Humanities Press, 1972), 351. 7 Bryan Hogeveen provides a breakdown of the various rationales for committing children to the school from 1898 to 1927 in “Accounting for Violence at the Victoria Industrial School,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 42, no. 83 (May 2009): 152. In 1921, 82 percent of inmates had been committed for a crime. 8 Craig Heron, “Boys Will Be Boys: Working-Class Masculinities in the Age of Mass Production,” International Labor and Working-Class History 69 (Spring 2006), 15.

9 “TO RESCUE FROM DANGER: The Victoria Industrial School at Mimico,” The Globe, August 1, 1891, 16. 10 Ontario Royal Commission to Investigate the Victoria Industrial School, Mimico, “Report of the Commission upon the Victoria Industrial School for Boys,” ed. J.J. Kelso, April 15, 1921, 4.

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managers of the Victoria Industrial School at Mimico.—9 The children lived in one of six cottages, each with an adult female and male supervisor in imitation of a nuclear family. Because the boys were cut off from the wider society, the school encompassed not just residential and educational functions, but all the necessities of a ”formally administered“ daily life. The other buildings on the site were the gymnasium, kitchen and dining cottage, superintendent’s residence, combined workshop and laundry, as well as various farm buildings [Figure 10, p 71]. Labour was considered to have curative properties; therefore, the school’s inmates spent half their day at work. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the institution became more commonly known as the Mimico Industrial School. It held between 200 and 300 inmates, and activities derived from military practices, such as drilling and marching, were a significant part of daily life [Figure 11, p 72]. These occupations, as well as undertones of brutality within the institution, emphasized acceptable notions of working-class masculinity. As was the case at many institutions of its kind, a period of more-or-less successful operation and optimism on the part of administrators gave way to ”difficulties“ that prompted public and official scrutiny. The problems at the VIS included run-down facilities and ”considerable numbers of badly nourished and enfeebled children.“—10 The school had also become a dumping ground for children with needs and issues that could not be addressed at the institution, such as those with developmental delays. The Royal Commission to Investigate the Victoria Industrial School recommended splitting up the population among two proposed new schools and an existing institution, suggesting that the land the VIS stood on could be sold at a profit to fund the endeavour. Another reason the Commission gave to abandon the current location was its proximity to rail lines, which facilitated escapes. In the end, the recommendations were never implemented and conditions continued to deteriorate. Just as Indigenous children retaliated against residential schools, inmates of the VIS made numerous escape attempts in resistance to their incarceration. In 1933, a headline explained twenty recent escapes: ”WISH FOR FREEDOM EXPLANATION GIVEN 52

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

FOR BOYS’ ESCAPE: No Cause for Discontent at Mimico Industrial School.“—11 Despite the supposedly wholesome state described by this almost oxymoronic statement, the institution was closed down in 1935 amid accusations of cruelty. The Minister of Public Welfare, David Croll, called the school ”the step-brother of Kingston,“ referring to the notorious adult penitentiary in that city.—12 The remaining boys at Mimico were sent to the Bowmanville Training School, where ”treatment was milder, corporal punishments were few […] the boys were given greater freedom, and for the first time were permitted to go to their homes at Christmas.“—13 Tentative plans in 1944 to return the buildings to their former use did not come to fruition. *** The site of the Victoria Industrial School is a stone’s throw from the new TSDC, a piece of land now known as Ourland Park [Figure 12, p 72]. It was severed from the main provincial government property and sold to the Borough of Etobicoke in 1973. I came here months after having seen the new jail, hoping to gain some further insight into the layered history of the place. On a dreary spring day, the park is empty except for a father kicking around a soccer ball with his son. A tall fence separates the park from Islington Avenue, which now bisects what was once the expansive government property. The park has all the trappings of a well-furnished suburban recreation spot: a community centre, baseball diamond, outdoor pool, playground, and tennis courts. I want to find some trace of the land’s former use, perhaps a plaque bluntly stating the site’s chronology, but these are completely absent. A low-lying, mid-century public school stands across the way, oblivious to what was once here. For Confinement and Profit: Ontario Brick and Tile Company, 1913–1969 In 1913, clay and shale deposits were found on government land near the VIS [Figure 13, p 73]. The provincial government developed a brickyard and, in order to extract the material for its own use, turned it into an out-camp of the Toronto Central Prison, located in what is now Liberty Village. Since its establishment in 1874, the 53 Magdalena Miłosz

11 “WISH FOR FREEDOM EXPLANATION GIVEN FOR BOYS’ ESCAPE: No Cause for Discontent at Mimico Industrial School, Is Report,” The Globe, September 30, 1933, 11. 12 “DOMINION’S GREATEST PROBLEM: Welfare Minister Speaks to ‘Big Brothers,’” The Globe, February 6, 1935, 9. 13 “DEFENDS MOVING BOYS OUT TO BOWMANVILLE: Says Lads From Mimico Have Begun to Fit In at New Home,” The Toronto Daily Star, January 11, 1936, 6.

14 William John Hanna, The Prison Labor Question: History of the Contract System in the Toronto Central Prison—A Record of Continuous Failures—The Outlook for the future (Toronto: L.K. Cameron, 1907), eco. canadiana. ca/view/ oocihm.82701. 15 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990), 92–3. 16 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 109. 17 “Brick for Sale,” advertisement, The Globe, June 26, 1920, 27. 18 “Morrisburg Prisoner Escapes at Mimico,” The Globe, March 12, 1932, 13; “Dump Cart is Used By Five Prisoners In Daylight Escape,” The Globe, June 30, 1934, 4.

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Toronto Central Prison had farmed out inmate labour under contract to private companies. Prisoners also produced supplies for provincial hospitals, jails, and asylums. In 1913, this longstanding practice continued when the prison began sending inmates to the brickyard in Mimico; known as the Ontario Brick and Tile Company, the brickyard was located precisely where the TSDC now stands. Like the inmates of the newest prison on the site, the brickyard labourers were serving sentences of up to two years. Total institutions run by governments were often expected to generate their own income, and financial considerations necessitated the introduction of labour to prison life in the 1790s. However, prison labour was not efficient when compared to outside standards; this is not surprising given that it was often free or underpaid. Still, private companies argued that inmates represented unfair competition, so the prisons eventually restricted their production primarily to items that could be reabsorbed by government institutions rather than sold.—14 David J. Rothman, an American scholar of social medicine, explains that labour in carceral institutions was thereafter postrationalized as a rehabilitative measure and, once found ineffective at generating profit, widely used instead as punishment.—15 Foucault argues that the signification of carceral labour once played an important role as well: ”The ideal would be for the convict to appear as a sort of rentable property: a slave at the service of all.“—16 In other words, the visibility of prisoners working their way through a jail term was supposed to provide both a deterrent and an image of restitution. When the Toronto Central Prison closed in 1915, the Ontario Brick and Tile Company became a branch of the Ontario Reformatory in nearby Guelph (now the abandoned Guelph Correctional Centre). The Company continued producing bricks for provincial use, occasionally using them as a source of revenue for the government. In 1920, the province advertised ”approximately one million wire cut, well burnt brick“ for sale, enough to build some fifty average houses.—17 Just as runaways from the nearby industrial school made headlines, prisoners made frequent escapes from the brickyard.—18 The institution became the autonomous Ontario Reformatory-Mimico 54

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

after the Victoria Industrial School was closed in 1935 and the school property was merged with the brickyard lands. The Reformatory continued to operate the brickyard until 1969, when issues of competition with private enterprise were brought up once more, this time by labour unions. The Ontario Brick and Tile Company was closed that year. *** Beyond the video visitation room at the TSDC, we go through the screening area to enter the secure section of the building. All volunteers and professionals visiting the prison will have to pass through this room, where they will be subject to search and screening via metal detectors. Their bags will be examined by x-ray machines. Because the prison is not yet operational, we pass through this area undisturbed and emerge beyond what would normally be the boundary of the highly restricted space inhabited by prisoners. On our way to the inmate intake area, we pause by a wide but short window with heavy, horizontal bars. We peer past them into the enclosed yard with its manicured green lawn, where inmates will never set foot unless they are being evacuated due to an emergency. At the intake area, a large, weathered man in uniform greets us from behind a counter, stationed there as if ready for prisoners to start streaming in at any moment. A prison guard in his day-to-day life, today he plays host to a crowd of visitors, explaining the ritual of admitting prisoners. New inmates will be brought to the TSDC by vehicle and dropped off in a secure garage prior to intake. Before they are processed, they will be kept in the ”dirty“ area, so named because its occupants are assumed to be carrying weapons or other contraband until they can be confirmed as ”clean.“ In relation to this process, the officer dramatically alludes to an experience in which he nearly lost his life. From a distance, the intake area looks like an office full of grey, half-height cubicles, acoustic ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights above. Doors to single cells line the walls of the large room. The ”cubicles“ in the centre are actually stalls made of concrete block where each prisoner will be stripped, searched, and given thorough security, medical, and mental health screenings. His personal effects 55 Magdalena Miłosz

19 Cecil Porter, The Gilded Cage: Gravenhurst Prisoner-of-War Camp 20, 1940– 1946 (Gravenhurst: Gravenhurst Book Committee, 2003).

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will be itemized and taken away. He will be given his new clothes: an orange jumpsuit, a t-shirt, blue boxers, blue slippers. He will be assigned to a cell in the vast structure beyond and moved from the ”dirty“ area to the ”clean“ side of the intake room until he can be taken there. The decision made here may affect him for only a few days as he awaits bail, or for up to 729—two years less a day, although likely not exceeding sixty days. If his sentence is longer, he will be transferred to a provincial ”correctional centre“ or, if it is two years or more, a federal institution. As we are shuffled out of the intake room, we gawk at the shiny surfaces and invasive paraphernalia. The dry toilet used to recover ingested items and the Body Orifice Security Scanner (BOSS), a contraption devised for non-invasive body cavity searches, incite particular interest. The prison seems modern, safe, and humane. It is pristine. But it differs from what came before it only in form, not in substance. Although the physical matter of the institution is new, the practice of incarceration it enables is not new at all. ”An Unnatural Life“: Camp 22, 1941–1944 On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland; nine days later, Canada declared war against Germany. The United Kingdom, which had joined the war on September 3, appealed to its former colony for assistance with handling prisoners of war; the presence of thousands of German captives on British soil posed a great risk while the war raged on. The first prisoners bound for Canada left Europe in June 1940. They were eventually interned at camps across the country, many of them in a variety of existing but disused structures. Some were perceived to have quite comfortable conditions, such as the ”gilded cage“—19 of Camp 20, located at a former hotel in Gravenhurst, Ontario. In Mimico, part of the Ontario Reformatory-Mimico grounds became Camp 22, where German prisoners of war were interned for four years. The camp population was composed of 300 German merchant seamen and 200 civilians who lived in huts and took their meals in an existing building. A British officer stationed at the camp reported that after ”camp bosses“ who had prohibited inmates from 56

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

working were moved to another camp, many prisoners ”begged to be allowed to undertake farm work or factory work or some other form of reasonable and regular work“ (emphasis original).—20 This request demonstrates how work in total institutions may be seen as a prophylactic against boredom and a means of maintaining some meaningful activity. The British officer observed that incarceration was extremely difficult from a psychological point of view [Figure 14, p 73]. His observations apply equally well to the inmates of any carceral institution. Near the end of the war in 1944, Camp 22 was dismantled, and plans were made to return the site to its former use as the VIS. These were not carried out. The Ontario Brick and Tile Company, however, continued to operate long after the war. *** We leave the intake area of the TSDC and wait for an elevator to take us to one of the prisoner ”living units.“ Each of the three towers is seven storeys high: three levels of two-storey living units in addition to the ground floor. Each living unit has two levels of cells overlooking a double-height common area. The corridors of all three towers are colour-coded, but the route to the cells is so circuitous it is impossible to orient oneself in the building. We eventually make our way through a sally port—two doors one immediately after the other—into the living unit. Typically, these ”airlock“ doors will be shut; prisoners and officers will have to enter through one, shut it behind them, then wait for the second door to open. These sally ports can be found throughout the building, some even breaking up the long, otherwise continuous corridors. All of them are centrally controlled. The living area is awash with natural light. Its source is unrecognizable until I finally notice the translucent windows in the cells, many of whose doors are open. There are twenty cells, ten on the lower level and ten on the upper, both looking out onto the common area. The shared space has foam chairs spread out in front of a television, as well as metal tables and seats affixed to the floor. An ”exercise yard“ in the corner is simply a room separated from the common area by glass, with a wall of translucent glazing and air vents to the outside. All the translucent glazing gives 57 Magdalena Miłosz

20 The officer kept a detailed count of the political opinions of the 500 prisoners, which he categorized as follows: 9.1 percent were fanatical Nazis, 48.3 percent convinced and sincere Nazis, 31.9 percent lukewarm Nazis, 5.3 percent non-Nazis, and 5.4 percent antiNazis. Political opinions among the prisoners waxed and waned according to the influence of highranking internees as well as news from the warfront. “Camp 22, Canada: Report by British Intelligence O,” 1942, HO 215/37, The National Archives, Kew, (UK), original department: I/GEN 2/2/26, discovery. nationalarchives. gov.uk/SearchUI/ Details?ur i=C2454905.

21 Alberta Justice and Solicitor General, “Direct Supervision,” www.solgps. alberta.ca/newerc/ pages/direct_ supervision.htm. 22 Richard Wener, “Effectiveness of the Direct Supervision System of Correctional Design and Management: A Review of the Literature,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 13 no. 3 (June 2006): 392–410.

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a disconcerting impression of almost, but not quite, being able to see what is going on outside. Several visitors in the tour group question the lack of exterior views. The officer stationed in the living unit explains that prisoners are not allowed to see outside for security reasons. For instance, he says, he wouldn’t want one of them catching a glimpse of his license plate as he drove away after work. The living area will operate on the ”direct supervision“ principle, an ”inmate management system“ that, despite the danger intimated in the hypothetical ”license plate“ scenario, is supposed to foster a more normalized relationship between prisoners and guards.—21 Correctional officers will mingle with prisoners in the common area of the living unit rather than watch them from behind glass. It is touted as a more humane way to incarcerate people and flaunted as something new and improved, but the philosophy was first applied in United States in 1974 and has seen decades of use.—22 It is linked with reduced levels of violence among inmates and against guards, but it also promotes a severely unequal relationship in which guards have complete power to incentivize certain behaviours and, conversely, to punish others. Expansion and Contraction: Ontario Reformatory-Mimico, 1917–1972 The Ontario Brick and Tile Company became a full-fledged, independent prison when the Ontario Reformatory-Guelph was turned into a hospital for WWI veterans. In 1917, the last three Guelph prisoners were transported to the new Ontario Reformatory-Mimico (ORM), where in addition to labouring in the brickyard, they would work on the institution’s farm. In 1934, the three farm buildings were destroyed by fire, but the animals, comprising forty cows, fifty pigs, and twelve horses, were rescued. The farming operation continued, and the Reformatory even had a world-record-breaking cow named Reta, which produced 34,636 pounds of milk in 1947. Like the farm at the VIS, the ”jail farm“ at Mimico grew out of the idea that work was rehabilitative and prisoners should contribute to the maintenance of the institution at which they were incarcerated. At the beginning of WWII, Ontario Premier Mitchell 58

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

Hepburn wanted 560 short-term prisoners of the ORM enlisted in the Canadian Forces. He justified this proposal by stating that ”they took men from the reformatories during the last war. These men are not criminals, but largely victims of the depression and lack of a constructive policy on the part of the Federal Government.“—23 The premier’s recognition that the men were incarcerated due to systemic circumstances demonstrated an understanding of the ineffectiveness of the prison system. However, his desire to divert the prisoners towards the war effort perpetuated the idea that they owed the government a debt that must be repaid in some way, adhering to the notion that prisoners were ”property“ to be put to use. A new dormitory building was constructed at the ORM in 1954 before a program to scale down the expansive brickyard and farm operations was initiated. In the 1960s, the ORM was known as ”The Old Men’s Home“ in reference to the age of the prisoners and their recurring stints in prison.—24 Many of these ”old men“ were arrested on public intoxication charges, and since shorter sentences were being given by the province for this particular misdemeanour, the men found themselves in and out of prison on a regular basis. In 1968, a tract of 32 houses next to the ORM was expropriated to form a continuous lot with the farm. This consolidated property, part of which was the site of the old VIS, was later sold to the Borough of Etobicoke for industrial development. In 1969, the Ontario Brick and Tile Company was closed due to complaints of interference with outside labour. The downsizing efforts heralded the end of large-scale industry at the ORM, although prisoners continued to work at smaller enterprises that produced park tables and slippers. *** The cells lining one wall of each living unit are small and spare. A bunk bed, two shelves with hooks, a table, two stools, and integral toilet and sink are all the furnishings within. These cells, including fixtures, plumbing, electrical wiring, external cladding, and window were completely prefabricated by Tindall in Atlanta. After arriving in Toronto by rail, the ready-made cells were stacked together to construct the three towers of the prison. The dimensions of each cell have been determined by the Ontario Building Code as 59 Magdalena Miłosz

23 “Patients Moved Quickly as Hospital Taken Over,” The Globe and Mail, October 17, 1939, 5. 24 “Inmates Find Mimico Comfortable,” The Globe and Mail, July 21, 1964, 3.

25 Elise Chenier, Strangers in Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 53. 26 Quoted by Stuart K. Jaffary in “Claims ‘Revenge’ Laws Hamper Jail Reform,” The Globe and Mail, November 30, 1954, 5. 26 Quoted by Stuart K. Jaffary in “Claims ‘Revenge’ Laws Hamper Jail Reform,” The Globe and Mail, November 30, 1954, 5. 27 Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 159. (28) Chenier, Strangers in Our Midst, 139.

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well as American design guidelines, since Canadians are much less experienced with prison design than their southern neighbours. They also had to be designed to fit onto rail vehicles for their journey north. The prefabricated cells scored a point towards the TSDC’s LEED Silver certification, brandished by the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services as a selling point for the project. The point was for the use of ”local“ materials. Treatment and Punishment: Alex G. Brown Memorial Clinic, 1951–1973 The Alex G. Brown Memorial Clinic, named after a past superintendent of the ORM, opened in 1951. Established in one of the former VIS buildings, the clinic was an alcohol treatment centre for prisoners who were admitted voluntarily a month before their sentences were up. It was one example of how the provincial Department of Reform Institutions (DRI) ”showed a remarkable willingness to explore and implement new and innovative services in the province’s reformatories [prisons].“—25 The building was renovated by prisoners and had space for up to thirty patients when it opened. It was also host to a job-training program. The ”voluntariness“ of attendance was, of course, limited to a choice between continuation of a prison sentence or transfer to the government-run clinic. In 1954, the clinic’s services were expanded to include drug-addiction treatment, and the program drew worldwide interest. It was advocated as a viable alternative to incarceration and, in this way, espoused the idea of British social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb that ”the most practical and the most hopeful of ‘prison reforms’ is to keep people out of prison altogether.“—26 Whether prisoners were transferred to the clinic to complete their sentence or were sent there in lieu of prison, the clinic, like the industrial school before it, never left the continuum of carceral institutions. In both prisons and hospitals, as the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner notes, ”a number of people are confined in one particular place, although they would prefer not to be, and in both cases constant supervision is necessary.“—27 This resemblance was all the more clear given the clinic’s connection with the prison. 60

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

Almost 3,000 inmates were treated in the clinic’s first nine years of operation. In 1961, it became the inaugural centre for ”rehab“ as an alternative to imprisonment. However, the conflation of rehabilitative and punitive programs caused friction between doctors and administrators; those within the senior ranks of the DRI were ”openly hostile toward any program that departed from traditional military-style rule and discipline.“—28 The same year, eight clinic staff members resigned. The DRI’s reputation as a supporter of progressive reform disintegrated as treatment centres became tools to control prison discipline rather than places of healing. The Alex G. Brown Memorial Clinic was moved off-site to the Ontario Correctional Institute in 1973. In the late 1970s, prisoners from the ORM took part in a rehab program at a nearby psychiatric hospital. Despite the absence of the clinic, it was evident that a more productive alternative to incarceration that addressed prisoners’ real need for treatment was still very much necessary. *** The TSDC has a twenty-six bed mental health assessment unit as part of its program, with psychiatrists and other health professionals on staff. The unit is part of a ”Forensic Early Intervention Service“ delivered by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which aims to divert prisoners with acute mental illness towards assessment and treatment. We don’t see this area on the tour, nor do we see the prison’s 120 segregation cells. There, prisoners will be isolated for safety reasons but also as punishment, which officers within the direct supervision units will have the power to mete out. The prison program is a strange amalgam of well-intentioned rehabilitative measures and hard-line discipline that continues to perpetuate the histories of its institutional predecessors. ”Inside“ Out: Hillsdale Forestry Camp, 1956–1964 The Hillsdale Forestry Camp, although located away from the TSDC site, forms part of its institutional history. The camp was built north of Barrie, Ontario in 1956 and, after three years of running seasonally, was turned into a year-round operation. Just as the 61 Magdalena Miłosz

28 Chenier, Strangers in Our Midst, 139.

29 “Inmates Find Mimico Comfortable.” 30 “Hillsdale Prisoners Play Golf, Swim, and Build Parks for Public,” The Globe and Mail, June 26, 1964, 39.

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Ontario Brick and Tile Company had once been an out-camp of the old Toronto Central Prison, Hillsdale became an out-camp of the ORM. Prisoners could ”win“ a month’s transfer to Hillsdale for ”co-operative conduct.“—29 Others were sent there for a few months at a time after experiencing negative effects, such as claustrophobia, as a result of being imprisoned. At Hillsdale, prisoners could swim and play golf in addition to performing manual labour for the province. They worked at maintaining parks in townships near the camp; they also cut wood, cleared land, and pruned provincial and municipal forests. They built the structures of the camp, including the bunkhouses, dining hall, and offices, and were responsible for cooking the food. Like the ORM, the forestry camp was a self-supporting entity, with the prisoners producing many of the institution’s necessities. Hillsdale was described by one journalist as a place for men of ”the sort who can no longer live in free society,“—30 conveying the perception that these men somehow wanted to be imprisoned. The low rate of escapes due to the camp’s isolated location and the fact that camp life seemed preferable to being kept within the walls of the ORM or its brickyard contributed to this perception. Populated by repeat offenders, the ”old men“ who had already spent several terms in prison, the camp must have appeared to outsiders as a benign entity populated by those for whom life on the ”outside“ was impossible. However, the fact remained that the camp was structured on the same carceral basis as the prison with which it was connected and, like that prison, made full use of the labour of those who were incarcerated there. A New Language: Mimico Correctional Centre, 1972–2011 The 1970s marked a period of prison reform within the Ontario Ministry of Corrections, which focused on improving conditions within prisons and manifested in more ”normalized“ prison formats intended as a fresh take on incarceration. In 1976, the chief facilities design planner of the Ontario Ministry of Corrections, Stephen Lendvay, exemplified this attitude with a new architectural nomenclature for prison spaces: ”I don’t call them cells anymore. I 62

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

call them rooms. Cells are for storing bodies and we’re not storing bodies.“—31 From an abolitionist perspective, language use that normalizes the experience of prison, such as calling prisoners ”inmates,“ incarceration ”treatment,“ or jails and prisons ”centres“ of all sorts, ”denies prisoners the reality of their experience“ and prevents the development of a realistic definition of prisons.—32 The fiction evoked by these substitute words presents a soft-focus view of prisons to the public and thereby impedes an honest critical examination of their (lack of) effectiveness. This perspective also applies to language that defines the physical environment of the prison, as well as the design tactics used to normalize this environment. Calling prison cells ”rooms“ and prisons ”detention centres“ or ”correctional facilities“ obscures the primary purpose of these spaces: incarceration. Similarly, many new prisons in this period of reform were designed to have a ”homelike atmosphere.“ To Lendvay, for example, horizontal window bars had a more residential character than conventional vertical bars.—33 Although the TSDC has since shed this pretense of domesticity, the horizontal window bars outside its windows demonstrate how rhetorical design features may become embedded within successive built environments. Consistent with the new language use surrounding prisons, the ORM was renamed the Mimico Correctional Centre (MCC) in 1972. In the 1980s, it became fashionable, once again, for jails to collaborate with private businesses to supply inmate labour for various enterprises. The specific format of these arrangements varied, although prisoners were generally paid for their labour.—34 At the MCC, a workshop produced fireproof mattresses under the management of an outside factory. In the prison greenhouse, inmates at Mimico grew the poinsettias that graced government offices.—35 The MCC was for a time renamed the Mimico Correctional Complex but soon reverted to its former name. Perhaps the term ”complex“ suggested an unnecessarily large institution, although the jail expanded again in the 1990s. Part of the enlargement was to accommodate a ballooning number of remand inmates in the province. When the two-phase TSDC project was announced in 2008, the population of adults awaiting trial or sentencing was double 63 Magdalena Miłosz

31 “Changing the Look of the OldTime Jail,” The Globe and Mail, April 1, 1976, 43. 32 “Prison Abolition & Alternatives,” www. prisonjustice. ca/politics/ abolition_ alternatives.html. 33 “Changing the Look of the OldTime Jail.” (34) “Prisons Profiting in Joint Ventures with Outside World,” The Globe and Mail, February 21, 1981, B1. 35 “Inmates Receive Training in Greenhouse,” The Globe and Mail, November 25, 1988, A18.

36 “Corrections unit to close,” The Globe and Mail, December 16, 2003, A13.

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what it had been ten years earlier. The TSDC was also identified by the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services as a necessary replacement for the aging Toronto (Don) Jail in the city’s east end. The MCC site was chosen for the new facility and in 2008, construction began on the first phase of the project, the Toronto Intermittent Centre (TIC). During construction of the TIC, the MCC continued to operate. Just days after the MCC was finally shut down in December 2011, the TIC became operational; the MCC itself was demolished soon after to make way for the second phase, the TSDC. Youth ”Justice“: Toronto Youth Assessment Centre, 1998–2003 The short-lived Toronto Youth Assessment Centre (TYAC) was a facility for 138 sixteen- and seventeen-year-old prisoners pending bail hearings, or those who had been denied bail. It was connected with the Mimico Correctional Centre and located on the site of the current TSDC. The TYAC was notorious for its brutal atmosphere and occurrence of violence among its young prisoners, as well as for its inadequately trained and neglectful staff. The TYAC was closed in 2003 in the wake of the 2002 death of David Meffe, a sixteen-year-old prisoner who hanged himself while awaiting trial for a minor offense.—36 A New Prison Economy: Toronto South Detention Centre, 2014– The Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services predicted in 2008 that the TSDC would generate $120 million in construction job salaries. 500 to 550 workers were to be on site during the busiest period of construction. Whereas in the past, the profit extracted through jails was in the form of prisoners’ labour, the biggest profit is now derived from the design, construction, and operation of the jail. Prisoners are no longer required to work, nor is there any work for them to do. Instead, the prison focuses on educational and cultural or religious ”programming“ that will fill some of the idle time of incarceration. 64

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The jail itself is almost entirely the creation of private enterprise. Through the P3 arrangement that made it a reality, the provincial government will be paying rent to the ITS consortium for thirty years. In that time, the accumulated cost of the institution, including interest and inflation, will rise from $593.9 million to $1.1 billion.—37 *** Each living unit within the Toronto South Detention Centre has a program room of its own, and the entire prison shares a central program area with religious and multipurpose rooms. We leave the living units and return to the ground floor to see what they are like. The multifaith worship room, with fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling in a sunburst pattern, has amenities such as bathing facilities for various religious requirements. The prison is projected to hold so many Indigenous inmates that it has a specific program room for their use; it has a circle motif and is adorned with First Nations art. Its special ventilation provisions will allow smudging ceremonies to be performed in the space. An area has also been planned in one of the enclosed courtyards for Indigenous prisoners to construct a sweat lodge on the pristine lawns. The idea is that the lodge will be built and dismantled according to need. The maximumsecurity status of the building, however, with restrictions on the circulation of prisoners, seems likely to impede its implementation. *** Indigenous people are disproportionately overrepresented in Canadian prisons. In 2010–2011, 27 percent of adults in provincial and territorial sentenced custody and 20 percent of those in federal custody across Canada were Indigenous, about seven to nine times the percentage of Indigenous people in the population as a whole (3 percent). In the province of Ontario, the rate was 11.4 percent, compared with 1.8 percent representation in the general population.—38 Recalling the four boys who came to the Victoria Industrial School from the Mohawk Institute in 1903, the continuing systemic oppression experienced by Indigenous people at the hands of governments is brought into glaring focus on the TSDC site. 65 Magdalena Miłosz

37 Infrastructure Ontario, “Contract Awarded for Toronto South Detention Centre: Environmentally Friendly Facility to Boost Local Economy during Construction,” media release, October 28, 2009, www.infra structureontario. ca/WorkArea/ DownloadAsset. aspx?id= 2147485574. 38 Statistics Canada, “Adult Correctional Statistics in Canada, 2010/2011,” October 12, 2012, www.statcan.gc. ca/pub/85-002-x/ 2012001/article/ 11715-eng.htm.

39 Ibid., see notes 14 and 17. 40 At the Central East Correctional Centre (CECC) in Lindsay, Ontario, 191 prisoners out of a total capacity of 1,184 were migrant detainees as of September 2013. The migrants were involved in a strike to protest the federal government’s practice of indefinite detention. See Tings Chak and Mac Scott, “Hunger Strikers Protest Indefinite Detentions in Lindsay, Ontario,” Rabble, December 13, 2013, rabble.ca/ news/2013/12/ hunger-strikersprotest-indefinitedetentionslindsay-ontario. 41 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (London: Routledge, 1999), 62. 42 Justin Piché, quoted in “Etobicoke’s Cutting-edge Jail Opens to Mixed Reviews,” CBC News, February 13, 2014, www. cbc.ca/news/ canada/toronto/ etobicoke-scutting-edge-jailopens-to-mixedreviews-1.2534549.

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Non-status immigrants will also likely be detained at the TSDC, as they are at other provincial jails. Statistics Canada reports that in 2010–2011, inmates in prison for reasons other than sentenced custody or remand, including immigration holds, made up about 1–2 percent of all adults in federal and provincial custody.—39 However, the percentage of migrant detainees at one provincial jail reached a much higher 16 percent, and it is still too early to tell what the figures are or will be at the TSDC.—40 The programmatic attempts at cultural inclusion within the TSDC can be understood as being consistent with the ”institutionalization of difference,“ which developed in 1960s Canada as state multiculturalism.—41 This institutionalization makes manageable disparate identities within the prison and deranges a critical evaluation of the carceral system as it currently exists and how it has been shaped by its past. An awareness of the history of this site is essential for realizing that the TSDC is just the latest in a string of carceral structures built on top of one another—its shiny surface is thin. This recognition should make us stop and wonder about the process of repackaging the same old carceral apparatus in new language, new building techniques, increased depersonalization, and new methods of extracting profit. Justin Piché critiques the new prison economy espoused by the TSDC by suggesting that ”maybe we should stop thinking that it is the design of old prisons that is antiquated and start looking into whether it is the idea of imprisonment itself that is well past its time.“—42 *** The Toronto South Detention Centre began taking in prisoners in the spring of 2014. Not long after, I catch sight of the building from a bus going down the Gardiner Expressway. The towers of the jail soar above the low-rise industrial buildings around them. From a distance, the cell windows look tiny in the massive walls. The TSDC purports to be a piece of civic architecture, to represent the dignity with which society can deal with criminal behaviour. The muted and almost serene exterior of the building belies 66

Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre

an actuality that the very incarceration of individuals is an undignified humiliation. The site’s histories waver in and out of consciousness, obscured by the new prison. When they come into focus, it is clear that incarceration is a practice that is indeed well past its time. Acknowledgments Thank you to Janne Janke and Michelle Hunniford for invaluable editing assistance.

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Figure 4: Train station, Orestiada, Greece, 2011 (Photo: Jenna Loyd, courtesy Island Detention Project)

Figure 5: Train station graffiti, Orestiada, Greece, 2011 (Photo: Jenna Loyd, courtesy Island Detention Project) ↓ Ghosts of Prisons Past . . . pp 47–67 ↓ Figure 6

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Figure 7

Figure 9

Figure 8

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Figure 10

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Figure 11 Figure 12

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Generic William Orr [Figures 15–22, pp 133–136] Event In 2005 riots erupted in the Parisian banlieue,—1 revealing a hidden reality. There is a void beyond the well-known form of the city, an area in which millions of people suffer near-total exclusion. Žižek described the riots this way: The message of the outbursts was not that the protesters found their ethnic-religious identity threatened by French republican universalism but, on the contrary that they were not included in it, that they found themselves on the other side of the wall which separates the visible from the invisible part of the republican social space.—2 The protesters were simply not part of the recognized state of affairs known as ”Paris.“ Historically, as in nearly all European cities, the material boundaries of Paris were defined by fortifications. Since the end of the 1950s, the circuit of the outermost and last to be demolished city wall has been occupied by the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road marking the territorial boundary between the city of Paris proper and the banlieue.—3 With the events of 2005, a suppressed reality, which had been known in some way to all Parisians, had suddenly become reality. Formerly a vague zone beyond representation, the periphery had paradoxically become central to the Parisian world. The opening of this void onto the closed interior destabilized the territorial structure of the city and transformed differential identities into the universal Subjectivity.—4 As Subjects, there are as many differences between an inhabitant of the banlieue and a wealthy Parisian of the seventh arrondissement,—5 as between me and anyone at all—including myself.—6 Counter to a recognition of the ”other,“ what was truly 77

1 French term for the suburban area surrounding a large city. 2 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 77. 3 While the suburbs beyond the Périphérique vary in economic and social power (southern and western areas gener ally being more affluent), the city is formally defined by an interior and exterior. In this case, through the events of 2005 the underserved and poorer banlieues (mostly in the north and east) define the universal case of exclusion from “Paris” in general and point to a genericity beyond qualitative differences. 4 Subjectivity here refers to the subject mobilized by the Idea, the subject of truth rather than personal opinion. The Subject is free of the merely “personal.” 5 Paris is organised into twenty administrative subdivisions, or arrondisse-ments, the seventh being particularly wealthy and prestigious. 6 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 25–26.

7 The concept of the generic set was developed by mathematician Paul Cohen in relation to the “forcing” methods he developed in his work on the Continuum Hypothesis. Paul J. Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2008). 8 This project is heavily indebted to the work of Alain Badiou, and draws much of its technical language from his philosophy, central to which is a commitment to the mathematical ontology of set theory, with the concept of the generic set at the forefront. 9 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 370. 10 W. Brian Newsome, “The Rise of the Grands Ensembles: Government, Business, and Housing in Postwar France,” The Historian 66, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 794–795. 11 Ibid., 805. 12 “Le logement: Un champ d’étude et d’action pour Paris Métropole,” Institut d’aménagement et d’urbanisme (Îlede-France: Paris, June 2010).

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lacking was a space for the assertion of the same, a space of ”generic“ consistency. The term generic has a technical sense,—7 defining a collection or ”set“ of abstract objects that exceed all predication.—8 Such a set cannot be ascribed meaning. It always includes further objects that escape the definitions assigned to it, and is therefore indiscernible from within a given situation (in this case, for instance, the generic set of Parisian Subjects is indiscernible from within the Parisian situation).—9 And since, as the event revealed, there is no possible predication for the identity of a member of the Parisian ”republican social space,“ there can be no architectural content appropriate to giving that set or that space meaning. There remains only the discredited situation, a still reverberating territory, and the Subjective position from which the set’s existence can be affirmed. Situation Paris has a tradition of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements intimately tied to the city’s urban and material form. During the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, May ’68, and many times since, the city streets have been the arena of direct action. Haussmann’s massive intervention in the city’s plan (implemented between 1853 and 1870) was motivated in part to revoke the strategic advantage Paris’s narrow streets held for revolutionaries—changes that had a large impact on housing. The redesign of bourgeois Paris drove up the cost of land, restricted affordable accommodation, and cast out a portion of the poor population beyond the city walls.—10 Over the next century, the construction of housing estates at the periphery of French cities increased greatly. It began in the 1880s as a social project intended to diffuse revolutionary tendencies, and picked up steam under the Vichy regime as part of the corporatist construction industry. By 1960, more than 300,000 units were being built per year in France, four times more than in the previous decade.—11 However, in the early 1970s, it had become clear that despite their increased production, rent-controlled complexes (known as Habitations à loyer modéré, or HLMs) were 78

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extremely unpopular among their actual residents. In response to political pressure, President Georges Pompidou terminated their further construction. A recent study showed that the Parisian housing situation is defined by shrinking production and increasing demand.—12 The numbers clearly demonstrate the need for new affordable housing, while the poor infrastructural connectivity of existing HLMs in the banlieue, and the ethnic, cultural, and economic segregation of their populations all demand redress. Territory On April 29, 2009, President Sarkozy presented the goals of his government’s major plan for the Paris region: Le Grand Paris. Central to the plan was a new transit scheme developed by the minister assigned to the project, Christian Blanc, who had already developed a transit plan and a law for its implementation. It included a speculative southwestern loop intended to lure technoindustrial development. However, the City Council, led by socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë, had also developed a plan based on current need in an underserved ring comprising the inner banlieue. The jurisdictional and ideological conflict was eventually resolved by a compromise plan, and presented by the president in October 2011. Coupled with this transit agenda was a general consensus that the high-density HLM structures were moribund and ought to be levelled in favour of more traditional single-family housing. The material and economic irresponsibility of such an approach was highlighted well by the PLUS project of Lacaton & Vassal, and Druot.—13 While their strictly material intervention was a reasoned response to the situation predicated on improving the existing housing stock, it remained overly bound to the situation as such. Like Manfredo Tafuri’s ideal architect at the end of Theories and History of Architecture, their method resisted formalist and historicist pitfalls, choosing instead to focus directly on immediately presented reality.—14 However, this purely supplemental approach to the situation failed to recognize the evental status of the problem—it is precisely that apparent ”reality“ which has been called into question. Because no empirical approach to the situation can adequately address its problematic 79 William Orr

13 Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton, and JeanPhilippe Vassal, PLUS: Largescale Housing Development: An Exceptional Case (Barcelona: GG, 2007), 17. 14 Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (London: Granada, 1980).

15 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995).

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territory, the designer—as Subject—is confronted by the necessity to risk producing there a new reality. Project This project begins with a geometrical wager: the formalization of the peripheral transit system into an ellipse. Unlike the typical axes of Paris, which create monumental perspectives centred on privileged positions within the city, the ellipse creates an enormous set of nearly identical perspectives throughout the banlieue, all of which are tangential to the curve defining the whole. The ellipse is composed of several infrastructural layers: below-grade metro, plus at-grade LRT and boulevard. On either side, the boulevard is lined by an architectural type with a simple structure allowing for diverse plans and programs. The footprint of these buildings is determined by the intersection of existing streets, which divide them into courtyard blocks rising to a uniform seven storeys. Together, the boulevard and its buildings create a gigantic space of formal consistency without defining individual programmatic cases. While recalling the form of city walls, the ellipse does not act to separate the exterior from the interior of the city. Rather, it traverses the undefined territory of the banlieue, connecting and transforming the existing urban structure. Underlying the project is a design strategy of concatenation. Each building considered individually lacks weight; however, taken in near endless repetition, the buildings form a generic city of subjects. The project as such can therefore be defined as a method for forcing the recognition of a previously unseen set, in this case expanding the Parisian situation to include the indiscernible subjects of the banlieue. Perhaps the failure of universalism under the modern project was not definitive. With the generic, universality reappears rather by subtraction. It is only through the evacuation of architectural meaning that architecture can be tethered to Subjectivity. Postscript The last chapter of Rem Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL is titled ”Generic City.“—15 The concept of the generic promoted above can be 80

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seen in greater relief when set against Koolhaas’s own conception. He begins by associating the Generic City with a kind of historical break, one involving the obsolescence of the city’s historical centre.—16 For Koolhaas, that break is a function of the failure of historically derived identity due to population increase and diversity.—17 These thoughts culminate in the following formulation: ”The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of centre, from the straightjacket of identity. The Generic City breaks with this destructive dependency: it is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability. It is the city without history.“—18 Many of these perceptions are convincing. In fact, we could say that Koolhaas has accurately identified the situation of contemporary urbanism. However, his city is a city without Subjects. It is a city where ”anything goes,“ where validity is a function only of facticity. A more precise term for this kind of world would be ”atonic.“—19 The Atonic City is the city without points, the Koolhaasian city of suspended judgement. Koolhaas never ceases to register predicates for his Generic City—all of which are in fact predicates of the situation. Rather, the generic city must be brought into being by Subjective action since it is impossible to define from the standpoint of the situation alone. Furthermore, the properly generic city is fundamentally historical because it is brought into view only through the intercession of an event which ruptures the atonicity of the contemporary city by revealing its excluded truth and putting its world into tension.—20 Triggered by the event, the generic city would be the product of Subjective action inaugurating a new reality ... where the atonic city exists, the generic city must come to be.

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16 Ibid., 1249. 17 Ibid., 1248. 18 Ibid., 1249–1250. 19 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 420. “Atonic” refers to a lack of “points,” in the sense that a point is a transcendental moment of tension on which subjects can properly make decisions. We might say that an atonic world is a relativistic world, a world of opinion in which truth is impossible. 20 Koolhaas even hints that part of the truth of his Generic City is its tyrannical politics (in light of which his formula equating post-modernism to democracy appears highly suspicious).

Figures

↓ Generic, pp 77–81 ↓

Figure 15

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Figure 17 133

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The Cultural Work of Decommissioned Carceral Sites: Representations of Confinement and Punishment at Kingston Penitentiary Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby [Figure 23, p 137] On 19 April 2012, the Government of Canada announced plans to shut down Kingston Penitentiary (KP), a maximum-security prison located in Kingston, Ontario. In operation since 1835, KP was the country’s most notorious prison, incarcerating individuals perceived to pose the greatest danger to society before and after Confederation in 1867. This news shocked many, including the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers. Hundreds of workers and members of the public protested in front of KP. Many people felt the closure would cripple the local economy. Workers for KP were upset as plans had yet to be made for their relocation. Others, particularly abolitionists, were pleased to see the closure of KP. Although, as noted in a zine by End the Prison Industrial Complex, this development ”is not a victory for abolitionists,“ particularly given that this period ”is a time marked by massive prison expansion across this stolen land.“—1 By 30 September 2013, all prisoners had been transferred to other facilities. KP is located on the waterfront of Lake Ontario, minutes away from downtown Kingston. Soon after the announcement of the closure, debates commenced about the site’s future. Complicating matters is the penitentiary’s status as a National Historic Site of Canada, designated in 1990. Many of the original buildings cannot be demolished. One popular idea among developers was to turn the site into a world-class sailing facility. Another popular option involved transforming KP into a dark tourism site dubbed ”Alcatraz North,“—2 which would re-open the doors of the facility to the public; this was the case from the years following its construction to the early 1900s, until officials came to view these visitations as a distraction from its operation. Many decommissioned carceral institutions have been turned into penal history museums, such as the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. We use the term ”carceral retasking“ to refer to the act of turning a decommissioned penitentiary, prison, 83

1 End the Prison Industrial Complex (EPIC), Closure Is Not Abolition: Perspectives on the Closing of Kingston Penitentiary (Kingston, 2013), 1. Also see, Justin Piché, “Accessing the State of Imprisonment in Canada: Information Barriers and Negotiation Strategies,” in Brokering Access: Politics, Power, and Freedom of Information in Canada, ed. M. Larsen and K. Walby (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 234–260. 2 Carys Mills, “Shutdown of Kingston Pen Clears Path for Alcatraz North,” The Globe and Mail, April 22, 2012, www. theglobeandmail. com/news/ politics/shutdownof-kingston-penclears-path-foralcatraz-north/ article4101874.

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jail, or lock-up into another enterprise that continues to reproduce imprisonment as a dominant idea and/or material practice. Following the closure of KP, tours were organized by the United Way of Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox & Addington (UWKFLA) and Habitat for Humanity Kingston & Frontenac (HFHKP) in October and November 2013 with the permission of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC). This development is symptomatic of the close relationship between non-profit organizations and the state, with the former often buttressing the repressive policies and practices of the latter, either materially or ideologically. In the case of KP, this relationship manifests itself with non-profits generating funds for the activities of their organizations by collaborating with state actors (e.g. CSC staff serving as volunteer guides) to put on tours of the decommissioned penitentiary that briefly expose tourists to the ”realities“ of incarceration—albeit largely from CSC’s vantage point. Tours of defunct carceral facilities have been described as a form of dark tourism where visitors encounter representations of death and disaster for education or entertainment purposes. To date, there has been a lack of studies examining cultural representations of imprisonment and dark tourism at decommissioned carceral sites in Canada, of which there are more than 50 across the country that our research team has visited. There has also been a lack of research examining the motives and experiences of penal tourists. This study examines visitors’ motives for participating in the tours of KP, the representations of confinement and punishment communicated during the tours, as well as how individuals share their tour experiences. Prospective penal tourists were encouraged to take tours of KP to gain access to a previously inaccessible space for a limited time only and to get an authentic look into prison life. Themes emerging from the first public tours of KP included the extraordinary aspects of prison life, such as prisoner violence, security, the use of force, and escapes. Tourist reactions after the tour were appreciative, focusing on the performance of tour guides and their own personal enjoyment, while critical reflections on the harms of incarceration were rare. According to criminologist Michelle Brown, the majority of information about prison is communicated to the public through cultural representations such as television shows, 84

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movies, and prison tours. The social distance of those members of the public who are not directly involved in or affected by institutionalized punishment thus creates ”penal spectators,“—3 a position that may increase and normalize sentiments towards punishment. This distancing also allows most people to ignore any responsibility they have toward penal practices.—4 In this way, such tours increase the social distance between the general public and the lived realities of incarceration in Canada. While abolitionists direct much effort toward developing strategies to shut down spaces of confinement and punishment, our analysis of narratives stemming from the carceral retasking underway at KP shows that even when carceral sites are shut down, they continue to perform cultural work that reproduces the idea that imprisonment is a necessary state practice. Following a review of relevant literature, the presentation of our findings, and contributions to debates on dark tourism and penal tourism, we conclude by reflecting upon the challenges that this phenomenon poses to abolitionists working to resist state repression. [Figure 24, p 137] Dark Tourism and Penal History Museums Research on dark tourism and penal history museums has focused on the meanings of penality and prison life communicated through narratives presented to tourists. Many studies have examined cultural representations that are part of tours at decommissioned carceral institutions, using case studies such as Alcatraz and Robben Island, South Africa. Criminologists Carolyn Strange and Michael Kempa claim the narratives of imprisonment at Alcatraz have been shaped by external group pressures, visitor interests, and managerial actions. Similarly, Jacqueline Wilson has found that organizers at the HM Pentridge Prison tour in Australia communicated punitive and sensational narratives for the purposes of entertaining guests.—5 There has also been a lack of literature examining the desire of people to participate in penal tours. Researchers Nancy Phaswana-Mafuya and Norbert Haydam conducted surveys of visitors 85 Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby

3 Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 8. 4 Ibid., 11. 5 Jacqueline Wilson, “Dark Tourism and the Celebrity Prisoner: Front and Back Regions in Representations of an Australian Historical Prison,” Journal of Australian Studies 28, no. 82 (2009): 1–13.

6 Nancy PhaswanaMafuya and Norbert Haydam, “Tourists’ expectations and perceptions of the Robben Island Museum—a world heritage site.” Museum Management and Curatorship 20 (2005) 149–169. 7 Mickey Dewar and Clayton Fredericksen, “Prison Heritage, Public History and Archaeology at Fannie Bay Gaol, Northern Australia,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 9, no.1 (2003): 45–63.

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before and after their tour of the Robben Island museum, finding tourist expectations (e.g. information on Nelson Mandela’s cell, history of the museum) were generally met by the facilities and services offered.—6 Apart from Strange and Kempa, who used tourist surveys and interviews with prison staff to discover why people visit Alcatraz and Robben Island, tourist motives for visiting the penal history sites are understudied. Contemporary research on individual reactions to carceral tours is also scarce. Some researchers, including Mickey Dewar and Clayton Frederickson, who conducted a study at Fannie Bay Gaol in Australia, have analyzed comment cards to study public reactions following such tours.—7 They uncovered themes of punitiveness, sympathy, and tour dissatisfaction. No studies have analyzed how visitors share their encounters with carceral experiences after tours, particularly through social media, which is now a key forum for communication that influences the way people think about issues. It is sometimes referred to as ”electronic word of mouth,“ or eWOM, and platforms such as Twitter and Facebook serve as vectors for transferring emotions. Below, in addition to studying the narratives communicated to penal spectators during tours of KP, we examine how tourists share their expectations of, and reactions to, penal tourism through social media. Penal Spectatorship and Kingston Prison To examine the meanings of confinement and punishment communicated during these visits, our research team recorded audio, took photos, and wrote field notes based on our participation in a tour of Kingston Prison organized by the UWKFLA and another coordinated by HFHKF. To analyze the motives and reactions of participants, we also collected and analyzed online comments posted in response to news outlet stories (e.g. CBC Ne0ws, CTV News, Global News, The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, The National Post, The Ottawa Sun, The Toronto Star, and The Kingston Whig-Standard), as well as comments on Facebook and Twitter that included hashtags such as #kingstonpenitentiary, #kingstonpen, #kptour, and #kingstonpentour. We protect the anonymity and confidentiality of 86

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tour guides and visitors by not using their names or pictures where they could be identified. The identities of online commenters, which are often linked to their social media profiles, are also concealed to protect their privacy—with the exception of posts published by the UWKFLA, HFHKF, and journalists. Tourist Motives [Figure 25, p 137] There were three primary motives for participating in KP tours expressed in news articles and related reader comments, as well as social media posts. First, KP was presented as a forbidden space that would be appealing to gain access to. Many articles, comments, and posts presented the KP tours as an opportunity to gain insider access to an ordinarily inaccessible area. Global National’s tweet described the tours as offering the chance for an ”exclusive look at Kingston Penitentiary,“ while a news anchor from a radio station called it ”a rare look inside.“ HFHKF enticed volunteers for the tours by tweeting that they could ”get behind the scenes“ and would be ”first in line to see the site.“ Many articles described the tours as an unrestricted look ”behind the storied walls.“—8 The second motive for taking tours of KP expressed in news and social media comments was to gain an authentic look at prison life. It was suggested that tourists would get a ”glimpse into life behind the prison’s historic walls,“ in ”one of the oldest prisons in continuous use in the world.“ —9 The news media also promoted the authenticity of the facility by focusing on the people that were held in KP. One article describes ”eager customers beginning an online bidding war for the chance to have a look inside the maximum security prison where some of Canada’s most notorious criminals served their time.“—10 The time-sensitive nature within which these first tours were offered also served as motivation for touring KP. The tours were described as a ”one time only“—11 or ”limited time“ opportunity.—12 The most prominent theme among the Facebook posts and tweets was demand for tickets. The popularity of the tours was undeniable 87 Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby

8 Harvey Kirkpatrick, “Selling Out: Kingston Pen Tours,” Kingstonist, November 6, 2013, www.kingstonist. com/2013/11/06/ kingstonpenitentiary-tourtickets-24807. 9 Erika Tucker, “Inside Kingston Penitentiary: Tours Sold Out within Hours,” Global News, October 2, 2013, globalnews. ca/news/877576/ inside-kingstonpenitentiarytours-sold-outwithin-hours. 10 Nicholas HuneBrown, “Kingston Penitentiary’s Brutal Legacy,” October 7, 2013, The Toronto Star, www.thestar. com/opinion/ commentary/2013/ 10/07/kingston_ penitentiarys_ brutal_legacy. html. 11 Kirkpatrick, “Selling Out.” 12 Tucker, “Inside Kingston Penitentiary.”

13 “More Kingston Pen Tours,” The Kingston Whig-Standard, October 17, 2013, www.thewhig. com/2013/10/17/ more-kingstonpen-tours. 14 Natalie Pierosara, “Inside Kingston Penitentiary,” CTV Ottawa, October 11, 2013, ottawa. ctvnews.ca/insidekingston-penitentiary-1.1494075. 15 Kirkpatrick, “Selling Out.” 16 Jacqueline Wilson, “Dark Tourism and the Celebrity Prisoner,” 1–13. 17 Regina Bendix, “Capitalizing on Memories Past, Present, and Future: Observations on the Intertwining of Tourism and Narration,” Anthropological Theory 2, no. 4 (2002): 469–487.

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in the pages of posts inquiring about where and how to buy tickets. Potential tourists expressed interest and attended the tours from ”as far away as British Columbia and Nova Scotia.“—13 One Facebook user posted: ”I am from a few hours away and would make the trip to go and visit,“ while a news article commenter said that she ”would fly from Alberta to Kingston just to see it.“—14 Disappointment, frustration, and outrage were also expressed through article comments, Facebook posts, and tweets when many of those interested in touring KP were unable to obtain tickets, which had quickly sold-out. One Facebook user noted, ”I have been trying to get tickets to the tour to Kingston Pen since 6am this morning… I didn’t get tickets and I am really disappointed.“ Another post on Facebook stated, ”Ridiculous… not even 2 min after sales and can not even get 1 ticket.“ When tickets could no longer be obtained through the brokers that worked with the charities operating the KP tours, people turned to Kijiji and EBay, where they could be purchased at up to four times their face value, which one online column contributor noted was ”more than what you’d pay to go (to) an average NHL game.“ —15 Others who ”couldn’t get tickets“ decided ”to volunteer“ their time for one of the charities running the tour so that they could still get the KP experience. Article comments, tweets, and Facebook posts flooded the Internet demanding more tours be organized, culminating in the creation of a petition demanding that CSC allow for more tours. The initial enthusiasm for the KP tours and the disappointment conveyed by those who could not take part reveals the Canadian appetite for penal and dark tourism. The interest in gaining ”authentic“ experiences of prison life, a central theme in news coverage and online comments we examined, appears to be an important driver of this kind of voyeuristic tourism. Jacqueline Wilson describes a similar situation that emerged when an Australian prison closed and members of the public wanted to tour the decommissioned facility because they were captivated by the idea of having an ”authentic“ prison experience.—16 Regina Bendix describes a tourist desire to ”collect“ new experiences and the pressure on tourist sites to offer these.—17 The presentation of the KP tours as exclusive, authentic, and limited may have aroused 88

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prospective visitors’ desire for new experiences. Phaswana-Mafuya and Haydam highlight the way in which sites must accommodate the demands of tourists.—18 Interest in KP as a spectacle supports this trend. As is shown below, tour guides often tailored the narratives to accommodate tourists’ demands, purposely focusing on exciting aspects of KP and avoiding features that could foster a critical engagement vis-à-vis penality. Taking Tours of Kingston Prison [Figure 26, p 138] Prisoner violence, security, the use of force, and notable prisoners were the dominant themes consistently present during the tours. The tour organized by the UWKFLA that our research team participated in was guided by a former employee at KP (Tour Guide A), like the tour organized by HFHKF, which was also run by a former staff member at the facility (Tour Guide B). A third volunteer, not affiliated with CSC (Tour Guide C), tended to rely on the pre-made tour script produced by the federal agency, more so than the former employees, who largely focused on anecdotes they had come up with from working at KP. Although the volunteer guide officially ran the HFHKF tour, it was the former staffer who took the lead, captivating people with his behind-the-scenes stories. Often, the volunteer guide would look to the former employee for clarification on information or interesting stories about a section of the facility. She would also refer to the former KP worker’s expertise by saying things like, ”where is the parole office?“ and ”how often did they come to the gym?“ [Figure 27, p 138] Violence among prisoners was presented as a normal aspect of prison life. For example, Tour Guide A included a story about a prisoner being killed over a cigarette that he owed. He also mentioned that grates were installed on the upper tiers of the main dome because prisoners threw each other over the railings. Tour Guide B also recounted violence at KP, including a story about a 89 Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby

18 Nancy PhaswanaMafuya and Norbert Haydam, “Tourists’ Expectations and Perceptions of the Robben Island Museum—A World Heritage Site,” 149–169.

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murder in which a prisoner was stabbed repeatedly in the chest. He also described how ”an inmate took one of the weight bars, struck another inmate in the head, cracking his head like an egg, killing him instantly.“ Tour Guide A claimed that six prisoners had died during his years working at KP, which he felt was ”not enough.“ Both tours described violence in the kitchen and at mealtimes, resulting in the closure of the cafeteria. [Figure 28, p 138] Prisoners were depicted as constant security threats, requiring the newest technology to control them. All tour guides referred to the prisoners as ”punks,“ ”inmates,“ ”murderers,“ and ”animals“ who merited the institutional security and maintenance practices they were subjected to. For example, in the workshop dome, Tour Guide C pointed out that ”on the floor there’s like a yellow passage. That’s where they were allowed to walk and there is a set of painted footprints, they would have to stand there to be searched, before they came in and came out.“ Security and ”good order“ were the basis for allowing prisoners to gain access to privileges such as the Personal Family Visitation Units, with Tour Guide B remarking, ”You had to have zero institutional charges, no fights at all like in the last year or so, not just in the last week or so.“ [Figure 29, p 138] Tour guides also emphasized the need for security with regards to those who would visit prisoners. During our tour on 2 November 2013, a volunteer guiding another group passing by noted, ”if you are a visitor, you would stand on the footprints. And then what they would do is they would have a drug dog go up and down and they would be checking you for contraband… if the drug dog stopped in front of you, you had the option to be searched, or you had the option to leave.“ Any staff member who had ”reasonable“ grounds to suspect that a visitor had contraband who opted not to leave when they were approached could be frisked, detained, and strip-searched. 90

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[Figure 30, p 139]

As tourists made their way through the grounds, guides would highlight the security measures in each cellblock, including the location of the officer control post and the automatic door-locking system. All guides pointed out that the minimum number of armed guards needed in the main dome at all times was fifteen and specified which guards carried weapons. Each tour went into detail about voice-recording and camera-monitoring systems in the visiting area, as well as giving insight into prisoner counts, the necessity of prisoner searches, and communication between prison staff. On this topic, Tour Guide B frequently stated: ”In corrections we are not proactive in stopping violence, we are reactive.“ In his view, changes to prison security devices or procedures would only take place in response to a problematic event. For example, the tour guide reiterated, ”we’re reactive in the service, not proactive. After the attempted escape“ when a prisoner accessed the roof, ”they put razor wire“ in that area. [Figure 31, p 139] The guides all deemed the use of force against prisoners necessary, due to the supposedly violent nature of prisoners and the gaps in KP’s security system. Guides focused on equipment such as flash-bang grenades, gas delivery systems, firearms, and pepper spray. Tourists learned about circumstances where officers had the authority to kill prisoners. On this topic, Tour Guide B remarked: ”The criminal code covers any correctional officer who shoots an inmate, within reason. Inmates going over the wall—when would you shoot them? Halfway up the wall because nobody accidentally climbs a rope in a maximum-security prison without the idea of escaping.“ The same guide stated that they would try to kill the winner of fights between prisoners saying, ”we don’t shoot to injure, we shoot to stop.“ [Figure 32, p 139] A central component of the tour experience was stories of extraordinary prisoners such as Paul Bernardo and Russell Williams, 91 Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby

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both high-profile serial killers, as well as exceptionally violent events at KP, like prisoner murders. Such stories were often sparked by tourist responses to the guides’ narratives. For example, one participant on the 2 November 2013 tour asked, ”Are we going to talk about some of the infamous (prisoners)… we watched the Russell Williams documentary yesterday… we were getting excited.“ Illustrating the low regard with which the incarcerated are often held, tourists acted disgusted when tour guides pointed to the double cells that warehoused some infamous protective-custody prisoners who spent most of their time within these spaces. Tourists frequently requested information about conditions of confinement, but were often dissatisfied with responses depicting compassion for prisoners. In one situation, Tour Guide A pointed out that despite the fact that KP sits on the waterfront, Lake Ontario could not be seen from inside the prison. This statement was met with negative reactions, including one tourist who said ”I don’t feel bad for them.“ [Figure 33, p 140] Depictions of notable events also contributed to the animosity directed toward KP prisoners. Among them was the focus on the 1971 prison riot, which Tour Guide C rightfully described as a ”very violent (…) episode“ in which ”the inmates decided to take the guys that were in protective custody, which were sex offenders, informants, that type of clientele, and have a kangaroo trial here. Two inmates died, one here and one at the hospital.“ The tours also emphasized the damage caused by prisoners during the incident, which involved military intervention, and how security and prison standards were tightened afterwards. The broader context of state repression and the absence of human rights for those under the control of the federal penitentiary system that triggered the violence were not discussed. [Figure 34, p 140] Prisoners were also presented as a constant risk for escape during the tours. Scheming escape plans that included leaving 92

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dummies in their beds and replacing bars with wooden dowels were shared with visitors. Often the groups would laugh at the extent prisoners would go to for freedom. Two recurring examples included one prisoner lassoing the guard tower pulley from the roof of the gym to scale the outer wall and Ty Conn’s escape attempt, both portrayed as failures of prison staff to prevent these incidents. When pointing to the area of the wall where Ty Conn’s escape took place, Tour Guide B explained, ”Afterwards (…) they put the fence up, and put the razor wire.“ Turning his attention to the nearest guard tower he noted that it was unmanned when the escape occurred, which was remedied thereafter. The themes of prisoner violence, institutional security, use of force, and notable prisoners and events were a product both of tour guide narratives and interactions with tourists when questions were raised. Themes like program participation, education, and religious observance among prisoners, which could contribute to their humanization, were not addressed in any depth. As well, themes like sexual assault, mental health issues, and suicide that could paint CSC, its staff, and incarceration in a generally negative light were omitted. Wilson problematizes the use of prison staff as tour guides, suggesting that it perpetuates the ”othering“ of prisoners.—19 Brown notes that penal tourism excursions foster distance between spectators and the realities of imprisonment in ways that allow punishment to remain largely unproblematized.—20 Both phenomena were apparent during our tours, as former KP staff referred to prisoners using degrading language that removed any connection between the public and the incarcerated, absolving people of any remorse they may feel for caging fellow human beings. Tours are also products of the engagement and interaction of tour group members.—21 Due to the largely unscripted nature of the KP tour, the punitive views among guests influenced the tour by helping to nudge the tour guide toward certain topics. For example, tourists consistently inquired about infamous prisoners and their living conditions, and research on penal tourism at Alcatraz has shown that tourists’ interests can alter the narrative of the official script.—22 Regardless of what the pre-made script about KP stated, tour guide anecdotes and tourist interests influenced the narrative focus of the 93 Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby

19 Jacqueline Wilson, “Australian Prison Tourism: A Question of Narrative Integrity,” History Compass 9, no. 8 (2011): 562–571. 20 Brown, The Culture of Punishment, 8. 21 Katie Best, “Making Museum Tours Better: Understanding What a Guided Tour Really Is and What a Tour Guide Really Does,” Museum Management and Curatorship, 27, no. 1 (2012): 35–52. 22 Carolyn Strange and Michael Kempa, “Shades of Dark Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 2 (2003): 386–405.

23 J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, “Interpretation of the Unimaginable: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., and ‘Dark Tourism,’” Journal of Travel Research 38 (1999): 46–50. 24 Clifford Shearing and Michael Kempa, “A Museum of Hope: A Story of Robben Island,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592 (2004): 62–78.

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tours toward the more spectacular aspects of incarceration. Tourists’ impressions that they have been exposed to authentic prison life are erroneous. Lennon and Foley describe how, despite educational goals, a dark tourism site can prove to be a form of entertainment, focused mainly on winning the attention of visitors as opposed to critically examining an issue.—23 During the tours of KP, visitors were made to feel they were witnessing raw reality, but in fact were provided with a sensational portrayal of the prison that failed to address some of the more mundane or routine aspects of incarceration. More specifically, the tours glossed over the everyday pains of imprisonment, such as the deprivation of liberty, goods and services, desired sexual relationships, autonomy, and security. Although the tour was presented as an authentic look at KP, the selected route (which was the same in both tours) and the exclusion of certain areas indicates that only specific areas were accessed. The groups were brought to the cleaner sections of the penitentary with less graffiti and were unable to enter areas like the hospital for ”sanitary reasons,“ further limiting their already fleeting encounter with imprisonment. The way that KP is represented to tourists serves to distance them from the reality of the many operational penitentiaries mere kilometres away. Shearing and Kempa explain the importance of alternative perspectives in the engagement of visitors.—24 Indeed, the KP tours lacked alternative perspectives, particularly by excluding the narratives of prisoners. This setup encouraged tourists to take a less active role as they simply viewed these scenes of incarceration devoid of prisoners and their voices, thus avoiding the potential of being called-out for being among the authors of the punishment inflicted upon them in Canada. Tourists on their KP Experience [Figure 35–36, p 140] Generally, penal spectators cherished their brief encounter with KP, with many sharing their opinions through short statements on Facebook and Twitter. Posts such as ”tour was amazing… 94

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would go again“ and ”the tour of Kingston Peniteniary (sic) … was brilliant!“ were common. The general experiences among news commentators tended to be similar to the social media postings. As one community editorial member wrote: ”Kingston Pen. First tour. First Day (sic). I was impressed. Would I go back? Yes. Would I pay money to go back? Yes. Would I encourage everyone in the area and every tourist to go on the tour? Yes.“—25 With similar enthusiasm, a reader commenting on a news article in The Kingston Whig-Standard by Elliot Ferguson stated: ”What a terrific experience with plenty of stories to hear about. Given me the appetite to visit Alcatraz.“—26 Tour reactions in newspaper articles focused more on the mood of the tour and how this impacted the tour experience. This is evident in the headlines of articles, including ”Kingston Pen—A Sobering Tour“—27 and ”Kingston Penitentiary Leaves Visitor ‘chilled.’“—28 Only a handful of comments had a critical tone. For example, one tourist interviewed on CTV News remarked, ”When you think of all of the suffering by the inmates plus their victims, it’s just emotional… Anybody thinking of doing anything bad and ending up in something like that, I don’t know how they would live in there.“—29 Tourists who commented online often talked about their specific tour guide positively and focused on the interesting perspectives that he or she had to offer. A common occurrence was social media users who toured KP mentioning the stories being communicated by their guides: ”Kingston pen tour was a must see! no better tour guide than our fam(ily) friend who’s been a KP guard! lots of history, unfiltered pen stories!“ While the majority of users reacted favourably toward the tour and the stories being told by the guides, one user expressed frustration: ”(I)t has come to my attention that others have received much more detailed tours than the one we received. (…) The tour guide they had was a pen guard, the one we had was a volunteer. I realize that a volunteer would not have the same knowledge as a CSC employee, however receiving the same tour would be beneficial.“ Yet, most social media users were fascinated with the personal experience of their guide and their role in the facility. Guides were mentioned by name and many times the comments would specify the previous role of the tour guide at the prison. One Facebook comment noted: ”We thoroughly enjoyed our 95 Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby

25 Edward O’Brien, “Penitentiary Tour an Eye-opening Experience,” The Kingston Whig-Standard, October 4, 2013, www.thewhig. com/2013/10/04/ penitentiary-touran-eye-openingexperience. 26 Elliot Ferguson, “Inside the Walls of Kingston Penitentiary,” The Kingston WhigStandard, October 2, 2013, http:// www.thewhig. com/2013/10/02/ inside-the-wallsof-kingstonpenitentiary. 27 Elliot Ferguson, “Kingston Pen: A Sobering Tour,” The Kingston Whig-Standard, October 3, 2013, www.thewhig. com/2013/10/03/ kingston-pen-asobering-tour. 28 Joe Tersigni, “Kingston Penitentiary Leaves Visitor ‘Chilled’,” The Record, October 11, 2013, www. therecord. com/opinionstory/4152184kingstonpenitentiaryleaves-visitorchilled-. 29 Colin Perkel, “‘I Don’t Know How They Would Live in There,’ Kingston Penitentiary Visitor Says,” CTV News, October 2, 2013, www. ctvnews.ca/ canada/i-dontknow-how-theywould-live-inthere-kingstonpenitentiaryvisitor-says1.1480325.

30 Claudia Bell, “Pacifists or Partygoers? Young Antipodeans Visiting Gallipoli War Sites,” in The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies: Creating an Academy of Hope, ed. Irena Ateljevic, Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard (Oxford: Routledge, 2012) 179–193. 31 David Bowen and Jackie Clarke, Contemporary Tourist Behaviour: Yourself and Others as Tourists (Wallingford: CABI, 2009), 42. 32 Mohammad Reza Jalilvand and Neda Samiei, “The Impact of Electronic Word of Mouth on a Tourism Destination Choice,” Internet Research 22, no. 5 (2012): 591–612. 33 Ibid.

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tour. Our tour guide was a parole officer… she was fantastic.“ Unlike Strange and Kempa’s study, which found visitor reactions at Robben Island tended to consist of sadness and admiration for prisoners, KP tour reactions display much less empathetic responses. According to Claudia Bell, these results should not be surprising, for these practices merely offer the tourist a passive glimpse into an unfamiliar world, rather than create an ”active cultural critic.“—30 While tourism itself does not intrinsically provide a critical medium for fostering activism, the tourist experience does have the potential to alter personal beliefs on punishment; tours can indeed alter how we see ourselves in relation to others.—31 However, tourist experiences at KP demonstrate that people may not critically analyze their own experience, as their reactions were more concerned with the performance of the tour guide than the realities of incarceration. Finally, scholars have noted the power of electronic word of mouth to influence personal opinions and behaviours.—32 eWOM refers to any statement about products or services made through social media types available to a wide range of people via the Internet (e.g. online reviews, Twitter feedback). Emerging research has shown the effect eWOM has on individuals, and that it is able to alter public attitudes.—33 What people were communicating online and through newspapers about the KP tours reached a wide readership, helping shape public views of prison life and prisoners themselves. Reactions reflected positive personal experiences, and the performance of the tour guides created more dialogue, but again not on the conditions of imprisonment in a way that would raise questions about the quantity and quality of punishment meted-out to prisoners in Canada. Abolitionism and the Challenges of Penal Tourism Contributing to penal and dark tourism literatures, we have shown how members of the press and the general public expected to gain a rare opportunity to get an authentic impression of what KP was like. The tours were sensationalized in promotional materials and news coverage, generating significant demand for tickets. We also explored the representations of imprisonment communicated during the tours of KP that our research team took part in. Prisoners were 96

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described as security threats that required continuous surveillance to prevent violence and escape. The use of force was represented as absolutely necessary to control prisoners. The tour experience featured stories of notable prisoners and exceptional events, fuelled by the anecdotes of tour guides, many of whom previously worked as staff at the facility. Most KP tourists tended to show little compassion for prisoners, and expressed punitive beliefs in their questions and responses. The reactions to the tours communicated in news articles and online media also reveal a distance between the authors and the recipients of punishment, as most seemed more preoccupied with their tour experience than with the broader issues associated with the deprivation of liberty. The fixation on tour performances masks the realities of incarceration for tourists at the site, as well as any individual who reads about the tours of KP in news and social media. KP no longer warehouses prisoners as part of the Canadian carceral state that buttresses colonial rule, sustains capitalist domination, and perpetuates inequality through racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, and other discriminatory practices. However, this does not mean that this decommissioned carceral site ceases to perform cultural work that reproduces the notion that incarceration is a necessary part of contemporary life. As is clear in examining the narratives of penal spectators and tour guides about their encounters with KP, the main message that comes across is that imprisonment offers protection from prisoners, who are largely depicted as dangerous. As a result, penal tourism sites are important milieus of contestation that abolitionists should engage with to challenge dominant meanings associated with confinement and punishment. While one answer would be to work toward abolishing the kind of cultural production examined here, such a course of action has drawbacks—state repression should be memorialized, not forgotten. However, this memorialization needs to be informed by abolitionist work that privileges accounts ”from below“—34 to bridge the distance between authors and survivors of incarceration. Penal spectators need to be confronted with the violence that has and continues to be perpetrated in their names. 97 Matthew Ferguson, Elizabeth Lay, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby

34 Vincenzo Ruggiero, Penal Abolitionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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We encourage abolitionists to engage paid and unpaid staff at the many penal history museums doting Canada’s carceral landscape that disseminate cultural representations of imprisonment, and to cultivate opportunities to present alternative histories. Where KP is concerned, abolitionist interventions need to be oriented toward making room for critiques to be advanced as part of the stories that are told about the past, present, and future of imprisonment. Failing to do so will leave the punitive meanings of incarceration uncontested, condemning future generations to a damaging penal status quo. Acknowledgements This research is part of the Carceral Cultures Research Initiative (www.carceralcultures.ca) and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grant number 430-20120447).

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↓ The Cultural Work of Decommissioned Carceral Sites . . , pp 83–98 ↓

Figure 23: Photo of King Street in Kingston, Ontario after the closure of KP. Figure 24: Photo of a short rope strapped to the bars of a segregation cell window at KP that could be viewed during tours held in the Fall of 2013.

Figure 25: UWKFLA press releasing announcing tours of KP. 137

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Figure 26: Photo of the north gate of KP as viewed from the courtyard.

Figure 27: Photo of a Personal Family Visitation Unit at KP.KP as viewed from the courtyard.

Figure 28: Photo of a bulletin board featuring numerous regulations governing the conduct of prisoners and visitors in the visitation areas at KP.

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Figure 29: Photo of the central dome at KP.

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Figure 31: Photo of the northwest guard tower at KP.

Figure 30: Photo of a cellblock at KP.

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Figure 32: Photo of a cell at KP with a mock prisoner.

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Figure 33: Photo of the outside of the central dome that was the focal point of the 1971 riot at KP.

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Figure 34: Photo of the shop at KP were Ty Conn hid prior to his escape.

Figure 36: Photos of some of the items penal spectators could purchase at the Federal Penitentiary Museum to remember their brief encounter with incarceration.

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Pop-Up Lock Down Christopher Alton with contributions from Jay W., Meaghan D., John P., Mark D., Faraz S., Amelia H., and Dana H. [Figures 37–62, p 141–151] The Canadian government invested nearly $1 billion when hosting the G8/G20 summit in the summer of 2010, $676 million of which was devoted to security during the events. New infrastructure included a three-metre-high fence that stretched for nearly ten kilometres, seventy-seven additional CCTV cameras around Toronto’s downtown and four ”long-range acoustic devices.“ $330 million was budgeted for policing.—1 The Toronto Police Service, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and other forces from around Canada were present in the city. In the face of this securitization, the G20 event in Toronto (the G8 summit was held in nearby Muskoka just prior) was met by a counter-forum of activists representing a plurality of causes. On June 26, 2010, a peaceful march of thousands took place on the streets of Toronto. By late afternoon, the largest mass arrest in Canadian history had begun. In all, 1,105 people were apprehended on the weekend of June 26-27, 2010.—2 Part of this securitization scheme included converting the cavernous Toronto Film Studios into the makeshift Eastern Avenue Detention Centre (EADC). Inside, the detained were held in conditions that have been described as ”deplorable.“—3 They were segregated from the demonstration and events ”inside“ were actively excised from the collective memory of the G20, as cell phones and cameras were confiscated and real-time reporting was disallowed. Four years later, an attempt has been made here to resurrect the EADC and expose its architecture of control, one as ephemeral as the event itself. This project is intended to revive the EADC through two methods. First, from the point of view of several detainees through mental sketch mapping (MSM). Cultural geographer and environmental psychologist Jen Jack Gieseking describes MSM as having varied application and results, though it can offer a qualitative understanding of the experience and memory of place.—4 We have 99

1 CTV.ca News Staff, “Ottawa Releases Costs for G20, G8 summits,” CTV, November 5, 2010, www.ctvnews.ca/ ottawa-releasescosts-for-g20-g8summits-1.571322. 2 Alessandra Renzi and Greg Elmer, Infrastructure Critical: Sacrifice at Toronto’s G8/ G20 Conference (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Press, 2012). 3 Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith, “Martial Law in the Streets of Toronto: G20 Security and State Violence,” Human Geography 3, no. 3 (2010). 4 Jack Jen Gieseking, “Where We Go From Here: The Mental Sketch Mapping Method and Its Analytic Components for Social Science Data Gathering,” Qualitative Inquiry 19, no. 9 (2013).

5 Hon. John W. Morden, Toronto Police Services Board, Independent Civilian Review into Matters Relating to the G20 Summit (Toronto: Police Services Board, 2012), http://www. tpsb.ca/g20/ ICRG20Morden report.pdf.

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adapted this method here in an attempt to give form to people’s memories of the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. Second, I made requests for access to information from the Toronto Police Service for documents related to the planning and design of the detention centre. It was my hope that any official drawings of the detention centre would help validate the memories described by the participants and potentially also serve to unveil some of the machinations behind the construction of this architecture of control. In June 2012, the Toronto Police Service Board appointed the Hon. John W. Morden to head an Independent Civilian Review of policing at the G8/G20 summit and found (amongst other things) violations at the EADC which included failing to detain young persons in accordance with the law (they were not held separate from adults, as well as denied counsel and communication with a parent or guardian); engaging in unsuitable and routine strip searches; failing to provide reliable access to medical care; ignoring international standards with respect to the use of restraints; and failing to provide those arrested with sufficient information concerning their detention.—5 There has yet to be a full public inquiry into the events of the G20. Using MSM, this project has attempted to revive the memory of those few days—through a collective process of recollection and investigation—when a film studio on Eastern Avenue was transformed into a prison. I was able to make contact with a handful of people who were arrested that weekend and collectively we sketched our own MSMs, or simply provided a textual account of our time in the EADC. The drawings of Amelia H. and Jay W. are featured in this piece, as well as the written accounts of Meaghan D., John P., Mark D., Faraz S., and Dana H.. On their own, these accounts provide damning evidence of police abuse, but it was also my hope that they would serve to focus a counter-narrative concurrent to any information I was given through the requests for documents. In late January 2014, I made several access-to-information requests for documents from the Toronto Police Service with specific regard to the planning and construction of the EADC. The transformation from film studio to mass temporary holding site required certain logistics, but the contingency of its planning and construction has served to hide it from the official record. The EADC 100

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must have had a particular arrangement for construction—its size would suggest as much. Ideally, the release of official architectural drawings would allow for a base on which to begin an MSM project, and detainees could provide a check against the official record. My requests were continually denied. As such, our collective recall would have to be more speculative. Here then we have used MSM as a means of storytelling, using cognitive mapping as a way of communicating memories. The sketches, drawn four years after the events, are mostly textual in context. In fact, some participants chose simply to write. The drawings and stories curated thus far represent a non-comprehensive sketch of the conditions inside the detention centre, but this participatory project works as a resuscitation of site and toward a reconciliation of events. Faraz S. guides us through his weekend: ”Photographed in this area with bungling officers and subpar cameras. Held here next, asked if I’m a suicide risk, shirt taken off. Not sure of arrangement here, spent 2pm-6pm in a cell in this place. Held with six other people overnight.“ Though uncertain about some specific details, his memories are deeply embedded in his personal experience; through this account, combined with additional sketches, a collective record begins to emerge. In Mark D.’s retelling, he is careful to take into account the spatial dimensions of the detention centre: I was held in a cell within view of the bus bay near the front entrance. As I recall, my cell was positioned on the far left hand side of the bay, stretching all the way from the north wall until about halfway down the east wall. As I recall, the eastern wall was divided into two cells of roughly equal size. Mine was quite large and had ample room to lie down in—though I know that others weren’t as fortunate. All told, I recall having approximately 12-20 people in my cell. The stories collected contain memories that oscillate between distinct specifications and foggy impressions. Though participants remember the physical layout differently, their memories of events constitute a shared experience. John P., who wears a prosthetic leg, writes: 101 Christopher Alton et al.

6 Toronto Police Service, File No. 14-1100 (Toronto: Police Service, 2014).

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I did not have my glasses at Eastern and did not see very well during my stay there. The police would not give me my leg as they said it could be used as a weapon. People were also calling out for water, food, blankets and other things. Many were cold. I had my one shoe on but some were in bare feet. I was in a huge room, with human voices mixed in with police noises, buses and banging. Everything was a blur. Meghan D.’s account details the overcrowded conditions, and the humiliation forced upon her for no reason other than her gender: ”Second cage. 38 women. 20' x 10'? Had a washroom. No room for all of us to stretch out at the same time. Still in zip-tie cuffs but struggled out of them here. Fed cheese sandwich & cup of water… I was searched a third time. They take my bra.“ Surprisingly, several of my requests for information were returned in time for this publication. These provide an initial and partial documentation of the facility. What they reveal is a decidedly planned detention centre, rather than a makeshift and ad hoc ”solution.“ The drawings of the facility included here are by architecture and interior design firm One Space. Emphasizing interior design over architecture proper, The Toronto Police remind us: ”Please note that the EADC facility was not constructed. The building had already been in place while its interior was altered in preparing for the above-noted event.“—6 One Space’s portfolio includes working spaces for the Toronto Police Service and the Canadian Consulate in Dubai. (One Space has declined to comment on this particular project, their participation only revealed through the access-to-information requests.) The plans speak for themselves, and indeed they reveal a significantly more elaborate facility than any one contributor was able to recall from their MSMs. The thirty ”bullpen cells“ clearly denote a larger operation than any one person’s experience suggests. The orientation of the building also contradicts the initial layout used for the MSMs, as the floor plan we used assumed a different building footprint. With these final drawings of the EADC, the next phase of sketching would be to ”ground-truth“ the building, combining the method begun with our MSMs and the official architectural record. Combining the MSMs with 102

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the released documents allows us to move closer to confronting the pop-up architecture of state repression. In 1989, geographer Edward Soja invoked cognitive mapping as a way of revealing ”a hidden and insidious human geography that must become the target for a radical and postmodern politics of resistance.“—7 The One Space drawings are abstractions, of course, but carrying out the MSM activity produces a counter-narrative. The drawings and texts are a channel for people to tell their stories, and contribute towards the mounting testimony regarding the events of June 26-27, 2010. One can read here a contradiction internal to public space: It exists as a venue for both liberation and control, for democratization and surveillance. Inside a detention facility, this dialectic breaks down, as state control over bodies exerts psychological and political control. In so far as public actions confront a politics of fear, in detention, democratic resistance is less amplified or publicized. This project is an attempt to find a method of unlocking the space of detention from the monopoly of those who built the infrastructure. One Space is governed by their own logic, as are the Toronto Police and Canadian government. This investigation will not, on its own, result in accountability, but as there has yet to be a full public inquiry into the G20, we can advocate for this type of documentation to serve towards that eventuality. In addition to the architectural drawings, I have also acquired other documentation, including receipts, lists of equipment for processing prisoners, and several images of the building while under construction. One drawing entitled ”Alternate Facility“ seems to be a conceptual rendering in support of the final design. Along with these, we are presenting memories from a handful of those who were there, not to claim comprehensiveness but to begin the act of collective remembrance and offer our contribution towards an ”architecture of record“ revealed by the requested documents. And, like the event itself, this project is not without its own contradictions. As Dana H. writes of her experience: ”But I also remember the strength of the other women I found myself with. I carry forward the friendships I made in those cages. Most days I’m just happy to forget.“ 103

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7 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 63.

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↓ Pop-up, Lock-down, pp 99–103 ↓ Toronto Police Service, Eastern Avenue Detention Centre, 2010. Access to information requests (Retrieved June 17, 2014).

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Figure 61: Toronto Police Service, Alternative Facility Plan, 2010.

Figure 62: One Space, EADC Floorplan, 2010. 151

Dislocations and Relocations: Designing for Prison Cities Lynne Horiuchi [Figures 63–64, p 152–153] The editors of Scapegoat have asked contributing authors to connect design, architecture, and art to work for the abolition of prisons, and to use intellectual production, activism, and idealism to this end. So, how may architectural writing support prison abolition? How may we challenge our activism and activate our idealism through knowledge production? And broadly speaking, how should we write about incarceration, design, and art? The book I am currently writing addresses some of these questions. Entitled Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans During World War II, it engages with built environments, the architecture, and the material culture of incarceration. More specifically, it is a study of the material culture of the mass incarceration of ”persons of Japanese ancestry“ during World War II, one of the few notable voids in the literature on the war.—1 It is an architectural and planning history of semi-permanent prison cities built to hold ”people of Japanese ancestry“ during World War II. As intellectual work, Greg Robinson has pointed out that this incarceration has become a mini-industry within Asian American studies, the subject of thousands of books, plays, poetry, days of remembrance, museum exhibitions, documentaries, and feature films. So, how useful would another book on the incarceration be? Robinson, himself a scholar/activist, has provided his own answer to this dilemma of overproduction: the prison camps remain oddly resistant to incorporation into mainstream narratives of American history, even as efforts to understand the event proliferate and ongoing research has accessed formerly unknown archival documents, oral history testimonies, un-catalogued collections, and other material.—2 My initial work in creating an architectural history of the incarceration began with a seemingly simple question: ”What architecture?“ As I discovered in my initial research somewhat counter-intuitively, there were numerous architects, some canonical, 105

1 Lynne Horiuchi, Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2015). 2 Greg Robinson, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 1.

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involved in producing built environments for this mass incarceration effort. Though nominally a subject of architectural history, little substantive research has been produced on the building, planning, and design of the so-called Assembly and Relocation Centers, government euphemisms for the prison cities. The incarceration is remembered primarily as a violation of constitutional rights with a historical legacy to be corrected, such as Jim Crow laws, spatial segregation, and other types of egregious racial discrimination. My developing understanding of prison cities as a type of architecture and urbanism generated a series of other questions: How important were these architects in the production process? How do I find the material to produce histories of the building of prison cities? Do we start by looking at prisons as architectural objects to contain prisoners? Do we examine the histories of architects and their bodies of work for clues? Do we frame the production of built environments around militarization and the politics of the moment? What do we know about the planning for the prison cities? How may we interrogate the role of national sovereignty and power, both Japanese and American, in creating the prison environments? What do we know about the prisoners as designers and builders? The discovery early in my research that major architects were involved in designing the prison cities motivated me to focus first on the ethics of architectural practice. This also shifted my inquiry away from the documentation of canonical architecture. Some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most socially progressive and preeminent modernist architects of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Vernon DeMars and Garrett Eckbo, were involved in designing prison cities for the Japanese American incarceration as federal employees of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). DeMars only began to realize the implications of his work when two of his Japanese American colleagues, Siberius Saito and Hachiro Yuasa, were removed from the FSA Region IX and XI office in San Francisco and relocated to Assembly Centers. Ironically, because the FSA had been relatively open to hiring minorities and women, the FSA architects found themselves assigned by the U.S. Army to design community plans, schools, staff housing, and the specifications for the very concentration camps that their colleagues were to inhabit. Before 106

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World War II, Asian Americans rarely practiced as architects, so the presence of Yuasa and Saito in the FSA office was itself an extremely rare example of Asian American architectural practice in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the Japanese American community, professional opportunities were dismal for Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans born to Japanese parents) in pre-war urban areas. Demars and Eckbo left little information about their design work for Assembly and Relocation Centers. So their participation in the process became a focus of my first chapter, centred around the question, ”What would you do if you were asked to design a prison city for your colleagues?“ The question functions as a kind of corollary for practice inside and outside the prison cities, and wherever one might be located in production processes as an architect, prisoner, artist, engineer, planner, policy maker, government administrator, vernacular builder, community builder, contractor, or consultant. These categories were not mutually exclusive: for example, architects were imprisoned, and community planning tasks and goals involved the work of the prisoners and their jailors, etc. There were numerous concentration camps and prison cities built to imprison Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. My study looks primarily at the ten semi-permanent prison cities authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt under Executive Order 9066. These were camps that the U.S. government named ”Relocation Centers“ and located in largely isolated rural areas of the western United States and Arkansas. Prior to being sent to Relocation Centers, ”people of Japanese ancestry“ from the West coast of the United States, the southern half of Arizona, and Alaska were held temporarily in Assembly Centers near Japanese American communities and then sent to Relocation Centers. The FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the Departments of War and Justice had initiated a parallel process in December 1941, following Pearl Harbor, which resulted in the creation of concentration camps—correctly referred to as internment camps—for ”enemy“ aliens, citizens of Axis nations considered threats to national security. The War Relocation Authority built additional camps for particular administrative functions, such as Isolation Centers for disciplining prisoners identified as ”troublemakers.“ 107 Lynne Horiuchi

3 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066, February 19, 1942; Filed February 21, 1942, Federal Register 7, no. 38, 1407. 4 Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 75.

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Without specifying particular ethnic groups, Presidential Executive Order 9066, a brief, two-page document, was issued on February 19, 1942. FDR authorized the Secretary of War and his designated military commander, General John L. Dewitt, to head the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, stationed at San Francisco’s Presidio: (T)o prescribe military areas (…) from which any or all persons may be excluded and with respect to which the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military commander may impose in his discretion (… and) to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary (…) until other such arrangements are made to accomplish the purpose of this order.—3 E.O. 9066 also authorized the military to use federal troops and other federal agencies with state and local consent to enforce compliance. It asserted that extreme caution in protecting ”against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, nationaldefense premises and national defense utilities“ would result in victory. With such broad authority, the military took control over any person they wished to exclude from any military area they defined.—4 Yet, the military was cautioned to carry out exclusions only when they could be justified by ”military necessity,“ at the specific instruction of FDR. The decision to authorize the army to remove Japanese and Japanese Americans was contested at high policy and cabinet levels, and while it did involve debate about the role of citizenship, there was little discussion about what threats women and children might pose. General DeWitt claimed that, by reason of race and false reports of espionage or collusion, Japanese Americans were potentially loyal Japanese subjects, ready to die for Japan, and that the absence of any confirmed espionage was precisely the reason to incarcerate them. DeWitt conflated Japanese immigrants and American born citizens of Japanese ancestry into one category—the 108

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”Japanese.“ Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, California Governor Culbert Olson, Attorney General Earl Warren, and Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron, among others, gave credence to the purported threat of the Japanese American community to national security, contrary to military intelligence and FBI reports. Japanese American communities, along with a small pool of individuals generally without organizational support, protested proposals to remove Japanese American communities from their homes, but their efforts went unnoticed or were glossed over. The spatial authority of E.O. 9066 was the legal key to the mass incarceration. The military was able to remove approximately 120,000 ”persons of Japanese ancestry“ by issuing Civilian Exclusion Orders forcing them to move from specifically bounded areas in military zones in the Western United States, Alaska, and parts of Arizona where they were considered potential threats to military security based on their ethnic and racial affinities. The military thus gained jurisdiction over ”people of Japanese ancestry“ by categorizing the entire group as ”Japanese“ and displacing them from the normative rule of law as well as spatially. The orders did not specify people of German or Italian ancestry, nor did they involve the 157,905 people of Japanese ancestry living in the territory of Hawaii. Subsequently, FDR issued E.O 9102 on March 18, 1942, creating the War Relocation Authority (WRA) as a sole-purpose agency for the administration of excluded ”persons of Japanese ancestry“ removed from the military areas and then imprisoned in spaces such as Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers. As Giorgio Agamben elucidates, concentration camps theoretically constitute states of exception, which he defines as ”a no-man’s-land between public law and political fact, and between juridical order and life.“—5 Taking concentration camps such as Auschwitz as his primary examples, he observed the power of the state to create differentiated spaces through exclusion and the resulting absence of juridical order: ”(W)hat is outside is included not simply by means of an interdiction or an internment, but rather by means of the suspension of the juridical order’s validity—by letting the juridical order (…) withdraw from the exception and abandon it.“—6 For Agamben, a point of imbalance between public law and political 109 Lynne Horiuchi

5 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1. 6 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18. footnotes

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fact created by political crises produces a state of exception, resulting in the creation of sites such as concentration camps, internment camps, or prison cities that require an ordering of space outside an exclusionary space. The Relocation Centers, as the U.S. government euphemistically named them, were concentration camps in this sense and not just ”camps,“ as Japanese Americans have often referred to them to minimize their stigmatization. The prison cities were not constituted as prisons under penal law, and they were subject to only one congressional law, Public Law 503, which criminalized non-compliance with exclusion orders. So the means for forcing the population to move into concentration camps was the threat of criminal law. The Relocation Centers were administrated under E.O. 9066 and not by normative penal law, although the prison city boundaries were enclosed with barbed wire and guard towers. Agamben further distinguishes between the simple spaces of confinement sites and the space of concentration camps as absolute spaces of exception. While many normative urban functions had to be established in the American prison cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans in which normative rule of law had been suspended, the prison cities existed in a liminal form without official local, state, or regional status except through federal power. Conditions in the Relocation Centers existed in constant tension between the WRA’s attempt to run the concentration camps as if they were normative American towns, and the prisoners’ participation in, or protest of, civic functions in the cities in which they were imprisoned. The Centers thus essentially functioned as states of exception outside of the rule of law. In spatial, material, and historical terms, three major characteristics distinguish these prison cities as exceptional American urban spaces: 1) the abrogation of civil rights—both Japanese and American; 2) the significant scale of the cities as part of American domestic war-time production; and 3) the participation of the prisoners in the building projects themselves, based in part on New Deal utopian ideals for co-operative living. While these prison cities resonate with Agamben’s work, they differ definitively from other comparative types, such as the German concentration and 110

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death camps in the force of their disciplinary violence, and in local, regional, historical, and national contexts. While the architects’ roles in the design process were important, they were of course limited among the myriad of factors that led to the construction of the concentration camps. In Dislocations and Relocations, I am interested not only in how architects produced the these prison cities as states of exception, but also in asking basic questions about the design, planning, construction, and representation of imprisonment. The basic questions of each chapter are designed to provoke ways of thinking that address Scapegoat’s challenge to how we may begin to abolish prisons. As an architectural historian, I am most interested in the material conditions of the prison cities. Who planned, designed, and constructed the concentration camps? At the macro level, how did the policy direction and planning take place? How did the government build the camps? Who directed and profited from this work? How did they find the raw materials to build the camps when materials were being rationed during the war? What did the prisoners do with their new environments? What did the prisoners themselves plan, design, and build? Finally, how did the government and the prisoners materially constitute national loyalty, citizenship, and community within the prison cities? I’ve organized the chapters thematically to engage major discourses in the fields of architecture, urban studies, and Asian American studies. In the first chapter, I focus on the ethics of architectural practice, examining a wide range of architectural practices—professional, vernacular, and commercial, and ethical problems of designing and building concentration camps. Gathering together a kind of portrait gallery of people in the profession, I review individual and interrelated roles in different kinds of practice to provide a broad examination of the range of individual agency, or lack thereof. The goal is to lay out the uneven participation of designers, planners, and builders in order to define who had more or less power. The subjects of the incarceration were obviously not static objects or victims, and there were clear hierarchies of power for those inside and outside the prison cities. For example, as part of their professional trajectories, incarcerated Japanese and Japanese 111 Lynne Horiuchi

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American architects were disenfranchised, impoverished, and forcibly moved to concentration camps. On their release, they had to reestablish their careers from scratch. This was the uneven ground of competitive career development for all Japanese residents and Japanese Americans unjustly positioned as racial and ethnic subjects, regardless of their pre-war economic or professional circumstances. In the second and third chapters, I document the government policy, urban planning, and building of the Relocation Centers. As a state project, the mass incarceration was at a scale that only the largest New Deal public works projects had witnessed. The New Deal meta-organization of powerful federal agencies and land development in the western United States, plus the utopian ideologies of socially oriented programs of New Deal agencies, had a profound impact not only on the production processes of the mass incarceration, but also on policy formation and administration. However, the most dominant power was leveraged by the military in the process of producing concentration camps. Through the use of spatial jurisdictions, the military was able to claim nearly totalitarian control of large areas of the United States to create and organize disciplinary spaces for which they were able to capture large flows of capital and administrative power to implement the project. It was one of the largest domestic projects undertaken by the U.S. military, rivalled only by the provision of housing for troops and prisoners of war. Under E.O. 9066, the military retained control of the project just long enough to remove ”persons of Japanese ancestry“ from military areas and to build the camps, offering contracts and engaging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others to supervise construction. The Western Defense Command then transferred some of the administrative jurisdiction over the camps to the WRA on December 31, 1942, as defined by an earlier memorandum of agreement from April 17, 1942. The process of creating the concentration camps was complex, requiring coordination across existing federal, state, and local jurisdictions, and the participation and work forces of numerous public agencies and the prisoners themselves. In addition to the FSA, the Census Bureau, the National Regional Planning Boards, and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, powerful land development 112

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agencies were recruited, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Forest Service, the Civil Conservation Corps, the Soil Conservation Service, and the National Park Service. Planning for the concentration camps was a sophisticated and complex process involving topographical surveys, industrial and agricultural infrastructure, and opportunities for the use of evacuee labour in war-related industries and land development. The building of the camps consumed enormous quantities of raw materials and resources with priority clearance through the Army Quartermaster, resources that might have otherwise been diverted to war efforts abroad. As a housing project, two sets of prison cities was to accommodate a population of 130,000 people each. In the first set, seventeen temporary Assembly Centers completed in approximately three months—and in the second set, ten semi-permanent Relocation Centers. Thus, the plan constituted housing for a total aggregate population of 260,000, across a total area of 361,740 acres. Using the U.S. Army and the WRA budgetary reports, an approximate, conservative estimate for the cost of the project between 1942 and 1946 is around $300 million, unadjusted for inflation and without accounting for the expenditures of all participating agencies, non-profit organizations, nor the prisoners’ expenditures in the concentration camps and productivity losses related to their imprisonment. The focus of the fourth chapter is community building, of which I found abundant archival examples during my research. Although the agency of the inmates was very much limited by government policies and the overwhelming dominance of the military, it is possible to lift some of their projects to the surface of the historical record, supplemented by a rich collection of oral history accounts and secondary information. Once they arrived at the Assembly and Relocation Centers, Japanese and Japanese Americans planned, built, and created for themselves urban infrastructure, recreational facilities, and gardens, in addition to creating new government facilities and buildings. Indeed, some of the community building in Relocation Centers was incorporated into WRA building and industrial programs; inmates built infrastructure such as roadways, canals, and dams for wages one-tenth of the going commercial rate. WRA projects were 113 Lynne Horiuchi

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realized through industrial programs, but officials sometimes tolerated completely informal building. Some of the schools at the Colorado River Relocation Center, for example, were built with adobe bricks manufactured on site. Gardens were abundant, often developed with water elements, formal Japanese rock gardens, and shade according to the needs of regional climates. Barrack interiors took on inventive modifications as they were adapted to a wide range of tastes, personal expressions, and needs. In addition to the facilities provided by the government, the prisoners established nearly parallel urban social infrastructure, such as schools, churches, libraries, and recreation facilities, in spite of the limits of the disciplinary control of the WRA. For example, cooperative enterprises such as canteens, a ”moyashi-ya“ or mung bean shop, a tofu factory, shoe repair, beauty shops, and other co-operative businesses funded the construction of recreation facilities in the Colorado River Relocation Center, providing some relief from oppressive state management. Profit from the coops often went directly into the recreation facilities, though they were required to pay rent for space and buildings to the WRA. Community building ranged from micro to macro levels, and from the official to the clandestine, with a remarkable persistence, tenacity, and rhythm. The final chapter examines the punitive nature of the physical material environment of the American concentration camps as a way to understand the dilemmas of national belonging. Having been denied the rights of American citizenship and imprisoned for alleged disloyalty to the United States, Japanese Americans agonized over their approvals or criticisms of U.S. government actions. Japanese residents in the U.S. were denied the right to naturalize as American citizens, so expressing support for the U.S. had the potential to render them stateless. Dominant power and racialized segregation in all the camps were part of the visible material force and design of the concentration camps, most insistently in the monotonous environments of the repeating barrack units. Military guards were housed in separate compounds and kept watch twenty-four hours a day. Searchlights swept through the camps at night. Military police were used to control access points and perimeters, guard jails within the concentration camps, serve as military escorts, and suppress 114

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disturbances or riots. As per military protocol, no fraternization with civilians was permitted. In 1943, the Tule Lake Relocation Center was transformed into a Segregation Center for prisoners considered ”disloyal,“ where the punitive force of everyday material environments intensified. Through a mandatory registration and survey process, the WRA asked all camp prisoners, including the Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants), to foreswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor and swear allegiance to the United States or face relocation to Tule Lake and possible repatriation to Japan. Legally barred from naturalization as American citizens and uncertain of their fate after the war, the survey questions forced the Issei into a stateless condition as traitors to Japan if they swore allegiance to the U.S. or as disloyal inmates subject to repatriation if they swore loyalty to Japan. The survey, which required responses, also asked if they would bear arms to defend the United States; not responding risked segregation at Tule Lake. Political positions greatly impacted the future possibilities of all prisoners, determining whether they would be resettled, serve the military in racially segregated units, enrol in college, or be subjected to other types of incarceration for resisting government orders. Indeed, these difficult decisions split up family units and fragmented community support. The conversion of the Tule Lake Relocation Center into a maximum-security facility required additional housing for 6,000 persons, for a total population of 18,000; additional fencing topped with barbed wire; additional watchtowers and searchlights; and a significant expansion of the military police compound. Following a prisoner strike at the camp in 1944, the WRA and the military imposed martial law, built temporary stockades, permanent stockades, and jails. Transnational tensions that remained somewhat below the surface in other Relocation Centers erupted at Tule Lake Segregation Center, where the difficult decisions of identifying one’s homeland were part of the everyday chaos of life within this concentration camp. In understanding the processes by which prison cities are built, we may better understand the nature of the civil justice issues we must pursue to abolish prisons. The processes are inextricably linked to our concepts of national belonging that must be addressed 115 Lynne Horiuchi

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in answering the question, ”What would you do if you were asked to design a concentration camp for your colleagues?“ Eckbo and DeMars were quite silent about their participation in building prison cities, which may only be understood in more detail through government records. The way in which they related to their colleagues, moreover, raises questions about their interaction with Yuasa and Saito following the war. Both returned to architectural practice in Berkeley, California immediately after the war, with Saito eventually settling in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. For Saito and Yuasa, this meant rebuilding their professional practices after years of disruption and imprisonment for no other reason than their race and ethnicity. They returned to a generally hostile society and without much of the professional support they had held at the moment of their incarceration. This comparatively uneven development of their practices grossly contradicted the assumptions of fair and equal treatment that most Americans ideologically believe normative. The material production of concentration camps is one element in the practice of architecture not often included as part of the discipline’s canonical oeuvre. As large-scale projects sited in liminal spaces under extra-jurisdictional and extra-juridical sovereign powers, the prison cities designed for Japanese and Japanese Americans are important historical examples of the socio-economic and political American architectural landscape. They embody the militarization and capital flow of government funds for racialized mass incarceration and disenfranchisement with practices that relate directly to contemporary events. Fears of sabotage that fuelled the construction of American concentration camps legally and materially haunt the imagined threats ethnic and racialized subjects pose to the national security of the United States today. For example, Agamben illustrated the biopolitical significance of states of exception related to the USA Patriot Act issued on November 13, 2001. This Act eerily mirrors E.O. 9066 in allowing the Attorney General to arrest any alien suspected of activities that endanger the national security of the U.S. The synchronicity between E.O. 9066 and the Patriot Act is doubly alarming because of the historical continuity they constitute. The larger functions of military dominance, the violation of civil liberties, the encoding of people as racially inferior, and their 116

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material confinement are directly related to how American society functions. The book I am writing is intended to draw out the processes and practices of building concentration camps in all their complexities. Revealing the inter-relationships between high architecture, vernacular architecture, urban designs, socio-economic infrastructure, and disciplinary environments will widen the spectrum of practices that are normally considered in prison building. And by better understanding the historical legacy of these inter-relationships, it will hopefully provide more insight into phenomena such as violence targeting difference, the criminalization of people of colour, the detention of immigrants assumed illegal or the racialized violation of civil rights—so that we may abolish prisons. Acknowledgements I thank the MacDowell Colony for their support in completing this article.

117

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↓ Dislocations and Relocations: Designing for Prison Cities, pp 105–117 ↓

Figure 63: Block units of fourteen barracks and communal mess halls, laundries, and latrines built to Army standard specifications, June 1, 1942. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library

152

Figures

Figure 64: George Nakashima creating a model apartment at Minidoka Relocation Center, December 9, 1942. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library 153

Change of Scenery: The Architectural Reach of Electronic Monitoring Lisbet Portman The rate of incarceration in the United States is up to ten times higher than in other Western states, with most of those currently imprisoned being males of visible minority groups under the age of 40, with less education than the average American.—1 A report released in April by the National Academy of Sciences argues that the number of people currently incarcerated is unjustifiable, and that the ”high rates themselves constitute a source of injustice and social harm.“—2 Since the early 1970s, the prison population in the U.S. has increased by unprecedented rates due to aggressive arrest campaigns and harsh sentencing laws for minor drug offenses. The need for major reforms of the prison system has become common in urgent conversations about the impossibility of America’s current trajectory, though most reforms are intended to mitigate fiscal drain rather than correct an unjust paradigm of punishment. Although prisons serve as the conceptual and spatial nucleus of an ostensibly hobbled system, the use of new technologies as alternatives and supplements to the U.S. carceral infrastructure render the drive towards prison ”abolition“ all the more complex. Like most states across the U.S., California is seeking alternatives to incarceration, due in large part to the 2011 Supreme Court ruling that overcrowded prisons in the state violated inmates’ Eighth Amendment rights (protection from cruel and unusual punishment). When ordered to reduce its inmate population, the state drafted a complex piece of legislation that focused on ”realignment,“ which shifted confinement as well as parole responsibilities for nonserious, non-violent, and non-sexual felons (the ”3-N’s“) from the state system to the county level.—3 The use of electronic monitoring (EM) is a primary element of this policy’s strategy. In the context of criminal justice, EM consists of a device that is attached to a person and tracks their location in real-time, often by way of GPS technology. Data are transmitted to a central control station, where any violations of movement restrictions are immediately reported to the wearer’s parole or probation officer. 119

1 National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2014). 2 Ibid., 9. 3 See Joan Petersilia, “Voices from the Field: How California Stakeholders View Public Safety Realignment,” Stanford Criminal Justice Center, January 2014, www.law. stanford.edu/ sites/default/files/ child-page/183091/ doc/slspublic/ Petersilia%20 VOICES%20no%20 es%20Final%20 022814.pdf, and Lisa T. Quan, Sara Abarbanel, and Debbie Mukamal, "Reallocation of Responsibility: Changes to the Correctional Control System in California PostRealignment," Realignment in Review, Vo.l 4, January 2014, www.law.stanford. edu/sites/default/ files/childpage/183091/doc/ slspublic/CC%20 Brief%20Jan%20 14.pdf.

4 Marc Renzema and Evan Mayo-Wilson, “Can Electronic Monitoring Reduce Crime for Moderate to Highrisk Offenders?” Journal of Experimental Criminology 1, no. 2 (2005), 215–237. 5 “CURB Realignment Report Card: Second Edition,” Californians United for a Responsible Budget, March 8, 2014, curb prisonspending. org/curbrealignmentreport-cardsecond-edition.

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The use of EM varies between high- and low-risk populations: it is used on children in cases of truancy, people who have refused to pay child support, drunk drivers, tax evaders, child molesters, and murderers alike.—4 EM is also used to track people who are awaiting trial or completing post-prison sentences. For some, the monitor serves as a true alternative to imprisonment, but for many more, it is an additional restraint. Wearers are typically beholden to a curfew and assigned some form of house arrest. Some are restricted from entering certain zones such as schools, public parks, or specific neighbourhoods. The modern-day manifestation tends to be a bulky, black ankle bracelet, branding the wearer a ”criminal.“ Given the fact that more than sixty percent of people currently being held in U.S. jails are awaiting trial without being convicted of a crime, EM seems like a low-maintenance panacea that relieves pressure on prison capacity. While the release of pre-trial offenders via bail reform is a vital step in decreasing the numbers of those incarcerated, EM in its current application is not a good response to the myriad factors contributing to mass incarceration. While the procedural impact of California’s realignment policy is immediately obvious, its rehabilitative efficacy and success in reducing long-term recidivism is debatable. The legislation has come under scrutiny from various groups in California, such as Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), who argue that the emphasis on ”getting people out“ rather than ”getting people well“ leaves the crucial problem of discriminatory and needless incarceration untouched—and thus aggravated. Shifting parole and probation responsibilities from the state to the county simply transfers the brutalities associated with overcrowding to a different space.—5 Even though California’s incarceration rate is declining, some government officials are trying to channel realignment funds into prison expansion rather than investing in community-based alternatives. Meanwhile, prison conditions remain unchanged and thus far, realignment fails almost entirely to address the epidemic of mental illness among those incarcerated, which is proven to be exacerbated by any length of prison stay, if not its outright cause. Further, those who tout realignment as ”the most sweeping correctional experiment in recent history,“ or ”an 120

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experiment of unparalleled national significance,“ forget the history of such experiments.—6 In the 1980s, a nation-wide investigation into alternatives to incarceration was triggered by problems similar to those the U.S. faces today: in particular, that mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses have led to widespread overcrowding of prisons.—7 At the time, California corrections departments joined others across the country in implementing ”Intensive Supervision Probation/ Parole Projects“ or ISPs, which involved reduced high-risk caseloads, day-reporting centres, and notably, electronic monitoring. The hope was that by participating in these programs, low-risk offenders could avoid prison entirely. When the ISP experiments concluded in 1995, government-funded researchers had gathered a substantial amount of information about the efficacy of certain prison diversion programs. Researchers concluded that increased surveillance had no impact on re-arrest rates when compared to regular supervision or incarceration.—8 Surveillance-oriented programs not only failed to decrease incidents of crime, but they actually contributed to higher rates of incarceration by detecting more technical violations that would previously have been invisible or excused. The programs being put into practice today seem to ignore these crucial findings and contribute to perpetuating, and perhaps even aggravating, high rates of incarceration. By 2004, most monitoring systems had become GPSbased, which despite technical troubles due to spotty wireless coverage, enabled agencies to track wearers in real-time. In 2012, San Francisco County announced plans to triple the size of its EM program, and the number of ”participants“ continues to rise. While house arrest is no doubt preferable to a stay behind bars, many people upon release are being put on monitoring as an additional means of constraint. In such cases, the use of EM is extending the length and intensity of a sentence, rather than relieving it. Electronic monitoring is often conflated with prison reform, but in most cases, it is used to intensify punishment—the pulse and poison of our justice system. Behavioural scientists have been studying the impact of punishment for the past thirty-five years and a basic principle has since been established: punishment does not change behaviour; it temporarily suppresses it.—9 While a person 121 Lisbet Portman

6 Petersilia, “Voices from the Field.” Abstract. and Quan, Abarbanel, Mukamel, Reallocation of Responsibility. Summary. 7 Robert S. Gable and Ralph Kirkland Gable, “A New Image for Probation?” National Association of Probation Executives: Executive Exchange (Winter 2007). 8 Petersilia, “Voices from the Field.” 9. Renzema and Mayo-Wilson, “Can Electronic Monitoring Reduce Crime?” 216.

10 Ibid.

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may submit to rules in order to avoid punishment, when the threat is removed, the original behaviour is likely to reoccur. Thus the alltoo-common occurrence that once supervision ends, the rate of criminal behaviour increases. But this has led many to conclude that monitoring is necessary, rather than a re-evaluation of the efficacy of punishment. Again and again alternatives perpetuate the failed punitive code, yet we refuse as a public to attempt the only successful alternative: rehabilitation. The EM program is a prime example of reform gone awry. The first radio-frequency monitoring prototypes were designed by the Gable twins at Harvard University in the 1960s. At the time, Robert Gable was studying behavioural psychology alongside B.F. Skinner, and Ralph Gable was on the Science Committee on Psychological Experimentation studying under the supervision of Timothy Leary, a psychologist famous for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. The monitoring systems were intended to promote positive behavioural change and rehabilitation in juvenile delinquents, as surveillance (via bulky monitors housed in unsightly fanny packs) was paired with intensive therapy. Despite documented success in helping juveniles stay out of prison indefinitely, widespread paranoia surrounding the prospect of man-machine interdependence cast doubt over the viability of the project. This fearful scepticism, paired with financial and technological challenges that drained the Gables’ funding, relegated the project into a brief hiatus. In 1983, Judge Jack Love of New Mexico was reading a Spiderman comic and had a somewhat recycled epiphany. The judge pitched his idea to create a tracking system for low-level offenders to Honeywell, a company that ”tackles global issues with technology,“ but they didn’t bite. Judge Love eventually partnered with a computer salesman named Michael Goss, who quit his job to begin working on a device that in its first run kept three men (convicted of petty burglary, DUI, and fraudulent check-writing, respectively) out of an Albuquerque prison and instead sentenced to house arrest.—10 Years later, Goss started National Incarceration Monitoring and Control Services (NIMCOS), marking the beginning of the lucrative ”technocorrections“ industry. Other companies began experimenting with ”continuous signalling“ technologies consisting of radio transmitters 122

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and programmable receivers that were placed in the offender’s home and connected to telephone lines. Within three years NIMCOS was acquired by BI Inc., a company that would soon become the largest provider of monitoring services in the U.S. By 1987, twenty-one states had cultivated monitoring programs of their own and were amply supplied by twenty private suppliers. Today, an elite descendent of Love and Goss’s device clings to the ankles of more than 200,000 Americans. In a 1969 article for Psychology Today, entitled ”A Belt from Big Brother,“ Robert Gable predicted the potential transformation of their hopeful creation: ”(S)ingle technical innovations often affect our lives to a degree unforeseen by the originator.“—11 The use of monitoring devices today bears only a slim resemblance to the system developed by the Gable brothers some fifty years ago. The original prototype was intended ”not to enhance compliance but to help offenders gain self esteem and socially valued skills.“—12 Their method entailed rewarding even the smallest steps towards improvement, ”a monitoring transmitter might be conceptualized as a ‘social prosthetic device’ similar to a walker that is downgraded to a crutch, then to a cane, and finally abandoned.“—13 This vital cooperation between physical technology and social connectivity was gradually discarded in the name of punishment. Without adequate systems in place for promoting positive behavioural change, the use of monitoring devices is irrelevant and irresponsible: ”Extant EM programs seem akin to giving aspirin to a mixed group of hospital patients and then wondering why their underlying diseases have not been cured.“—14 Yet, EM in its current form enjoys considerable favour with the public, due to the widespread and misleading media narrative that celebrates the device for its relatively cheap and supposedly rapid relief of pressing problems. The device itself has no mechanism capable of deterring criminal activity, but corrections officials, EM manufacturers, and defence attorneys exaggerate the capacity of monitoring to keep the public safe in order to bolster participant numbers and quell concerns. As Gable and Gable write, ”terms such as ‘electronic handcuffs’ or ‘electronic jail cell’ imply a physical deterrence that does not exist. These fanciful descriptions have 123 Lisbet Portman

11 Robert L. Schwitzgebel, “A Belt from Big Brother,” Psychology Today, April 1969. 12 Ralph Kirkland Gable and Robert S. Gable, “Electronic Monitoring: Positive Intervention Strategies,” Federal Probation 69, no. 1 (2005), 1. www.uscourts. gov/uscourts/ FederalCourts/ PPS/Fedprob/ 2005-06/ intervention.html. 13 Ibid., 4. 14 Ibid., 2.

15 Gable and Gable, “A New Image for Probation?” 2.

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appeal to the public that generally wants a ‘get tougher’ policy toward offenders.“—15 Such idealism is upheld by stories about the lowest-risk offenders, people who previously would have been released on parole or probation but are now assigned anklets, who complete their due time and are then held up as proof of the program’s success. People who wouldn’t have run—people like Mari. I waited at the only café on Treasure Island, San Francisco, where a young waitress hurried to remedy the music situation on her iPod: Celine Dion can ruin a hot afternoon. Two regulars sat far from each other, eating. They appeared slowly, he with a silver ponytail and she with a bob. Mari introduced the tall man as her boyfriend, adding ”he won’t bother us.“ He secured a dark corner in the carpeted section of the café while I bought a lemonade for myself and a sweating purple energy drink for Mari, which she opened expertly, saying ”My son says this stuff is addictive.“ ”Pick your battles.“ Mari, now 53, did ten years of a twenty-year sentence for embezzlement in the early 2000s and managed to stay out of trouble the entire time she was inside. Now she stands as one of the poster children for a realignment-funded pilot program that offers certain lowrisk female offenders early release from prison if they agree to wear a monitor and attend a residential treatment centre. When Mari heard about the new program she assumed her acceptance into the program would be easy, but the classification committee felt differently. ”They don’t want anyone to leave prison and they make it extremely difficult to get out,“ she said, ”everyone I know that is on an ankle monitor has gone through the same kind of hell that I went through.“ She was initially denied on several accounts. One, because she owed too much restitution money, ”and the chances of that getting paid while I’m in prison are…“ Another, because she hadn’t participated in the Substance Abuse Program during her time inside, even though she wasn’t incarcerated for any drug-related offense, ”they make this shit up because they don’t have any intention of letting you go.“ Many women are denied early release due to minutiae pertaining to their 124

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living spaces. Corrections Department representatives will complete home visits and report back: ”dog in house, dirty,“ ”mould in basement,“ or ”no indoor plumbing.“ Mari’s is an inside-out story. She embezzled funds directly from her cubicle at the District Attorney’s office: ”That’s why they were so hard on me, if they could have they would have hung me out by the tree.“ Prior to that position, she worked as a police officer for twelve years, a fact she shared with no one until the committee asked after her employment history. But they had no record of her ever having been a member of the department, as ”the office told them I’d volunteered once or something.“ They assumed Mari was lying and she was officially denied early release. It turned out that her son had become ”quite the spokesperson“ for her while she was serving the first ten years of her sentence. When he heard about his mother’s predicament, he called the senator’s office to work his magic. Days later, she was accepted into the program.

picture?“

”Well thank god for your son.“ ”He kinda looks like you, only he’s 6’5“. You want to see a

She dug through her purse for a folded photograph: Christmas time, a tall skinny redhead sat pressed against a grinning girl in a roomy booth. ”You wanna see something else?“ Mari heaved her foot onto the rickety table and tugged up her pant leg. ”It’s huge!“ The device hung loosely from her ankle. ”It is, isn’t it? Brian! She likes my bracelet!“ Other than that, there was little drama in her telling. I tried to steer the conversation down towards the monitor, but for Mari it doesn’t haunt her as it does for many others. Getting it on was ”no big thing,“ the parole officer clamped the loop closed with a tool. When she gets it removed in seventy-six days, the same officer will snip it off with a pair of store-bought scissors. ”The physical thing I could have done without,“ she admits, ”you could take it off right now and it wouldn’t be any different, but they don’t get that and I don’t expect 125 Lisbet Portman

16 “The GEO Group Announces Acquisition of BI Incorporated,” BI.com, December, 21 2010, bi.com/ geo_group_ announces_ acquisition_of_bi_ incorporated.

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them to.“ The device seems to her little more than a mean joke and a royal pain. She shrugs towards Brian, ”I can’t go anywhere overnight,“ and cracked a smile. The monitor has to be plugged in every day from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM. It never comes off: ”get up in the morning and I am tethered to my bed so I unplug it and go about my day. I could probably go to Europe if I could get back by ten.“ Mari’s monitor hasn’t caused her any severe trouble because she answers first to the rules of the residential program where she resides. On evenings when she has to work late and can’t ”plug in“ until 1:00 AM, there is no fatal alarm. Her probation officer simply calls the program director to confirm the reason for her absence. People who don’t have the same support system in place can be tossed back inside for unexplored technical glitches or the normal mishaps that sometimes make people late. A significant portion of the population on monitoring and awaiting trial is homeless, without reliable access to a power source for charging the monitor at night. In such cases, wearing the device increases their chances of being re-incarcerated. Why then, as a low-risk ”3N“ offender who is already privy to intensive rules governing her everyday life, is Mari being monitored at all? Although the prison system destroys thousands of lives every day, it fills the pockets of a powerful few. Writer, teacher, and activist James Kilgore emphasizes the oft-forgotten fact that EM is an industry as well as a policy device. Within the criminal justice system issues of funding have much more sway in defining policy than do concerns with humane treatment or reducing crime. In order to increase revenue, companies like the GEO group (a provider of correctional, detention, and re-entry services) constantly need to expand their user base. In 2010, GEO bought BI Inc., the leading EM manufacturer in the U.S. By 2011, their total annual revenues amounted to more than $1.6-billion.—16 Kilgore served a six-year prison sentence and spent one year on EM as a result of his involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army, the left-wing revolutionary group active in the early 1970s. On top of the novel that he penned during his time in a maximum-security prison, Kilgore has written extensively about the 126

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criminal justice system and specifically, the complexities of electronic monitoring. Unlike Mari, his experience on the monitor ”was just like a form of electronic caging,“ in that it negatively impacted every aspect of his so-called ”freedom,“ from employment opportunities to relationships. He argues that the physical constraints of monitoring programs and the social stigma associated with the device isolates wearers during the particularly difficult re-entry period, a time when social interaction and community involvement are vital predictors of future success. Mari did not use to be an abolitionist. She says: ”I used to think prison was an appropriate place for some people,“ but after watching the system flex for ten long years she realized that ”there are a hundred other possibilities to make a person whole again instead of pouring proceeds into the Corrections Department—that’s what they are doing and most people are laughing all the way to the bank.“ She doesn’t attribute any part of her sobriety, growth, or gratitude to the monitor around her ankle, nor to the years she spent in confinement, but rather to the work she has done post-release in processing groups at the residential facility. Now, she thinks prisons should be replaced by programs like the one she is currently in, but in the meantime, they are struggling. The day after we met, two California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) employees came and built a fence right through the centre of the residential facility where Mari is currently being housed, halving the space without explanation. ”I don’t understand what is going on, but it has to do with funding,“ she admits. Under the supposed goals of the realignment strategy, this is the kind of program that should be receiving more funds. Instead, money is being invested in EM and other ”high-tech“ gadgets such as gunshot detectors. Mari says she knows where the money goes. In spite of the good intentions of legislators, the CDCR and the Prison Guards Union have their own agenda: ”To make sure prison guards stay employed, the more people in prisons, the better off they are.“ She thinks the CDCR has too much leeway in deciding who can be released and who cannot: ”They could easily let 25,000 people out tomorrow and the crime rate wouldn’t go up, but they are terrified of losing their jobs, their swimming pools. That’s just not gonna happen, and they disguise it in all sorts of ways.“ 127 Lisbet Portman

17 James Kilgore, “Technocorrections, Ankle Bracelets and Mass Incarceration: Toward A Research Agenda for Electronic Monitoring in the U.S.” (article in progress). 18 While most people who are convicted of a sex offense have committed crimes of a sexual nature, some have committed a crime that falls under a sexual category. Such crimes can include public urination, breastfeeding and “sexting.” Crimes under this category often receive harsher sentencing than violent crimes, as these laws assume that sex offenders will reoffend. See Richard Tewksbury and Wesley G. Jennings, “Assessing the Impact of Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification on Sex-offending Trajectories,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 37, no. 5, (2010): 570–582. 19 This name has been changed to protect identity. 20 Kerana Todorov, “Malfunctioning GPS bracelet triggers false arrest,” Napa Valley Register, November 4, 2011, http://napaval leyregister.com/ news/local/ malfunctioninggps-bracelettriggers-falsearrest/article_ 8e410026-069411e1-972a001cc4c03286. html.

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The modern program of EM is unsubstantiated by evidence proving its efficacy. Of the scant research that does exist, monitoring is not considered superior to alternative tactics such as ”penal code reform, intensive probation, or psychotherapy“ in reducing the psychological burden of imprisonment and decreasing the rates of recidivism.—17 Said research also foregoes considerations regarding one’s quality of life and ability to participate in their community while being monitored. If one of the primary purposes of EM is, as stated by proponents, to help people re-enter society, then the rules associated with wearing the device should not inhibit one’s ability to do so. Corrections departments fail to consider how wearers will spend their days while monitored. What if a family member needs to go to the hospital past curfew? How should wearers manage the stigma associated with it? Do you go around wearing shorts? How do you excuse yourself from dinner if you have to plug in? Likewise, few establishments are eager to hire an ex-felon on a monitoring device (probation officers can show up at one’s home or place of work unannounced). Depending on each situation, EM can be a burden or a constant threat of return to prison; the device never hangs neutral. Because EM has been used on sex offenders for some time (in certain states, sex offenders must be monitored for life), the experience of this population is key to understanding the intricacies of surveillance without support. Sex offenders are the modern day lepers, ”they have to prove their right to exist,“ says Kilgore, ”and as a group they are easy to vilify because the most extreme forms of the crimes are easily categorized as anti-human and anti-child, things people can’t possibly understand or comprehend.“ In reality, however, the definition of ”sex offense“ ranges from public urination to child molestation.—18 Napa County Corrections Department sought Robert Gable’s advice in the case of a man named ”F.O.“—19, who got in trouble with the county for climbing onto his roof and spying on his neighbours.—20 Upon printing photographs of local women undressing, he was arrested and sent to state prison. When he was released on parole, F.O. was issued a monitoring device, and his transition back into the community was unsurprisingly difficult. He was found working 128

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in a field beside a high school, thus violating the strict boundaries set for him as a sex offender. After being picked up by the county, F.O. was issued yet another ankle monitor, so he had to wear two: one from the county and one from the state. One night, F.O. was asleep in his bed when one of the monitors went off and a voice-command began barking on repeat, ”Return to your assigned area immediately! Return to your…“ He was subsequently arrested even though the monitor on the other leg showed that he was precisely where he should have been. After much deliberation, the monitoring company admitted they had made an error. Technical malfunctions or ”false positives“ are commonplace with these devices, but often the ”criminal“ is punished without question. Had F.O. not been assigned two monitors, one of which functioned properly, he would have been locked up for life. The Miami area offers a fine example of terrible EM planning and implementation. One county designed spatial restrictions for sex offenders so carelessly that over 100 people on electronic monitoring could ”legally“ reside only under a bridge. After complaints from community members about the makeshift campsite found there, the city declared a small patch of ground near the bridge a public park, thereby making the bridge out-of-bounds for sex offenders. A similar story gained national attention when a group of people in Miami who were convicted of sex offenses moved together to a rural community because they couldn’t find any place to live reasonably within the city due to the strict exclusion zones. They called the community Miracle Village. Such legally defined exclusion zones exist in every city across the nation. Electronic monitoring radically transposes the prison cell to the home: release from prison does not mean freedom but ”preferable“ confinement. The recent increase of house arrest sentences, in conjunction with EM as a quick-fix to budget crises and overcrowding, is particularly haunting when considered in light of the steady rise of gentrification in urban spaces: ”Who has a right to be where?“ In a city like San Francisco, where sinister ordinances and legal mechanisms are commonly used to force unwanted people out, it is not difficult to imagine a cityscape where invisible ”restrictions“ pervade low-income neighbourhoods as ”community129 Lisbet Portman

21 Gable and Gable, “A New Image for Probation?” 3. 22 Kilgore, “Technocorrections, Ankle Bracelets and Mass Incarceration.”

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based alternatives.“ Because the majority of low-income families live in certain city districts, these same areas often have the highest populations of ex-felons. Rather than contributing to the abolition of prisons, EM instead places the burden of confinement onto communities and families by transforming homes into cells. A majority of the monitors in use today are technologically faulty (there are no legal requirements for pre-testing), and probation officers are often overloaded with cases, both of which problems lead to hazardous holes in the system. Most of the current news coverage about EM involves horror stories that begin with people cutting off their bracelets and either disappearing or committing a heinous crime. In a recent California case, it took days for parole officers to realize that two men had cut off their bracelets. By the time the two men were declared missing, they had already murdered a woman and discarded her body at a trash-sorting facility. As the investigation intensified, more victims were discovered. The two convicted men were high-risk offenders and had cut off their monitors once before. With adequate oversight, they should have been assigned rigorous supervision and treatment. When accidents such as this happen, and they always do, the public is as quick to renounce EM as it was to embrace it, claiming that the device is insufficient for dealing with ”criminals“ who cannot be controlled. Indeed, it is far easier to blame a faulty object than a broken system. Terrible crimes have been committed by people wearing monitors, and terrible crimes have been committed by people who are not, but as Robert and Ralph Gable state, ”unrealistic expectations increase the probability of a backlash of public opinion.“—21 Kilgore suspects that electronic monitoring in its current form will not last long, but that ”the surveillance technology of which EM is a subset is a permanent fixture in our society.“—22 Surveillance technologies are becoming more advanced, pervasive, and commonplace by the day, in ways that most people have not considered. The Quantified Self (QS) movement, for example, is an international collaboration among makers and users of self-tracking tools. With access to the appropriate tools, you can track just about anything: quality of sleep, steps taken, caloric intake, emotion, frequency of twitching, time management, sexual satisfaction, 130

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productivity, etc. QS Operators lift meaning from raw data. While trends in technology do not necessarily distinguish between populations, the applications do. For vulnerable groups such as exfelons, the very data that enables certain people to increase their quality of life can also be used to punish others. Once caught up in the web of the prison system, one is forever condemned to a world defined by threats of punishment and ultimately, reincarceration. As long as we live in a punitive society, privacy remains a concern. For the past three years, James Kilgore has been working as a temporary faculty member at the University of Illinois and has since secured an impeccable reputation among faculty and students alike. In the spring of this year, he played a vital role in keeping a prison in the area from being built. While many applauded his accomplishment, those invested in the proposed prison moved quickly. On February 9, 16, and 23, 2014, the local right-wing paper, The News-Gazette, ran three articles attacking Kilgore by highlighting his criminal past and questioning why the University would hire an ex-felon.—23 On April 9, Kilgore was informed that his contract of employment would not be renewed in the future. Kilgore writes: ”The existing regimes of EM, while having provided some relief from incarceration, have done little to reframe the punishment paradigm which continues to dominate our criminal justice system.“—24 Any alternative to incarceration, no matter how well funded or expertly staffed, will contribute to the carceral rot if operating upon a theory of punishment. Kilgore’s current situation evidences how far we are, even within so-called progressive institutions such as the University of Illinois, from revising such a theory. Fifty years after the original prototype was created, EM is being deployed at rapidly increasing rates as a low-cost alternative to incarceration. Yet the utopian impulse too often swerves towards purposes of punishment and profit. Prisons play the part of ”elsewhere“ for a comfortable public. The oft-muted aesthetic of their architecture and placement makes it so that most people need not notice. Only from a rare bird’s-eye view does the haunting geometry of these facilities cause people to question them. But systems of ”justice“ are becoming more translucent. Budget crises and issues 131 Lisbet Portman

23 Jim Dey, “In Plain Sight,” The NewsGazette, February 9, 2014, www. news-gazette. com/news/local/ 2014-02-09/jimdey-plain-sight. html. 24 Kilgore, “Technocorrections, Ankle Bracelets and Mass Incarceration.”

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of overcrowding are driving corrections departments across the U.S. to reach across barbed property lines and adopt more subtle roofs— each day little prisons erupt in the neighbourhoods of the ”free,“ seemingly detached from the source but wedded by similar constraints. A revised panopticon is thus created by way of electronic devices. Until the punitive paradigm of the criminal justice system is replaced with one of rehabilitation, familiar humiliations will be housed in different spaces. We can expect that new technologies will simply buttress the current framework as it stands. When Mari is released from EM in seventy-six days, she and Brian will move into a ”cute little apartment“ in San Francisco. The rent is terribly steep, but Brian has two more years on parole and he is required to live within city limits. Until then, ”I feel like I am still incarcerated. It may be less structured, it may be less restrictive, but it’s still theirs. They still have me.“

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Agit-Prop Against HIV Criminalization FUCKLAWS Collective [Figures 65–66, pp 197–198] It is fitting that that the FUCKLAWS collective appear for the first time in a journal publication called Scapegoat, since thematically, our subject contends with just that: the use of punishment towards a distinct population in order to instill terror into a wider one, i.e. that of Canada’s estimated 84,000 HIV positive people. The FUCKLAWS collective has something to say about this. HIV positive people in Canada live in constant fear of being criminalized. Before the advent of highly effective anti-retroviral medication, moral panic around the spread of HIV created a legal precedent, steeped in fear and stigma, that required all HIV positive people to inform their sexual partners that they are carriers of the virus in order for any sex act to be considered consensual. Since the earliest criminal cases to employ this AIDS-crisis-era precedent, Canada has become a world leader in the prosecution of what is known as ”HIV non-disclosure.“—1 In such cases, people who fail to prove that they have disclosed their status to a partner are considered to have committed sexual assault. Although HIV is now treatable using a variety of medications that can prevent carriers from transmitting the virus through sexual contact, the legal framework has maintained the stigmatization of HIV-positive people’s bodies in favour of what is seen as a necessary deterrent to protect HIV-negative (and ipso facto innocent) citizens. This solution, a throwback to AIDS crisis-era paranoia, is putting HIV-positive people in prison using the full force of police investigation, harassment, public denunciation, prosecutorial flair, and court ambivalence to things such as medical science. The FUCKLAWS collective was formed out of a one-time creative workshop at Concordia University’s Centre for Exhibition and Research in the Aftermath of Violence (CEREV) with visiting facilitator Avram Finkelstein. A member of activist art collective Gran Fury, and a founding member of the Silence Equals Death Collective,—2 Finkelstein was in Montreal to deliver the presentation ”Collective Queer Cultural 157

1 Sarah Schulman, “Canada’s Vicious HIV Laws: How the Supreme Court Redefined Safe Sex,” Slate.com, May 5, 2014, www. slate.com/articles/ health_and_ science/medical_ examiner/2014/05/ canada_ criminalizes_ nondisclosure_of_ hiv_status_shifts_ responsibility_ from.html. 2 NYC-based activist art collective Gran Fury was founded in 1988. Their poster art has become canonical in the history of AIDS art, particularly their 1987 AIDSGATE and 1989 KISSING DOESN’T KILL. Contrary to popular belief, the iconic Silence = Death poster was created by a distinct but overlapping group of activist artists, including Finkelstein, who was interviewed in FUSE Magazine (19 September 2013): http:// fusemagazine. org/2013/09/ silenceequals.

3 “HIV Criminalization Discourages HIV Testing, Creates Disabling and Uncertain Legal Environment for People with HIV in U.S.” from The Sero Project: National Criminalization Survey, HIV Justice Network, July 25, 2012, www.hivjustice. net/news/hivcriminalisationdiscourages-hivtesting-createsdisabling-anduncertain-legalenvironment-forpeople-with-hiv-inu-s-press-release.

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Production, AIDS, and the Public Sphere“ as part of the Concordia Community Lecture Series on HIV/AIDS at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in January 2014. The following day, Finkelstein joined a dozen students, artists, activists, and community members—both HIV positive and not—in a day-long workshop on how to create visual messaging on an issue that haunts all HIV-positive people, no matter how diligent they are about disclosing their status. The issue of HIV non-disclosure as a crime has received increased attention since two 2012 Canadian Supreme Court decisions known as R. v. Mabior and R. v. D.C. These contentious decisions still allow HIV-positive people to be accused of sexual assault simply for not disclosing their status to a partner. The nuance that HIV-positive people could be deemed innocent if they use a condom and have a very low viral load, is unlikely to help curb the rate of prosecutions since what remains is this: the carriers of the virus are still required to prove their innocence and are essentially considered guilty by virtue of having HIV. The fact that women have less control over how and when condoms are used (in heterosexual sex) and that it is harder for HIV-positive women to attain an undetectable viral load was not taken into consideration by the court. Paraphrasing one prominent woman HIV/AIDS activist’s response to the decisions: we’re all still just one bad break-up away from a malicious accusation, and potentially, a prison term. It is also widely acknowledged that the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure discourages people from getting tested (2) and that such laws have no positive impact on public health. UNAIDS and the U.S.-based HIV Justice Network have confirmed growing anecdotal evidence from front-line HIV/AIDS workers that the criminalization of non-disclosure does nothing to stem the spread of the virus. Rather, the fear of criminal accusations and imprisonment discourage HIVaffected people from getting tested because deniability would preclude such accusations from having any legal impact.—3 Hence the message from the FUCKLAWS flash collective’s day together: ”I HAVE HIV CALL THE COPS“ and the corollary ”GET TESTED—GET ARRESTED“ were created in order to draw attention to the disproportionate use of state and police force against an already stigmatized population. Taking our cue from Gran Fury’s sometimes brash style (particularly the Reagan remixes ”AIDSGATE“ and ”He 158

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Kills Me“) and Aids Action Now’s ”Think Twice“—4 campaign, the message is directed both to an uninformed public and to readers who might consider availing themselves of unjust criminal laws to persecute their sexual partners. In light of Montreal student activists’ tense relationship with an increasingly powerful and nefarious police force, the photo contained in the image is particularly pertinent: police, as the physical manifestation of the law’s force, can be tools of oppression, manipulated by unfounded fears, such as the fear of having an educated populace with access to universal, affordable post-secondary tuition.—6 The image calls on the reader to reconsider what involving the police in cases of consensual sex with an HIV-positive person could mean: that the legal treatment of HIV non-disclosure does not serve to protect anyone, but rather holds the fear of incarceration like a sword of Damocles over an already stigmatized population. Follow us for more agit-prop, rage-art, gifs, and potential future actions, at http://fucklaws.tumblr.com.

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4 “Criminalisation of HIV Non-Disclosure, Exposure, and Transmission: Background and Current Landscape,” UNAIDS, February 2012, www.unaids.org/ en/media/unaids/ contentassets/ documents/ document/2012/ BackgroundCurrentLandscapeCriminalisationHIV_Final.pdf. 5 “Think Twice: HIV is Not a Crime,” Aids Action Now, October 16, 2013, www. aidsactionnow. org/?p=1149. 6 The image chosen for the background was meant to reference the UN-condemned use of excessive police force during Québec’s highly publicized 2012 student strike, which sought through civil disobedience to oppose the Liberal Charest government’s highly unpopular proposed tuition increase.

Figures

↓ FUCKLAWS: Agit-Prop Against HIV Criminalization, pp 157–159 ↓

Figure 65 197

Je Suis Seropositif  Appelle Les Flics!

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Figure 66 I Have HIV  Call The Cops!

198

Towards an Architectural Explosion of the Oubliette text by Eileen Wennekers, project by Patrick Casey, illustration by Peter Sherratt Architectural emotion: that’s when the work resounds inside us in time with a universe whose law we are subject to, recognize, and admire. When certain relationships are achieved, we are apprehended by the work. Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture—1 I The prison is a carceral machine simultaneously producing visibility and invisibility. To be incarcerated is to be divested of the wherewithal to be visible in public. It is also to be made an object of constant politicized surveillance. Positioned by the lines of force delineating carceral space, the incarcerated body is dismembered into an invisible and a visible entity by a mirror-box-function that produces the effect of the prisoner. This symbolic bait-and-switch caves in the ground of self-consciousness that mediates our sense of integral self through the gaze of the Other.—2 To pass through the threshold of the prison is to experience a violent bereavement that leaves those who suffer this with no place to be. It is for this reason that we state that contemporary techniques of incarceration stage a return to the institution of the oubliette. She embodies a political subjectivity that congeals a total lack of recognition and consequently does not figure. By means of these functions, the mechanism of incarceration exchanges subjects for ciphers. Both the labour forced from prisoners contracted by the state to capitalist forms and the symbolic labour of political disappearance operate to abstract the subject from herself. What remains is a mode of being reduced to a closed circuit through which the prisoner’s pain—the pain of 161

1 Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture. Transl. John Goodman (Los Angelos: Getty Publications, 2007), 97. 2 “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 50. See also GWF Hegel’s discussion of recognition in “The LordBondsman’s Dialectic” (The Phenomenology of Spirit) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s in “The Existence of Others: The Look” (Being and Nothingness). Similarly, Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek insist on the dependency of subjectivity upon the fantasy of symbolic recognition by the Other.

3 While we can think of the cipher, in visual terms, as the always-masked vanishing point of perspectival representation, it can also be thought of as a code with a one-to-one correspondency of translation, and therefore, as an medium of pure referential exchange without residue. The subjectivity of the prisoner is a cipher precisely because she is reduced to her function as a prisoner. No particularity adheres to her. She is rendered a totally universal signifier – a body, but without recognition, emptied of particularity; in the Hegelian sense, totally negated. 4 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald NicholsonSmith. 3rd edition (New York: Zone, 1995), 33–4 5 Michel Foucault, Disclipine and Punish, 2nd edition (New York: Vintage, 1995), 5. We argue that the iteration of carceral techniques described by Foucault is grounded in the industrial mode of production and the modernist nation state: “The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised

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the subtraction into a state of pure corporeality—pulses as an affect without symbolic register.—3 Following Guy Debord, we diagnose the dialectical movement of capitalist logic as a mutation of its configuration towards necessity, and, therefore, the body: Replacing that necessity by the necessity of boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs, now met in the most summary manner, by a ceaseless manufacture of pseudo-needs, all of which come down in the end to just one – namely, the pseudoneed for the reign of an autonomous economy to continue—4 While labour in the late capitalist mode of production continues to be abstracted from our corporeal beings, the valorization process is now autonomous from our biological existence. This form of class exploitation requires a corresponding intensification of the carceral machine: The prisoner is forced to perform the limit case of our fundamental bodily incompatibility with the imperatives of capital accumulation, making manifest our new collective political entity as subjects who are physically surplus to the economy.—5 It is to this remaking, this reform, that we may apply Foucault’s observation: ”Hence the expression, so frequently heard, so consistent with the function of punishment, though contrary to the strict theory of penal law, that one is in prison to ‘pay one’s debt.’“—6 II To the law-abiding citizen, the prison cell appears as a black-box whose functions mediate the implosion we have described. It masks and disavows both the potential of the citizen’s own incarceration and her ideological identification with a state judiciary power whose organizing principle, thought in terms of the visual, can only be described as ob-scene.—7 Therefore, we suggest a counter-move: Construct a structure that deploys the carceral machine, and its scopic force, against itself. 162

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In order to do so we have designed a model that replicates the spatial characteristics of a standard prison cell and of a prison cell which may be assembled in a public place. The proposed structure is designed to have the full dimensions of a standard prison cell (6 ft. x 8 ft. x 8 ft. tall) while being of easily portable size and weight. This is accomplished using a modular design incorporating threaded steel pipe that can be hand tightened into standard pipe fittings. The steel pipe is standard 1 inch schedule 80 black steel pipe available in most hardware stores. The pipe lengths are threaded at the ends and treated with teflon tape to allow ease of assembly/disassembly and to allow hand tightening. The pipe lengths are as follows: six 8 foot lengths, five 6 foot lengths, and eight 4 foot lengths (exact lengths to be determined during initial construction). The required pipe fittings are as follows: eight ”corner“ splits, two tees, and two 4-way splits. [Figure 67, p 199] This replication of the cell will be a frame structure, meaning that the people that we recruit to inhabit the cell will not be invisible, but will, rather, occupy in their bodily particularity the blind spot that the prison cell generates through its two-fold negation of the prisoner’s social being. We hope that those who choose to participate by inhabiting the structure will experience a moment of shocking identification with the subjectivity which we have described above as agonizingly impossible under any but an obscene regime of visibility. We would also hope that these acts of compassion will be confronted with what the black box of the cell currently scars over in our cultural imagination. III In her recent Alexander Lecture, Judith Butler identified ”the interdiction against appearing“ in the public square as the ”condition of imprisonment.“—8 Informed by this observation, it is our hope that the deployment of this structure, and its habitation by participants who are recruited from and may appear in the public square, will make manifest a moment of collective empathy with 163 Eileen Wennekers

by society as a whole”(5). The lines of force aligning our subjectivity have changed with the mutation in the mode of production, described by Jean Baudrillard as the advent of the “structural law of value” and roughly datable to the advent of fiat currency and digital logistics in the early 1970s (Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage, 2007), 10. Accordingly, the phenomena of visibility and invisibility also resonate at different frequencies now than they did at the time of Foucault’s analysis. 6 Foucault, 232–3. Avant la lettre, Arendt qualifies Foucault’s proposition — that visibility is a technique of state power — by introducing the category of the social. This space is “neither public nor private,” strictly speaking, and is “a relatively new phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern state and which found its political form in the nation state” (Arendt, 28). As social subjects inhabiting the nation state we are interpellated by “innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to “normalize” its members, to make them behave” (Arendt, 40). This mode of social practice — ie. Disciplinary education, is cited in the rhetoric of rehabilitation.

The prison’s structure and accompanying determinations are applied to the reconditioning of the prisoner as a productive member of society. 7 As a prefix, obmay indicate against, or signal an inversion or reversal of the noun it modifies. Here, the term to indicate that the prisoner is subjected to an encounter with the other that enacts an inversion of the primal scene of Hegelian recognition 8 Judith Butler, Alexander Lecture, “Public Assembly and Plural Action,” University College, University of Toronto, February 11, 2014.

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prisoners by agents of popular sovereignty. To participate in staging this scene as if imprisonment is not a possible consequence of resistance, despite knowing very well that it could be, is a praxis in which ”vulnerability is mobilized as a political instrument.“—10 Accepting the ethical imperative ”not to regard the body as an instrument of political claims but to make the conditions and requirements of the body the site or origin of political claims,“ this project may also achieve the complementary aim of demonstrating that the tendency to think political subjectivity as abstracted from our bodies is not grounded in any necessary quality of the political as such.—9 By these means we reclaim a place from which to contradict the hegemony of what Arendt describes as the social, and that Foucault localizes in the disciplined body. Rejecting incarceration, we pursue the establishment of a solidarity grounded in all of our singularity and difference, unified in our alignment not with an abstract or abstracted political cause but rather by the desire that each of us be honoured alike.

9 For a detailed discussion of the implications of this notion for political praxis see Mary Eileen Wennekers, “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Then as a Post-Apocalyptic Helicopter Flight with No Certain Prospect of a Safe Landing,” The Word Hoard: Vol. 1: Iss. 2, Article 5, 2013. 10 Butler, Alexander Lecture, “Public Assembly and Plural Action”.

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Figures

↓ Towards an Architectural Explosion of the Oubliette, pp 161–164 ↓

Figure 67

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Undocumented: The Achitecture of Migrant Detention Tings Chak

Based on description by Susan Rosenberg, interviewed by Brett Story in CBC Ideas “Alone Inside” (2013)

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Hannah Arendt in “Reflections on Violence,” New York Review of Books (1969)

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Undocumented: The Achitecture of Migrant Detention

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Interview with Macdonald Scott, immigration legal consultant and member of No One Is Illegal - Toronto

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Amin Mjasiri, interview by End Immigration Detention Network (2013)

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Lisa Guenther, interviewed by Brett Story in CBC Ideas “Alone Inside” (2013)

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International Committee of the Red Cross, “Water, Sanitation, Hygiene, and Habitat in Prisons” (2005)

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Interview with Mandy Hiscocks, see boredbutnotbroken.tao.ca

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Bernard Tschumi in “Architecture and Disjunction,” MIT Press (1996)

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Learn more about the strike and ongoing campaign: www.endimmigrationdetention.com

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The preceding pages are an excerpt from the recently published book, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (The Architecture Observer, 2014). Every year, thousands of people are detained for administrative/immigration purposes in designated ”holding centres“ and provincial prisons across the country—they are held indefinitely, without charge or trial. On any given day, hundreds of women, men, and children are locked up, primarily poor people of colour from the global South whose mobility is increasingly criminalized and illegalized. This work draws its inspiration from ongoing migrant justice struggles in solidarity with migrants held in detention in Lindsay, Ontario’s Central East Correctional Centre. Stories are based on collective organizing work through No One Is Illegal— Toronto and the End Immigration Detention Network and research completed for a Master of Architecture thesis at the University of Toronto. For more information about the book and campaign, please visit www. undocumented.ca and www.endimmigrationdetention.com.

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Testimonials

HOW TO SURVIVE IN PRISON?

In Canada, a prisoner serving a life sentence (lifers) can be granted parole after 25 years, which means that a prisoner is on parole for life. But under the current conservative government the number of paroles granted has been reduced. Not many get out, and if they do they are faced with a different set of procedures and hard-lined rules and regulations that are still constrictive and repressive. Lifers from inside a medium-security federal prison have written the following testimonials that bring attention to the daily hardship they encounter having lived inside for many years. The authors’ names have been left out due to the fact that it could be detrimental for prisoners to share their thoughts and experiences about prison.

During my incarceration I’ve had to deal with many irritants, deceptions, moments of anger, and bad emotions. I’ve lived through such situations about twice a year for a bit more than nineteen years of consecutive incarceration. It is not pertinent to remember which one marked me most. I’ve erased a lot of them from my memory. It’s better that way ... for my internal peace. However, I’ll always remember that I never want to live through this again. I’ve had to find strategies to get out of this curse. I’ve gotten to hate prison and everything that is part of this penal world so much so that it motivated me to find a defense system which would allow me not to get hurt morally and that would offer me a way out. Never to go back. Why did I adapt? Simply because I had no choice. The only choice I had was ... the different ways to make the choice. First choice: stay limited, headstrong, unyielding, which turned out to be draining and really slow. Second choice: flexibility, openness, patience, and resignation, which is softer but still really slow. I am not physically free, but I am free to make decisions, to evolve, to look forward, or not. Irritants and unpleasant situations, there are some everywhere. Everyone is confronted by them one day or another, it does not only happen in prison. So I try to dodge and accept them. Yes, it’s not always easy. Some days I’m more fragile but I’m working on it. That way I’ll be ready for the outside. After all, they’ll only let me out once I’ve proven to them that I’m able to adequately manage delicate situations. For me, psychological suffering had a positive impact since it provoked reflections, and attitude, value, 207 Anonymous

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and life philosophy changes enabling me to evolve into someone that will never make the same mistakes again. I’ve scored many points by convincing psychologists and parole officers that I’ve changed. But from the bottom of my being I truly believe that I’ve changed. Actually my work is not done yet. In conclusion, it took me many years of misery to become aware and decide to change to become a better person. It’s a shame that I’ve caused harm to many individuals in the past due to my previous disregard towards others and my old lifestyle. If I’ve lived injustices, abuses of power, etc., it’s just what I had coming due to my past actions. For those who believe in Karma, keep hoping, it’s never too late to do good. Life will have good surprises for you later on. PEPPER STORY Hey Hal, you know what happened last week after I left the meeting? You gave me those super duper hot peppers from the greenhouse and I had them in my coat pocket. Well, we’re on our way out and there’s a line-up to go sign out. I ask the guard what’s going on and he says that they are checking people’s coats through the scanner on the way out. Could you believe it? They’ve never done that before. Then it strikes me that I have these hot peppers in my coat pocket and I have no pockets on my clothes because we did yoga. I start freaking out! I’m in line with about 20 other people waiting to be processed. I whisper to Pete, “I have those hot peppers in my coat and have no other pockets.” He calmly says, ““Slowly slip them to me one at a time.” Here we are, smuggling hot peppers into his jeans pocket. He saved my ass with those jeans! What the hell? The things they lead us to do. It’s like we were smuggling illicit drugs or weapons. It’s so ridiculous. We laughed our heads off on the way out. 208

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SEIZED OR NOT? A prison door gets broken in our gym area. Some say it was because some guys were upset that the guards didn’t unlock it so that they could use the ice rink. Security used this to flex its muscle. Keepers got going to shops, bothering inmates and staff, asking about tools—maybe the tools used to break the doors. Not finding anything, they moved on to the hobby shop. Bingo: tools they could take. They removed tools from inmate lockers without any care, leaving behind paper work to say where they were gone, or why they took them. My tools were taken. More than a month goes by. I make a formal complaint, asking for the seizure tags and for my tools to be returned. After two months, I was told the tools were not seized—that I could have them back if I withdraw my complaint. I said I wanted my complaint answered. I was told they were keeping the tools if they had to create a seizure tag. Bottom line: when personal effects are taken, a seizure tag has to be written up. My tools went to a special room for seized items. But: today they claim the tools are not seized—just being held until they write seizure tags… or until I die and go away. MY WEEK IN PRISON Hi. I am a minimum-security inmate—oops! Sorry, they call us delinquents now—in a multi-level institution. Multi means it houses both minimum and medium-level inmates. I’m pretty lucky being at the end of my sentence. I get escorted passes to go to community activities such as church food baskets, AA, Recon, and such. So here is my week. Monday I work at my job. Tuesday I work and have an AA outing at night with a 209 Anonymous

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civilian escort. Wednesday I go home to my daughter for six hours with a guard to escort me. Thursday I go out with five other inmates to work in a church basement, and I have an AA meeting at night. Friday the same. Sound good so far? Oh, but I forgot to tell you every time we come back to the joint from a visit outside, we go through a routine metal detector, an ion scanner— which tests for illegal substances—the dog sniff, then a strip search. Not bad for a minimum-security inmate! But the last Friday I came in after this hectic week, lo and behold, the ion scanner goes off on me. Well, then it was a strip search in handcuffs, and seventy-two hours in a dry cell. I’d never seen the inside of the prison’s dry cell before. It’s about six feet wide by ten feet long, with a twelve foot ceiling—with very bright lights. There are two cameras inside and a toilet on a giant throne. There are three steps that lead up to the toilet, and the toilet cover makes a beeping sound when opened. When you sit, your waste goes through the pipes to another room next to the cell, which has a window so you can watch them go through your feces. Well, being the good inmate that I am, seventy-two hours later, after many times on the toilet, they find that I have nothing in me, and they let me go. Not just that— they cut my codes to go outside, and I have to explain or prove to them that I did nothing wrong. Oh, I forgot. This cell has no windows and lights are on twenty-four hours a day. No walks. No books. No radio—nothing. They even search the rest of your food when they come by after meals. If you want a drink of water, you have to ask and all this time you are only wearing jockey shorts and a t-shirt. Happy Happy!

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DOUBLE TROUBLE Twenty square feet. That’s the room I have to move around in my cell. Of course, my cell is larger than that. But once you put in a bed, a desk, a chair, a toilet, etc… you’re left with an area that has the advantage of not taking too long to clean. Not being a big man and not being too claustrophobic, I can manage to live in a room with twenty square feet of usable floor. Of course, the configuration of the room is such that every time I need to open a drawer or the window, I have to move the chair out of my way. But I got used to it. Like I got used to taking the same chair to reach one of the shelved. But these are only minor aggravations. The problem starts when they decide to put a second bed on top of yours, plus the inmate that comes with the bed. All of a sudden, those twenty square feet look awfully small. For two people to move about in such an area you almost have to design a choreography. And to avoid physical contact, you have to be some kind of contortionist. If you sleep on the top bunk, you will have to add gymnastics to your credentials. Double-bunking is perfect for ballet dancers and cirque du soleil performers. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a cellmate who is clean and respectful. If you’re less lucky, he will be a slob who never shuts his mouth, who watches TV til two in the morning, and who will snore when he finally falls asleep. The problem is that you rarely have the choice of who you will be stuck with. It’s somehow like those forced marriages in India, minus the sex. Physical intimacy is not the only thing you lose when you’re double-bunking. There is also the psychological aspect. Just knowing that every time you go back to your cell “he” will be there—it makes you frustrated, depressed, even angry. You cannot enjoy peace of mind when there is constantly someone in your bubble. 211 Anonymous

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I started doing time more than twenty years ago. Back then, they were saying that double-bunking was an exceptional measure. That is was in response to a surplus of a carceral population. Twenty years later, they say the same thing. My question is: how long does it take for an exceptional policy to be called a norm? Twenty-five years? Fifty? 100? Double-bunking is bad enough. Please don’t rub it in by saying it’s only temporary. One final comment: I know that there are a lot of countries where conditions of incarceration are 100 times worse than here. Knowing that there are people worse off than me puts things in perspective. But still it doesn’t make my pain and discomfort disappear. Canada always boasts of its human rights record. It would have more credibility if it would stop stripping its inmates of their privacy and dignity. TESTIMONY OF A MADMAN I’ll try and focus on a narrow slit of the abuse that a life sentence has evolved into. I’m in my twenty-eighth year of correction, the past twelve have been in minimums facilities and transition houses. I have completed around 800 escorted passes, ninety-five percent with civilians where I’m brought outside as human traffic to provide free labour. There I drive loaders and machines on farms and on the streets of Kingston, I’m in the community at a daycare centre, and so on. In June 2009 I was released on day parole where I was forced away from all my family and support because of falsified documents and police pressure. I was muscled out of my province to one where I don’t speak the language. Within six months on day parole I had a full-time job, a car, and I was approved for another six months of day parole with the permission to have my own apartment where I could stay during the weekends. 212

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Unfortunately, I broke conditions. As a psychiatrist pointed out to me, “Mr. P is of metis descent so clearly his risk to reoffend is greatly increased with any substance abuse.” This, coupled with the fact that my victim was a police officer, and now I’m on my fourth year of what looks like will be a total of eight years before I get another chance at day parole. I’ve seen others come and go more than five times in this time. I’ve had three hearings with full support from five of their professional colleagues to return to day parole. However, with two police traveling from Ontario to “observe” every hearing they have had the chance to observe the Parole Board say “no.” I had full support for my fourth hearing, but my case manager pulled out two months before the hearing because a “secret investigative convict” told them I brought tobacco inside, with absolutely no evidence. A psychologist I did counseling with wrote a report saying I complain too much (shortly before she went off work with a mental breakdown). It’s been six months now and she hasn’t been back. Maybe she was too stressed having to listen to such complaints. So the Board used these “crimes” to put me off for at least another year and a half. The other psychologist paid to do an assessment concluded that I was calm and that it was time to move on and let me return back to day parole. This assessment did not appease the police on their fourth trip to Quebec, so this Board ignored this report. The Board instead told me to come back with a more realistic slow gradual release plan. In short, I am inside for another year and a half doing free labour. Then I’ll have to ask for unescorted passes to spend three days at a time at a halfway house. Then maybe I’ll get a closed halfway house for three to six months where I’ll end up doing free labour. Then I can ask for an open halfway house for a year and a half to two years where I’ll be able to find a job when I’ll be nearing 213 Anonymous

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the retirement age by then. After all of this I’ll be able to ask for full parole. All of this, of course, depends on whether an investigative convict tells them that I am up to no good. At which point I’ll have to start over. So I sit here in a “minimum” that recently doubled in population with medium inmates. My pay got cut to $3.50 a day. Doing free labour in the community and stripped naked at every return. I’m denied access to my family even though I’ve been eligible for unescorted passes since November 2006. Luckily my family has money so I can call my seventy-six-year-old father daily and hear how he cares for my eighty-year-old mother with Alzheimer’s, how he is out of firewood for the winter. I also get the chance every day to hear my mother ask me why I won’t come to see her. I am their only child. So maybe soon you’ll hear of the result of Mr. Harper’s C-10 and it won’t be pretty thanks. I’M JUST ANOTHER NUMBER I’ve been caged now for eighteen years, having visits with my wife and son, raising him from a child to a young adult. Through it all, we tried to keep our little family as sane as we could. I was doing what I could to become a better man for myself and my family. The controllers now got the idea to cut the wages of the con man, and with this collapsing system the effects are drastic. I was not able to accumulate a lot of money over the years mainly because I took care of my family. So today when I want to go to a private family visit I have to go without pay for six weeks to accumulate the money to pass a weekend with the people who have been supporting me all this time. I have a real hard time asking my wife to spend money, even if it is for us. There are too many things that she has to pay for just to survive as it is. So I get 214

Testimonials

the feeling that I am being punished for having a family. The man does not understand that this visit program is more than just a place to get laid. As inmates, we are so deprived from any kind of affection that it is hard to maintain any type of relationship. With the inflation of food and commodities over the years it is just so hard to get by on $35 every two weeks. And worse if you can’t spend it because you choose to keep it for those who have been and will continue to be there for you. I’m getting out one day! Doesn’t the public want me to have a good connection with my family so I don’t come out of here with my hate-filled and angry at everyone? If I didn’t have a family maybe I wouldn’t care about people so much. THE VALUES OF CSC Two years ago I got into an altercation with another lifer. The other inmate pissed me off in the range right in front of other inmates but I stayed calm. The day after, on Friday, I asked to transfer out of the range. On Monday, we had a meeting with our parole and correctional officers, we both have the same. The minute I walk into the office, he puts all the blame on me saying that I pissed him off and invited him to fight, completely the opposite of what happened. My PO and my CO decided to back him up. Two days later, I get all my outings suspended. He doesn’t. Two weeks later he receives a gift, an exterior placement. Meeting with the warden his response astonished me: “It is entirely normal to put up with injustice in CSC.” All of this pissed me off. Two months after the initial altercation, the other inmate made death threats against an inmate in front of two COs. Nothing happened and five months later he is in a halfway house. A year after the altercation, my PO asks me to trust him, no way I’m doing that. Two years after the altercation, I get a new PO. Same thing, she doesn’t trust me, I don’t trust her. She 215 Anonymous

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does not want to give me back my outings. I’ll have to pass in front of the Board to obtain Escorted and Unescorted Temporary Absences. Why call this text “The Values of CSC”? In CSC’s manual there is a question as to which values should be taught in inmates. During the last two years, I had a lot of feelings, more time spend mad than good. During this last year I’ve been putting a lot more thought to answer why my PO and the warden always try to put a stick through our wheels. In the last two months, I’ve been asking myself which values are being taught to us. I can’t answer for certain but these last two years have certainly been hypocrisy, dishonour, arrogance, definitely not trust or compassion. They dare to talk to us about empathy, respect, dignity, and modesty. It’s easy for them to tell us about this, they’ve never had to deal with themselves. They ask us to let go of past situations but they never forget, they never let go. With the current changes in the system under the Harper government, there is no place for rehabilitation. There are no good values being taught. When I talk about good values here is my list: honour, dignity, modesty, compassion, respect, good manners, trust, loyalty, equality, lenience. That’s the kind of values that would create good programs. But the one value that has to prevail is integrity.

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Testimonials

HOW TO SURVIVE IN PRISON?

In Canada, a prisoner serving a life sentence (lifers) can be granted parole after 25 years, which means that a prisoner is on parole for life. But under the current conservative government the number of paroles granted has been reduced. Not many get out, and if they do they are faced with a different set of procedures and hard-lined rules and regulations that are still constrictive and repressive. Lifers from inside a medium-security federal prison have written the following testimonials that bring attention to the daily hardship they encounter having lived inside for many years. The authors’ names have been left out due to the fact that it could be detrimental for prisoners to share their thoughts and experiences about prison.

During my incarceration I’ve had to deal with many irritants, deceptions, moments of anger, and bad emotions. I’ve lived through such situations about twice a year for a bit more than nineteen years of consecutive incarceration. It is not pertinent to remember which one marked me most. I’ve erased a lot of them from my memory. It’s better that way ... for my internal peace. However, I’ll always remember that I never want to live through this again. I’ve had to find strategies to get out of this curse. I’ve gotten to hate prison and everything that is part of this penal world so much so that it motivated me to find a defense system which would allow me not to get hurt morally and that would offer me a way out. Never to go back. Why did I adapt? Simply because I had no choice. The only choice I had was ... the different ways to make the choice. First choice: stay limited, headstrong, unyielding, which turned out to be draining and really slow. Second choice: flexibility, openness, patience, and resignation, which is softer but still really slow. I am not physically free, but I am free to make decisions, to evolve, to look forward, or not. Irritants and unpleasant situations, there are some everywhere. Everyone is confronted by them one day or another, it does not only happen in prison. So I try to dodge and accept them. Yes, it’s not always easy. Some days I’m more fragile but I’m working on it. That way I’ll be ready for the outside. After all, they’ll only let me out once I’ve proven to them that I’m able to adequately manage delicate situations. For me, psychological suffering had a positive impact since it provoked reflections, and attitude, value, 207 Anonymous

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and life philosophy changes enabling me to evolve into someone that will never make the same mistakes again. I’ve scored many points by convincing psychologists and parole officers that I’ve changed. But from the bottom of my being I truly believe that I’ve changed. Actually my work is not done yet. In conclusion, it took me many years of misery to become aware and decide to change to become a better person. It’s a shame that I’ve caused harm to many individuals in the past due to my previous disregard towards others and my old lifestyle. If I’ve lived injustices, abuses of power, etc., it’s just what I had coming due to my past actions. For those who believe in Karma, keep hoping, it’s never too late to do good. Life will have good surprises for you later on. PEPPER STORY Hey Hal, you know what happened last week after I left the meeting? You gave me those super duper hot peppers from the greenhouse and I had them in my coat pocket. Well, we’re on our way out and there’s a line-up to go sign out. I ask the guard what’s going on and he says that they are checking people’s coats through the scanner on the way out. Could you believe it? They’ve never done that before. Then it strikes me that I have these hot peppers in my coat pocket and I have no pockets on my clothes because we did yoga. I start freaking out! I’m in line with about 20 other people waiting to be processed. I whisper to Pete, “I have those hot peppers in my coat and have no other pockets.” He calmly says, ““Slowly slip them to me one at a time.” Here we are, smuggling hot peppers into his jeans pocket. He saved my ass with those jeans! What the hell? The things they lead us to do. It’s like we were smuggling illicit drugs or weapons. It’s so ridiculous. We laughed our heads off on the way out. 208

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SEIZED OR NOT? A prison door gets broken in our gym area. Some say it was because some guys were upset that the guards didn’t unlock it so that they could use the ice rink. Security used this to flex its muscle. Keepers got going to shops, bothering inmates and staff, asking about tools—maybe the tools used to break the doors. Not finding anything, they moved on to the hobby shop. Bingo: tools they could take. They removed tools from inmate lockers without any care, leaving behind paper work to say where they were gone, or why they took them. My tools were taken. More than a month goes by. I make a formal complaint, asking for the seizure tags and for my tools to be returned. After two months, I was told the tools were not seized—that I could have them back if I withdraw my complaint. I said I wanted my complaint answered. I was told they were keeping the tools if they had to create a seizure tag. Bottom line: when personal effects are taken, a seizure tag has to be written up. My tools went to a special room for seized items. But: today they claim the tools are not seized—just being held until they write seizure tags… or until I die and go away. MY WEEK IN PRISON Hi. I am a minimum-security inmate—oops! Sorry, they call us delinquents now—in a multi-level institution. Multi means it houses both minimum and medium-level inmates. I’m pretty lucky being at the end of my sentence. I get escorted passes to go to community activities such as church food baskets, AA, Recon, and such. So here is my week. Monday I work at my job. Tuesday I work and have an AA outing at night with a 209 Anonymous

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civilian escort. Wednesday I go home to my daughter for six hours with a guard to escort me. Thursday I go out with five other inmates to work in a church basement, and I have an AA meeting at night. Friday the same. Sound good so far? Oh, but I forgot to tell you every time we come back to the joint from a visit outside, we go through a routine metal detector, an ion scanner— which tests for illegal substances—the dog sniff, then a strip search. Not bad for a minimum-security inmate! But the last Friday I came in after this hectic week, lo and behold, the ion scanner goes off on me. Well, then it was a strip search in handcuffs, and seventy-two hours in a dry cell. I’d never seen the inside of the prison’s dry cell before. It’s about six feet wide by ten feet long, with a twelve foot ceiling—with very bright lights. There are two cameras inside and a toilet on a giant throne. There are three steps that lead up to the toilet, and the toilet cover makes a beeping sound when opened. When you sit, your waste goes through the pipes to another room next to the cell, which has a window so you can watch them go through your feces. Well, being the good inmate that I am, seventy-two hours later, after many times on the toilet, they find that I have nothing in me, and they let me go. Not just that— they cut my codes to go outside, and I have to explain or prove to them that I did nothing wrong. Oh, I forgot. This cell has no windows and lights are on twenty-four hours a day. No walks. No books. No radio—nothing. They even search the rest of your food when they come by after meals. If you want a drink of water, you have to ask and all this time you are only wearing jockey shorts and a t-shirt. Happy Happy!

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DOUBLE TROUBLE Twenty square feet. That’s the room I have to move around in my cell. Of course, my cell is larger than that. But once you put in a bed, a desk, a chair, a toilet, etc… you’re left with an area that has the advantage of not taking too long to clean. Not being a big man and not being too claustrophobic, I can manage to live in a room with twenty square feet of usable floor. Of course, the configuration of the room is such that every time I need to open a drawer or the window, I have to move the chair out of my way. But I got used to it. Like I got used to taking the same chair to reach one of the shelved. But these are only minor aggravations. The problem starts when they decide to put a second bed on top of yours, plus the inmate that comes with the bed. All of a sudden, those twenty square feet look awfully small. For two people to move about in such an area you almost have to design a choreography. And to avoid physical contact, you have to be some kind of contortionist. If you sleep on the top bunk, you will have to add gymnastics to your credentials. Double-bunking is perfect for ballet dancers and cirque du soleil performers. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a cellmate who is clean and respectful. If you’re less lucky, he will be a slob who never shuts his mouth, who watches TV til two in the morning, and who will snore when he finally falls asleep. The problem is that you rarely have the choice of who you will be stuck with. It’s somehow like those forced marriages in India, minus the sex. Physical intimacy is not the only thing you lose when you’re double-bunking. There is also the psychological aspect. Just knowing that every time you go back to your cell “he” will be there—it makes you frustrated, depressed, even angry. You cannot enjoy peace of mind when there is constantly someone in your bubble. 211 Anonymous

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I started doing time more than twenty years ago. Back then, they were saying that double-bunking was an exceptional measure. That is was in response to a surplus of a carceral population. Twenty years later, they say the same thing. My question is: how long does it take for an exceptional policy to be called a norm? Twenty-five years? Fifty? 100? Double-bunking is bad enough. Please don’t rub it in by saying it’s only temporary. One final comment: I know that there are a lot of countries where conditions of incarceration are 100 times worse than here. Knowing that there are people worse off than me puts things in perspective. But still it doesn’t make my pain and discomfort disappear. Canada always boasts of its human rights record. It would have more credibility if it would stop stripping its inmates of their privacy and dignity. TESTIMONY OF A MADMAN I’ll try and focus on a narrow slit of the abuse that a life sentence has evolved into. I’m in my twenty-eighth year of correction, the past twelve have been in minimums facilities and transition houses. I have completed around 800 escorted passes, ninety-five percent with civilians where I’m brought outside as human traffic to provide free labour. There I drive loaders and machines on farms and on the streets of Kingston, I’m in the community at a daycare centre, and so on. In June 2009 I was released on day parole where I was forced away from all my family and support because of falsified documents and police pressure. I was muscled out of my province to one where I don’t speak the language. Within six months on day parole I had a full-time job, a car, and I was approved for another six months of day parole with the permission to have my own apartment where I could stay during the weekends. 212

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Unfortunately, I broke conditions. As a psychiatrist pointed out to me, “Mr. P is of metis descent so clearly his risk to reoffend is greatly increased with any substance abuse.” This, coupled with the fact that my victim was a police officer, and now I’m on my fourth year of what looks like will be a total of eight years before I get another chance at day parole. I’ve seen others come and go more than five times in this time. I’ve had three hearings with full support from five of their professional colleagues to return to day parole. However, with two police traveling from Ontario to “observe” every hearing they have had the chance to observe the Parole Board say “no.” I had full support for my fourth hearing, but my case manager pulled out two months before the hearing because a “secret investigative convict” told them I brought tobacco inside, with absolutely no evidence. A psychologist I did counseling with wrote a report saying I complain too much (shortly before she went off work with a mental breakdown). It’s been six months now and she hasn’t been back. Maybe she was too stressed having to listen to such complaints. So the Board used these “crimes” to put me off for at least another year and a half. The other psychologist paid to do an assessment concluded that I was calm and that it was time to move on and let me return back to day parole. This assessment did not appease the police on their fourth trip to Quebec, so this Board ignored this report. The Board instead told me to come back with a more realistic slow gradual release plan. In short, I am inside for another year and a half doing free labour. Then I’ll have to ask for unescorted passes to spend three days at a time at a halfway house. Then maybe I’ll get a closed halfway house for three to six months where I’ll end up doing free labour. Then I can ask for an open halfway house for a year and a half to two years where I’ll be able to find a job when I’ll be nearing 213 Anonymous

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the retirement age by then. After all of this I’ll be able to ask for full parole. All of this, of course, depends on whether an investigative convict tells them that I am up to no good. At which point I’ll have to start over. So I sit here in a “minimum” that recently doubled in population with medium inmates. My pay got cut to $3.50 a day. Doing free labour in the community and stripped naked at every return. I’m denied access to my family even though I’ve been eligible for unescorted passes since November 2006. Luckily my family has money so I can call my seventy-six-year-old father daily and hear how he cares for my eighty-year-old mother with Alzheimer’s, how he is out of firewood for the winter. I also get the chance every day to hear my mother ask me why I won’t come to see her. I am their only child. So maybe soon you’ll hear of the result of Mr. Harper’s C-10 and it won’t be pretty thanks. I’M JUST ANOTHER NUMBER I’ve been caged now for eighteen years, having visits with my wife and son, raising him from a child to a young adult. Through it all, we tried to keep our little family as sane as we could. I was doing what I could to become a better man for myself and my family. The controllers now got the idea to cut the wages of the con man, and with this collapsing system the effects are drastic. I was not able to accumulate a lot of money over the years mainly because I took care of my family. So today when I want to go to a private family visit I have to go without pay for six weeks to accumulate the money to pass a weekend with the people who have been supporting me all this time. I have a real hard time asking my wife to spend money, even if it is for us. There are too many things that she has to pay for just to survive as it is. So I get 214

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the feeling that I am being punished for having a family. The man does not understand that this visit program is more than just a place to get laid. As inmates, we are so deprived from any kind of affection that it is hard to maintain any type of relationship. With the inflation of food and commodities over the years it is just so hard to get by on $35 every two weeks. And worse if you can’t spend it because you choose to keep it for those who have been and will continue to be there for you. I’m getting out one day! Doesn’t the public want me to have a good connection with my family so I don’t come out of here with my hate-filled and angry at everyone? If I didn’t have a family maybe I wouldn’t care about people so much. THE VALUES OF CSC Two years ago I got into an altercation with another lifer. The other inmate pissed me off in the range right in front of other inmates but I stayed calm. The day after, on Friday, I asked to transfer out of the range. On Monday, we had a meeting with our parole and correctional officers, we both have the same. The minute I walk into the office, he puts all the blame on me saying that I pissed him off and invited him to fight, completely the opposite of what happened. My PO and my CO decided to back him up. Two days later, I get all my outings suspended. He doesn’t. Two weeks later he receives a gift, an exterior placement. Meeting with the warden his response astonished me: “It is entirely normal to put up with injustice in CSC.” All of this pissed me off. Two months after the initial altercation, the other inmate made death threats against an inmate in front of two COs. Nothing happened and five months later he is in a halfway house. A year after the altercation, my PO asks me to trust him, no way I’m doing that. Two years after the altercation, I get a new PO. Same thing, she doesn’t trust me, I don’t trust her. She 215 Anonymous

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does not want to give me back my outings. I’ll have to pass in front of the Board to obtain Escorted and Unescorted Temporary Absences. Why call this text “The Values of CSC”? In CSC’s manual there is a question as to which values should be taught in inmates. During the last two years, I had a lot of feelings, more time spend mad than good. During this last year I’ve been putting a lot more thought to answer why my PO and the warden always try to put a stick through our wheels. In the last two months, I’ve been asking myself which values are being taught to us. I can’t answer for certain but these last two years have certainly been hypocrisy, dishonour, arrogance, definitely not trust or compassion. They dare to talk to us about empathy, respect, dignity, and modesty. It’s easy for them to tell us about this, they’ve never had to deal with themselves. They ask us to let go of past situations but they never forget, they never let go. With the current changes in the system under the Harper government, there is no place for rehabilitation. There are no good values being taught. When I talk about good values here is my list: honour, dignity, modesty, compassion, respect, good manners, trust, loyalty, equality, lenience. That’s the kind of values that would create good programs. But the one value that has to prevail is integrity.

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THE PATHOLOGY OF REHABILITATION Peter Collins 0792S3B, April 2014

1 The friends and associates that frequented her house included prison escapees, bank robbers, bikers, parole violators, drug dealers, and she was a sex worker, a fraud artist, and highly skilled shoplifter.

At the age of twelve I was a chronic runaway. My home life was emotionally distressed, I was unhappy, I felt unsafe and unloved, but 2 running away didn’t make things better for me. On “Life-25” is a sentence of Life the street I was victimized by two male pedophiles, without eligibility for parole before and this solidified my distrust of adults who I twenty-five years have been served. viewed as authority figures. At the age of fourteen, 3 I was taken in by an older woman who groomed young Special Handling Unit (SHU) is boys for sex and I lived with her for a couple of Canada’s highest security prison. —1 years. Her home was a hive of criminal activity, and this experience pointed me on a collision course with society and the rule of law. At sixteen I was an angry, misguided teenager who was incrementally more and more out of control. At twenty-one, I was arrested and charged with a series of bank robbery related crimes. Before I could be brought to court I escaped and while on the run, during a botched bank robbery, I shot and killed a police officer. I was convicted of murder, sentenced, and placed in the custody of the Canadian Penitentiary Service (CPS). That is how my life-25—2 sentence started thirty-one years ago. My sentence was intended to denounce and punish me while deterring others. My incarceration was intended to keep society safe and somewhere in the mix “rehabilitate“ me. Police and prison officials were concerned that I would try to escape and had me placed in one of Canada’s two federal Special Handling Units—3 (SHU). When I arrived at Millhaven maximum-security prison, the low, sprawling building projected the image of a college. As the transport vehicle got closer it revealed the gun towers and the tall perimeter fences which were electrified and covered in razor wire. The entrance gates opened and I was swallowed up; stripped of my clothes, 217

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assigned a number and locked in a cell. My initial SHU placement was an iron box, complete with iron walls, ceiling, bed and desk, all welded into the other with two sheets of steel covering the cell window. The staggered steel coverings over the window had half inch holes punched into them but were off-set to allow me to look outside with one eye at a time and only if I held my head off at an angle. These “windows“ provided no sunlight and no fresh air and have no business being referred to as windows. The heavy metal door opened and closed electrically with a grinding, whirring smash. Through the layers of metal and concrete I could hear the metallic echoes seamlessly embraced by angry yelling, pleading sobs and the tormented screams of the discarded and forgotten. The Rules In prison there are endless reams of official policies, rules, directives, regulations and laws that need to be followed; paradoxically, Canadian prisoners have high rates of illiteracy and mental health issues. Regardless of ability prisoners are expected to know and follow the thousands upon thousands of complicated rules and regulations, which are applied unevenly and often capriciously. There are also unwritten rules that officials arbitrarily impose, but the main rule is NEVER complain. Prison administrators expect a level of compliant subservience; a “good inmate“ is quiet and willingly malleable to any official’s whim, at any time. While this official expectation assists in the short-term goal of the day-to-day running of the prison system, it has no benefit to helping prisoners become more responsible and accountable. Prisoners also impose rules on themselves. The main rules are “don’t get involved in other prisoners” affairs,” “don’t look into other prisoner’s cells,” “don’t 218

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take another prisoner’s property,” “don’t inform on other prisoner’s,” and “don’t gossip.” All of the rules are regularly broken by both prisoners and guards, and both groups appear equally willing to turn a blind eye to most anything if it benefits them in some way. Personal Change In the early years of my incarceration I took no responsibility for my conduct or my crime. The process of being caught, convicted, and sentenced only strengthened my belief that I was the victim. I was still nurturing my victimhood from childhood traumas and my attitude was generally defensive, disrespectful, and confrontational. While I was in the SHU, a significant friendship developed through correspondence. Our letters were epic tomes, hundreds and hundreds of pages passed back and forth every week for many years. We investigated ideas, challenged and questioned each other and she helped me widen my perspective and I came to realize how flawed my outlook and attitude was. Through this relationship (and others since) I learned that compassion, respect, friendship and love are the only keys to influencing positive change in people. Had her kind and thoughtful influence not occurred, my view of the world and my role in it would have been reinforced by the prison system and I would have tried to escape again. Had I not been killed trying to escape, I would have been responsible for more tragedy. As a result of her patience, kindness and insight I was finally able to see that it was me that was in the wrong and who needed to change. For the first time in my young life I was able to see that I was part of the human family called society and I was the problem. I realized I was no longer the victim but had become the victimizer. Faced with the realization that I wasn’t separate from society but actually a part of it I strained to change my path and be useful and do some good. When I was released 219 Peter Collins

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from the SHU in 1987 I was having a discussion about how screwed up the prison system is. The barbershop supervisor (Bill Moore) was incensed at my critical comments and told me it made him sick how guys commit crimes and when they end up in prison become social advocates. I asked him if the point of prison wasn’t to help us take a more positive social attitude, then “what was the point?” He commented that it seemed I had a lot of criticism but offered no solutions. I realized that he made a good point. I didn’t want to be one of those people that complain but have no solutions or constructive suggestions to contribute. I began to think about these social justice issues more deeply. I got a job in the prison library and I read as many articles, reports, and books on social issues, problems, and opinions as I could find. I worked at upgrading my grade-eight education and earned my high school equivalency. I started and completed a first-year political science course with Queens University. In 1992, I began an Arts program and earned a Graphic, Commercial and Fine Arts Honours Diploma, a program which was initially discouraged by prison officials. The more I learned and understood, the more I wanted to try to solve systemic problems and corruption. I saw how people were being mistreated and mistreating each other in the prison system and it disturbed me. The conditions of our collective imprisonment combined with my social awakening had the effect of politicizing me. In prison I found what I felt was a useful social purpose, trying to improve things. I began to bring problems in the prison system to officials inside and out of prison. I wrote to parliamentarians and non-governmental social justice organizations and law societies and university criminology departments. I submitted articles to magazines and newspapers. I regularly contributed to community radio shows in an effort to raise awareness about issues in the prison system. My efforts to address systemic problems in the prison system, such as parole, 220

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case management, health care, HIV/AIDS, racism, violence, homophobia, corruption, abuse, and official bullying has resulted in the development of strong relationships with community organizations and people involved in the social justice aspect of the prison system. On the other hand, my efforts to advocate for positive change to the current justice and prison system has resulted in me being labelled an administrative nuisance, anti-authority and a trouble-maker. While I have not been convicted of any offences in around twenty years the parole board, in their most recent decision, state they want to see a period of time in which I can demonstrate that I can follow the rules before I can be paroled. Silence, it seems, equals “rehabilitated” in Canada’s prison system and this explains why so many prisoners withdraw emotionally and try to mimic doormats. The Prison System On a political level justice and prison is working well—it is a constant source of distraction from pressing social problems like poverty, racism, sexism, classism, the war on drugs, disproportionate wealth, corporate exploitation & crimes and environmental catastrophe. Instead of finding and working towards real solutions prisoners are tied to the whipping post. A villain to point at, to feel better than, to fill the role of “the other,” the enemy. That we are sisters, mothers, brothers, fathers, and people’s children doesn’t strike a chord with the distracted masses. Prison is “the stick,” “the carrot” is relative comfort as people work paycheckto-paycheck to cover the monthly credit bills on the car, house, TV, and couch. Meanwhile, disenfranchised, over-policed, racialized, and impoverished communities are routed for their young men and women, who fill the prison cells. Its true the prison system gets out of control from time to time, and things (prisoners) are difficult 221 Peter Collins

4 The SubCommittee on the Penitentiary System in Canada, Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs, Report To Parliament, Chairmen Mark MacGuigan, Second Session of the Thirteenth Parliament, 19761977, 5, para. 12.

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to manage, but for the most part the machine is working well... like clockwork... it’s just a matter of time. In the 1980s the Canadian Penitentiary Service (CPS) morphed into the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) in what was a strategic re-branding effort. The CPS had just come through a decade of violent upheavals, “riots, strikes, 5 murders, and hostage-takings that grew in numbers Canadian Prison Service and other and size with each passing year. By 1976 the prison international jurisdictions explosions were almost constant; hardly a week with abusive and reviled prison passed without another violent incident.”—4 The systems: China, Russia, USA, etc. The Verdict of the country’s population was increasingly uncomfortable Coroner’s Jury from the Office of with the stories of violence and mistreatment the Chief Coroner in the prisons. The government took the cue (it of the Province of Ontario, 2 was time for a little distraction) and was now pushing the concept of “rehabilitation” in the latest instalment of “how to incarcerate” while appearing to be better than they were before and better than those “other,”—5 less enlightened & abusive foreign prison regimes. Canada added the word “correct” right into the new title of their prison service, as if a label can change the contents of the box. Regardless of Canada’s official effort to change (re-brand), prison is still prison and at its heart punitive oppression is what they sell in the correctional misery market—and we prisoners are the commodity. What is Rehabilitation? I know what people think “rehabilitation” means, and I know what they claim to do in these prisons. The reality is that prison is categorically incompatible with the dictionary definition of rehabilitation. As if to prove the point, on rare occasions, excerpts from the correctional horror show ooze out from behind the Iron Curtain; like the CSC snuff films, circa 2007, Ashley 222

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6 The Verdict of the

Smith. This grotesque film footage shocked the Coroner’s Jury from the Office of nation (temporarily), and the ensuing Coroner’s the Chief Coroner of the Province Inquests, circa 2013, which CSC fought tooth and of Ontario, 26 Grenville St., nail (costing taxpayers millions in CSC legal Toronto, Ontario, M7A 2G9. defence costs, not to mention years in delays) 7 all to prevent video evidence being shown to Chicken is a contest of the public. When all was said and done CSC was courage, often, if not usually, played found to have engaged in a pattern of long term with cars driving towards each torture, assault, and abuse, which culminated in other in the same lane until one of homicide (by prison officials) of the mentally the contestants swerves to miss distressed teenager. Ashley was pronounced dead the impending collision. at 8:10 am October 19, 2007. The verdict of death by homicide—6 was handed down six years after her death, on December 19, 2013. Ashley’s crime was throwing an apple at a postal worker as a youth. She was transferred to the adult prison system (CSC) and held illegally and tortured in a variety of isolation chambers. Smith’s young life ended in the Grand Valley Prison for Women in Ontario. Prison guards stood outside her isolation cell watching and filming her slow, excruciating death. After the fact, in true Eichmannesqe fashion, they claimed they were following orders. Their orders, if they are to be believed, were to wait until she had stopped breathing before they “helped her.” The word “rehabilitation” rings in my ears when I ponder their conduct. Unfortunately, Ashley’s case is only one of many wherein CSC engages in a battle of wills with prisoners in their custody. The Service appears unable (unwilling?) to differentiate between principled resistance to degrading treatment (or worse) from a strong- willed prisoner (or a prisoner attempting to be strong-willed) and an emotionally distressed and or mentally ill person being held prisoner. Apparently both must be crushed. The Service constantly engages in “battles of will” or games of “correctional chicken”—7 with prisoners. There is very little evidence to support the premise that officials have any awareness of the possible harm caused 223 Peter Collins

8 Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women in Kingston, 174, para. 3.4.1.2.

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to the prisoner. The CSC sub-culture is rigid and never wrong and considers a change of course to be an admission of error. An admission of error for the CSC is to accept defeat, and CSC can never be wrong. Former Supreme Court Justice, Louise Arbour, referred to this sub-culture in her 1994-1995 Inquiry—8 into the Kingston Prison for Women. Commissioner Arbour, speaking about the CSC complaint and grievance system, stated: “On the basis of facts revealed by this inquiry, I am satisfied that as a method of dispute resolution, the process has no chance of success unless there is a significant change in the mindset of the Correctional Service towards being prepared to admit error without feeling that it is conceding defeat.” The Kingston Prison for Women (P4W) was closed under the weight of the Arbour Commission inquiry, which had exposed systemic corruption and abuse at the prison. The Canadian government built a series of women’s prisons across Canada to correct the pattern of systemic abuses at P4W. The Grand Valley Women’s Prison was a shining example of the innovative changes being ushering in. However, name changes like CPS to CSC are distractions that don’t address systemic correctional failure. The “old” attitudes and systems simply migrate to, and populate, the new prisons. As soon as construction was completed on the new women’s prisons, CSC began to add high security isolation cells and units. The systemic cycle of excessive segregation and isolation was ramped up. The CSC created a policy titled “The Management Protocol” and this “protocol” was only applied to, and used on, Aboriginal women. The Management Protocol was protested by community groups, and the Office of the Correctional Investigators (OCI) and came under heavy scrutiny and it was eventually abandoned by CSC. However, it should be noted that CSC only jettisoned the name; not the practice. Aboriginal women are still over-represented in Canada’s segregation and isolation chambers, and Aboriginal women still spend 224

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more time in administrative and punitive seclusion than their Caucasian counterparts. It is important to acknowledge that “Canada’s incarceration rate is already high when compared internationally,”—9 and to realize that “we” (Canada) “incarcerate Aboriginal people at a rate that is nine times more than the national average,”—10 and recognize that “among women offenders, the over-representation is even more dramatic—an astounding 33% of the federal women inmate population is Aboriginal,”—11 as reported in the 2009-2010 OCI report. Is this is an example of failed rehabilitation or an extension of the residential school policy and the Canadian government’s effort to crush Aboriginals out of existence by destroying their communities through poverty, neglect, oppression, over-policing, and finally overincarceration? Tough on Crime

9 Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator, 20092010, 5, para. 4. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 The Corrections & Conditional Release Act had sections added to it that would allow CSC and the National Parole Board to streamline and facilitate conditional releases of Aboriginals. However, since the introduction of those sections to the CCRA the rates of conditional release (parole) and incarceration have increased. 13 Multi-Point “restraint equipment” consists of a variety of different hardware and mechanisms devised to handcuff, shackle someone onto beds, chairs, floors, and walls using harnesses that resemble racecar driving seatbelt harnesses.

The conservative default “tough on crime” attitude has added to CSC’s inability to “rehabilitate” and has increased abuse and systemic racism.—12 The CSC’s current position on mental health care issues is just symbolic lip service. The CSC continues to be irrational, non-adaptive, and insensitive to the high needs of prisoners with significant mental health issues. Woe to those prisoners who can’t self-“fix” their mental health condition on command before a screaming guard shoots tear gas into their face as a team of correctional officers swarm them, chain them up and strap them down in multi-point “restraint equipment.”—13 Prisoners suffering these conditions are regularly left in their own filth for hours and days, neither guard nor prisoner capable of changing their behaviour to meet the other’s limitations. 225 Peter Collins

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Over the fence, out there in over-privileged Canada, in the face of the endless evidence, blind faith and trust is placed in the prison system. The Conservatives willfully turn their backs on social science and they are undeterred by the statistical realty that crime rates have been dropping for decades. They have a pathological desire to put more people in prisons. They pump out new “tough on crime” legislation, which regularly fails to pass constitutional muster in front of provincial and federal courts and the Supreme Court of Canada. Harper & company are undeterred and continue to write and pass “new” Reform Party bills and hastily shove them through in omnibus bills, with no regard to the outcome. When it comes to putting more and more people into cramped, dirty, violent prisons it is difficult to reconcile any claim of rehabilitation or positive outcomes. As prisoners are squeezed, two at a time, into cells built for one, where they now spend more time, the word rehabilitation is truly a misnomer. The prison I am currently in has increased its population by about 100 and about two-thirds of the prisoners are doublebunked. There are two brand-new prison compounds inside this perimeter that will soon go on line. We are expecting a couple hundred more prisoners. The construction has not included increases to phones, showers, bathrooms, healthcare services or visiting spaces. The recreation yard has been reduced by half, and our library has been made smaller. Unemployment is rampant and prisoner pay levels (established more than thirty years ago, and never indexed for inflation) were recently cut by a third. Over the last thirty years the CSC gradually shifted the purchasing burden of many medical, hygiene, recreational, and program items onto prisoners. So while poverty has always been a serious problem in prison, it is now at a crisis point. Low pay has reduced prisoners’ ability to survive prison and reintegrate back into the community safely or effectively. 226

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14 Office of the

The prison system appears again to be teetering on Correctional Investigator the brink of violent upheaval. Annual Report, 2011-2010, page 8, Violence in the prison system has been para. 2. rising since the Harper government has imposed 15 Ibid. their ill-informed and punitive “tough on crime” agenda. According to the OCI, “In the last five years, the number of self-injury incidents in CSC facilities has more than doubled,”—14 and Aboriginal women prisoners “accounted for 45% of all self-injury incidents.”—15 It is difficult not to see “rehabilitation” as a buzzword that encapsulates a non-existent correctional pursuit that can never be achieved in a cage and is simply not intended to be anything more than a distraction for the masses. Implosion, Delusion &. Compliance Personal change is not something I am saying can’t happen in prison; I experienced it and I’ve seen it in others. I have seen some people become more thoughtful, more considerate, and kind, but most often I have seen people emotionally isolate themselves. A disadvantaged early life complimented by a tour in prison teaches many people that no one can be trusted. The warped social lessons don’t just come from predatory or exploitive prisoners they also come from prison administrators and officials who approach prisoners with careless duplicity. In these places where trust is a rare commodity, people’s humanity gets shredded. Over time, prison warps and distorts people to the point they can be rendered unstable, violent and a danger to themselves and others (in prison or out). People who were not dangerous become violent and dangerous, and people who were dangerous before prison have become angrier and more volatile and unpredictable. Prisoners can become so disillusioned and frustrated by their endless incarceration under dehumanizing conditions that they turn inward and 227 Peter Collins

16 Stockholm Syndrome is a term for the condition identified in the Red October kidnapping of Patty Hearst, who went on to adopt the ideologies of, and even love for, her kidnappers, and was subsequently charged in Red October bank robberies she took part in.

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slice and slash themselves horribly; cutting off their own genitals, slashing their throats, cutting their arms in so many places there are only bumpy trails of scar tissue left on their arms and chest. So many people come pre-damaged from their life before prison and it spills out in many different ways. Some create elaborate (if unsupportable) stories of wealth and success in the community, perhaps it’s to convince themselves, or perhaps it’s so they can live in a 17 Stepford Wives world where they can believe that someone believes is a novel that tells the tale of they have a wonderful life, even if it is only a community wherein a by imaginary proxy. Others, paradoxically, adopt doctor used chemicals and the ill-informed mantra of the prison industrial mind control to groom and mold complex (PIC) and assume rigid conservative the community’s wives into “tough on crime” attitudes. It may seem like a compliant and subservient “rehabilitation,” but it is more likely to be partners to their husbands. a manifestation of a “Correctional” Stockholm Syndrome.—16 It seems obvious that the prison system wants prisoners to become “Stepford”—17 prisoners, but these developments are unhealthy for the prisoner. There is no doubt that change is found in these places: sometimes change is obvious and sometimes it’s hidden, sometimes the change is understood and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the changes can be productive in spite of the unnatural and harsh conditions, but most times it is counterproductive, and if an individual is able to make positive changes in themselves it cannot reasonably be tied to the fictional propaganda premise of “correctional rehabilitation.” Difficulty For me the most difficult aspect of prison is witnessing how prisoners are diminished, degraded, and destroyed in these places. I see it happening, and I am unable to help them. The damage is delivered in subtle and 228

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imperceptible events and procedures, which over time have come to be “normalized” as prisoners are desensitized to it, and therefore unaware of it. The closest comparison would be how a frog in a pot full of water won’t notice the temperature gradually increase until it’s too late for the frog. Our social conditioning through the education system and the news and entertainment media teaches us that only bad people go to prison, and society is safer due to prisons. Our collective adoption of these “truths” makes it difficult for the general public to see prisoners as people; it’s so much easier to label them as misfits, pariahs, and monsters. Canadians look down their noses at other countries’ failing “justice systems” but turn a blind eye from their own system because they blindly trust the oversight mechanisms will protect the rights of all Canadians. That confidence is misplaced. If you are aboriginal or black you are more likely to be arrested and more likely to be imprisoned. If you are a visible minority in prison in Canada, you will stay in prison longer, more likely be placed in segregation, and stay in isolation cells longer than your white counterparts. I’ve been in prison thirty-one years, and I see no evidence of anything resembling justice coming from this system. Everything about “corrections” is approached from a punitive logic, and the “tough on crime” agenda encourages this type of short-sighted, vengeancedriven approach. This current system allows hurt and angry (victimized) people to feel as if something has been fixed by hitting it (the perpetrator) harder. The vast majority of prisoners are not in prison for violent crimes, and they generally come from impoverished backgrounds and have also been victimized in their own lives. They can be broken down into a variety of sub-groups of disadvantaged and vulnerable people. Prisoners generally don’t have the resources, political capital, or community support to defend themselves. 229 Peter Collins

18 Stephen D. Hart, C. Michie, and D.J. Cooke, “Precision of Actuarial Risk Assessment Instruments Evaluating the ‘Margin of Error’ of Group v. Individual Predictions of Violence,” British Journal of Psychiatry 190, no. 49 (2007): 6.

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Contrary to current conservative political and media hype, the rules are not bent towards providing an unfair advantage to people convicted of crimes. There is no open-door policy to get out of prison, and there never was; Canada has some of the longest prison sentences in the world. When parole hearings come up every couple of years the process is presented as a nuisance and a waste of the parole board’s time, or worse, an affront to victims. The prison system uses psychiatric and psychological “experts” who are in the business of labelling, categorizing, and identifying who is a risk and who is not. This mental healthcare offshoot selfvalidates their value to the process of industrial incarceration and lends their medical credentials to their prison paymasters by pathologizing prisoners. The system has developed a medical hybrid language to lend weight to their pronouncements of risk, which are then used to justify holding someone behind prison walls. They are, in my opinion, a correctional version of the “Dionne Warwick Psychic Hotline Network.” Unfortunately, both hotlines are flawed, and correctional psychologists over-predict risk—18 using Actuarial Risk Assessment Instruments (ARAI’s), thereby preventing the release of prisoners. The accuracy of these predictions can’t be proven wrong because the prisoner is not released, based on the prediction. However, The British Journal of Psychiatry (2007) published Dr. Stephen D. Hart’s paper, “Precision of Actuarial Risk Assessment Instruments Evaluation of the ‘Margins of Error’ of Group v. Individual Predictions of Violence,” which states that, “The ARAI’s cannot be used to estimate an individuals risk for future violence with any reasonable degree of certainty and should be used with great caution or not at all.” This evaluation by clinical and research experts found that risk estimates at the individual level were so high as to render risk estimates virtually meaningless. 230

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Having watched people’s lives and relationships be destroyed by prison has been painful. I believe prison mistreats and dehumanizes prisoners, and teaches them that they are unworthy of dignity, respect, or human rights. It is this curriculum that convinces many prisoners that the law is not applied fairly for everyone, and certainly not for them. After all, most of Canada’s prisoners have had lives filled with personal crisis from day one; poverty, racism, classism, limited education, and few job opportunities. In prison, the “rehabilitation lessons” administered by “corrections” are brutal and degrading and serve no useful purpose. Complicit correctional psychologists “evaluate” prisoners based on a moment in time and then narrate a story based on that moment as if that reflection is all the prisoner is, and ever was. With that approach, prisoners are just human debris dumped into high-security landfills. If Canada was interested in dealing with the root causes of crime, they would look at the social disparity that has its roots in racism, classism, sexism, and withheld opportunity. Prison would be a last resort, not the first resort, and only violent people would end up in prison. Canada would employ the Aboriginal forms of transformative justice and healing circles to hold people accountable and work to heal individuals, families and communities that have been impacted by crime. When it comes to “rehabilitation” I’m reminded of the saying, “The devil’s greatest trick is convincing people he doesn’t exist,” and in this case the trick has been convincing society that “rehabilitation” exists in degrading, damaging, and dangerous prison warehouses.

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Peter Collins

errick Quintero #155453
RMSI 2-D-204
7475 D Cockrill Bend Blvd.
Nashville, TN., 37209-1048

1 American Civil Liberties Union.

December 25, 2013 Hedy Weinberg ACLU P.O. Box 120150 Nashville, TN., 37212 DEAR HEDY, Terry Horgan, catholic prison ministry, said he talked with you about my need for legal assistance from the ACLU—1 concerning the toxicity of this death row building/site and using the Grubbs vs. Bradley prison condition lawsuit’s Consent Decree to possibly re-vitalize the Federal court’s overseer jurisdiction through a Contempt Order. It is my opinion that every death row prisoner, by being forced to live in this toxic soup bowl, has an 8th Amendment claim that negates their death sentence. Please pass this on to the appropriate people. I was initially imprisoned at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution (RMSI), in August 1990, as a pre-trial detainee. I have been imprisoned on Tennessee’s death row since December 1991. I am 52 years old. RMSI was opened in October 1989. In Grubbs, the Middle District Federal Court of Tennessee resolved a prison conditions lawsuit, in part, by closing the Tennessee State Penitentiary (TSP) and accepting Tennessee’s agreement to build RMSI, which houses the state’s death row prisoners. All parties agreed that the totality of TSP’s living conditions were unconstitutional. In essence, all parties agreed that TSP’s physical plant created conditions that damaged the mental and physical well being of the prisoners housed there. Specifically regarding death row, in the case of Ron Harries 233

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(a case consolidated into Grubbs by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals), Federal Judge John Nixon, opined that the conditions at TSP contributed to Harries dropping his appeals, and ordered an attorney (Brad McClain) to act as his guardian ad litum. A “Death Row Plan” was developed to deal with the idleness and to create avenues for mental and physical health treatment and an adequate grievance system. Prior to constructing RMSI, there was an environmental impact study done, roughly completed around 1985. As the RMSI’s name suggests, this area is on a river’s bend. And there was some concern about building any structure on this locale because this used to be a major dump site, some of which used to be for construction-type materials. My Papa, Celerino Cuintero, used to dump here in the early 1980s. Currently, there are three prisons built on this dead end road: Charles Eass (currently a classification centre), RMSI, and the DeBerry Special Needs Facility (mental health, certain medical treatments and hospice care). RMSI and DeBerry house many long-term prisoners. In the early 1990s, I personally read the 1985 environmental study result. My memory is not what it used to be, but the concern of the study seemed to be whether or not it was safe for workers to work 8 or more hours at this site. This seemed to indicate to me that this site was not originally slated for prisons but industrialtype facilities. (Until just a few years ago, these three prisons’ mailing address was changed from Cockrill Bend Industrial Road to Cockrill Bend Boulevard.) The crux of my understanding of this study was that it came to the conclusion that it was not safe to build industrial-type facilities. Grubbs needed a site for these three prisons to be built on so... The reason why this study has stuck with me all these years is that I have asked, to no avail, multiple people in the local legal and anti-death-penalty community to help me in determining whether or not this physical site 234

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is causing mental and physical health issues that Grubbs was designed to alleviate. Granted, the evidentiary proof was not obvious earlier as, in my opinion, it currently is. It is my conclusion, based upon 22 plus years of imprisonment at RMSI that, at least amongst the longterm confined prisoners (and possibly some guards too) at RMSI, and most likely DeBerry: (1) this physical site has directly caused an inordinate and statistically indefensible amount of deaths (beginning in 1997 until the latest death(s) in 2014) and debilitating physical and mental disorders such as: cancer (lung, colorectal, testicular, brain); arterial disorders (heart attacks and strokes); muscular sclerosis; bacterial infections; memory loss; and general lethargy, especially after coming indoors where we are forced to breathe 85% recycled air from ventilation shafts that have never been cleaned, with the outer shafts having been welded shut around 2000. (2) The nutritional value of the food was impacted beginning around 1995, when the newly elected Republican Governor Sundquist ceased prisoner-grown food production and preparation, and contracted with Marriott to feed all Tennessee prisons with “quick-chill” prepared foods (cooked and frozen at least three days in advance of thawing and serving, similar to airplane-style food). (It did not help matters when, in 1996, the new RMSI warden, Ricky Pell, stopped serving fresh fruit because a couple prisoners were caught making wine). What is obvious is that many death row prisoners’ health started declining immediately after the prisoner-farmed food was contracted to Marriott. Under the current Republican Governor Haslam’s regime, the nutritional value of the food has recently taken a worse turn with daily servings of fake eggs and vegetarian (?) meats, few fresh vegetables, and sporadic fresh fruit, except for those in recently won, court-ordered Kosher meals. (3) All RMSI buildings, and possibly all the DeBerry buildings, have developed cracks and have leaked from the roofs, walls, and windows since day one, due to structural 235 Derrick Quintero

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settling. As seems to be the usual business practice, the original construction company went bankrupt immediately after RMSI and the DeBerry facility were opened, negating their contractual obligation to upkeep the structures. In 2004, the state finally decided to try to fix the problem by replacing the roofs. The result was that accumulated bird and rodent feces and whatever rust-related contaminants washed into the buildings. Immediately, about a half dozen or so RMSI prisoners, three or four from death row, were hospitalized for weeks in ICU at St. Meherry General Hospital in Nashville, for respiratory and blood related afflictions. One of these death row prisoners, Tommy King, after being released from death row, and being given parole, died of cancer about a year ago, within 18 months of his release. We believe he contracted cancer from this incident, as he had to have multiple blood transfusions to remove the toxins from his blood system. After the roofs were replaced, none of the contaminated RMSI buildings were decontaminated. (4) In 2010, Nashville was flooded. All the water supplies were compromised, including all three of the above-mentioned prisons, all of which were flooded to various degrees. (RMSI, including death row, was forced to house general population prisoners from other local prisons that were severely flooded.) The local health authority advised that the water had to be boiled, or to drink bottled water if possible. Many cases of bottled water arrived at RMSI, but the maximum-security prisoners, at least, did not receive a single bottle of water. We were forced to heat our own water, but we could not boil it as our hot pots are not capable of obtaining a boiling point. In the last couple months new water pipes are being installed all over RMSI due to major water losses. Plastic piping is now being installed. (5) In 2014, the prison medical contract was awarded to Centurion, replacing Correctional Medical Services. The current Department of Correction Commissioner’s (Derrick Schofield) wife has some 236

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executive position with Centurion. An article detailing this was recently published in the local newspaper, The Tennessean. We are experiencing problems associated with “non-diagnosis.” I currently have a grievance in the commissioner’s office regarding medical treatment not being offered simply due to us having a new medical contractor and the new doctor Lai (sp) not wanting to order a colonoscopy until after the first of the year (2014) because he did not know what exactly this new company would approve yet. I had acute diarrhea for a week and was having 25–30 bowels movements a day, with associated bleeding, which was verified by a stool sample test. (I have been on the “chronic care” list since I had a stroke on May 20, 1997, which, I believe, was caused by non-treatment of a torn abdominal muscle in January that caused me debilitating pain. These incidents have been covered up since, even though I was placed on daily aspirin, blood pressure and cholesterol medication, and a modified diet. My current attorneys tell me that there is no proof in my medical records of this stroke. I still have residual effects of this in my left eye.) For decades, a local minister, Joe Ingle, has been death row’s constant advocate for medical care. Rev. Ingle was seeing me on May 20, 1997, to have me sign medical release papers so outside doctors could assess my torn abdominal problem. When the guard came to tell me Rev. Ingle was here, I had just been taken back to my cell, after not being treated for the stroke I was having at that moment (blood pressure 190 over 140). This guard aided me to the visitation room, out of concern for my situation, and Rev. Ingle ran from there to the prison infirmary where he tried to get me medical treatment, to no avail. So, he brought a local cardiologist out to see me, but the prison medical personnel removed all the testing instruments from the death row unit’s triage room. I lay in my prison cell for two weeks with no treatment. I never knew how depression could physically hurt until 237 Derrick Quintero

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this time. Right after this, the prison quit allowing outside medical people to come into the prison to offer “second opinions.” Four death row prisoners died of cancer and heart attacks during the next two and a half years, beginning with Terry Barber on April 15, 1997. I believe these illnesses primarily killed those who had compromised immune systems. Only the ones who were/are physically active/fit have managed to survive this building’s toxicity, exacerbated by nutritionally bankrupt food. (6) Over the last five or six years our eye sight has been damaged by the installation of energy-saving florescent bulbs. Immediately after the installation of these bulbs, we noticed how dim the lighting was and began experiencing pressure around the eyes. And, it is hard to focus after an hour or two, especially if reading or doing any detailed work, like art. Even the people who come to visit complain about how it takes several hours for their eyes to readjust after being here for a couple hours. Related to health, TDOC Commissioner Schofield went on television in October 2013 stating that he was going to install an airport body-scanning machine at RMSI for everyone entering the compound. (This was in retaliation for a non-death row, maximum-security prisoner calling a local reporter on a contraband cellphone while he was confined in his cell.) While this scanning machine impacts the visitors who come in two or three times a week, if prisoners raise this concern, the commissioner will simply implement video conference (non-contact) visiting, which he already tried (unsuccessfully) to get the legislature to approve in his first budget session. This issue has to be raised by the medical and prison employees who will be exposed to much radiation four or five times a week, on top of already being forced to have scanned any food they might bring in. I have been educating and consulting with several guards, who have expressed concerns about this radiation issues, coupled with the exposure to the issues associated with the dump site under this facility. I have 238

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not heard one guard tell me that they were warned about coming to work where an industrial waste dump used to be situated. The concern among these guards is that they are worried about losing their job-related benefits, especially healthcare. We all know they will be retaliated against. Just as we all know that their ability to obtain other work is limited by their poverty-based lives. I will have to find some who are not ex-military, as they are already conditioned wrongly. I will handle it if you can help us fight this first-of-its-kind situation: a body scanner in any state (or Federal(?)) prison. Grubbs’ and Contempt Order Some of us death row prisoners have come to the conclusion that opening the Grubbs lawsuit would be more efficient and a faster vehicle to obtain an injunction to stop what is happening now before it becomes settled in. We are being told that a whole bunch of new policies are being implemented after the first of the year. Even our food portions are going to be cut because the commissioner said on television that the prisoners are too fat. A Contempt of Court order would seem to be the avenue, as the state is now trying to renege on the conditions of the settlement. Here are some other concerns, related to this: 1) The monthly “Warden Meetings” are no longer video recorded, starting about two years or so ago. The machine broke and has never been repaired. 2) The grievance Chairperson tells the inmate who writes out the minutes what to put into the minutes. 3) Since this administration came into office in 2010, a practice of not giving the prisoners anything in written form has been established. No paper trail! 4) The prison job-creating group “TriCor” used to have a data entry program situated on death row, which employed over twenty death row prisoners. This was created by the Grubbs case to stop the damaging effects of 239 Derrick Quintero

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idleness. Constant praise was given to the quality of work being produced on death row. It is obvious that the quality of work produced was due, in great part, by the fact that death row was not a transient population who had to be retrained constantly. In 2010 this administration removed the entire program to general population. They determined that this was a rehabilitative type work and death row was not entitled to it because of that factor. Since then, some jobs have been created specifically to have some money coming into the unit. These jobs are meaningless—merely paper jobs. They do nothing to alleviate idleness. 5) Idleness has become apparent again as the “Death Row Level Program” is working so well that over fifty prisoners are walking around unrestrained to everywhere but media visits, where we are now forced to be in full restraints. (This was due to a 1999 escape from Unit 1, the general population lock-down unit next door, where the local media criticized the then warden, Ricky Bell, for his lax security at RMSI. Bell even punished the media by not letting them interview us for several years, then only if we were manacled, perpetrating the lie that we were always restrained whenever we are outside of our cells, which is not the reality.) The prison administration is, once again, complaining that there are too many “A-Level” (the elitist group) prisoners walking around. Every time this occurs, the administration begins harassing the A-Levels until some of them are given write-ups and their level is dropped to a B or C. If there were meaningful jobs, there would not be that many death row prisoners walking around. 6) The current administration wants death row treated like the punitive based maximum security units are. A good example is that Christmas packages were given out to every prisoner here by local churches and individuals. Just because death row is situated on the high security side of this prison, we were not given shampoo and toothpaste (and some other items, like crackers and cotton gloves) because the punitive-based prisoners in the surrounding units use 240

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the bottles to squirt fluids onto the guards. Now, death row can buy these same items from the commissary, unlike the punitive-based units. Death row has never been treated like the punitive units, because we are not here for breaking some prison rule. The court ordered “Death Row Level Program” has always allowed us to have a similar status as general population prisoners’ classification system, which means that based upon our good behaviour we are given certain privileges, such as being able to work, walk around unrestrained to the law library and visits, and congregate with other A-Level prisoners in groups of 12 or more. A-Level is similar to minimum custody. B-Level is similar to medium custody. C-Level is similar to maximum security custody. 7) Unit 2 has its own mini-law library. The books were originally donated by a federal district judge, John Nixon. The pocket parts inside most of them read 1997 or earlier. A 1999 computer was recently placed in, but there is no hook-up to West Law. This is mainly due some guards raising a stink about us having it in the first place. Some of them are saying that due to copyright laws, they cannot copy the West Law onto discs at RMSI’s main law library and carry it down to install into this computer. Two computers were donated by two Vanderbilt students about two years ago, but the red tape has kept them buried in some closet somewhere unknown now. All we can do with this computer is key stuff into it and access the encyclopedia Britanica. Anyone who is anyone knows that Tennessee death row prisoners have been heavily involved in their own cases and those of other prisoners who cannot defend themselves from the torrent of bad attorneys who have been shoveled onto many cases here. We cannot be expected to rely upon some prisoner we do not know at the main library to do our research for us. We cannot sue these prisoners for I.A.C. We want our unit’s library returned to fighting order once again. 8) Two years ago, commissioner Schofield ordered 241 Derrick Quintero

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that all but two cubic feet of our legal material had to be removed from our cell. It was placed in plastic containers and sits in the 2A Program Building, where the law library and arts and crafts room are located. We can access it once a week, unless an emergency comes up. Schofield said this paper was a fire hazard and presented too much for his staff to search through. As I write this, all of our legal file boxes have been removed from this unit and taken somewhere to be searched. The agreement we had with the prison officials, when they first took these legal papers, was that the boxes would be zip-tied in our presence and they would not be opened outside of our presence. Like usual, authority’s word is bankrupt of veracity. Schofield has created two special forces units of guards, which are only concerned with searching things. There is the “Strike Force Team,” which protects and only answers to the commissioner. Then there is the “Green Team,” which is only answerable to the warden of each prison they work at. Then you have the low-level guards who are searched and trusted like they were prisoners. This commissioner, at the order of the governor most likely, has already run off most of the old-time prison personnel. This saves money, but it also allows the commissioner to get ex-military personnel to help him run these prisons. 9) Currently, death row is being forced to endure daily inspections, where we have to stand and acknowledge whomever comes around for inspection, mostly the unit manager and sergeant. This was implemented several months back, after being implemented in the general population last year. (The current commissioner is a retired colonel, who the Governor was in the military with, some say.) We are awakened at 6:15 a.m. every morning (even though we come out for breakfast around 6:30). Sometime after the 9:00 a.m. count, they come around for cell inspection. Everything you are working on must be put up until this inspection is over, sometimes around 10:30, or sometimes, 242

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they do not even show up. Then there is an 11:15 am and a 4:15 pm head count. Then there is a 3:00 pm head count where you have to be sitting or standing. You cannot go to sleep before 9:00 pm. The 9:00 pm and the 6:15 am count are to determine that you are alive. Some of the guards said this was being implemented because a prisoner at the Tn. Prison for Women was found dead in her cell, after three days. We later determined this was a lie, utilized by some of the guards to get us used to the idea of having to be awakened every morning. I want whomever reads this to understand that I do not relish this fight, as I know the retaliation that will come down behind it. I am strong enough to handle whatever comes, as long as I know I am being aggressively represented. I cannot carry this fight myself anymore, since the stroke. I honestly do believe this could be used to end the death penalty in Tn. I also want you to know that ending the death penalty means a life sentence for me, which bothers me more to have than the death penalty—one ends and the other is merely a walking death sentence. It is not in my personal interest to have a life sentence because this means that I, an innocent man (with a long list of documented issues with authority), might very well have to depend on myself and some prisoner legal aides to carry my fight forward. All I am saying is, please do not send anyone who does not understand that I view life from a political prism. I fight because I have to. I have paid my dues to the Struggle. I do not owe but a handful any apologies for the mistakes I made and none of them belong to anyone in authority. It took me a long time to grow to like and respect what I see in the mirror, so please do not come around me if you are not real to who you are. You, in general, have asked me to learn how to fight abusive authority differently, which is why I picked up the law books when they indicted me on this Tn. case. I have enough 243 Derrick Quintero

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gas for one more good fight, so help me and this gluedtogether personal word processor show what justice is supposed to look like. Thank you for your time and attention in this matter. In Peace and in Solidarity,

“If My Journey Was A Book Title . . .” by Derrick Quintero, mixed media

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IF MY JOURNEY WAS A BOOK TITLE Derrick Quintero

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If My Journey Was A Book Title

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Derrick Quintero

PRISON OUTSIDE THE BOX Harold W. Nichols

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Harold W. Nichols

New Jersey State Prison

Ojore Lutalo

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RETHINKING ILLINOIS’ TRUTH-IN-SENTENCING LAW JOSEPH DOLE K84446 P.O.BOX 112 JOLIET, IL 60434 We are all aware of the dire fiscal state that Illinois currently finds itself in. One of the main causes of this has been years of passing laws without any consideration of the financial costs of their enactment. One of the most egregious examples of this being the Truth-InSentencing (TIS) law. TIS in Illinois requires that nearly all violent offenders serve 85% to 100% of their sentences. Prior to TIS being enacted here in 1998, offenders served, on average, 44% of
their sentences. For more than a decade Illinois resisted enacting a TIS law when other states rushed to do so. Instead, we increased sentencing ranges for violent crimes. The State didn’t pass its TIS law until after the federal government began offering monetary incentives to the states to do so. Although TIS was enacted in Illinois over a decade and a half ago, not a single comprehensive cost/benefit analysis has been undertaken to determine what monetary effect its enactment has had on the state. Other states that enacted TIS legislation adjusted for it by reducing sentences so the average imposed sentence was about half of what it was before enactment. That way a prisoner ended up serving the same amount of time in prison and didn’t cost the state additional money. Illinois, on the other hand, failed to adjust. Instead, judges here actually increased average sentences
imposed or kept handing out similar sentences. With the sentencing ranges having already been increased, Illinois taxpayers are being hit twice as hard. A couple of years ago I compiled a preliminary report using rudimentary calculations and the limited statistics available on the internet or from the Illinois 255

1 The report can be downloaded at www. realcostofprisons. org.

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department of Corrections (IDOC). I found that even if one considers the meager funds received from the federal government from 1996-2004, which altogether 2 See http://www. totalled less than $125 million, the additional vera.org/files/ price-of-prisons- costs incurred by the
state for sentences imposed illinois-fact-sheet. under TIS for 2002-2004 alone will be over $750 pdf. million. My estimates were extremely conservative. They were reached using a roughly $25,000-per-year-perperson cost of incarceration figure, which is nearly $10,000 too low. Also, that number failed to account for the increased expenses required to care for prisoners when they become elderly and require expensive medical care. Writing in an article for the Chicago Reader entitled “Guarding Grandpa,” Jessica Pupovac reports that the IDOC “spends roughly $428 million a year—about a third of its annual budget—keeping elderly inmates behind bars.” As Pupovac notes, “[w]hile keeping a younger inmate behind bars costs taxpayers about $17,000 a year, older inmates cost four times as much,” or $68,000 per year.—1 This is close to the $69,000 figure that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) arrived at as well. As for the $17,000 figure, or the $25,000 figure that I used from the IDOC itself, these are ridiculously low. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, the IDOC does not calculate the full cost to taxpayers when reporting the average costs of incarceration. They neglect to account for pension contributions, employee benefits, healthcare contributions for both employees and retirees, capital costs, and state-wide administration costs. When one takes all of these costs into account, as Vera has, it shows that Illinois spends, on average, $38,268 annually per inmate to incarcerate someone.—2 So, prior to the passage of TIS in Illinois, if a person received a 50-year sentence for murder at age 18, he or she would have had to serve, on average, 44% of that sentence, or 22 years, due to the
numerous types 256

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of good time awarded then. Thus, they would have been released at age 40, and it would have cost the State $841,896 to carry out that sentence. After passage of TIS, though, that same sentence means that the offender must now serve the entire 50 years and won’t be released until they are 68. Therefore, the first 32 years will cost the State $1,224,576, and the last 18 years, when he or she is elderly will cost the State an additional $1,242,000 (the IDOC considers prisoners elderly at age 50). So before TIS, a 50-year murder sentence cost taxpayers $841,896, but after TIS it cost taxpayers $2,466,576. (This is in addition to the million dollars or so they may have already spent on a trial and appeals.) Thus, TIS nearly tripled the cost to taxpayers, adding $1,624,680 to the tab for this one sentence. Each year, over 300 people in Illinois are sentenced for murder. Thousands more are sentenced for other violent crimes. All of these TIS sentences add up to the State incurring well over a quarter of a billion dollars per year in added liabilities. How many more teachers, police officers, and firefighters can a quarter billion dollars per year pay for? How many more of them will need to be laid off in order to continue paying for TIS? Every year that TIS remains law without action to adjust, reform it, or repeal it we add another quarter billion dollars to the State’s credit card that we’ll all be paying for years to come. Isn’t it time we had a discussion about what constitutes a reasonable amount of money to spend to punish someone? Isn’t it also about time we consider whether there are more efficient ways to spend that money to reduce crime? Studies have shown that inmates who have served 25 years in prison and are 50 or older have less than a 1% recidivism rate. They also consistently show that “murderers,” the socalled most “violent” criminals, have the lowest recidivism rate of any category of offenders. Keeping elderly people incarcerated well past the point where they cease to pose 257 Joseph Dole

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a threat to society may sate our appetite for revenge, but it does nothing to keep society safe. It actually does the opposite by taking away funds that could have been used to employ police officers and teachers, fix dangerous bridges and roads, and rehabilitate the 90% of prisoners who will return to the streets. It is time to use some “common cents” in our criminal justice policies.

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THE CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT: AT THE PINNACLE OF POLICE CORRUPTION, AND A MENACE TO SOCIETY JOSEPH DOLE K84446 P.O.BOX 112 JOLIET.IL 60434 When is enough enough? How about when the police torture and imprison innocent people? How about when innocent people are routinely snatched off the streets and locked up for life with little recourse? How about when even after police officers are found to have tortured innocent people they still aren’t punished? How about when police officers can easily keep all of their misconduct secret from the public for years, decades, or even indefinitely? How about when the police, with impunity, with the complicity of the State’s Attorney’s Office, and in violation of both discovery laws and the Illinois Freedom Of Information Act (IFOIA), conceal exculpatory and exonerating evidence from those who are wrongfully convicted? Then, enough is enough in Chicago where all of this occurs on a daily basis. While the majority of people in prison are, in fact, guilty of the crimes they were convicted of, way too many are actually, completely innocent. Many of these innocent people have had their entire lives stolen from them when they received the death penalty, life imprisonment, or its numerical equivalent (i.e. a fifty-year sentence and must serve 100% of it). Even the ones who were later able to prove their innocence, and there have been many, lost decades of their lives while in prison fighting for their freedom. The reasons for false convictions are numerous: false confessions, perjured testimony, coerced witnesses, suggestive identification, fabricated evidence, concealed exonerating or exculpatory evidence, and more. The common 259

1 Marc Mauer, “Lessons Of The ‘Get Tough’ Movement In The United States,” presented at the International Corrections and Prison Association, 6th Annual Conference, Beijing, China, October 25, 2004.

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denominator in the majority of these is police misconduct. In a study of death penalty cases over a twenty-year period, Marc Mauer, then of the Sentencing Project in Washington, found that twothirds of them were overturned due to a serious error. One of the most common of which was the suppression of evidence by police and prosecutors.—1 The most unconscionable aspect of all of this is that, in Chicago, we know that it happens on a regular basis, but allow it to continue. As I write this, yet another police misconduct scandal is coming to light concerning the Chicago Police Department (CPD). This time it involves Detective Reynaldo Guevara and numerous other officers at Area 5 Police Headquarters. Det. Guevara had a history of improperly influencing witnesses (such as showing eye witnesses a photo of who he wanted them to pick out of a line-up) and physically coercing suspects into making false confessions. Dozens of people most likely spent years or decades behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. Lieutenant Jon Burge routinely tortured people into confessing to crimes they were innocent of, or into implicating the innocent in order to escape either the torture or false charges against themselves. He physically beat, burned, and shocked people with electricity, to get them to say what he wanted them to say. He was not alone. His associates at Area 2 Police Headquarters were complicit, as was at least one Assistant State’s Attorney who took the “suspects” statements. (That ASA now sits as a criminal court judge in the Cook County Circuit Court). Tens of millions of dollars have been paid out to try and compensate some of the victims who often, in addition to being tortured, had to spend many years of their lives behind bars (and often their family’s entire life’s savings on attorney’s fees) due to the criminal actions of members of the CPD. More appalling than that even, is the fact that 260

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2 Steven A. Drizin

Jon Burge has never faced charges for his torture and Richard A. Leo, “The of innocent Chicagoans. The reason being is that Problem Of False Confessions In The he and the CPD were successful in keeping it Post-DNA World,” North Carolina all secret from the public until long after the Law Review 891 (2004): 82. statute of limitations had run out to charge him. Oh, be assured, the victims told anyone who would listen that they were tortured and only falsely confessed to escape further torture. Unfortunately, they decried to a society with deaf ears. Society has such an animosity against people who are charged with crimes that it refuses to believe them. It wasn’t until DNA evidence started proving, unequivocally, that they were innocent and had therefore falsely confessed, that anyone began to take them seriously. These types of police misconduct are no aberration, either. This was and is routine operating procedure at the CPD, and many other police departments in Illinois. Although the CPD clearly wins the “misconduct and concealment thereof award,” they clearly are not alone. For instance, during the Brown’s Chicken murder trial, it came out that the Palatine Police Department had coerced witnesses into falsely implicating an innocent suspect. In 2004, Steven A. Drizin and Richard A. Leo conducted a study of 125 people who had been completely exonerated by DNA evidence after having been wrongfully convicted based on false confessions.—2 They found that out of all the states, Illinois had the most cases with twenty-seven, or 22% of the total. More than half of those were found in Chicago alone. This was before the vast majority of the Burge and Guevara cases came to light. When these police crimes remain hidden for years, or forever, it has an incredibly deleterious effect on individuals’ lives, citizens’ rights, and the fabric of our democracy. First, it destroys both the lives of those wrongfully convicted and the lives of their families. Second, it allows the truly guilty to remain free to murder others or commit further crimes. Third, it denies the 261 Joseph Dole

3 Christian Henrichson and Ruth Delaney, “The Price Of Prisons:
What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers,” Vera Institute Of Justice, January 2012, www.vera.org/ priceofprisons.

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victims and their families justice, or at the very least, delays that justice, forcing the victims and their families to relive the emotional strain of another trial. Fourth, it exacerbates the problems of police misconduct when there isn’t any deterrent effect of punishing police misconduct. Also, when the police officers gain promotions based upon these false confessions and allegedly “solving” these crimes, other officers see an incentive in this type of misconduct. Fifth, it corrupts the entire police department as the code of silence pressures other members of the CPD to keep silent, to conceal evidence of misconduct, and to deny the public their right to have access to police files. Sixth, it wastes taxpayers’ money to put innocent people on trial unnecessarily. (A capital murder trial can cost $1 million or more). Seventh, it wastes the taxpayers’ money to incarcerate innocent people for years or decades. (It costs Illinois $38,268 to incarcerate one person for a single year).—3 Eighth, it wastes taxpayers’ money to compensate the wrongfully convicted when it does come to light. Though few deserve compensation more than they do, without the illegal acts of police, neither the prison time nor the compensation would have been necessary. (Over the past decade, Chicago has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to compensate Jon Burge’s victims.). Ninth, it denies the wrongfully convicted and tortured the justice they deserve, as the statute of limitations to charge the officers with a crime (official misconduct, assault, etc.) quickly runs out. Police misconduct disproportionately affects the poor. This is because the poor are: least able to afford competent defence counsel; least likely to be able to afford civil counsel to file a lawsuit against the police; least politically powerful, so they are routinely ignored by both the press and those elected as aldermen, legislators, and judges; and least educated, so they are often easier to intimidate and coerce into keeping quiet 262

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4 Summary of

or falsely confessing, and are often unaware of the the Chicago Problem, “Crime, extent of their rights. More importantly, though, Corruption and Cover-ups in the any person (especially if poor) accused of a crime Chicago Police Department: in America is automatically viewed as scum, a liar, Anti-Corruption Report Number and untrustworthy in the eyes of the public. This 7,” January 17, 2013 (University of is the result of four decades of tough-on-crime Illinois at Chicago, Department of rhetoric that has tainted the national psyche; it Political Science), 21. directly facilitates police misconduct, because anyone accused of a crime who then accuses police of misconduct is never believed. This also incentivizes false charges, because if the police don’t charge the victims of police abuse they then become more credible in the eyes of the public. At the same time, there is an equal misconception that the police are upstanding, honest, and serve the public. This has never been more of a myth than it currently is in Chicago. As the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Political Science found: The real problem of [police corruption in Chicago] is that an embarrassingly large number of police officers violate citizens’ rights, engage in corruption and commit crimes while escaping detection and avoiding discipline or prosecution for many years. The ”code of silence“ and ”deliberate indifference“ have prevented police supervisors and civilian authorities from effectively eliminating police corruption.—4 Prosecutors often refuse to even acknowledge police misconduct, let alone prosecute it. The reason is actually twofold. First, as noted, the police code of silence makes gathering evidence difficult. Second, there exists a tight working relationship between the police department and prosecutor’s office. The people working in both become friends and watch each others’ backs. More importantly though, the prosecutors are often complicit in much of this misconduct, because it helps with their cases. Often the false confession or false eye-witness identifications are the only “evidence” against a person and the prosecutor knows that without it they would lose 263 Joseph Dole

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the case. In other instances, the prosecutor knows that if he or she discloses the exonerating evidence they’ll lose the case. Prosecutors, in general, have little interest in justice. They want to advance their careers, and only successful prosecutors (i.e. lots of wins) advance. The average citizen would be shocked to learn how often exculpatory and exonerating evidence is concealed for decades. It is done both by the police and prosecutors, often conspiring together. This prevents defendants from not only being able to defend themselves against false charges, but also from being able to successfully appeal or challenge their wrongful convictions. When evidence does finally come to light the State’s Attorney’s Office vociferously fights against the defendant getting released or a new trial. Often they will, in concert with the CPD and the Internal Affairs divisions of the Illinois Department of Corrections, craft additional false statements of other people in prison or who are charged with minor crimes, who further implicate the defendant in exchange for a time cut or dropped charges. (Ironically, and detrimentally, society usually views these criminal/ prisoner-witnesses as credible, because they are now aligned with the other side of the courtroom.) As things stand now, there is no transparency or accountability in the Chicago Police Department. Ironically, current laws and policies seem to create an incentive not to discipline officers for misconduct. Furthermore, the independent body supposedly set up to investigate misconduct at the CPD is not only toothless, but actively conceals evidence of misconduct by citing the IFOIA as requiring secrecy. The IFOIA states that: Pursuant to the fundamental philosophy of the American Constitutional form of government, it is declared to be the public policy of the State of Illinois that all persons are entitled to full and complete information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts and policies of those who represent them as public 264

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5 CR is the name

officials and public employees consistent with the terms given to any complaint filed of this Act. Such access is necessary to enable the people against, or investigation of, to fulfil their duties of discussing the public issues fully and misconduct of a member of the freely, making informed political judgments and monitoring CPD. government to ensure that it is being conducted in the 6 Martinez v. City public interest. of Chicago, 2012 WL I655953*3 The General Assembly hereby declares that (N.D.ILL, May 10, 2013). it is the public policy of the State of Illinois that access by all persons to public records promotes the transparency and accountability of public bodies at all levels of government. It is a fundamental obligation of government to operate openly and provide public records as expediently and efficiently as possible in compliance with this Act. Inconsistent with all of the above is Section 7(l) (n) of the IFOIA, a 2010 amendment that exempts: Records relating to a public body’s adjudication of employee grievances of disciplinary cases; however, this exemption shall not extend to the final outcome of cases in which discipline is imposed. Both the CPD and the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) claim that this exemption justifies their refusal to disclose any information concerning complaints or investigations of police misconduct unless those investigations result in disciplinary action against that officer, and then it only requires that the final outcome be disclosed. The courts are split on whether this exemption actually applies to Complaint Register (CR) files.—5 As the federal district court for the Northern District of Illinois noted: “Even if we assume that Section 7(1)n exempts CR files from disclosure under IFOIA, it is not clear what interest that exemption serves.”—6 It certainly doesn’t serve the interests of the abused or wrongfully charged and/or convicted. Nor does it serve society’s interests. Rather, it unequivocal1y works against their interests and erodes the very soul of the IFOIA. According to Tia Mathew, Assistant Corporation Counsel for the City of Chicago: 265 Joseph Dole

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In 2007, the IPRA was established as ”an office of the municipal government“ by municipal ordinance of the City of Chicago. See Chicago Municipal Code, Chapter 2-57-020. Pursuant to the Chicago Municipal Code, the IPRA’s powers and duties Include, inter alia: (a) receiving and registering all complaints filed against Bombers of the CPD: (b) conducting investigations into complaints against members of the CPD concerning domestic violence, excessive force, coercion, and verbal abuse; (c) conducting investigations into all cases in which a CPD member discharges his/her firearm, stun gun, or taser in a manner which potentially could strike an individual, even if no allegation of misconduct is made; and (d) conducting investigations into cases where the death of a person or an injury sustained by a person occurs while in police custody or where an extraordinary or unusual occurrence occurs in lockup facilities, even when no allegation of misconduct is made. Chicago Municipal Code, Chapter 2-57-040. It should be noted that prior to 2007, these complaints and allegations were investigated by the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), which was a division of the CPD before the IPRA’s creation. Both pre and post 2007, all other investigations that were not undertaken by OPS or IPRA were conducted by Internal Affairs Division (IAD), which is a division of the CPD ..... the IPRA investigation and finding as to whether the allegation is sustained, not sustained, unfounded or exonerated, and its recommendations of discipline are not a final determination. So the IPRA simply makes a recommendation to the CPD concerning disciplinary action. It has no power to impose discipline themselves. That falls back to the CPD, which makes the final determination. The CPD can simply ignore an IPRA recommendation for discipline, which, in the CPD’s reasoning, would keep all records of any investigation of police misconduct, whether investigated by the CPD or IPRA, exempt from disclosure under the IFOIA. All that the CPD needs to do in order to keep police misconduct a secret from the public is choose not to discipline its officers, even if the toothless IPRA recommends that it should. Then they can tell the public that any allegations of misconduct were unfounded, and 266

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refuse to disclose any details of the complaint or investigation, thereby saving the CPD from yet another public relations nightmare, media scrutiny, etc. Therefore, it creates a clear incentive to refrain from disciplining its own officers when they torture people into falsely confessing. Or when they suggest to eye-witnesses who should be picked out of a line-up. Or when they conceal or destroy exonerating evidence. Transparency and accountability be damned. Furthermore, it makes officers feel above the law, and thereby promotes officer misconduct, cover-ups, and the code of silence—all to the great detriment of society. One can only guess at how many other Lt. Burges or Det. Guevaras types are failing to be uncovered because of this. One can only imagine how emboldened officers feel when there is no accountability for their misconduct, and where they can ruin peoples’ lives with impunity. One can only imagine how many more citizens’ rights are being trampled, and how many additional lives have been destroyed because of this. More importantly, though, with the vast amount of misconduct that is known to occur, and the monumental hindrances to uncovering misconduct, one should be terrified at the amount of misconduct that remains concealed from the public. It is high time that the Chicago Police Department is made transparent and accountable. If not, no one in Chicago will ever be safe.

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PRISON: A ROUNDTABLE CONVERSATION WITH LIFERS with Gee, Kato, and Just Another Number Prisons, prisoners, and the discourse that surrounds them are often made inaccessible to the outside community. We are too often fed fear-mongering propaganda that legitimizes extreme punitive measures at any cost. The prison discourse is most often completely one-sided (the system’s version) or when critical, from the outside looking in. Since prisoners’ voices are often silenced, their accounts on crime and justice are rare. This conversation is an attempt to make some of these voices heard. The following is a conversation with two men that I have come to know through my involvement in a prison lifers’ group. Both men are currently serving life sentences in Canada, which means that they have served a long-term sentence inside and upon release, are on parole for life. Their names have been changed due to the fact that prisoners and those involved in prison groups are not allowed to share their thoughts and experiences about prison. Gee: There is an assumption that being inside prison is easy. What do you think? Kato: Most people look at the physical aspect of prison. Prison has gotten a lot better throughout the years, that is to say there is less physical hardship. But on an emotional level it is far from being easy, which is why the suicide rate is high. It can be compared to work. With unions, a lot of the jobs got better. You look at some jobs as great and easy, yet burnout is higher than ever before. That is to say that on an emotional level, some jobs aren’t that easy. The boss is too demanding, your supervisor is an asshole, and so on. But on the street 269

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you can always change jobs or seek medical leave... while in prison you’re stuck, there’s no way out. And we’re not talking about a day or a year but years of living with that pressure. Another aspect of prison that people don’t seem to get——I guess you have to live it to understand it——has to do with loved ones. Can you imagine that all of a sudden you could only see them once a week? I think you would have a very hard time dealing with that. This is perhaps one of the hardest parts of prison. You could send me to live on a nice tropical island with room and board, but without the people I love, I wouldn’t be happy. Yes, I understand that I committed a crime and that society said that I should go to prison, but don’t tell me I’m doing easy time. I didn’t find anything easy about prison. Yes, I had a roof over my head and three meals a day, but my loved ones were not with me. and other people were in total control of my life. Just Another Number: Before I was incarcerated, I never gave more than a moment’s thought to the world inside prisons. After being incarcerated, a moment rarely slips by without some scar from the “inside” having a presence. During my time, I have lived through the current swing towards more punitive conditions. A political move through and through. To give you some perspective, imagine living in a six-by-nine-foot concrete box for twenty-three and a half hours a day. A shower every three days, where even lukewarm water was a cause to bring a smile to your face. Two men living in the same cell was common and everyone knew that was a powder keg waiting for a spark. A blue-suited robot with the keys more often than not was that spark. I often thought about what makes someone want to be a prison guard. Still to this day, no suitable answer is to be found. Arrogance and lack of compassion are the norm. I found throughout my life when someone is in a dominant position, the true measure of their decency is revealed. The keepers 270

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of the cages caused more harm to prisoners than prisoners ever did to themselves. Verbal, physical, and psychological violence are their aims and orders. I staggered out, bloodied and torn, but out I finally am! But the invisible leash remains firmly attached. As intrusive as it is, it is better than going back in. It was a horrible place that the government made to be as unpleasant as their laws allow. If the law gets in the way, then they just make a new one. Gee: Do you or did you feel like you were always being watched? Just Another Number: While I was inside, I can say with certainty, yes, I was always being watched. The cameras are everywhere, the guards are always floating around sniffing, and the snitches are a story unto themselves. These snitches are recruited in several ways. They were afraid and sought protection, which has a price. Others were caught doing some infraction and were given a pass on punishment so long as they inform on their fellow prisoners. Some others were just cowards that wanted to cause someone else suffering and wanted someone else to do their dirty work. Inside, you can tangibly feel when you are not being watched. There is a lightening of the shoulders and you can close your eyes for a few moments defenseless. I believe I find comfort in solitude because of those little moments. On parole, the ever-present physical reminders are out of eyesight, but never far from memory. The attention outside is different. Once you’re out, you are mandated to see your parole officer every week. Failure to do so is an automatic violation of your parole conditions. These mandatory meetings are their chance to what I call “sniff.” So, hiding the scars of the living hell you just survived is paramount, otherwise they view you as an undue risk and throw you back inside prison with no end date. Then, you 271 with Gee, Kato, and Just Another Number

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will not know when or if you will ever get out again. Gee: Did or do you feel part of a community on the outside while you were in prison? Kato: A big factor in the reality of prison life is the inability to find friends or possible relationships. Some guys run into situations that allow this to happen, but it is not a normal occurrence. For the most part, it is a lonely world that you get accustomed to and later turns into a way of life. The institution is supposed to encourage and accommodate such activity, but the fact is that they do the exact opposite. Their concerns over illegal activity block the way for those with a sincere interest in maintaining the ties they have with loved ones. The result is the urge to cut the ties with the ones you care about, in order to save them from becoming pawns in the sadistic games played by the prison administration! Things are done in the name of false prevention and unrealistic protection of the ones who support you, resulting in you being so discouraged that you cut it off and never let it happen again. Then when it comes time for release they have the nerve to ask why there is nobody there to support you? Anyone who has gone to a family visit or trailer in a prison or asked for a community assessment to go somewhere knows full well what this feels like! Is there no obligation on the part of the prison to treat visitors with more dignity than the way we are treated every day? Is there any accountability for those who deal with innocent people in support of those fallen from grace? They discourage visitors as much as possible through their portrayal of you, then they explain that this is done to make sure that the person is aware of what they are getting into. This should not be an excuse when prying into the lives of your family members! As for those in relationships, should it not be up to these individuals to set their own level of information sharing, rather than 272

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having authorities dictate that for them, with regard to personal information that does not have anything to do with the protection of society, or the good order of the institution? What business is it of theirs what each knows about the other? And is what they tell your loved ones correct? So who can regulate this routine and what strategies are shared with the offender or professionals for the purpose of accountability? Consideration for the integrity of the external contact (loved one or community) should be a priority because of the importance of the role the contacts play in the rehabilitation process. Just Another Number: When I first went in, I felt thrown away. Although my family in their grief tried to hold me close, I was slowly slipping away. Everywhere else in my social realm, I felt alone and unwilling to try to remedy the situation. It wasn’t until I decided to come out of my cave that I began to reach out. It was surprising that a warm hand was offered… a slow steady progression of good, decent people willing to share a part of their lives with me. Those that came inside the prison and volunteered their time saved my life. So for me, I finally feel as if I am a part of the community that I want to be in. Gee: How did you prepare yourself to get out of prison? Kato: Is it assumed that the reintegration process is so simple that it does not warrant much attention? I have heard very little spoken about the readjustment of people who are now on society’s doorstep after having been wrung out, strung out, and now thrown out! What about the individual skills he needs to become a contributing and profitable member of society after spending so long in prison? I’ve done all the programs set out by my classification team, and I’m supposed to be cured of the problems which led to my being in jail. The cold truth of 273 with Gee, Kato, and Just Another Number

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the matter is that after taking all of the programs set out, none of them addressed my problem! What I needed was to learn how to live with secure employment and financial stability, and yet none of this was offered! I had to create my own program in order to attempt to address my own needs. It’s a known fact that the prison institution claims to recognize this problem, but fails to take steps to address it. They think that slow reintegration is the only solution. What a failure of society and for society! Interaction with the outside world is vital to this process! At the end of my prison sentence, while in a minimum-security institution, I am supposed to have this reality before me. Now the problem is that if I don’t have a substance abuse problem and I’m not involved with church activities, I don’t qualify for group outings, which would give me credibility before the parole board. There are other outings, but all of them are related to volunteer work projects approved by the prison (not field training), and I believe they serve the institution more than the individual. Nothing would be better than to work with people from the community who understand your dynamics and with people you are comfortable with. If you have this during your last stretch inside, then you can stay focused and get the most out your time, as opposed to wasting it. At some stage it’s vital to the reintegration process to allow volunteers the chance to walk side by side with those with non-substance abuse problems in order to help them combat the effects of their sometimes very long prison stays. Luckily a small door was open to me at the prison, and this program gave me a link to the community, a volunteer network that helps long-term offenders with their reintegration. And this is very important because a link with the community is required to get paroled. It is a must to have someone you’re comfortable with to share your feelings, fears, and thoughts without fear 274

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of retribution... be it your family or some community resource. If you share some of the feelings with the prison staff, they will analyze it and decide that they perceive that a certain feeling or thought might mean that you are not ready yet and they will cut off your outings instead of helping you to deal with it. So you find yourself pushed back on your release program for a couple more years because you were a bit overwhelmed on your first outing, which is a normal reaction after years of incarceration. And two years later, when they let you try again, that feeling is still going to be there because you have to work on that slowly while you’re reintegrating back into society. We live with realities that for the most part are far beyond our control. We must re-adjust ourselves constantly as we venture through this world of deception and corruption. One of the problems about living in prison is the total lack of control you have over the events of the outside world. We try to go on with purpose and meaning in a direction of what is perceived to be right and just, but sometimes we find confusion in that reality, and that we really don’t have a clue as to where we’re going, or why we’re doing anything. At times, life is held by such a small thread that a feeling of security is unattainable in the spectrum of conscious thought. When the balance is held insecurely, the chances of everything crashing down at a moment’s notice seems more real. When you come to the point where you have lost everything meaningful in your life and all motivation because of prison’s reality, you begin to find yourself again, and your understanding, as you search for new meaning. Many people are trying to find themselves, and prison is a reality that is not restricted to places of confinement. Life is a learning experience no matter where you are. As a prisoner, the label itself restricts you from certain things in life afforded to the regular citizen. The fact is that differences of social class, within society, 275 with Gee, Kato, and Just Another Number

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create the same reality for people who have never been in prison. This goes back to the rich/poor, strong/weak, etc. Today, prisons are less confrontational, conditions are somewhat better than days gone by, but upon closer inspection you find the new system is based on the exchange program, or what I call the Candy System. If you rat on another prisoner you will be rewarded by being given special privileges. The idea is to divide and conquer by turning one against the other for personal gain. Upon release, a real concern is about getting a job. It’s tough when you’ve been out of the work force for 30 years. I was often asked by my classification team about potential future employment. If I had the choice of doing anything for a living what would it be? Well, of course, the first response is a job with lots of overtime and acceptable pay. But after a period of reflection, try to find something you like doing in life and try to make a living at it. I would try to avoid having to do a job that I hate. Just Another Number: I prepared myself by studying the system. Also, by working on myself… self-reflection is like most things, too much and you end up spinning around in a world of one. Having some knowledge of what Corrections needs and expects me to do has been an enormous help to me. I have learned to work around their hurdles. So, I stay off their radar and go about my business. A desire to try and find peace and do something meaningful with my life is the compass I follow. As for Corrections, they taught me several useful things, all of which I would gladly toss away except for the tools I found to navigate through the system. Gee: What is parole and how does it work? Kato: Your first day in prison is also your first day on parole. You are assigned a parole officer and a guard who will decide how to manage your case and these two are 276

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going to watch your every move and analyze everything you say. What is scary about this is that their perception is often not necessarily the reality. If you’re lucky you’ll get somebody who has decent perception, although that is not often the case. For example, a mental error in perception that we often do is projection, which means that when an event happens to someone we project our thoughts and feelings on that person. “He must be very angry, I wouldn’t take that.” That is how we would feel in the same situation, but it doesn’t mean that the other person feels that way… he might only be slightly irritated. But if you say that in prison, you might be told that you’re lying or that you’re minimizing the situation, then you have to take a new program to get in touch with your feelings. And when you have a verbal argument with somebody you get called in to explain yourself and they suggest that perhaps an anger management program would be good for you. What anger? In the case I am thinking about, we were just two guys arguing about who was the best hockey player. Yes loudly, but not in anger. So, try to imagine that for years there are people watching your every move and everything you say and their interpretation of the situation becomes the “gospel truth.” I’m sure that if you look around you can see some assholes, or some people with a chip on their shoulder. Well, they’re present in the prison system, too; now imagine that those people you just pointed out are in total control of your life. Life inside is not easy. Just Another Number: Parole is the farce that’s used to extend the system’s involvement in your life. When someone is sentenced, a portion of the time the judge gives you is available to be spent on parole. At its inception, parole was meant to be a community’s involvement in helping someone adjust and make their way back into society. It has been bastardized several times, all with the goal of widening the reach of Corrections, to be used as a political milking cow and as a tool to help keep the 277 with Gee, Kato, and Just Another Number

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prison-industrial complex functioning. Parole works like an invisible leash waiting to be yanked. A parolee must meet with his or her parole officer every week when they first get released from prison. A list of conditions are the scorecard that sets your fate. Break one of them and it’s back to prison. The ironic part is that the correctional system is so driven to follow their minders’ wishes that they are setting unreachable goals for prisoners to attain for parole. I’m surprised that they need to put so many safeguards on people after they are deemed fit to return to society. It’s all designed to fail so that they can have flexibility with the flow and ebb of the fuel that runs the system. The condemned! When parole is revoked for a violation, the person is tossed back in prison. A violation does not necessarily mean that you have committed another crime... it means you may have breached a condition. Within a month or two, your case will be assessed by the parole board for a decision on a full parole revoke. You don’t get to represent yourself at this stage. So if you breach, you go back in for who knows how long. Sad and simple. Gee: How do you relate to the idea of transparency? What does this mean? Kato: Parole officers ask that you be totally transparent about the life that you lead on the outside, yet they are the least transparent people that I know. Being totally transparent is very hard because in this context, it means you must tell them about everything significant in your life. Yet something that is insignificant to me may be significant to my parole officer, and I, therefore, lack transparency because I didn’t tell him. I have to adjust my thinking to his thoughts of what is significant and what is not to attempt to be safe from his wrath... sending me back inside for not telling him something he deems important. 278

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Just Another Number: The idea behind transparency was explained to me as a valuable necessity that is the cornerstone of the relationship between someone on parole and their parole officer. The parole officer has to feel that you are being completely honest and always willing to volunteer information about your life. If they feel doubtful, they can put you back in prison because there is a “lack of transparency.” It’s a pitfall for those doing parole. The proof is very discretionary—an opinion someone has—and changing someone’s illusion is very difficult. The vagueness and the rationale for using this practice is so maddeningly selfish it literally makes me groan. Since every parole officer has a different itchy trigger finger, it makes assessing people’s tolerances a necessary skill. That’s way too much discretion given to a parole officer. Personally, I think transparency is akin to a field filled with landmines. One false move and life gets complicated very quickly. Gee: Victims of violence groups often gear their energy towards punitive measures and keep the victims involved in the criminal cases for decades. The victims remain victims and there is little place for healing. How would you deal with someone else causing harm to you or your loved ones? Kato: Today it seems that with the victims groups, the media, and Harper [the Canadian Prime Minister], everyone is geared on tougher sentences and cutting different community programs that help crime prevention. Punishment is the new word, yet the crime rate has steadily been going down. You would think that community programs were helping, but the budget for these programs has been cut. Statistics show that some programs like restitution, where the convicted and the victim interact, had a good success rate and that victims find closure. Instead, they send these young offenders to prison for punishment and 279 with Gee, Kato, and Just Another Number

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spend millions of dollars more than the cost of community programs. These policies are not based on logic but on revenge. And the prisons have also become an institution that does not want to die. Since the crime rate has gone down, they have made it harder for people to get out and even tougher to stay out. And you should know that in crime statistics, parole violations are considered a crime so they make it seem like prisons populations are growing in number when in reality, it’s a lot of the same people who are back in for parole violations (transparency, disorganization, etc.), and not because they committed an actual crime. Yes, I personally understand what it’s like to have a loved one attacked for no good reason. My feelings to seek revenge were very strong, and all kinds of punishment went through my head. But in the end, I know that wouldn’t have given me any closure. After spending decades in prison, I know that this is not the solution and in most cases the new prisoner that comes to jail is not there for an act of violence. After doing prison time and getting out, they will come back because they committed an act of violence. And yet, the community at large still thinks that prison is the solution, the ultimate punishment. I would like to see the ones who hurt my loved one get help within the community because I know prison isn’t the solution. Hate is what fucked up my life, so revenge is not the solution! This train of thought only came to me after I found closure. I do believe that when I was a teenager if I would have been put in the right environment instead of jail, I would not have continued my life of crime. Being a teen that wanted to belong to something, I was easy to influence... so being in jail, I became valued as one of the boys. My principles became the same as other “criminals,” and slowly violence entered the picture. So for one stupid mistake I made when I was a teen I became a hardened “criminal.” This is not to excuse my actions... I still live with the guilt of my actions, but I cannot take them 280

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back. So I live to better myself and live to try to make life better for those around me and my community. Just Another Number: Throughout my experiences, I have seen how anger can make compassion a tiny whisper within a roar of rage. Living with my own scars reminding me of empty violence, I keep looking for solutions. As a person who has caused great harm and who has also been on the receiving end, it has allowed me to see a more complete picture of the aftermath of violence. As to how I would deal with someone who caused harm to me or my loved ones, I would want to confront the person. Not for vengeance, but to try to understand why this harm occurred and to try to start the process of healing. Through my own self-reflection, I have come to understand and accept that people in pain cause pain. Who would want to hurt someone when they are at peace themselves? By striving for empathy, I do not dismiss the person who has caused me harm into a category that allows me to view them as a thing rather than as a human being. I feel this is vital in order for me to heal since I do not want to further harm myself. If I accept the model that vengeance is the accepted methodology, I can never see an end to my pain. If I harm someone and the people who care for that person harm me in retaliation, then someone who cares for me can justify harming that person... and so on. The cycle never ends, and it will ripple across and affect everyone in a destructive way.

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Illuminating the Margins: Engaging with the Carceral Image within an Abolitionist Framework Margarita Osipian [Figures 73–79, pp 301–305] Given the entanglements and parallels between the history of photography and the history of criminology,—1 the image serves a vital role in the ”making visible“ of the prison. The image, broadly defined in this context as all forms of visualization, is a tool that can function both to construct and undo the tensions between the visibility and invisibility of the prison itself, and more importantly, as an abolitionist tactic to illuminate the carceral framework. The prison, conventionally understood to embody Foucault’s disciplinary society, is often made socially and geographically invisible. However, the prison works on an axis of invisibility and visibility, where those inside the prison are always visible, heavily integrated into systems of surveillance, their information logged into massive databases; yet they are invisible to those outside the prison. The prison can be visualized as existing both as a remnant of Foucault’s disciplinary society (static, separate from other institutions, hierarchical, centralized), and as a part of Deleuze’s control society (connected to other institutions, flows of people in and out). Conceptualizing the prison as simultaneously embodying both Foucauldian and Deleuzian structures allows us to understand how it functions as both highly visible and highly invisible. The system of opening and closing allows for a simultaneous isolation and penetrability, for a simultaneous visibility and invisibility. The carceral system is strongly connected to the space outside the prison, impacting the lives of a large percentage of the American population, but these interconnections are often made invisible, hidden by the rhetoric that the prison is a space apart, both physically and metaphorically. I want to touch on two projects that engage with the dynamics between the prison and its representation, Stephen Tourlentes’s Of Length and Measures and Spatial Information Design Lab’s Architecture and Justice. Both projects can serve as the basis for looking at abolition in terms of the tension between 285

1 A concise and well-argued parallel is laid out in Allan Sekula’s “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.

2 Stephen Tourlentes, Of Length and Measures: Prison and the American Landscape, www.tourlentes. com.

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the visible and the invisible, but whereas Tourlentes’s work engages with the Foucauldian framework of the prison as a static institution, Architecture and Justice makes visible the Deleuzian, networked elements of the prison. In the same manner that the juridical archive served to catalogue the criminal body and place it within a hierarchy of other bodies, the prison quite literally serves the role of marking off the space of what is normal and what is abnormal, between the ”criminal class“ and the law-abiding citizen. As a demarcated and closed off physical structure, the prison is often relegated to the margins of the geographical and social landscape. As a medium of light, illuminating its subject matter, the photograph serves a very particular role in the documentation of the prison. Tourlentes’s Of Length and Measures: Prison and the American Landscape documents prisons at night, as they illuminate empty landscapes. He has documented close to 100 prisons, in forty-six states, constructing a visual archive of these places of exile. In his project statement, Tourlentes writes that ”the presence and location of these institutions of exile paradoxically reflect back upon the society that builds them“ and that ”these institutions tend to sit on the periphery of a society’s consciousness.“—2 Showing that the prison sits both illuminated by the unceasing need for surveillance and illuminating the landscape around it, Tourlentes attempts to place the prison back into the central focus of society’s consciousness. His long exposure photographs point to the way in which the prison becomes present, rather than absent, at night. Such a slower form of documentation carries the potential for a different kind of political impact and open up the space for a dialogue about the relationship between the prison and the landscape it inhabits. With the Foucauldian understanding that history functions as a series of emergences and fissures, we can begin to theorize the prison as simultaneously existing between two regimes of power. The prison also exists within a network structure, though its Deleuzian properties are obscured by the common understanding of the prison as a singular, bounded, and demarcated site. The space of the prison is precisely where this juncture between distributed control and rigidly defined hierarchies occurs, where the older institution of the prison and the networked structure of new media technologies are in tension 286

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with one another. Projects that make use of new media technologies, like the Architecture and Justice project by the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL), work to make visible these network connections and highlight the extra-penal functions that the prison has taken up.—3 Since ”civic, urban, and global networks today are formed not only of visible but also invisible information resources with concrete effects on our daily lives“ and ”(i)nformation builds and organizes most of the structures, policies, and landscapes of our cities,“—4 the translation of these networks of invisible information into visual images can help to refocus the understanding of the prison and its relationship to the rest of society. Architecture and Justice visualizes criminal justice data sets of criminal activity locations, but rather than placing the focus on the address of the crime, it maps the home addresses of the people incarcerated as a result. Different patterns emerge when the focus of the maps shifts from ”crime events“ to ”incarceration events,“ showing that ”the people who are convicted and imprisoned for urban crimes are often quite densely concentrated geographically.“—5 The typical focus solely on the event of the crime works to eclipse the real factors that impact and influence criminal behaviour; SIDL’s spatial mapping instead supports Loïc Wacquant’s argument about the criminalization and imprisonment of the poor.—6 Incarceration maps help to visualize the massive migrations and flows of people in and out of the city and the potential impact that this kind of movement can have on stability within communities. Similarly, SIDL’s earlier project, Million Dollar Blocks, maps the yearly cost of housing each prisoner, but places that economic figure physically within the context of the city and neighbourhood where the incarcerated individual is from. Supporting Wacquant’s argument that the decline of the social-welfare state in America is tethered to the increase in penal spending,—7 the maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become the predominant government institution in these communities. Such tracing of the interconnections between prisoners and the rest of society, the making visible of the networked connections, can be extremely beneficial for public policy changes. Moreover, revealing these networks works to unhinge the prison from its solitary space at the edges of society and shows how it is woven into the urban fabric. 287 Margarita Osipian

3 The unparalleled growth of the U.S. prison system over the last three decades is coupled with the growth of vast archives of data of criminal justice information, which is “used to regulate and organize the lives of individuals inside its system, playing its part in an institutional self-perpetuation.” Spatial Information Design Lab, Architecture and Justice (September 2006), 4 www.spatial information designlab.org/ MEDIA/PDF_04. pdf. 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Ibid., 8. 6 Loïc Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 7 Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” New Left Review 13 (Jan/Feb 2002): 41–60.

8 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 3–23.

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The Prison exists on contested ground between the disciplinary society and the control society. Tensions of power dynamics—of fissures in societal shifts—manifest themselves in the fluctuations between the visible and the invisible. For visual culture at the present moment, visibility is not as simple as a straight sightline between seeing and being seen, but rather, as Nicholas Mirzoeff suggests, its objects of study are precisely those entities that come into being at the points of intersection between visibility and social power.—8 All forms of visual culture ”visualize“ the prison in some way, while other tendencies work to make the prison invisible. Through the analysis of various forms of visual culture and the way they depict the prison environment and interact with it, we can reach certain political conclusions, or open up possibilities for further investigation into the complex relationship between visuality and its objects within the contemporary political sphere. Indeed, the visualization of prison and its dynamics can help construct a counteracting force to mitigate the increasing invisibility of the prison within the American landscape.

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Figure 76: Brooklyn, New York City

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Mass Incarceration and the Book Cover Josh MacPhee I became aware of the problems within the U.S. prison system in the early 1990s when a friend took me to an event in Washington, D.C. centred on political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. It (and Mumia’s case more generally) was a great eye-opener to how the U.S. prison system sits at the intersection of many important issues in our society, particularly race, class, violence, and political repression, but also gender, health care, sexual preference, age discrimination, and much more. Over the past twenty years I have amassed a large collection of books and publications on the topic of prison. Book covers are a compelling lens through which to look at the ideas and opinions a society has towards social issues at a given point in time. Each book cover is crafted by its culture, and carries a diverse set of understandings about the world. Although publishers and designers carry all the cultural prejudices of their moment, they are often more progressive than the broader public, especially if they publish from the left. At the same time, commercial concerns can compel publishers (and designers) to affirm a representation of a subject that they think will be comprehensible or attractive to the audience. From the consumption side, book covers are often the first visual representation of ideas that a reader will see. A strongly designed cover can create an image that will resonate with a reader for a lifetime, transcending even the book itself. Early Representations Book covers about prison prior to the 1970s tend to fall into two categories. First, you have the image of the solitary prisoner, crushed by the scale and size of the prison institution. The 1957 edition of Jack Finney’s account of an escape from San Quentin, The House of Numbers [figure 80, p 306], is a good example. A lone prisoner, anonymous in a grey uniform, is in the corner of a cell, pushed deep back by the prominent black bars that fill the 289

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foreground. John Bartlow Martin’s Break Down the Walls (1954) [figure 81, p 306] is a variation on the theme, with a small and stark solitary figure against a giant and imposing guard tower. Red and yellow diagonals swoop from left and right, highlighting the shape of the prison wall while illuminating the panopticon-like vision in which the figure is caught. Hugh J. Klare’s Anatomy of a Prison (1962) [figure 82, p 306] captures the exact same sense of overarching control, but inside the walls. The other major trope is the abstraction of the prison edifice as solid and unyielding bars. A 1951 edition of Flemish novelist Ernest Claes’s Cel 269 [figure 83, p 307] is one of the best examples of this—the prisoner, represented by a bright yellow sun, is trapped behind stark black shafts. Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (1962) [figure 84, p 307] is a variation, with the title—and by association, the author—breaking through the bars with words. In each of these covers, the intention is for the reader to identify with the prisoner. The prison is a faceless institution, a set of harsh bars (or a large, otherworldly wall) crushing the radiance of the individual trapped inside. The Advent of Mass Incarceration Three events in the 1970s irrevocably changed the direction of these covers: the Attica Rebellion in 1971, the explosion of the U.S. prison population by the mid 1970s, and the publishing industry’s expanded use of the diminutive—yet extremely popular—”mass market“ paperback, with its bright, full-colour photographic covers. Attica is the daddy of the modern U.S. prison riot, and awoke the American public to the fact that there were serious problems in the prison system. A slew of both academic and sensational writing followed, including a series of reports published in broadly distributed, cheap paperbacks. Gerald Leinwand’s Prisons (1972) [Figure 85, p 307] and the Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica (1972) [figure 86, p 308] are exemplary of this trend. Both feature provocative photographs on clean white backgrounds, creating a striking starkness, perhaps as an attempt to suggest the reality—and validity—of their highly charged and sensational content. Leinwand’s 290

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cover provokes with a bold setting of ”PRISONS“ and a grainy photo of ominous (black!) prisoners with their faces covered by T-shirts. For the N.Y. Report, the strong stencil font evokes a sense of militarization, while the photo reinforces a sense of severity and domination. Dozens of men—mostly black and brown—are naked and dehumanized, controlled by a single white guard who plays the same visual role of the prison tower in the previously described cover designs. Yet opinions on Attica and prison expansion were diverse, and my favourite of the Attica-related covers takes a different design approach. On the cover for A Bill of No Rights: Attica and the American Prison System (1972) [figure 87, p 308], simple and powerful red and white typography sits on a black field, and the distortion of the text suggests that the contract between prisoners and society has also been stretched and warped. It is significant that this cover is not found on a mass-market paperback, but on a hardcover. Designers of the initial cloth-bound editions were relieved of many of the restrictions and imperatives that came with designing for the inexpensive paperback formats intended for sale in drug stores and groceries. While politicians hardened their stance toward crime by the end of the 1970s, greatly expanding the prison system, a significant parallel movement to reform/abolish prisons was developing— encompassing political activists as well as mainstream social scientists and psychologists who had compiled data to prove that mass incarceration was not going to make society any safer. On the activist wing, the American Friends Service Committee issued a book-length report in 1971 [Figure 88, p 309], which features a heavily reproduced photo of a fist through the bars on a saturated green background. In fact, the image has been reproduced so many times—in movement publications, on Cuban political posters, and in the underground press—that, although the photographer is known (Mark Feinstein), the location of the photo was taken is not. Also, notice the stencil font for the main title, a recurring typographic theme for prison books. The political bent of Eve Pell’s Maximum Security (1972) [figure 89, p 309] is made clear by the cover’s description of Attica as a ”Holocaust.“ Once again, the designer had more creative freedom and produced a direct and minimalist cover that is striking for its savvy use of political signifiers. The face behind the bars is rendered in flat fields of orange 291 Josh MacPhee

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and black, and makes reference to the design aesthetic of both the Cuban political posters popular at the time and movement artists like Rupert Garcia, who had produced a poster in support of Angela Davis featuring her flattened likeness in a similar colour scheme. To a general audience, the cover represents a sole body locked within a very dark prison system, but to an activist audience, it most certainly also evoked the repression of the movement by the government, and the massive increase of prisoners who were members of the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, or a dozen other political groups. The paperback edition was geared to a much broader audience and is more sensational—its titling and image have much more in common with the Attica paperbacks discussed above than with the hardcover edition. With the increasing repression of 1960s political movements, prisons largely became an unchallenged reality in the popular imagination throughout the mid-1970s and 1980s. From a social sciences perspective, Janet Harris’s Crisis in Corrections (1973) [figure 90, p 310] serves as a great example. At first glance, the cover harkens back to the pre-1970s imagery of a lone figure caged by the inhuman prison; we no longer see abstract bars, but instead a bird’s-eye view of the prison as a maze. But here the ghostly figure is both harder to identify and is not simply trapped in the prison but is also part of the prison. John Irwin’s Prisons in Turmoil (1980) [figure 91, p 310] carries another ambiguous message. On the cover is a photograph of a brick wall awkwardly cracked open to expose a bright reddish-orange inside. For many, the breaking of the wall shows a system in a dangerous crisis, for others the collapsing of prisons is a symbol of liberation. The return to a more abstract and distanced perspective also implies a neutrality not found in the books published during the initial thrust of prison expansion a decade earlier. This new-found conceptualism in the cover designs might be attributed to a turn towards a more academic approach to the subject. Birth of a New Prison Activism By the early 1990s, a nascent movement critical of mass incarceration quickly began spreading across college campuses and activist communities. A new collection of organizers, academics, 292

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and journalists began writing and publishing on prisons again. Many of these authors had some experience working within the growing movement. By 2000, there was an entirely new literature about prisons, with dozens of titles. Books by Rosenblatt and Parenti are good examples of the covers of this period. The design of Criminal Injustice (1996) [figure 92, p 310] attempts to stake out the same new ground as the content by going beyond the usual graphic clichés, but ends up just piling them on top of each other. The U.S. flag, the Statue of Liberty, a dollar bill, and a policeman make up the bars holding a black man in prison. While this is a clear and direct representation of the book’s perspective, it is quite didactic. Lockdown America (2008, second edition) [figure 93, p 310] is much more intriguing—the prison literally turned on its side so that the hands protruding from the bars reach upwards—not in fists, but open palms, pleading for help out of the system. To me, the hand gesture has a religious connotation and indirectly references the fanatical aspects of our current criminal justice system that helps keep millions locked in U.S. prisons. We have reached a point where it appears that the tide might be turning. Politicians are having to make hard decisions about whether to build more prisons or keep schools and libraries open, and increasing numbers of people are pushing for the latter.—1 I suspect a new round of books will emerge, and it will be interesting to see how publishers and designers choose to represent this nascent reality.

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1 Editor’s Note: For more on the complicated relationship between schools and prisons, see “Ghosts of Prisons Past: A Prehistory of the Toronto South Detention Centre” by Magdalena Miłosz, pp 47–67

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Capadocia: The Place Where Women are Buried Alive / Without Forgiveness Irmgard Emmelhainz “From the depths I yell out to you, my Lord” (Psalm 129:3)—1 By many accounts, the global prison-industrial complex is an expression of the neoliberal re-articulation of the political economy: under the rhetoric of ”safety“ and the ”War against Drugs,“ it is the harbinger of the new authoritarianism. In Mexico, new legislative efforts, and their application by the judicial system, brought about by reforms to penal codes since 1994 have created new criminal figures, punishable behaviours, and augmented conviction lengths. The steady growth of the inmate population (mostly the poor and vulnerable) is also linked to subcontracting the prison system, as corporations take advantage of the considerable amount of labour available: as society pays the bill for its own repression, the reformed prison system oppresses large swaths of society while generating surplus value for private companies.—2 The television series Capadocia, produced and written in Mexico and broadcast by HBO, tells the story of women incarcerated at a prison opened under the maximum-security privatepenitentiary regime. The series begins at the ”Reclusorio Oriente,“ an overcrowded, medium-security state prison housed in an old colonial building lacking security, sanitation, and the minimum living conditions, which supposedly leads to an environment of corruption and violence. The series begins when lawyer Teresa Lagos, specializing in humanitarian and criminal law and married to Santiago Marín, Mexico City D.F.’s left-wing governor, is asked to be director of a new jail subcontracted to ECSO, a massive corporation.—3 In spite of ECSO’s willingness to bribe state officials, the bill to privatize prisons does not pass in congress, so Federico Cantú—future CEO of Capadocia—incites a jail riot in complicity with La Negra, head of security. The riot marks a change in leadership inside, while nineteen prisoners are killed. The state of exception created by the 295

1 Written outside the door of the solitary confinement unit in the jail in the show Capadocia. 2 Pilar Calveiro, Violencias de estado (México y Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2012), 17. 3 As we learn as the story develops, ECSO diversifies into mass media, sweatshop factory labour, drug dealing, high-level pimping, etc.

4 Calveiro, Violencias de estado, 147–154.

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riot justifies the legalization of prison subcontracting, thus enabling the inauguration of Capadocia, a new, utopian, high-security private jail that will supposedly rebalance the Mexican penal state system. Survivors from the ”Reclusorio Oriente“ who are considered candidates for rehabilitation and reinsertion are transferred there. For Lagos, Capadocia is a potential site for rehabilitation, and she governs it according to feminist and humanist principles, while Cantú (Capadocia’s CEO) sees the jail as ”a prison with twenty-first-century security but with nineteenth-century living (and working conditions).“ Built underneath the ground, with bare cement walls, a transparent semi-circular panoptic tower with surveillance screens, an automated voice giving orders, and general atmosphere of depersonalization and dehumanization, Capadocia is not overcrowded, and the inmates wear fancy blue uniforms, are fed leftover airplane food, and have access to psychiatric and psychological care. Capadocia illustrates how maximum-security prisons are, in Argentinian political scientist Pilar Calveiro’s words, ”panoptic and cellular systems“ created to regain control of the internal life within the prison, to avoid overcrowding, corruption, and violence. They are characterized by the absolute separation between prison guards and inmates (they address each other only by giving or receiving orders); circulation is restricted except when inmates are accompanied by a guard; contact with the exterior, including phone calls and visits, is limited; communication among prisoners is severely limited, as the inmates have few or no shared activities; and there is high-security technology for surveillance, as well as disproportionate and repressive weaponry. The rigid norms and imprisonment conditions are apparently oriented to prevent emergency situations and maintain order, but they have the purpose of ”neutralizing“ subjects through intimidation.—4 In spite of Lagos’s efforts to ensure the best living and working conditions for the inmates, Cantú introduces drugs into Capadocia, and a sweatshop to produce Cautiva (captive) lingerie. The undergarments are marketed with a discourse of social responsibility, rehabilitation, and a revealing yet problematic poster—in terms of how women are seen in Mexico—showing the headless figure of a woman with the slogan: ”The woman that you 296

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are.“ The first inmate to enter Capadocia is Lorena, an upper-middleclass chemist who confesses to murdering her best friend after finding her in bed with her husband. A corrupt judge—the victim’s father—ensures that Lorena will serve a long sentence. With Lagos’s help, Lorena’s sentence is revoked the same day that she murders fellow inmate La Bambi; she is again doomed to serve time while she becomes queen of Capadocia. Lorena assures her a position of power upon discovering that the fillings of the bras manufactured in Capadocia contain a designer drug that will be smuggled to Spain. Unable to denounce ECSO’s criminal activities, Lorena and Lagos decide to hide the drugs inside the prison. Cantú is then held accountable for the loss of the drugs by the (American) dealer, who beheads his boss. Because Cantú is in charge of carrying out ECSO’s interests in Capadocia, he is always caught between the corporation’s interests and paying for his subjects’ misdeeds; in other words, while he is in charge of corrupting and extorting everyone beneath him, he is also held responsible for their mistakes and betrayals. Through the figure of Cantú, the narrative reveals the mechanism of power inherent in the Mexican authoritarian logic: there is always someone higher up to be feared and obeyed, and someone below to be oppressed; thus, in varying degrees, everyone is both master and slave at the same time. This authoritarian logic has been sustained for 500 years by the Christian idea (which appears surreptitiously in the narrative of Capadocia) that one needs to first suffer in order to be saved. Lagos’s perspective of Capadocia is extremely important in the narrative, although she overlooks how crime is bred from within the prison itself and believes too much in ”rehabilitation“ from within prison as the solution to the inmates’ problems. Insofar as she is a feminist, she enables spectators to see how the prison system exploits and thrives on the binary notions of gender in society at large. Lagos’s perspective also enables spectators to see the connections between personal tragedy, the political, and how the institutional affects the private realm. For instance, Ignacia is an indigenous woman who works as a servant at a home in which the couple are estranged: he is gay and busy with his lovers, while she gambles until she loses everything. Ignacia is caught up in a fight between them, and 297 Irmgard Emmelhainz

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gets blamed for the murder of her patrona. Because she is not fluent in Spanish, she cannot defend herself and it takes months before she is appointed a translator. Her case becomes an example of how racial and class prejudice and abuse are embedded not only in (colonial) work relationships but also in institutions, evidencing how both are sites of political struggle. While providing a raw and reliable general perspective on the Mexican situation, Capadocia focuses on the feminization of oppression showing how neoliberal power is geared toward expropriating prisoners’ bodies. Moreover, the series evidences how oppression in this context creates specific forms of vulnerability (extortion, illness, exploitation) through a complex network of invisible punishments for women and their families, which leads to violence and the disintegration of the social fabric. Moreover, we see how the neoliberal logic of productive conversion works: the prison guard becomes foreman and pimp, as the prisoner is converted to slave and prostitute (inmates are smuggled out of Capadocia to have sex with ECSO’s executives and associates). The first two seasons of Capadocia (broadcast in 2010-11) exude ”PANista“ (from PAN, the right wing National Action Party in power between 2000-2012) sensibilities in terms of political context and discourse: humanitarianism and social responsibility are inextricable from privatization, and fighting on behalf of those below was the order of the day (within the newly privatized conditions), especially in large urban centres. In this context, Lagos and Marín embody Christian and leftist political values (which are not always at odds with the right wing’s privatization efforts and its ”security“ discourses as an excuse to oppress). Lagos and Marín are both well-intended and honest government functionaries who want to serve the people, but the prevailing corruption hinders their good intentions and actions in a regime in which politics, corporations, and the legal system are intertwined in an omnipresent network of crime, extortion, and exploitation. The third season (2012) turns into a sci-fi cop narrative when Lagos and Marín are deprived of their power and freedom, and they find themselves not fighting on behalf of the oppressed, but for their lives and against power embodied in a ”sect.“ Known as ”La Confederación“ (a hierarchical organization made up of narcos, high298

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ranking army officers, politicians, corporate heads, and members of the elite), the sect is scheming to take over power in Mexico with a discourse of racial superiority and by making the population kill each other, in a kind of manufactured self-genocide of the poor. Capadocia is not only a site of exploitation and abuse, but has become a site for drug experimentation in order to manipulate inmates. Developments in this season mirror the return of the PRI to power (the Institutional Revolutionary Party) in 2012, which has resulted in the use of PANista social responsibility and security discourses as cover for even more privatization, violence, militarization, and oppression. In this regard, ”La Confederación“ is the doppelganger of the ”Grupo Atlalcomulco,“ an organization with rules, leadership and a formal hierarchy made up of old and new members of the PRI, suspected of ruling the country from behind the scenes since the 1940s. Federico Cantú is current Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s double as he becomes a presidential candidate supported by ”La Confederación“; Emma Luisa Delgado, a santera and all-powerful leader of the teachers’ union who falls from grace in the new regime, ends up in Capadocia (her double in real life, teachers’ union leader Elba Esther Gordillo, ended up in jail a year later). Parading inside Capadocia we see the character La Mataviejitas (the old women’s assassin, whom in real life terrorized Mexico City’s imaginary in 2006) and Montserrat Olmos, wife of El Nuro, the doppelgangers of Emma Coronado and powerful drug cartel leader el Chapo Guzmán, respectively. There are also fictional characters like Diane Brighton, head of a finance bank based in New York who is murdered doing business with the cartels, and La Colombiana, a woman doomed by her beauty to be a sex object, especially in prison. There is also a mara member, a high-end pimp accused of human trafficking who gets off easy, a kidnaper, an emerald smuggler, a psychotic fallen star and murderer, a fraudulent transsexual, an autistic woman who performs miracles, an avenger of child rapists, a neurotic middle-class mother, etc. Capadocia evidently obeys a commercial mandate, and thus some of its shortcomings are due to market and consumer desire. Obvious silences (like the cases of Florence Cassez, Brenda Cruz Quevedo or Juana Hilda González Lomelí)—5 make it at times a telenovelezca, sensationalist and even propagandist. Overall, 299 Irmgard Emmelhainz

5 Florence Cassez is a French citizen imprisoned for seven years on false kidnaping charges; her case had an international political dimension, and led to a fallout between Felipe Calderón’s and Nicolas Sarkozy’s governments; Brenda Cruz Quevedo and Juana Hilda González Lomelí are known to have been falsely accused in 2006 of kidnapping and murdering Hugo Wallace, son of Miranda de Wallace who took up the task of finding her disappeared son (eventually she became Official Human Rights spokeswoman under Calderón and the PAN’s candidate for Mayor of Mexico D.F.). Cruz Quevedo and González Lomelí denounced having been incriminated through torture, and were routinely tortured in prison. Cassez was freed a month after Peña Nieto came to power in 2012.

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the narrative does not explicitly denounce the urgency of the current socio-political situation in Mexico reflected in the increased imprisonment of women (and men), though it does convey the force of neoliberal power mechanisms with the intensity of affect and shock through voyeuristic scenarios. In spite of its limitations, the series makes evident that the conditions of exception and corruption inside prisons reproduce instead of prevent crime, and that the political decisions the state has made in terms of penal justice reforms serve only neoliberal reorganization and its agenda of oppression. Finally, if we compare Capadocia to Orange Is the New Black, the Netflix series by Jenji Kohan, what comes across is that while the former crafts drama from historico-political reality with a politicized (feminist and humanist) sensibility geared at showing the mechanisms of the neoliberal criminal apparatus, the latter narrates a bourgeois liberal narrative from the personal experience of a white American woman, which is then turned into sensational comedy by exploiting gender and race stereotypes.

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Contributors Liat Ben-Moshe is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Her work examines the connections between prison abolition and deinstitutionalization in the fields of intellectual disabilities and mental health in the U.S. Ben-Moshe is the co-editor of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (Palgrave McMillan, 2014) and an upcoming special issue of Women, Gender and Families of Color on race, gender, and disability. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on such topics as deinstitutionalization and incarceration; disability, anti-capitalism, and anarchism; queerness and disability; inclusive pedagogy; academic repression; representations of disability; and critiques of the occupation of Palestine. Raphael Sperry is an architect and President of Architects/ Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), a 33-year-old organization dedicated to peace, environmental protection, ecological building, social justice, and the development of healthy communities. His work engages design professionals with issues of human rights in the built environment, especially in U.S. prisons. Jenna M. Loyd (@mobilarchiva) is a geographer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is the author of Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963-1978 (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and the editor, with Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (University of Georgia Press, 2012). She is currently writing a book with Alison Mountz on the late-Cold War history of United States immigration detention. Magdalena Miłosz is an MArch candidate at the University of Waterloo. She is completing a research thesis on the design politics and collective memory of Indian residential schools, with a focus on four specific institutions in Ontario and Manitoba. William Orr is a PhD student in history and theory at the Architectural Association in London. After completing his master’s degree in architecture at the University of Toronto, he worked as a freelance designer before again taking up research. Following up on the theme of ‘genericity’ explored in his master’s thesis, his work at 311

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the AA has pursued, through a continued reading of Alain Badiou, the categories of subtractive ontology as they relate to architectural subjectivity. Matthew Ferguson is an MA student in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. Elizabeth Lay completed her BA in Social Sciences in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa in 2014. Justin Piché is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa and is Co-managing Editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. Kevin Walby is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg and is Co-managing Editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. Christopher Alton received a Master in Design Studies from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2014. Within the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology concentration, his research emphasis was on practices of enclosure and geographies of spatial autonomy, countercartography and planning. He has a degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Ryerson University (2011) in Toronto, and has served as research associate for Plandform, a Toronto-based planning studio. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of Alberta (2004) in Edmonton. Christopher is an associate with the Spatial Ethnography Lab, se-l.net Lynne Horiuchi is an architectural historian who received her PhD. in 2005 from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She taught for two years at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, in the Department or Architecture and has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently writing a book, Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II and editing a collection of essays with Tanu Sankalia on Bay Area development, Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island. She has published a number of articles on urban planning, low-cost housing, and community project development with a focus on art and architecture. She has been the recipient of a numerous prestigious awards such as The Bancroft Library Study Award from the University of California at Berkeley and the American Fellowship from the American Association 312

Contributors

of University Women. Her professional experience is in environmental planning and engineering at Caltrans specializing in cultural resource management. In addition she has served on numerous community planning boards, and she has developed educational projects with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the California Council for the Humanities. Lisbet Portman is a writer and butcher currently living in Oakland, California who has written extensively about the architecture, economics, and therapeutic practices of privately owned inpatient treatment facilities in the U.S. Eileen Wennekers is a PhD Candidate in English at Western University, where she researches symbolic and material techniques of visual representation in the capitalist mode of production. She believes in the political efficacy of symbolic gestures and the emancipatory power of artistic praxis. Peter Sherratt lives in Baltimore with a hedgehog named Ozzy and works at an architecture firm in Washington, DC. Other projects and interests include furniture design and build, illustration, watercolor painting, installation pieces, and artist/event curation. Patrick Casey received his PhD in English Language & Literature from Western University. He currently teaches composition, technical writing, and professional communications at Fanshawe College in London, primarily to students in the college’s Electrical Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering programs. Tings Chak is an architecturally-trained artist whose work draws inspiration from anti-colonial, migrant justice, prison abolition, and spatial justice struggles. She is an organizer with No One Is Illegal—Toronto and the End Immigration Detention Network. She is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (Architecture Observer, 2014): www.undocumented.ca. Peter Collins I was born on a British Military base in 1961. I have lived in Canada since 1967. I was convicted of murder in 1983 and sentenced to life without parole eligibility for twenty-five years. I was ordered deported in 1990 and I have been 313

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repeatedly denied parole. As a result of my prison advocacy, activism, and political cartooning, I have been black-listed by prison officials. Over the course of thirty-one years I have been falsely accused of murder and held in the hole for six months, denied medical attention, refused family contact, and had my artwork stolen, censored or confiscated. I have been held in solitary confinement for about a half decade, transferred up in security and denied transfers down in security. I was the recipient of the 2008 Canadian Award for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights (presented by Human Rights Watch and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network). In 2010, the CSC was convicted of Failing to Accommodate a Disability and Recklessly Causing Pain and Suffering by a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (#2010–33), a conviction which was appealed by CSC and reaffirmed in 2013 by the Federal Court of Appeal in a unanimous decision. The case began because CSC charged me with disciplinary offences for not being able to stand up due to pain (I broke my back and experience chronic pain, I have degenerative disc disease coupled with retropulsed bone pushing into my dural tube and bulging and herniated discs, narrowing of nerve canals and some compression of nerve roots). Ojore Lutalo was a recognized United States Political Prisoner. He was held in solitary confinement in New Jersey State Prison’s infamous Management Control Unit for 22 years. His political history dates back to the black liberation movements of the 1970’s. During his time in enforced isolation, Ojore created political and social commentary collages from newspapers, magazines and glue. He was not allowed scissors and tore the pieces of paper by hand. Ojore was released in August 2009 and volunteers at the American Friends Service Committee offices. He continues to create his political and social commentary collages, which are shown in art galleries, 314

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universities and churches throughout the area.

Margarita Osipian is a Belarusian born, Canadian raised artist, researcher, and curator living and working between places. Margarita works at the intersections of art, design, and technology and thrives on bringing practitioners together to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries; organizing sound, art, and culture projects both in formal institutions and in more precarious and fleeting spaces. Simultaneously terrified of and completely enthralled with technology, she works within the spaces between analogue and 315

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digital, regularly collaborating with musicians and sound artists to do live video and projections. Margarita also works as an art editor for Versal, an international art and literature journal based out of Amsterdam, and can be found performing under her ‘Shark Attack the Future’ moniker. Holding both an MA in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam and an MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto, her recent research has focused on visual culture, technology, and the carceral state.

Josh MacPhee is a member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive. He has written multiple books on the intersection of art and politics, co-edits Signal: A Journal of Political Graphics and Culture, and organizes the Celebrate People’s History Poster Series. When not doing that stuff, he obsessively collects books for their covers (and sometimes to read). 316

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Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and professor based in Mexico City. In 2012, she published a collection of essays about art, culture, cinema, and geopolitics entitled Alotropías en la trinchera evanescente: Estética y geopolítica en la era de la guerra total (BUAP). Her current research concerns neoliberalism as a sensibility (or common sense), which she is planning to develop into a book. Her work has been translated to French, English, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and Serbian, and she has presented it at an array of international venues.

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Scapegoat Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy Scapegoat 7 Incarceration Fall/Winter 2014 Issue Editors Nasrin Himada, Chris Lee Designers Other Forms Copy Editor Jeffrey Malecki Editorial Board Adrian Blackwell, Adam Bobbette, Seth Denizen, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Nasrin Himada, Jane Hutton, Marcin Kedzior, Chris Lee, Christie Pearson Publisher SCAPEGOAT Publications Toronto Office 249 Bathurst Street Toronto, Ontario, M5T 2S4 [email protected] scapegoatjournal.org

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