Special Issue : The Beautiful Prison 9781783509669, 9781783509676

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SPECIAL ISSUE: THE BEAUTIFUL PRISON

STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY Series Editor: Austin Sarat Recent Volumes: Volumes 1 2:

Edited by Rita J. Simon

Volume 3:

Edited by Steven Spitzer

Volumes 4 9:

Edited by Steven Spitzer and Andrew S. Scull

Volumes 10 16:

Edited by Susan S. Sibey and Austin Sarat

Volumes 17 33:

Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick

Volumes 34 63:

Edited by Austin Sarat

STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY VOLUME 64

SPECIAL ISSUE: THE BEAUTIFUL PRISON EDITED BY

AUSTIN SARAT Department of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought and Political Science, Amherst College, MA, USA

United Kingdom North America India Malaysia China

Japan

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2014 Copyright r 2014 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78350-967-6 ISSN: 1059-4337 (Series)

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CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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EDITORIAL BOARD

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INTRODUCTION Doran Larson

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SEARCHING FOR THE BEAUTIFUL PRISON Kenneth E. Hartman

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THE ENLIGHTENED PRISON Drew Leder and the Jessup Correctional Institution Scholars

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KNOWING THAT WE ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE: A CASE FOR CRITICAL PRISON PROGRAMMING Rebecca Ginsburg

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RETHINKING THE HUMANITIES THROUGH TEACHING THE HOLOCAUST IN PRISON Anke Pinkert

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OF PRISONS, GARDENS, AND THE WAY OUT Michelle Brown

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WHAT BLOOMS: THE JAILHOUSE, INSIDE OUT Chuck Jackson

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Michelle Brown

Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

Rebecca Ginsburg

Landscape Architecture Department, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL, USA

Kenneth E. Hartman

California State Prison Lancaster, CA, USA

Chuck Jackson

Department of English, University of Houston-Downtown, Houston, TX, USA

Doran Larson

Department of English & Creative Writing, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA

Drew Leder

Department of Philosophy, Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA

Anke Pinkert

Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL, USA

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EDITORIAL BOARD Gad Barzilai Political Science University of Washington and Tel Aviv University, Israel

David Engel Law State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

Paul Berman Law George Washington University, USA

Anthony Farley Law Albany Law School, USA David Garland Law New York University, USA

Roger Cotterrell Legal Theory Queen Mary College, University of London, UK

Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller Political Science University of Hawaii, USA

Jennifer Culbert Political Science Johns Hopkins University, USA

Laura Gomez Law University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Eve Darian-Smith Global Studies University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Piyel Haldar Law Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

David Delaney Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought Amherst College, USA

Thomas Hilbink Open Society Institute, USA

Florence Dore English University of North Carolina, USA

Desmond Manderson Law McGill University, Canada ix

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Jennifer Mnookin Law U.C.L.A., USA Laura Beth Nielsen Research Fellow American Bar Foundation, USA Paul Passavant Political Science Hobart and William Smith College, USA Susan Schmeiser Law University of Connecticut, USA

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jonathan Simon Jurisprudence and Social Policy University of California, Berkeley, USA Marianna Valverde Criminology University of Toronto, Canada Alison Young Criminology University of Melbourne, Australia

INTRODUCTION Doran Larson beautiful adj. 1: having qualities of beauty. beauty n. 1: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1973. (emphases added)

Given the sheer numbers of men and women, families and communities upon which it metes out suffering, the American prison today is among the most destructive in the history of peace-time institutions. At such a moment, to speak of a “beautiful prison” could rightly be condemned as stepping over this deeply ugly prison only to trespass into the obscene. This title is intended to provoke reconsideration of our ideas of what prisons are, what they are for, and of the people condemned to live inside them. The essays collected here challenge these ideas both on and from inside the grounds where the ugly prison stands. They present documentary reports, theoretical considerations, and imaginative visions of the prison and incarcerated Americans that range from the optimal to the utopian. Yet the writers here never gloss over the pain produced by the current prison regime. They undertake the much more difficult work of mapping passages from inside the ugly prison we have, toward a constructive institution: passages excavated by the will and intellectual capital of the prison’s inhabitants, meeting outside critics willing to dispute accepted notions of

Special Issue: The Beautiful Prison Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 64, 1 10 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-433720140000064001

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what the prison must be. In these pages, imprisoned Americans in California, Illinois, and Maryland, along with prison educators and critical prison theorists, challenge the assumption that suffering is the prison’s only meaningful work. These are essayists who know that imprisoned people are more and better than the passive or intractable recipients of punishment, and that prisons can be more and better than machineries of pain. All are working toward closing the distances between the prison that exists, one that “exalts the mind or spirit,” and the day of the prison’s passing. This introduction will attempt to suggest the significance of such work by suggesting how formidable are the forces of resistance to it. The prison is both fact and image, both practice and idea. It both is and represents violence sanctified by law (cf. Cover, 1992, p. 203; Sarat & Kearns, 2001). Inside the prison, we meet state power’s demystified resort to fist and chain, to Taser and baton. From the outside, popular media project a horror-show prison whose convicted inhabitants are the primary or sole source of prison violence1 and who deserve a tax-funded, extra-legal hell on earth for being irredeemably other than the predominantly white, predominantly suburban middle-class consumers of such images. As Michelle Brown notes, “it is only a privileged group of citizens who do not know this experience”; yet it is the same public that develops its ideas of prisons and incarcerated people through acts of “penal spectator[ship]” who steer prison practice (2009, pp. 7, 8). “[T]echne,” writes Philip Smith, “cannot be explained without reference to mythos” (2008, p. 31). What we imagine “the prisoner” to be, what moral order(s) she appears to offend, and the resulting place s/he holds within the collective imaginary determines the degree of suffering we will allow the prison to mete out. Living or having worked inside prisons, the writers here meet these cultural formations from the inside. They understand, as George Jackson observed in 1970, that “Men are brutalized by [the prison] environment not the reverse” (1994, p. 19). Yet a looking-glass reversal of image and fact continues to shape prison practice, as it did when George Bush Sr.’s 1988 Willie Horton campaign both hardened policies that affect millions of American citizens, and sidestepped the question of how twelve years in a Massachusetts prison produced a man ready to commit a more heinous crime than the one that brought him there. The Beautiful Prison turns the prison and imprisoned peoples’ concretely signifying power to progressive advantage. It takes seriously Smith’s conclusion that “coming to terms with the symbolic logics of culture should be the first and not the last step in any analysis and reform of criminal justice” (2008, p. 183). The Beautiful Prison confronts the current logic in which the

Introduction

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prison must exact because incarcerated people deserve only pain and suffering. It does so by offering a venue wherein incarcerated people can appear as what they are: our most valuable and least appreciated resource for a progressive revolution from within. We see this as Kenneth E. Hartman wrestles with the very notion of beauty inside the prison walls that have held him since 1980; as men inside Jessup Correctional Institution, in dialogue with philosopher Drew Leder, consider what an “enlightened prison” might look like; as prison educator Rebecca Ginsburg documents the insights offered by men involved in a college program; as Holocaust historian Anke Pinkert attempts to practice an empathic pedagogy with men incarcerated for violent crimes; as the reader shares in Chuck Jackson’s engaged conversation between a jailhouse, a university, and the city of Houston, TX; and as s/he reconsiders the prison’s relationship with gardens in Michelle Brown’s mapping of a contemplative history of prisons that are in varying and variously significant senses overgrown. Yet as bracing and hopeful as these essays are, the force of resistance to these ideas remains as entrenched as what is veiled by current representations of prisons and the men and women who live inside them. If practice needs mythos in order to be understood fully, it is in part because mythos “frames” the effects and motives of current practice. The United States today is invested in prisons as never before in its history. A multi-billion dollar industry, departments of corrections now rival or outstrip state university systems as our largest public private enterprises (e.g., Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2010). The corrections industry is the nation’s third largest (and most racialized) employer (Wacquant, 2010). At the same time, the 2.37 million Americans in jails and prisons (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009) a population larger than our fourth largest city are never counted into unemployment rates. They are a statistically disappeared demographic in an age of globalized unskilled labor (Western, 2006). Politically, representatives of both major parties since 1964 have pitted white middle-class voters against urban people of color by invoking “law and order” as code for an effective state of penal segregation (Parenti, 1999), or “penal apartheid” (Larson, 2011, p. 40). This political economy is both veiled and underwritten by a cultural imagination that sets up the prison and its “denizens” endlessly reproduced in film and television drama and pseudo-documentary as objects of vindication for the working poor who work long hours, pay taxes, and “play by the rules” in return for misery spiced with resentful satisfaction in the suffering of those who trespass upon a repressive moral order (most poignantly, in seeking criminal relief for their own misery by using and/or selling drugs): free-world

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citizens who can most reliably improve their condition by enlisting as police or correctional officers. As factories close and industrial unions disappear, police and prison-guard unions grow in strength and numbers; and urban Blacks and Latinos are recruited into the violence of underground economies that spring up in communities without legal economic resources (see Sampson & Loeffler, 2010; Western & Pettit, 2010). Incarcerated men and women share so much in their condition with the predominantly white working poor who police and guard them that the cultural differences become truly surreal a fever dream of race-perceived-as-moral difference (Abu-Jamal, 2002; Gibbons & Katzenbach, 2006). Meanwhile politicians left, right, black, brown, and white boast of putting more police on the streets and more (poor) people into prison, drawing resources from public schools and social programs (NAACP, 2011; cf. Wacquant, 2000; Parenti, 2000). The American prison today has become the concrete and razorwired front line in an internecine class war pitting the jump-suited poor against the state-uniformed poor in the name of a selective enforcement of law that guarantees a class-bound order. Fronting criminalized abjection on one side, and legalized vengeance on the other, The Beautiful Prison seeks to disrupt this order. It is an experiment a radical trope-ectomy allowing us to re-conceive a prison and prison inhabitants whose public image is essential to continuing the prison’s destructive labor. This collection thus confronts a range of positions on the prison: the belief that the suffering experienced inside prisons is both deserved and a sufficient goal; cynical profiteering by a mass prison complex; the fears of those who understand that the prison is a destructive institution, but quail at the thought of releasing and wonder about the wisdom of empowering men and women assumed to resemble those represented in film and TV; and the position of a much smaller group that both wisely seeks the prison’s abolition by denying it more victims, and resists reforming current practice in the name of barring any action that might prolong the prison’s life (Davis, 2003; Rodriguez & Davis, 2000). All of these positions cut off discussion of what the incarcerated today might be and have been enabled to do for themselves while under state control. They sanction ugly practices, or limit our willingness to intervene in those practices. This collection pursues another path. It reveals instances in which the incarcerated have been able to think, act, and write toward a vision of a constructive institution even while under state control. It offers a platform for writers like Hartman to imagine a prison committed to “the reclamation of troubled souls, [and] the mending of wounded hearts.” Directly or indirectly, imprisoned thinkers and prison critics consider the challenges

Introduction

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of the very attempt to speculate on the variegated senses in which “beauty” and “prison” might, as well as the senses in which they can never be reconciled. Against both right and left politics, and without polemics, these writers refuse to allow vengeance- and profit-driven violence to stand as the rationale of criminal justice, or to abandon imprisoned people to such violence until a hoped-for day when prisons will not exist. The Beautiful Prison is a space wherein a critical edge is everywhere implicit without becoming mired in indictment. It is a space to devise a normativity that is premised as the men inside Jessup Correctional Institution would require upon hope. It is not a field of dreamy theorization keeping safe from facts. Indeed, it confronts at least two further cultural logics working to hold the ugly prison in place: that which grows from the peculiar history of nationalist imagination in the United States, and from intellectual mystification. While all nations exploit fears of enemies in order to catalyze in-group solidarity, the peculiar situation of the United States as an aggregate of immigrants witnesses particularly graphic markings of enemy others. As critics James Schramer and Timothy Sweet note (1992), such binary thinking was anticipated in 1676, when a Dr. Brakenbury conducted the first human dissection recorded by Europeans in North America. The body was that of a Native American killed in King Philip’s War. Samuel Sewall’s diary records that Mr. Hooper, “taking the [heart] in his hand, affirmed it to be the stomack” (Sewall, 1973, pp. 23 24). Without a monarchical “head” to legitimate the sole extant image of political organization the body politic it became necessary to demonstrate the Puritan community’s coherence as a body in relative and exclusionary terms (Schramer & Sweet, 1992). The organic, corporeal integrity of the Puritan community was confirmed through visceral contrast with the tangibly inhuman organization inside the same “savages” that the Declaration of Independence would later justify independence by accusing King George III of abetting (see also Erikson, 1966; Goodman, 2009). From dissection table to penal practice, from “savage” enemies to renegade slaves and Asian laborers, from communists to Black Nationalists to mythic Black and Latino “super-predators,” an intrinsically unstable nationalist imaginary requires actors and actions that counter-identify the un-American. Today, in an era of strident antigovernment sentiment, crime, crime control, and demonization of the criminal may well be the last consensus-based catalysts of public citizenship. As Jonathan Simon observes, “The crime victim can be celebrated in American governance as an ideal citizen subject in part because his or her demands are limited to what the state already knows how to produce relatively effectively,

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that is, punishment” (2007, p. 136; see also Smith on Durkheim, 2008, p. 16). And because Americans who can afford protection both by and from the law cling to self-interested faith in the equal application of the rule of law despite centuries of evidence demonstrating U.S. law’s very unequal application to targeted groups (e.g., Alexander, 2010; Brandon, 1911; Franklin, 1995) prisoner status has come to mark one face of a metaphysical divide, in which “they” are the physical objects of enforcement and “we” are metaor “post-legal” (Conniff, 2004). Within this cultural logic, prison abolitionist Dylan Rodriguez’ claim is confirmed: “[I]t is the prison regime that possesses and constitutes the state” (2006, p. 43). The Beautiful Prison challenges the very constitution of such a state by challenging popular complacency with the warehousing and punishment of offenders assumed incapable of moral agency men and women assumed to house rapacious “stomacks” (or addictions) where “we” house hearts. As Michelle Alexander writes, “criminals today are deemed a characterless and purposeless people, deserving of our collective scorn and contempt,” a “‘they’ [that] are no longer part of ‘us’” (2010, pp. 138, 139). Four of the essays in this collection work directly against this assumption. They give public voice to the intellectuals and moral thinkers that convicted citizens can become as a result of the experience of incarceration. These essays thus push aside blanket denials that state institutions might serve as sites where individuals can reclaim personal sovereignty. Until the 1975 English translation of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the free-world thinkers and writers that felt able to consider the prison were limited to penologists and criminologists. Thereafter, critics without actual contact with the American prison became skeptical of any ideas or practices aimed at enabling inmates to prepare to take places in a civil society whose “freedoms” Foucault suggests are as deeply disciplined as, and continuous with, those inside the prison. As useful as Foucault’s analyses of civil society are (cf. Smith, 2008, pp. 8 12), his vision of a prison that is indeed more concerned with “the reclamation of troubled souls” than with the control and punishment of bodies cast yet another mystifying veil over actual prison practice and the experience of imprisoned Americans. I once described Foucault’s ideas of the prison to the men in a writing class that I have led inside Attica Correctional Facility since 2006. When I’d finished, there was a brief, pent pause, before a man down for nearly three decades asked (facetiously), “So who do I have to kill to get into that prison?” The U.S. can boast of prisons intended to achieve benign or salutary ends. But the Enlightenment experiments in prison reform were always

Introduction

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limited by hard distinctions between races and classes thought capable of reform of the soul and those that could be reached only through the disciplining of the body (Smith, 2009, pp. 102 105). The first penitentiary experiment on Philadelphia’s Walnut Street quickly became overcrowded, the experiment abandoned in face of the need to contain growing numbers of bodies (Hirsch, 1992; Walnut Street Prison, n.d.). Progressive penology has rarely managed to overcome the habitual practices and prejudices of working prison personnel (e.g., Prisciotta, 1994). The American prison today suggests a more telling lineage, from the prison plantations and mills and other involuntary labor collectives that the post-emancipation Black Codes slipped through a sub-clause in the Thirteenth Amendment. Having survived through the first half of the twentieth century (Blackmon, 2009), these penal formations help us understand the prison today, when “Convict status,” Bruce Western has observed, “adheres … not in individual offenders, but in entire demographic categories” (2006, p. 31). Imprisoned Americans have been telling us as much for over a century. American prison writing can boast few benevolent institutions like Foucault’s Mettray, but it lists many recorders including the creators of prison plantation songs, Jack London, Kate Richards O’Hare, Nathan Heard, Iceberg Slim, Edward Bunker, Piri Thomas, George Jackson, Jack Henry Abbott, Assata Shakur, and the prison writers included in this volume who bear witness to a place where incarceration is a function of class, and brute physical power, veiled in law, is the sole catechism. From the outside, surveillance cameras look like the gaze of a modern Panopticon. But when the baton and strip cell are used to control behavior without concern for the effects on psychological, let alone moral health, and nearly half of all prison rape is perpetrated by staff (Prison Rape Elimination Act, 2009) convicted men and women must locate moral authority either in themselves or in their captive peers. And incarcerated Americans have been doing just this for decades. They have little choice when the gaze of the Panopticon today may be that of a predatory voyeur. So the essays in this volume begin in the American prison, with the words of an incarcerated American; from there they work toward a new and newly humane conversation about a prison whose humanity is in question, at best. Striking against a site of institutionalized pain, The Beautiful Prison seeks to draw a new endgame around a collectively sanctioned, and massively criminal criminal justice system. Imagining a prison freed from ugliness and suffering is not easy work. In these essays we see writers struggling with the problem of keeping ideas

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of incarceration and empowerment on the same page. Kenneth E. Hartman strikes on many of the themes that follow as he tries to muster the intellectual and emotional wherewithal to imagine beauty inside this institution. Men in Jessup Correctional Institution first reject the notion of a beautiful prison, then engage in a semester of imagining variously enlightened prisons. Rebecca Ginsburg documents the networks of empowerment she has seen flourish between incarcerated men while directing the Education Justice Project, a college program operating inside an Illinois state penitentiary. Anke Pinkert reflects upon the challenges of teaching a course on the Holocaust to men convicted of violent crimes and seeking “a starting point for a successful, critical pedagogy of empathy.” Chuck Jackson breaks open jailhouse doors as he envisions spaces where the community comes to listen to resident-teachers. Michelle Brown considers the multivalent and historically troubled relations between carceral sterility and its perennially entangled other, the garden. Whether humanists by training or here in practice, these writers begin to revive a conversation that Jonathan Simon points out has fallen troublingly still among humanists facing the enervating statistics generated by mass incarceration (2010). They bring together a prison so morally, politically, psychologically, and physically ugly so “massified” that it has defied both humane imagination and a vision of prisons in which subjects might pull themselves into the experience of truly human thriving. These are essays that model human freedom’s signature practice: to extract ourselves from the existing, to see from that distance what had not before been imagined, and thus to invite it within reach.

NOTE 1. Notwithstanding the trope of the sadistic prison guard who is always revealed and punished at the end.

REFERENCES Abu-Jamal, M. (2002). Live from death row. New York, NY: Perennial. Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press. Blackmon, D. A. (2009). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York, NY: Anchor.

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Brandon, G. (1911). The unequal application of criminal law. Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, 1(6), 893 898. Brown, M. (2009). The culture of punishment: Prison, society, and spectacle. New York, NY: New York University Press. Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2009). Retrieved from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty = tp& tid = 11 Conniff, B. (2004). Mumia Abu-Jamal’s live from death row as post-legal writing. In M. J. Meyer (Ed.), Literature and law (pp. 159 171). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi. Cover, R. (1992). In M. Minow, M. Ryan, & A. Sarat (Eds.), Narrative, violence, and the law: The essays of Robert Cover. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Erikson, K. (1966). Wayward puritans. New York, NY: Wiley. Franklin, H. B. (1995). Prison writing in twentieth-century America. New York, NY: Penguin. Gibbons, J. J., & Katzenbach, N. B. (2006). Confronting confinement: A report of the commission on safety and abuse in America’s prisons. Vera Institute of Justice. Retrieved from www.veradc.org/pdfs/Confronting_Confinement.pdf Goodman, N. (2009, June). Seminar talk. NEH Summer Institute on Legal Studies and the Liberal Arts. Biddeford, New Hampshire. Hirsch, A. J. (1992). The rise of the penitentiary: Prisons and punishment in early America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jackson, G. (1994). Soledad brother: The prison letters of George Jackson. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill. Larson, D. (2011). Politics by other means: Legal poetics, prison narrative. English Language Notes, 48(2), 37 48. Legislative Analyst’s Office: California’s Non-Partisan Fiscal and Policy Advisor. (2010). Background: Shares of state funding have shifted over time; Share going to corrections has more than doubled. Retrieved from http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2010/edu/educ_ prisons/educ_prisons_012610.aspx NAACP. (2011). Misplaced priorities: Overincarcerate, undereducate Excessive spending on incarceration undermines educational opportunity and public safety in communities. Retrieved from naacp.3cdn.net/01d6f368edbe135234_bq0m68x5h.pdf Parenti, C. (1999). Lockdown America: Police and prisons in the age of crisis. New York, NY: Verso. Parenti, C. (2000). Crime as social control. Social Justice, 27(3), 43 49. Prisciotta, A. W. (1994). Benevolent repression: Social control and the American reformatoryprison movement. New York, NY: New York University Press. Prison Rape Elimination Act. (2009). Retrieved from www.ojp.usdoj.gov/programs/prisonrapeelimination.htm Rodriguez, D. (2006). Forced passages: Imprisoned radical intellectuals and the U.S. prison regime. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Rodriguez, D., & Davis, A. Y. (2000). The challenge of prison abolition: A conversation. Social Justice, 27(3), 213 218. Sampson, R. J., & Loeffler, C. (2010). Punishment’s place: The local concentration of mass incarceration. Daedalus, (Summer), 20 31. Sarat, A., & Kearns, T. R. (2001). Making peace with violence: Robert Cover on law and legal theory. In A. Sarat (Ed.), Law, violence, and the possibility of justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Schramer, J., & Sweet, T. (1992). Violence and the body politic in seventeenth-century New England. Arizona Quarterly, (Summer), 1 32. Sewall, S. (1973). In M. Halsey (Ed.). The diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674 1729 (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Simon, J. (2010). Beyond the panopticon: Mass imprisonment and the humanities. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 6(3), 327 340. Smith, C. (2009). The prison and the American imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, P. (2008). Punishment and culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wacquant, L. (2000). The new “Peculiar Institution”: On the prison as Surrogate Ghetto. Theoretical Criminology, 4(3), 377 389. Wacquant, L. (2010). Class, race & incarceration in revanchist America. Daedalus, Summer, 74 90. Walnut Street Prison. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://law.jrank.org/pages/11192/Walnut-StreetPrison Western, B. (2006). Punishment and inequality in America. New York, NY: Russell Sage. Western, B., & Pettit, B. (2010). Incarceration and social inequality. Daedalus, (Summer), 8 19.

SEARCHING FOR THE BEAUTIFUL PRISON Kenneth E. Hartman ABSTRACT This essay draws from the personal experience of a man held in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for over 30 years. The author attempts to grasp how and what manner of beauty might be conceived inside an environment that has grown more sterile, less humane, and more violent over the past three decades.

For as long as I can recall, all my dreams are about prisons, are about the kind of prisons that occupy a place of nightmare for most. After more than three continuous decades living inside the confines of these nightmarish places, I cannot even dream my way back out. My unconscious mind is imprisoned no less than my tattooed skin. Prison is a total experience, as the wholly accurate truism holds. No part of the incarcerated isn’t inside, and no part of the free person is inside. The gulf between here and there is vast. The physical and social construct that is the modern institution has resulted in the creation of a separate world

Special Issue: The Beautiful Prison Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 64, 11 17 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-433720140000064000

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called prison, populated by inmates who have no individual identities inmates who wear the same clothes, have the same haircuts, and have become blurred versions of every other inmate. This means, in practice, that every one of us bears the collective guilt of every other one of us, and is subject to the collective wrath of all victims of crime. In the media frenzy of the hyper-politicized world of prison politics, every one of us must hold within him or herself all the shame and remorse of every other one of us, to the absurd degree that the poor, petty thief is designated too high a risk for early release. It is this “total experience” model that must be deconstructed for anything remotely beautiful to occur in the prison system. There is a straight line that leads, inevitably, to the current state of affairs. The modern prison is a profoundly effective isolation chamber, surrounded by armed gun towers, coils of razor wire, and lethally charged electric fences. Prisoners, now perfectly isolated and depersonalized to inmate status, vanish into the haze of obscurity, defined only by guards, politicians, and crime victims. Because of our imposed invisibility and anonymity, prisoners can be anything those most interested in applying a definition wish to describe. It’s always that which is most unknown, most unnamable, that’s most frightening. The only possible way to foundationally alter the current system is to take apart the total nature of the experience and diminish its isolation from the rest of society. So, through the eyes of a lifetime prisoner, whose very dreams are imprisoned, the idea of a “beautiful” prison requires a tremendous leap of imagination and faith. Having borne the weight of decades of scorn, abuse, and hatred, of the vilest of characterizations and the meanest of mean spirits, finding beauty inside the shell of separation is a Herculean task. Hopefully, it’s not also a Sisyphean one. Still, in spite of the decades of maltreatment, remarkably, I’ve seen beauty in here, stumbled across it and been the beneficiary of its soothing balm. Perhaps, like the green shoots of spring’s conquest of winter, the requirement is one of selective focus and a hopeful disposition. I’ve stood next to a glamorous woman on a prison yard who, somehow, saw through the fortress buildings and beyond the rows and rows of fences to the beauty of the hills ringing the compound. Though she had worked a lifetime inside prisons, she managed to retain within her a connection to the good not often seen on this side of the perimeter. I’ve felt the awesome power and purity of the love of a little girl, love not at all diminished by a room designed to thwart human contact and

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discourage connection. The healing medicine of a daughter’s desire to hold onto her father stood more than a match for the prison’s attempt to separate. I’ve witnessed acts of kindness and compassion performed by those who would describe themselves as unkind and hard-hearted, and I’ve been the recipient of generosity completely unexpected and below the radar of recognition, multiplying its value and sincerity. Even some of those who are a part of the prison system and must comply with its strictures as a condition of employment want to make the human connections that would be a normal expression anywhere else. Every day in a prison, guards and prisoners alike are subjected to a set of expectations that define roles and constrict behavior. I must walk down the roadway inside the yellow line painted on the asphalt designated for me, and the guards must walk on the other side of the same line. Nevertheless, we suffer from the same disappointment when the Raiders lose, again, and we all rail against the unreasonable nature of fate and the incompetence of weather forecasters. Back when I came to the joint, it was common to hear prisoners referred to by their first names without derision. But as the gears of the prison industrial complex wound-up and we became objects of commodification, most all of that changed. These days guards usually refer to prisoners by their last names, but the hated inmate designation becomes ever more prevalent. Back when prisoners were assumed to be men gone bad, not bad men, evil men, nicknames were the norm, for both sides of the fence. It is tougher to condemn a person, with both a given name and a personality, to policies designed only to keep prison beds and prison jobs filled than it is to condemn a dehumanized inmate. I once lived in a cell with a waxed brick red floor and sand-tan walls, with all of the metal parts chocolate brown. I had Maxfield Parrish prints framed in redwood behind glass. My clothes hung from the walls on polished, ornate brass hooks. The beds had matching spreads made by a prisoner with a months-long waiting list. I wore Levi’s 501 jeans, colored T-shirts, and a silver hoop earring. Guards often came by my cell to compliment me on the latest improvement. Today, I live in a cell with a bare, scarred concrete floor. The walls are poorly painted off-white with peeling industrial blue on the metal, exactly the same as every other cell. The walls are bare of trimming, not because I stopped loving the lurid colors and intricate details of Art Nouveau, but because I’m not allowed any form of decoration in my cell. The beds are made with dull gray woolen blankets that get rolled up every day to hide

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their ghastly ugliness. I wear blue pants with a cheap elastic waistband and large, yellow letters spelling out “PRISONER” down the right leg. The guards now comment on how my cell is “in compliance.” There are no flower beds on the yards, no splashes of color of any kind no murals, no more eccentrically dressed prisoners wearing purple hats or multi-colored yard shorts. Instead there’s an indistinct mass of gray and white, on top of blue pants stamped with shame down one leg. This is not, in any way, a beautiful reality. Nevertheless, this essay is an exercise in imagining a beautiful prison. There are dogs barking and trees whose heavy limbs carry rope swings. The perimeter is obscured by vegetation, and the front gate is crowded with flowers. There is a security force, but it stays out of sight unless it’s needed. The “beat” guards look like the cops in any big city, and they are trained to see themselves as a part of this community. The prisoners live in buildings that look like apartment blocks. Every morning we go to work at jobs that produce something useful to the rest of the world. There’s a bank and a market, and on the weekends a movie theater opens. In our living quarters there’s a bathroom and a kitchenette, and a semblance of privacy along with the freedom to personalize our walls. Counts are done respectfully. Escapes are infrequent because the expectation is of eventual release. At night, the schools and therapy rooms open up, and we go because human beings treated with dignity conduct themselves with self-respect. A positive sense of self-worth is fostered, which results in myriad efforts to balance out the scales with the rest of society. Prisoners devote themselves to community service projects, to volunteerism, to genuine restorative justice. And every prisoner is eligible for parole as soon as he or she is ready to rejoin society as a productive, contributing member. Disinterested professionals trained in the humane arts and sciences determine this readiness. Politics is barred from the process by all necessary means. The fundamental idea is to turn the “total experience” of prison into a total immersion in healing and socialization. The barren fortress is now a small city where men and women are encouraged to regain their essential humanity, to learn how to function not as automatons judged by artificial measures of compliance to ludicrous and pointless rules, but as free citizens. The purpose is not to discipline and punish but to educate and restore. In one of the countries of northwestern Europe, some years back, the government decided to open a new maximum-security prison to replace the aging old one, a new prison for its most dangerous offenders. The “cells”

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would be like studio apartments, with private baths and restrooms. The prison would be built around a state-of-the-art furniture factory. But the most revolutionary aspect of this institution involved the staff. Two basic requirements were set for the guards at this prison. First, all must be journeymen carpenters, with a high enough skill level and the motivation to train the prisoners. Second, none could have been prison guards before. Ever. In this second prerequisite, a fundamental acknowledgment of what is wrong with prison was revealed. The monumentally asymmetrical power relationship between prisoners and guards damages both sides of the dyad. Because of the politics of public employee unions and crime victims, guards are usually accorded a presumption of professionalism even though the truth on the ground often disproves this. This, too, is a direct result of the total nature of the experience inside a prison. The guards are traumatized at least as much as the prisoners. However, with the connivance of the media and the tacit assent of a terrified citizenry, guards are given carte blanche to keep the predators inside the perimeter, whatever it takes. In essence, the whole of society becomes the unnamed, mostly unwitting, co-conspirator in the creation of edifices dedicated to the suffering of fellow human beings. Repulsive prisons are everywhere, blotting out whole sections of the rural landscape of contemporary America, or, inside the cities, compressed into vertical slabs of blank walls fenestrated only with mirrors. These eyesores reek of the industrialization of incarceration, of the huge business of prison. Like most establishments dedicated to the service of mass markets, there is a disposable quality, a form that follows the function of processing and rending. The stink of the abattoir hides behind impassive, silent walls and inside cloned boxes squatting inside miles of chain-link fence. The old prison-castles of the 19th and early 20th centuries, embellished with turrets and the defined spaces of merlons marching across the rooftops, held a kind of grotesque attraction in their heavy solidity and symbolism. When the bus rolled up to the gatehouse, when the iron-barred portcullis was opened and the diesel-powered ship of the damned motored into the porte-cochere, at least you knew where you were, what you were there for, and what you could expect. The guards were guards and the cons cons, and this was the joint, the penitentiary, the big house. And just as the stony gargoyles spouting rainwater off the stones of cathedrals projected a frightening beauty, the machicolations of old Folsom’s ornate towers, or the crushing weight of Sing Sing’s wall were beautiful in their own terrifying ways.

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The new tilt-up half-pentacle boxes with their organs exposed, their walls punctured by dull, square access points partially obscured in dingy, scratched plastic, feed no imagination, spark no thoughts, elicit neither dragons nor griffins. They merely fill up space and use up truckloads of cheap cement. There is nothing remotely beautiful about them, only a bland nothingness. The old places, even with all their horror and history of repression, managed to fascinate people. At the gift store after the tour, no one will ever wear a T-shirt with the flat profile of any of these new prisons. Perhaps this is the most horrifying aspect of the modern prison, the modern prison system, its ability to flatten out prisoners. There will never be a Birdman of the California Correctional Institution, Unit IV-A, or any similar character of renown out of any one of the dozens of cookie-cutter facilities that plague the landscape of rural Texas like pustules in the rolling hills. Maybe all of this musing on the relative degrees of beauty in the architecture of old and new prisons is simply a way to draw out a labored metaphorical point that, finally, trumps the physical. The beautiful prison is not really a design or a place; it is a function. A world-famous production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” could take place inside the 150-year-old walls of San Quentin because the administrators and the local community of artists worked with the prisoners to bring the beauty of language and performance into that dismal pile of broken rocks. Even inside the graceless, buzzing electric fences of the California State Prison, Los Angeles County, the pluperfect example of the modern, flatworm institution, plunked down onto a square mile of dusty high desert wasteland, filled to overflowing with mind-numbing buildings decorated only with spray painted numbers, colored neutral tan even in this expanse of void, a prisoner-led revolution like the Honor Program could occur. The beautiful prison won’t be an elaborately constructed theme park ride that manages to hide the gears and keep the trash cans clean. And transformational events can happen as readily in a dump as in a palace: probably more likely in the former by the measure of my experience. The object must always be the reclamation of troubled souls, the mending of wounded hearts, and the making of amends. Without hesitation, the most beautiful prison is the one not built. The beautiful prison is characterized by the quality of its treatment of human beings. Respect is real and not based on fear but on the recognition of the inherent dignity of even the most damaged. The goal of placement is rebuilding and reintegration, not to torment and brutalize. Punishment

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is never for the sake of inflicting pain and suffering. In the beautiful prison, men and women who have done awful and even vile things are constantly encouraged to rise above their worst acts and rejoin society. This is done because to do any less is to succumb to the basest of human instincts, to fall prey to the worst of what resides in all of us, to become ugly. Restoration, rehabilitation, reconciliation, redemption, resolution these are the watchwords of the beautiful prison.

THE ENLIGHTENED PRISON Drew Leder and the Jessup Correctional Institution Scholars ABSTRACT Thirty men from the maximum-security Jessup Correctional Institution (Maryland), and Drew Leder, Professor of Philosophy, through smallgroup discussion, envision an alternative and authentically constructive institution. Uncomfortable with the notion of a truly “beautiful” prison, the group develops ideas of an “enlightened” prison, designed in counterpoint to the de-habilitating and destructive features of the existing prison. The enlightened prison would embody five core virtues: hope, growth, recognition of merit, individuality, and community. In the absence of these attitudes all too often a characteristic of current-day institutions there persists the “endarkened” prison, marked by despair, stasis, recognition of demerits, class-ification, and isolation.

Jessup Correctional Institution (JCI) is a maximum-security men’s prison in a rural area midway between Washington and Baltimore. JCI’s clientele range from lifers, some thirty or forty years into their “bits,” to new-timer youth caught up in gang violence. Of the roughly 1700 JCI inmates, most

Special Issue: The Beautiful Prison Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 64, 19 32 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-433720140000064002

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are African-American, many hailing from the tough and drug-ridden streets of East and West Baltimore but any cursory profile fails to do justice to the complexity and diversity of the men and their backgrounds. In fall of 2010, my class inside JCI included some of the prison’s “elite,” long-timers who are unusually committed to reflection and selftransformation. We had recently studied together the stoic Handbook of Epictetus (1983), and two contemporary works by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (2004) and The New Earth (2008). The focus, as always, was on the human capacity for understanding, empowerment, and freedom, even when under physical constraints. The fall semester’s class focused on the theme of the “Beautiful Prison.” Our central text was The Soul Knows No Bars: Inmates Reflect on Life, Death and Hope (Leder et al., 2000), a book I co-wrote with inmates. In dizzying meta-fashion we had dialogues about the book’s dialogues, including men who had been involved in the original project commenting on their words from eighteen years earlier. But our focus was also on the future. We were working together on this essay about what prison could and should be. With a limited amount of time (we met every other week through the semester), some 30 voices at play, and multiple pedagogical aims to juggle, our process was at times unsystematic and unpredictable. We engaged in both large-group and small-group discussion, took polls on different paradigms, and I solicited brief written essays.1 I tried to let go of my own preconceptions and pull together what I was hearing and reading from the men, presenting my summaries back to them for comment. What follows is thus not the product of a single author, but of a multifaceted dia-logue the thought, reasoning, speech (logos) that emerges across/between (dia). For Socrates that was the model of how human understanding best advances. Plato captured this process in his vivid literary portrayal of Socrates and his interlocutors. Alas, the sheer number of voices involved in our discussion, the brevity of this piece, and the need to avoid ego and competition, led us in an opposite direction we often speak here as a collective “we” rather than singling out individual contributions. We decided to move away from the language of the “beautiful prison”; a number of the men suggested discomfort with the term after years spent in harsh and unaesthetic environs. In fact, it provoked some bitter laughter. Prisons, they agreed, could be places for soul-searching and selftransformation … but not beautiful. One man launched into a description of the enlightened prison, and it met with general agreement when I proposed that as an alternate title. What if prisons were not like the dark cave described in Plato’s Republic: chained men, cut off from reality, consigned

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to watching shadows on the wall? What if, instead, prisons were places of, and for, enlightenment? This could lend itself to utopianism, but our conversations remained rooted in concrete experience. This, not professional training as criminologists, was the source of the men’s expertise. Prison was not something they had studied but had lived. They had witnessed the power for souldestruction or life-enhancement, in a warden, caseworker, family member, a ticket for an infraction, an educational class, a glimpse of the sky, an overcrowded cell, a contemptuous look, an unguarded shower. The challenge was to speak honestly of such experiences, but also to translate their specificity into general principles. If we could articulate the fundamental attitudes that characterized the enlightened prison, these could be used to suggest, validate, and measure the success of any and all features of an institution: employee-training, the types of programs offered inmates, architectural elements, etc. The enlightened prison, we concluded, would embody the following five core attitudes: hope, growth, recognition of merit, individuality, and community. (On the basis of our discussion I suggested these terms and categories, which were then checked and validated by the men.) In the absence of these attitudes, you have the “endarkened” prison. This type of environment, all too often characteristic of current-day institutions, embodies the opposite attitudes, which we termed, respectively, despair, stasis, recognition of demerits, class-ification, and isolation. I will describe these attitudes as they emerged in discussion, without much of a scholarly apparatus. Neither will I concern myself with whether the reader finds the recommendations naı¨ ve, idealized, or, conversely, insufficiently radical because we do not speak of prison abolition or dramatic social reorganization. These men are realists. They know what has really made their lives miserable, or, on occasion, better, and this remains their focus and the source of their authority.

HOPE VERSUS DESPAIR “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” So reads the sign over the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno (2003, Canto 3, l.9), and it would work well for many a modern penitentiary. Far from assisting a “penitential” process of self-examination and positive change, prisons often foster an experience of despair (etymologically, to “lose hope”). The men described how hope can

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be extinguished at several stages of the criminal justice process. This begins with the seeming contempt and callous mistreatment of the defendant demonstrated during trial proceedings, when attorneys on both sides joke with each other like members of an old-boys club; the shock of a long or life-sentence (with strange extensions such as “double-life plus twenty”); a harsh introduction to the “slammer” that slams you mentally and physically; loss of access to friends, family, resources, and kind words; a gathering sense of regret, bitterness, confusion, and depression, all of which endarken the spirit. This is reinforced by the many indignities of prison life. “Can you imagine,” wrote one man, “having your cell searched and torn apart by a person whom you graduated high school with? … having money missing from your inmate account and being unable to do anything? … your release date comes and your case manager hasn’t filed the appropriate paper work? … your family tells you they’ve sent pictures of the family reunion (but) the mail room lost them? … etc.” The men speak of imprisonment as a descent to the underworld, a confrontation with death from which some, though not all, return. The enlightened prison assists resurrection. It would be a citadel not just of punishment and deprivation, but of hope: “the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.” Some men said hope in prison is an imperiled, almost irrational feeling, and men sunken so low are in need of encouragement lest it die off. The enlightened prison is one that supports, philosophically and practically, opportunities for positive change. The criminal past need not rule all. The future does not yet lie in ruins. It remains a realm of hope that can stimulate and organize present action. Several men told stories of better prisons they have been incarcerated in, or their own ability to rise above dismal surroundings and pursue education, reach out to family, do legal research and filings on cases, make progress toward parole, or simply grow in meditation, prayer, and wisdom. With hope, they felt, a man can maintain a healthy relation to time even when “serving time” of unimaginably long duration. Of course, it mattered greatly, several said, to have someone who cares. This could be a mentor: an older prisoner, spiritual teacher, caseworker, or volunteer; a family member who stands by through thick and thin. Positive programs within the prison, recognition of accomplishment, possible paths to release these also give hope (and will be discussed later in more depth). Hope is both the product of positive institutional and personal reforms, but also, in a curious way, their precondition. One or two men spoke of how, ideally, everyone legislators, judges, wardens, correctional

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officers, parole boards, family, society at large, and inmates themselves have to hold onto hope or prison is just a gate to hell.

GROWTH VERSUS STASIS Hope is associated with possibilities for change and growth. Yet many prisons, according to these men, are monuments to stasis. Stasis is present in the architecture imposing, constraining, inescapable and the bureaucracy, unmovable in its exercise of power. The main “job” of the inmate at such institutions is simply to stay put. He/she has been put away, in this cell, tier, prison, for a prescribed number of years, or even the entirety of a life. A hugely expansive time is thus contained in a severely restricted space. The result renders both time and space confining and immobile. This is compounded in a prison where there is little to do (except watch TV, eat, or walk around a bit), and little to see (the patch of sky out a cell-window, the dining hall, the dirt yard). By contrast, the men described the enlightened prison as a place for growth. This is valued, supported, expected. After all, a human being is a living entity, and living entities must grow or die. They described the many forms this had taken in their lives, all of which and more would be available in the “enlightened” prison: GED tutoring for those developing high-school level competencies; higher education programs for those in love with learning, or seeking skill enhancement, employability, and special expertise; 12-step groups to help break addictive patterns; therapeutic groups, and environments like the Quaker-initiated “Alternatives to Violence Program,” which a number of my students participated in with great enthusiasm; a well-stocked library (individuals spoke of single books that had changed their lives); prisoner-run service groups that help others inside prison, or through outreach (to gang members and youth at risk), enhancing one’s own self-esteem and leadership-skills; classes in yoga and meditation; resources for the creative arts; access to computers; job training; workrelease programs; the list can go on and on. Like a university, the enlightened prison would embrace growth and change as central to its mission. As one man writes, even “architectural elements are very necessary for light to shine in. The design would be more like a college campus, plenty of windows, skylights, and flowers ….” Realists that they are, many men in my class expressed skepticism about whether the prison system, and society at large, really wants to empower

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inmate growth. I wondered, do we have not only the vision, but also the money for such things? Given the roughly $39,000 a year tab for housing a Maryland inmate, such programs and features, which can reduce recidivism, could prove cheap by comparison. A couple of men characterized our prison system holding over two million Americans, mostly Black or Latino as a contemporary form of enslavement. The goal is to keep the “slaves” under control, limited in intellect and ability, dead in spirit. More than a note of cynicism filtered into such conversations. The men had witnessed too much to believe that the “American dream” of rewarded selfimprovement was operative inside penal institutions. Here, instead, they saw a shadow side of America, infected by racism, classism, and a focus on capitalist profit. Nevertheless, these men refused to acquiesce to either passivity or bitterness. Many were living proof of the possibilities for multidimensional growth even while incarcerated. They have secured advanced degrees; written books, newspaper articles, and publically performed plays; developed artistic skills; pursued religious study and meditation-practice; won statewide and even national awards; received fellowships and political support for large-scale community programs, etc. Yet, these men also know themselves to be “exceptions to the rule.” They described a system that tends to favor stasis, and thereby retrograde movement, as many inmates are made worse, not better less employable, less self-sufficient, less able to negotiate the legitimate world by their extended prison time. Many inmates become complicit in this process. My students expressed frustration with some they live with: immature youth, distracted shorttimers, or long-timers who have given up on their cases, or are narcotized by TV. One wrote to me of those who “affected by this inhuman and psychologically degrading environment” become “addicted to the dependency of institutionalization, selfishness and lack of responsibility…. They know it’s wrong and no good for them but they lack the psychological and emotional discipline and will to free themselves from its grasp.” The enlightened prison would do what it could to prevent or cure this institutional paralysis.

RECOGNITION OF MERIT VERSUS DEMERIT When positive changes occur they need to be recognized and rewarded. Several men spoke with great frustration about how this is not currently

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the case. You may have crafted a new understanding of self and world, or a building desire and ability to help others but find yourself with no realistic way to act upon them. Or you pursue education, develop skills, achieve credentials, even take on leadership roles, but realize the prison administration, parole board, and governor couldn’t care less. There is no recognition of merit. Such recognition typifies progress in the outside world: you accumulate accomplishments that build your college application, job resume, and the like. However, in the criminal justice system, I was told, assessment is largely reversed. You are defined not by your demonstrated merits, but by demerits. The “convict” first became one by virtue of demerits, a conviction for alleged criminal activities. The criminal justice system then continues this focus on demerits. Infractions having an altercation with a guard, failing to show up for a count-out, being caught with contraband are meticulously ticketed and punished. Such records can lead to loss of privileges for the men, lockup, administrative segregation, transfer to another institution, or extension of sentence. But what, conversely, does it mean to “do well”? Primarily, to have a lack of demerits. Far from offering positive recognition, “good behavior” is redefined as the negative of a negative one has not done something one is not supposed to do. According to the men, while personal accomplishments are noted, they count for relatively little in the mathematized calculation of their record. I thought about this. It’s as if the best a student in my Loyola class could hope for, even at the end of a semester of excellent papers and presentations, was a note in my grade book to the effect that she had not been observed disrupting class. I can imagine how demoralizing this would be to my Loyola high-achievers. My prison class likewise included a number of high-achievers. One of them, a lifer, handed me a 60-page, single-spaced resume filled with significant accomplishments (including the publication of well over 100 articles and letters) largely done while in prison. In an enlightened institution such work would not only be supported by the correctional infrastructure, but rewarded through the granting of commendations, privileges, “promotions” through the system, and accelerated release. Another man, one of the organizers of our class, showed me a “Merit-Based Movement” program he and others had helped develop, which involved a detailed calculation of meritpoints earned by participation in educational, vocational, and addiction programming, and other noteworthy accomplishments. Not surprisingly, it was never implemented. The enlightened prison, however, would place emphasis on the development and honoring of strengths.

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INDIVIDUALITY VERSUS CLASS-IFICATION The recognition of merit is an aspect of a broader issue, the struggle in prison to realize yourself as an individual. “Who am I, really, and who do I want to become?” seemed a central life-issue for the men (as perhaps for all of us). I heard people searching to articulate their unique identity, value, and destiny. A number of them talked about how their criminal behavior was rooted in not being true to themselves. “I was trying to fit in.” “I lost myself for a while.” “I was just a stupid kid.” Without a sense of positive identity you can end up submerging yourself in gang-affiliations, or acting out in powerful but pathological ways. How to find yourself in a healthy fashion? The men talked about the importance and in today’s overcrowded and noisy prisons, the rarity of solitude and privacy. “I find my peace,” one writes, “early in the morning, when mostly everyone is asleep. There is no loud noise, the quietness in the air is so beautiful, calming and peaceful.” Time to think, remember, dream, return to your authentic self. Yet we also discover who we are by what others reflect back. The enlightened prison would be a place that affirms the positive individuality of those it houses. In the prison today, the individual is viewed primarily as a member of an unsavory class. You arrived at prison by being convicted of an act classified as a criminal offense, which then comes to constitute your identity. You have not just been found guilty of a crime; you are a drug-dealer, murderer, thief, or rapist a representative of a class of people (or, some would think, of sub-human predators). All the unique and positive aspects of your history and character are submerged in this class-ification. Prison is a place that ceaselessly reinforces a class identity. Your right to dress as an individual is taken away: in Maryland you are issued a uniform that both labels you as different from those in the outer world, and makes you the same, uniform, with other convicts. Your name is replaced with a number. In class, the men also brought up a different and, for them, especially hurtful and counterproductive form of classification: the punishment of entire groups for the infraction of a single person. One inmate stabs another and the whole prison is placed on lockdown. Someone violates a work-release program and commits a widely publicized crime end of the program. A large number of men who were making good use of workrelease in Maryland, laboring hard at their jobs and integrating well with the outside world, were all suddenly remanded to prison. Even the

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possibility of a single, high-profile crime plagues politicians worried about re-election. They decide that no lifers will be paroled on their watch, no matter what the individual’s accomplishments, or the positive recommendation of the parole board. This is the position taken since the early 1990s by a number of Maryland governors, one of the very few states in the country where the governor has had to personally approve every such parole. One of these, ex-Governor Glendening, has now admitted that his actions “made the parole process much more political than it should be and that he would ‘not have a problem’ with a change in state law to remove the governor from that process” (Rodricks, 2011). Again, such one-size-fits-all policies treat the individual simply as a member of a class. He/she can be punished after the fact, or in advance, for the actions of any other class-member. The enlightened prison treats each person as an individual. S/he is not simply categorized according to crime, sentence, addiction, race, or socioeconomic status. This notion became obvious as I got to know the individuals taking my course: this one a painter, that one a student of contemporary physics, another an avid meditator, or a Washington Redskins fan. I heard some of their complex family histories, involving a mother who had held the family together in tough times or the traumatic death of a brother in the young man’s arms. One person had previously been a criminal lawyer, another a physician, a third had run a business selling jet skis. The enlightened prison is an institution that illuminates, even celebrates, the complex humanity and individuality of its residents. Often the men spoke of the key role of personal relationships in preserving a sense of self. One wrote of a case manager who was clear and respectful in her communications: “I made sure that I was able to see and converse with Ms. Mowan weekly, and the more I spoke with her, the less burdensome my sentence became.” Another recommended having correctional officers assigned to a single tier, rather than constantly transferred from one to another; now they never get to know the inmates as people, and don’t treat them as such. The value of personal identification was clearly expressed by a man writing of his graduation from a college extension program (in the days before Pell Grant tuition funding was withdrawn from inmates): It was not a great moment because I graduated with honors. It was not a great moment because I gave a speech. It was a great moment because my son, Rashaun, was there. He was 11 years old, and it was his first opportunity to see me in a positive way. It was the first time that I didn’t feel like a prisoner who only had a few minutes left on his

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Over years of teaching inside this prison I have witnessed men honoring one another’s individuality through appreciative comments, gestures of friendship, mutual applause and fist-bumps at the graduation ceremony with which we end each semester. A prison must have hierarchy and security, but in an enlightened prison this recognition of the individual would also pervade the organizational structure, and be demonstrated by the warden, administrative chiefs, correctional officers, case managers, volunteers, parole board, and the family and friends whom the prison would make welcome. The emphasis in such an institution is not only on taking away your freedom, possessions, clothes, name but on helping to give back a sense of positive identity. For some this is the recovery of an earlier, lost self to the throes, for example, of addiction. For others, it may be an entirely new experience. “I hate the term ‘rehabilitation’,” said one of the men. “It implies I’m recovering something I used to have. But I never had it to begin with.” The sense of healthy individuality is a developmental challenge. Not everyone is ready for it: the men in my class were quick to acknowledge that many in JCI were mired in violence or ignorance and uninterested in change. But the enlightened prison would invite a developmental process, with the individual held responsible for follow-through.

COMMUNITY VERSUS ISOLATION As the above discussion suggests, healthy individuals are formed and recognized within healthy community. Obviously, such is often lacking, or actively discouraged, in prisons. Convicts are removed from family, friends, and the community in which they reside, which they have “offended.” They are thrown together, often in overcrowded and insecure conditions, with hundreds of other men who themselves have committed anti-social acts. Prison administrators discourage close ties between guards and inmates, for such ties can compromise command and security. So, too, close ties among inmates may be deterred. They can lead, in the eyes of authorities, to the forming of power blocs and conspiracies. Men have told me that a prisoner with too many friends or too much power may simply be transferred to another penitentiary. “Diesel therapy,” one prisoner called it.

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Then, too, the whole spirit of penal institutions and their members can undermine attempts at community. Anger, fear, aggression, distrust are a pervasive element among inmates and staff given their personal histories, current experiences, and the institutional mission. Several men voiced contempt for the correctional officers for treating them with contempt. Thus the circle turns. “Hell is other people,” says a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1989, p. 45). To spend long years in an overstuffed prison, with two men crammed into a cell barely adequate for one, constant noise echoing down the tier, no hope of escape, without friends to lighten the burden, this would be hell indeed. Paradoxically, this overcrowding can also lead to a spirit of isolation. Forgotten by the larger world, looked down on by prison authorities, and having to fight for survival with other inmates, each person stands alone. “The jungle’s creed reads; the strong must feed off any prey at hand,” one man wrote. “Prison is a jungle. It’s a matter of do or die.” As mentioned above, this stark aloneness is not to be confused with restorative “solitude.” Quite the converse: When you can never get away from others, never feel safe and quiet, you seek simple isolation. What encouraged me, though, was the extent of positive community among the men despite all these impediments. This wasn’t the false community of clinging to a violent gang, or a powerful exploiter/protector for security. This was a community of mutual respect and affection: men in the class had known each other in some cases for decades, struggled and worked side-by-side in harsh conditions, and had bonded through the experience. The enlightened prison seeks to support such community. Opportunities for solitude would be complemented by activities with and for others. Again, we return to the importance of providing classes, groups, and programs. There are also curricula that directly enhance community-building and defuse threats to its existence. One of my inmate class-members writes of the Alternatives to Violence Program used in JCI, and nation-wide: Some inmates here are like a time bomb, which can explode at any time and without any warning, resulting in a violent or deadly situation in a fraction of a second. A good, alert, open minded and wise inmate who utilizes the AVP tools is like an experienced member of a bomb squad who dismantles a bomb before it explodes, preventing death and destruction. I believe we must be visionaries, open-minded and proactive.

He contends that, due in part to such programs, violence in JCI has declined. The enlightened prison need not compromise security: it can and should be a safer prison for inmates and correctional officers alike.

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This is especially true insofar as the latter are included in the sense of community. This may seem naı¨ ve, or even dangerous the guards are there to guard, not to fraternize and thereby “let down their guard.” But they too have to live within this tightly wound world. They, too, need to feel and be more than just “the enemy.” One inmate spoke of an enlightened warden who created an annual charity-run in which correctional officers and inmates had to participate together. This began to break down the barriers of hostility that had pervaded the institution. However high the walls and razor wire, several men also spoke of the crucial nature of contact with those outside. A friend or family member who kept in touch, sent a package, came to visit, held a place in their heart, could make all the difference. So, too, volunteers who enter to share their skills; or having access to the Internet so you can learn what’s happening in the world and ready yourself to participate in it; work-release programs that allow you to enter it directly, reclaiming a public identity — the enlightened prison supports such visits and ventures. It is not solely about creating barriers locked cells, segregated tiers, towering walls but about assisting people to surmount the barriers that keep them in isolation. To me, and I think us, that is what our class, and this essay are all about: speaking with and to others across all of the walls.

CONCLUSION The Conference of the Birds is a 12th century Sufi allegorical poem by the Persian author Farid ud-Din Attar. The plot is nicely summarized by the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis-Borges: The faraway king of the birds, the Simurg, drops an exquisite feather in the middle of China; weary of their ancient anarchy, the birds determine to find it. They know that their king’s name means “Thirty Birds.” They know that his royal palace stands on the Kaf, the circular mountain, which surrounds the earth. They undertake the almost infinite adventure. They fly over seven valleys, over seven seas; the next-to-the-last one is called Vertigo; the last, Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; others perish. Thirty of them, purified by their labors, set foot upon the mountain of the Simurg. At last they contemplate it: they perceive that they are the Simurg, and that the Simurg is each one of them and all of them. (1994, p. 43)

The “enlightened prison” is like the Simurg an ideal that is sought for, but seems far away, almost impossible to reach. Why even discuss and

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write about it in our class? Many inmates have “deserted,” others “perished,” caught in the “vertigo” and “annihilation” of inner-city streets and nihilistic prisons; yet there are those who labor on in their quest. “They undertake the almost infinite adventure” of life still available even to a lifer. Seeking the enlightened prison, they catch a glimmer of it as a reality, here-and-now. In our class discussion, I experienced among the men the very things of which they spoke: hope for a future still alive and beckoning; a dedication to growth in mind and spirit; the recognition of merit their own and that of others as we listened respectfully, argued, laughed, and on the last day of class, shared cake and applause, celebrating both our individuality and community. We were 30 in our class, looking for the Simurg, the “thirty birds.” We discovered that for now we are the Simurg. Wherever people search within, and with others, for the “enlightened prison,” right there and then it begins to manifest.

NOTE 1. Nine Loyola service- and service-learning students accompanied me into the prison, serving as enthusiastic and invaluable co-learners/co-teachers. To more fully explore their experience and contribution would lead us beyond the boundaries of this essay.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all the “Jessup Correctional Institution Scholars” who participated in our discussion, sharing their thoughts, experiences, and insights, thereby functioning as co-authors of this piece: Douglas Scott Arey, Kenneth Bond-El, Dalphonso Brooks, Craig Cobb-Bey, Anthony Davenport, Jeffrey Ebb, Sr., Vincent Greco, Eric Grimes, Donald Gross, Tyrone Herrell, Edward Hershman, Warren “Ren” Hynson, Michael Jeffrey-Bey, Marvin Jenkins, Arlando “Tray” Jones, Kevin Jones-Bey, Fortunato Mendes, Wesley Moore, Shaka F. Muhammed, Christopher Murray, Shakkir Talib Mujahid, Lakhem Ra-sebek, Michael Razzio Simmons, Clarence Somerville, Michael Thomas, Gregg Dallas Wakefield, Mike Whittlesey, Jacobi Williams, John Woodland, Zaeed Zakaria.

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REFERENCES Alighieri, D. (2003). The divine comedy: The inferno, the purgatorio, and the paradiso. New York, NY: New American Library. Borges, J. L. (1994). Ficciones. New York, NY: Grove Press. Epictetus. (1983). The handbook of epictetus. New York, NY: Hackett Publishing Company. Leder, D., with Baxter, C., Brown, W., Chatman-Bey, T., Cowan, J., Green, M., … Woodland, J. (2000). The soul knows no bars: Inmates reflect on life, death and hope. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Rodricks, D. (2011, February 20). “Glendening: ‘Life means life’ Absolutism was Wrong.” Baltimore Sun. Sartre, J. P. (1989). No exit and three other plays. New York, NY: Vintage International. Tolle, E. (2004). The power of now. New York, NY: New World Library. Tolle, E. (2008). The new earth. New York, NY: Penguin.

KNOWING THAT WE ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE: A CASE FOR CRITICAL PRISON PROGRAMMING Rebecca Ginsburg ABSTRACT This paper considers a peer education initiative through which incarcerated men provide English as a Second Language instruction to other incarcerated men. Programs such as this are sometimes criticized for objectifying and exploiting their incarcerated participants. I argue that prison programs that support the demonstration of competence and meaningful collective action can bring out the best in their students, transform the climate of the institutions that house them, and promote progressive social change. This study suggests how thoughtfully designed prison programs can create communities committed to personal growth, social responsibility, and engaged citizenship.

Special Issue: The Beautiful Prison Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 64, 33 47 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-433720140000064003

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INTRODUCTION Rehabilitation is out of favor. The proposition that incarceration should primarily promote individual reformation has in recent decades been viewed with suspicion by scholars, jurists, and commentators across the political spectrum. Its death knell in the popular imagination came in January 1989, when the U.S. Supreme Court noted that a Senate Report had “recognized that the efforts of the criminal justice system to achieve rehabilitation of offenders had failed” (Miller, 1989, p. C3). Granted, as early as 1977 it had been possible to chronicle the demise of the notion that incarceration specifically, prison programming could effectively address the causes of crime (Walker, 1977). By the early 21st century, mainstream public opinion and carceral policy had come to firmly reflect the dominance of the deterrence and just-desserts attitude toward incarceration (Robinson, 2006). The rehabilitative agenda has fallen out of favor among some on the left as well. The view that prison rehabilitation programs cannot help becoming troubling extensions of repressive, coercive prison regimes has led some to question the advisability and the ethics of cooperating with such initiatives (Rodrı´ guez, 2003, p. 96). For others, the trope of rehabilitation, which has been integral to the American prison system since the founding of the penitentiary in the 18th century, has provided cover for the violence enacted against incarcerated people. According to this view, penal law and practices rely on the rhetoric of personal transformation through imprisonment to justify deprivation, mortification, and other assaults on men and women in prison. This violence, in the name of forging new, improved citizens, is fundamental to the American experience of incarceration (Smith, 2009, p. 208). As the director of a prison higher-education program, the Education Justice Project (EJP) of the University of Illinois, I am struck by the practical and philosophical skepticism with which people regard rehabilitation efforts and the very notion of rehabilitation itself, in juxtaposition with our students’ assuredness of their own transformations. Without a doubt, the rehabilitation debate would become more nuanced by incorporating the voices and experiences of the incarcerated. For instance, my own suspicions about the discourse of reform have been challenged by students’ insistence that they have used their time behind bars to develop into their better selves, that such change would probably not have been possible on the outside, and that for this opportunity if decidedly not for the years spent in prison long past the point of personal change they are grateful. “Prison

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was the only thing that was going to change my life,” attests Erick Nava, an EJP student (personal communication, June 28, 2011). Conservatives might be sufficiently swayed by their stories to, at the very least, support investment in correctional programming. Progressive critiques, which might be tempted to discount such accounts of redemption as cynical or illformed, need instead to grapple with the possibility that these narratives are sincere and reflect their authors’ experiences. If the myth of rebirth behind bars was integral to the development of particularly American notions of the self-governing citizen and his relationship to the republic, and if it remains central to the defense of penal incarceration as a practice, it is a myth complicated by the vehemence with which generations of incarcerated people have sworn by it. I cannot speak for the students of the EJP. However, in this essay I offer one way of thinking through some of the problems that Rodrigeuz (2006), Smith (2009), and Daivs (2003), and others have identified with a rehabilitation- and program-centered approach to imprisonment. My argument is based on my personal experiences with the EJP and my acquaintance with the approximately three-dozen programs like it around the country. To bolster my claims, I rely on comments I have recorded at meetings with our students and in classes (which we take down routinely to support our program’s ongoing evaluation efforts); a two-hour interview I conducted with two EJP students in preparation for writing this article; and a three-hour meeting in which I discussed a draft of this essay with a larger group of students. My argument is that programs that offer incarcerated adults opportunity to exercise leadership, authority, and expertise within the prison setting can promote personal development and social health, while avoiding the trap of reinforcing institutional disciplines that degrade and dehumanize. In the following pages I describe the EJP. A brief discussion of the theoretical lens through which I interpret some of our work at the prison follows. The largest section of the paper is an account of EJP’s Language Partners program and its peer instructors, the Teaching Partners. They serve as a model of the power of critical prison programming and of its further potential. Before proceeding, I offer two important disclaimers. First, the claim that thoughtful prison programming education programming in particular has the potential to support incarcerated people’s personal growth and, through that, social betterment, is not an apology for the prison industrial complex. American states and our federal government should close the majority of our prisons, invest in schools, reform discriminatory

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laws (notably those in the areas of criminal law and immigration law), tackle poverty, and acknowledge the impacts of centuries of institutionalized racism in the criminal justice realm and elsewhere. Then we need to turn the few prisons that remain into centers of intense programming. However, even as we push for these reforms, the kind of programming I advocate has a place. Because the programming I support takes direction from incarcerated populations, responds to their interests, and provides a platform for their concerns, it can help to move us toward a more just society. Second, it is not my argument that prison education programs that support intellectual enquiry and personal efficacy, and thereby set the stage for personal growth and collective action, as I shall argue, should be valued because they prepare incarcerated people to be better citizens upon their release. While I am convinced by the decades’ worth of research that finds correlation, if not convincing causation, between prison education and reduced recidivism, that is not my focus here.1 Lower crime and incarceration rates are, of course, an important social goal. Of greater interest to me, though, are the changes that prison programs cultivate within their participants, wherever they may be, such that the potential exists not only to reduce crime on the streets but also to transform the prison.

BACKGROUND OF THE EJP The EJP was founded in Fall 2006 by a group of University of Illinois graduate students, faculty members, and community members dedicated to higher education in prison. We spent two years in program design and forming relationships with university administrators, prison administrators, and Department of Corrections officials. We began to offer reading groups at the prison, Danville Correctional Center, a men’s medium-high security state prison near the Indiana border, in Fall 2008, and for-credit courses in Spring 2009. Because Illinois community colleges provide lower-division courses in the state’s prisons on a contract basis, EJP provides only 300- and 400-level classes. In effect, our students are non-degree transfer students to the University of Illinois, though our plan is eventually to establish a degree-completion program. Over the past three years, EJP has expanded programming at the prison to include thrice-weekly tutoring, a guest lecture series, a sustainable agriculture project, extra-curricular writing, science, and math workshops,

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a debate program, cultural workshops, and an English as a Second Language (ESL) program called Language Partners. Funding comes from private donors, grants, and the University of Illinois. There are about 110 men involved in EJP programs at the prison, of a general population of about 1800. We encourage these men to consider themselves our partners in the development and administration of our programs, and they respond by serving on planning and evaluation committees and presenting ideas for new programs and initiatives. That is how Language Partners was born. About 48 men are involved in Language Partners. While all of our programs, though not without challenges, are running well and receiving strong evaluations from students and instructors alike, Language Partners, which I discuss below, appears to be the most powerful in its effects and, I believe, best demonstrates the potential of prison education programs.

REASONABLE PERSON MODEL I rely on the reasonable person model (RPM), developed by psychologists Stephen Kaplan and Rachel Kaplan, to help make sense of the impacts upon our students of participating in Language Partners.2 The RPM speaks to our basic nature as information-dependent creatures. Compared to other animals, and partly to compensate for our lack of strength and speed relative to other creatures, human beings have developed an extraordinary facility for processing information (Kaplan & Kaplan, 2003, p. 1484). “Information is what we store, trade, hide, and act on. We are overwhelmed by it, yet endlessly seek it. We cannot act without it” (Kaplan & Kaplan, 2008, p. 826). Psychologists refer to the ever-evolving products of our efforts to organize the information that we extract from our environments as mental maps or, alternately, cognitive maps. The word “map” can be deceiving, for it is not geographic information only that one seeks through mental mapping, nor is it day-to-day effectiveness in a given setting that is at stake here. Rather, mapping forms part of the vital human project of making sense of one’s social and material world and an individual’s place within it. Mental maps include not just locational data, but all manner of images, thoughts, perceptions, and biases about people, things, and ideas. And they are integral not only to individual efforts to move from point to point, but also to make long-term plans, engage in contemplative thoughts, and respond to the world and its frustrations with reason and clarity (Kaplan, 1973, p. 75; Tolman, 1948).

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We tend to underestimate how much we depend on our mental maps and how much they support the quality of our lives, until we find ourselves in a situation where we are frustrated in our efforts to create them. The RPM holds that when people’s basic informational needs are not met for instance, when they are unable to extract cues from their physical or social surroundings about where they are, what is going on around them, or how they can effectively act within a given setting they are likely to feel muddled, confused, and angry. If they regularly occupy places that deny such informational needs, they are unlikely to attain even a minimal level of healthy functioning. Prison is a prime example of a site where spatial and orienting information is denied to inhabitants. Most correctional facilities do not allow incarcerated people access to maps of the facility and the surrounding area. Some assertively impede a sense of environmental comfort or competence by setting all clocks in the facility to different times, regularly shifting scheduled activities such as meals or tower movement to throw off a sense of predictability within the landscape, and block views between one section of a prison and another to prevent residents from developing a cognitive map of the prison. The ostensible security concerns that justify such practices often are satisfied at the cost of incarcerated people’s sense of calm and peace, thus creating a greater need for security measures to contain inevitably resulting displays of aggression and resentment. On the other hand, the Kaplans argue, when people are in a position to construct comprehensive, detailed mental maps of their relevant worlds, the conditions exist not only for them to achieve basic levels of physical, personal, and social health, but also to be their best. The RPM does not offer a definition of what it means for person to be at his or her best. I take it to mean that his innate capacities for love, compassion, generosity, and courage are unencumbered, such that he can feel and act on these impulses in ways supportive of his own well-being and that of the larger world. A person at his best does not have to negotiate, for instance, the debilitating confusion of being lost, or the mental fatigue that renders him unable to think straight and make plans. Freed from such burdens, he is an engaged, rational, clear-headed member of his community. He receives the satisfaction of such engagement and the community in turn is better off for it. The power of the RPM, and what it contributes to earlier scholarship on mental mapping, lies in its drawing our attention to what we tend to neglect, namely, the human need to be able to extract useful information from our surroundings and act on it with competence. “Being effective is

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adaptive; being known for one’s effectiveness helps to secure one’s place in the group” (Kaplan & Kaplan, 2003, p. 1485). Engaged, rational, clearheaded members of a community receive the satisfaction of social engagement and collaborative effort, and the community in turn is better off for their thoughtful engagement. RPM offers a vision of personal health and civic well-being based on individuals being able to make critical sense of their world and work as effective actors within it. In the section below, I describe the Language Partners program and consider how its successes can be attributed to Teaching Partners’ expanding mental maps and sense of competency.

LANGUAGE PARTNERS Language Partners is the brainchild of an incarcerated EJP student, Ramon Cabrales. In his written proposal, in which he advocated for a pilot ESL program at the prison, he noted that Spanish-speaking men incarcerated at Danville prison had had no access to ESL instruction for about five years because of state budget cuts. This made them ineligible for most work assignments, which not only provide spending money but also a way to pass time and the satisfaction of being productive. In addition, their limited English skills prevented their participation in educational programs at the prison. Most and he estimated there were between 150 and 200 such men occupied a Spanish-speaking ghetto within the prison.3 Their lives inside are constrained and their prospects upon release unpromising. Mr. Cabrales proposed that bilingual EJP students provide ESL instruction to these men. Language Partners was born. We selected eight incarcerated students as peer instructors, mostly on the recommendation of Mr. Cabrales, designated them Teaching Partners, and invited them to help us develop the program. This they did along with a half dozen University of Illinois instructors (“Resource Partners”), who also provided training in communicative language instruction and tutoring techniques to the Teaching Partners. After distributing bilingual flyers about the program within the residence units and posting them at the gym, we held a large informational meeting for men who wished to learn more about the program. About 50 men ended up applying, and the Teaching Partners and Resource Partners jointly administered a series of oral and written assessment tests. We selected 10 men based on their similarity in aptitude (so we would not have to deal with a wide range of capacities),

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and a pilot Language Partners class began in January 2011, meeting twice each week under the direction of the Teaching Partners, aided by Resource Partners. We expected that the 10 English learners would gradually improve their reading, writing, and oral communication skills, such that they would able to place into the GED courses offered by the state at the prison. We have indeed seen statistically significant improvement in their English, based on aptitude tests, and we are encouraged. However, what has proven even more exciting is another, unanticipated outcome, one that concerns the Teaching Partners. Based on what they tell us and what we have observed, their participation in the program has produced significant changes in their behaviors and attitudes. In the language of the RPM, we are seeing a simultaneous, mutually supportive process of expanding mental maps and growing competencies. The Teaching Partners’ worlds are enlarging, and their view of themselves within that world, now and in the future, is shifting. Specifically, the Teaching Partners report that they consider Language Partners one of the most meaningful things they have ever done and that it has changed the way they think about their roles inside the prison and their lives upon release. As a consequence, their prison worlds have changed. The next section explores this in detail.

THE TEACHING PARTNERS Being a Teaching Partner is a significant commitment, and the men make sacrifices to participate in the program. They commit to spending six hours a week in the classroom. This may not seem onerous. Once one takes into account the very restrictive schedule of the prison routine, however, the implications of this time commitment become clearer. Most of the Teaching Partners have morning “assignments” or jobs, which means that they regularly forgo morning dayroom (i.e., time outside of the cell in the common area of the residential units), gym, or yard activities. “This may not seem like such a big sacrifice,” one of the Teaching Partners wrote, “till one considers that most of the Language Partner volunteers also go to school at night or do other volunteer work on our ‘off’ days from the program. This means that for some of us, the only time we enjoy sunshine is on our way to work or school. The other 23 hours 45 minutes are spent indoors” (Mayorga, 2011).

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One of the most striking aspects of Mr. Mayorga’s paper4 is that he goes on to draw attention to the particular sacrifices made by three of his fellow Teaching Partners, Erick Nava, Joseph Mapp, and Ramon Cabrales: On days (Mr. Cabrales) wishes to enjoy a stroll on the yard or exercise in the gym, he forgoes the privilege because he is forced to choose between recreation time or a shower … (Mr. Nava’s) morning and night dayroom time is non-existent during the week. He has no recreational time on the yard or gym. (2011)

All of the Teaching Partners suffer from limited contact with their families; the only telephones available to them are in the dayroom, to which they have limited access. He concludes: Life in prison is not easy. Time to relieve stress through exercise or calling home to check on family, not to mention easing their worries about us, is necessary. The question is, are our sacrifices worth it? Looking at the smiles of our Learning Partners after having grasped a new English language concept, we’d say yes. Knowing that we are making a difference makes all our sacrifices worth it. (Mayorga, 2011)

Orlando Mayorga’s comments speak not only to the sacrifices that Teaching Partners make, but also to the regard that they have for one another. Indeed, parts of his paper read like a paean to his fellows, and the reflections of other Teaching Partners share this sensibility. In Ramon Cabrales’ paper, written for the same journal, he notes, I can see the determination that the Teaching Partners have to see (our students) succeed. They are there, week after week, with a goofy grin and a contagious enthusiasm that reaches (the students) and Resource Partners as well. When teaching or preparing a lesson, this is very important. To know that you can count on such a magnificent group of tutors who are there for the same reasons makes all the difference in the world. (Cabrales, 2011)

Mr. Mayorga refers as well to the sense of responsibility he feels toward the students, the Learning Partners, and his commitment to their success. Erick Nava writes of his relationship to these men as well: Just a few months ago most of these guys were strangers. I feel a loyalty toward them that is alarming. I feel proud when they learn something new. They are not just students any more. In a way they are friends and family. That’s why the program will prosper. Because when you are in class, it doesn’t feel like prison … I’m glad to feel this way, because it’s preparing us to work with other people. Besides, I’m tired of letting family down and I can guarantee that we will do everything in our power not to let this one, Language Partners, down. (Nava, 2011)

In his conversation with me, Mr. Cabrales described being in his cell at night, preoccupied with upcoming classes and his desire to teach his students well. He told me, “I’m literally lying in bed thinking about how I can

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make the lesson better. And then it comes to me. ‘Yeah, they’re going to like that!’ It’s a very good feeling.” (interview, May 23, 2011) This sense of responsibility and engagement extends beyond those formally in the program. After the final selection of 10 men was made last fall, several of the Teaching Partners began working on their own time with those who had applied but had not been offered admission. These disappointed applicants were strongly motivated to acquire better English language skills and were willing to work hard to acquire them. Our Teaching Partners responded to their pleas, and have been using what they’ve learned about language instruction from the training we provided them, their growing classroom experience, and one another to work independently with these individuals, in essence offering private English lessons, though receiving no reimbursement. The Teaching Partners demonstrate their commitment to their students in other ways as well. Before the program began, two Teaching Partners went cell-by-cell through the blocks where they respectively lived, asking neighboring inmates to contribute notebooks. (The University doesn’t provide writing materials and the Partners suspected that some of the learners wouldn’t have resources to buy their own from the prison commissary.) “I expected [donations] from other Mexicans, but I [also] got [them] from white guys, black guys,” one of them told me (E. Nava, personal communication, May 23, 2011). They clearly felt empowered by the response to their collection efforts and by their ability to support, as they have come to call them, their students. Since classes have begun, the Teaching Partners have developed the habit of encouraging the English learners by distributing small rewards such as pens in recognition of work well done. They purchase these prizes with their personal funds from the prison commissary, which charges inflated prices. Giving prizes was their idea. When I offered to purchase suitable trinkets on the outside and bring them to prison for them to distribute as they wished, they politely declined. They explained that the prizes had more value to the students because the students knew that they, the Teaching Partners, were providing them. The learners interpreted the financial sacrifice as evidence of their teachers’ confidence in them, and the peer instructors were desirous of their receiving that message. Erick Nava has surprised himself with the strength of his feelings for Language Partners, his students, and his role within the program. He is scheduled to be released in two years, and tells me, shaking his head in disbelief as he speaks, “It’s cool that I’m going home. OK, great … but at the same time …. Two years is not enough time to learn everything …. I’m going

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to miss prison because of this [program]. I’m going to miss prison when I go home. People depending on me.” (personal communication, May 23, 2011) Erick Nava was, like most of the teaching partners, an exceptionally thoughtful and mature man when he became involved in the program. Language Partners did not make him what he is. Rather, the program appears to have made it possible for him and others like him to realize their potential. It provided a context in which he could both learn and apply his skills. The program is responsive to the needs of information- and meaninghungry actors who seek to navigate their world with confidence and to engage their world such that they can see themselves having an important impact within it. Perhaps this is all the more pronounced by virtue of the contrast between Language Partners and the larger prison setting, which does not encourage information seeking and discourages group action. To understand this as mental mapping, it’s helpful to compare the experiences of peer instructors with their common pre-incarceration experiences. Most were involved in Chicago gangs and achieved considerable competence, respect, and a sense of connection to others through those involvements. But, as Erick Nava put it, “[I] had a sense of community through gangs before, but not like this” (personal communication, May 23, 2011). When pushed, he explained that some of the fellowship he felt from the gang was a drug-induced sense of camaraderie. He had some close friendships with other gang members, of course, but he was never sure in a crisis that all of his fellow gang bangers had his back. Many EJP students, not just Language Partners, report that in their prior lives they lived in a world of narrow cognitive maps. They do not use that term, of course, but they describe themselves as having limited perspectives, circumscribed views, and a very fragmented orientation to the world. Peer esteem and social power existed, but not rich and illuminating mental maps whether of the city beyond the neighborhood, or of social, historical, or psychological contexts nor a conscious sense that the maps they did possess were limited and corrupted by what EJP student Robert Reed calls “stinking thinking,” or biases born of the narrowest of street values. When I read a draft of this paper to the Teaching Partners in order to check my impressions, the first comment they made when I had finished related to this assessment of gang life and narrow mental maps. They all agreed with me, and some were struck that I had been able to articulate so well the nature of “fractured views,” as one put it. “That captures our gang experience … the neighborhood was our world” (E. Nunez, personal communication, June 28, 2011). They emphasized that within that small world,

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they had exercised the same talents that are so much in evidence in their teaching for example, leadership, teamwork, planning, and communication. But they were applying them “in the wrong direction,” as Teaching Partner Joseph Mapp described it (personal communication, June 28, 2011). A sense of satisfaction and personal meaning based on worthwhile work was largely absent. After my reading, the Teaching Partners confirmed that participating in this program is one of the most fulfilling things they have ever done and that they consider themselves to be operating at their peak. “Assured,” “confident,” “making a difference,” and “a role model” were some of the terms they used to describe how they see themselves, in contrast with their assessment of their pre-incarceration accomplishments. The Language Partners program, one explained, “provides the environment to be your best,” borrowing from the language he had heard me use in the draft paper (E. Nunez, personal communication, June 28, 2011). At the same time, I was struck by their modesty as we considered the cohesiveness of the community that they have created, their satisfaction in performing meaningful work, and their sense of hopefulness about their future as language instructors, in prison and on the outside. Their enthusiasm about being able to provide for themselves and their families in this capacity had recently been boosted with the news that a recently released Teaching Partner the only one to be released to date had found employment as a private school teacher.

CONCLUSION We expected that the EJP’s classrooms and resource rooms at Danville prison would become, to some extent, safe refuges, alternatives to the environment of hyper-masculinity and isolation that is the norm at most American prisons. Less expected was what our students would do within the world of relative personal safety, critical inquiry, intellectual exploration, and personal challenge that Language Partners opened up to them. They might have rested comfortably, secure in their status as elite students within the prison hierarchy. Instead, they have applied their capacities and skills to improving the condition of those who are among the most disadvantaged of incarcerated men. The story of Language Partners is not unique in our experience at Danville Correctional Center, though it is the most fully realized among all

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of EJP’s programs in its expression of student leadership and generosity. There are other initiatives in the works, also motivated by our students. These include plans to support homeless shelters with food cultivated in the prison garden, an intervention program directed at youth violence in Chicago, and an academic tutoring program at the prison. These initiatives speak, as does Language Partners, to the liberating power of the intellect rightly channeled, and the potential of prisons offering time and opportunity to people who may seek to make a break from their past lives and turn toward a more efficacious future to become centers for collective healing and action. This program demonstrates how prisons may bear a striking resemblance to at least one popular vision of the undergraduate campus as a place “that helps students go beyond their own private interests … and discover how they, as individuals, can contribute to the larger society of which they are a part” (Boyer, 1987, pp. 67 68). Might the proliferation of critical, well-designed programs that empower incarcerated people to develop their intellects, assume leadership, and act on their desire to be agents of change produce beautiful prisons? That would be a heady and ambitious claim. Let me propose, more modestly, that prison programs that allow incarcerated people to take responsibility for their personal development, to act with authority and competence within their environments, to contribute to the welfare of their fellows and to know that they are making a difference within the prison and within their communities on the outside would support the creation of lively, purpose-filled institutions. Such prisons would not sever incarcerated people from their communities nor resign incarcerated people to a ghostlike state of social invisibility, although both conditions are popularly held to be the preconditions of successful re-emergence into the world as rehabilitated men and women (Smith, 2009). Instead, incarcerated adults, through generating and participating in well-designed and executed programs (and with the assistance of correctional staff that support them) would contribute and be seen to be contributing to prison administration and civic life. In this scenario, prisons will become places of hope and compassion, as well as crucibles of activism and generators of innovative ideas. Danville Correctional Center is, admittedly, a small sample, but EJP’s Teaching Partners and its other students, through their example, encourage me to dream of a day when the few prisons that remain serve as centers of reflective service, guided by the evolving visions and leadership of incarcerated men and women. It will be up to them to tell us if this produces a beautiful prison.

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NOTES 1. See, for example, Chappell (2004), Gaes (2008), and Winterfield, Coggeshall, Burke-Storer, Correa, and Tidd (2009). The first two references offer meta-analyses of the myriad of studies in recent decades that explore the relationship between post-secondary prison education and recidivism rates. All three references conclude that there is a need for further study if a stronger case for causation is to be made. 2. See Kaplan and Kaplan (2003, 2008, 2009) for detailed accounts of the reasonable person model. 3. Many of the Teaching and Learning Partners are undocumented Mexican immigrants. A longer paper would explore the implications of U.S. immigration policy for their condition and consider how the existence of more programs like Language Partners might help shape debates about immigration and its criminalization. 4. These untitled, undated papers were provided to me by their authors, who wrote in response to a Call for Papers from a journal planning a special issue on teaching ESL in non-traditional settings….

REFERENCES Boyer, E. L. (1987). College: The undergraduate experience in America (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Cabrales, R. (2011). Untitled paper. Chappell, C. A. (2004). Post-secondary correctional education and recidivism: A meta-analysis of research conducted 1990 1999. Journal of Correctional Education, 55(22), 148 169. Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Gaes, G. G. (2008, March 31 and April 1). The Impact of Prison Education Programs on Post-Release Outcomes. Reentry Roundtable on Education, John Jay College of Law, NY. Kaplan, S. (1973). Cognitive maps in perception and thoughts. In R. M. Downs & D. Stea (Eds.), Image and environment: Cognitive mapping and spatial behavior (pp. 63 78). New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Kaplan, S., & Kaplan, R. (2003). Health, supportive environments, and the reasonable person model. American Journal of Public Health, 93(9), 1484 1489. Kaplan, S., & Kaplan, R. (2008). Bringing out the best in people: A psychological perspective. Conservation Biology, 22(4), 826 829. Kaplan, S., & Kaplan, R. (2009). Creating a larger role for environmental psychology: The reasonable person model as an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2008.10.005 Mayorga, O. (2011). Untitled paper. Miller, J. G. (1989, April 23). Is rehabilitation a waste of time? Washington Post, C3. Nava, E. (2011). Untitled paper. Robinson, P. H. (2006). How psychology is changing the punishment theory debate. Law and Psychology: Current Legal Issues, 9, 94 104.

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Rodrı´ guez, D. (2006). Forced passages: Imprisoned radical intellectuals and the U.S. prison regime. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, C. (2009). The prison and the American imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tolman, E. C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. The Psychological Review, 55(4), 189 208. Walker, S. (1977). Reexamining the president’s crime commission: The challenge of crime in a free society after ten years. Crime Delinquency, 24, 1 12. Winterfield, L., Coggeshall, M., Burke-Storer, M., Correa, V., & Tidd, S. (2009). The effects of postsecondary correctional education: Final report. Washington, DC: Urban Institute, Justice Policy Center.

RETHINKING THE HUMANITIES THROUGH TEACHING THE HOLOCAUST IN PRISON Anke Pinkert ABSTRACT This essay documents the experience of teaching a course on the Holocaust to incarcerated men. It asks whether teaching about violence inside an institution that responds to and is rooted in violence can produce something transformative for students and teachers; it also asks what it means to initiate this project as a German raised under communism near the Berlin Wall. Situated in critical discussions of the utopian/rehabilitative role of prison education, the essay insists on grounding in reflective and personal experience. It thus contributes to discussion of the ethics of humanist education and pedagogies of hope in prison and beyond. .

I recently came across a photograph that shows Angela Davis surrounded by people during a public visit to East Germany in the year 1972 (Fig. 1). In the lower part of the picture, we see a girl dressed in a uniform of the young pioneers gazing outside the frame, a little uncertain, perhaps, into an

Special Issue: The Beautiful Prison Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 64, 49 66 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-433720140000064004

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Fig. 1. Public Appearance of Angela Davis, Leipzig, East Germany. Photo: Heinz Krabbes. Source: With permission of Leipziger Verlags- und Druckereigesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2011.

unknowable future. This girl is not me, but she could be me; her image resembles any of my childhood pictures at the time when I grew up in communist East Germany. Slightly off center, we see Angela Davis, who was celebrated in East Germany for her struggle in the civil rights movement in the United States. Visiting East Germany after her release from prison, she was greeted by cheering crowds in the street. Rather than the iconic figure of anti-racism in East Germany’s official archive, she appears more personal in this picture, happy at the welcome, but also a bit displaced and vulnerable behind a big bouquet of flowers. On the left of the frame, we see the camera of an official news team. Captured in this private image, the camera reminds us that moments in history often linger as snapshots in our memory. Personal memory and collective history do not coincide. Despite the official rejection of East Germany’s internationalist efforts as mere ideology after 1989, the intimacy in the picture resonates with the fondness I felt for this civil rights leader and her fight for racial and social equality. I wrote her letters, we collected money, I anxiously waited for her release. Fast forward several decades, the Berlin Wall falls in 1989, opening the border to the West. Now, in midlife, I am a tenured Professor at a public university in the United States, teaching and researching the cultural memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War and involved in

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a college prison education program. The childhood memories of Angela Davis have lingered in my unconscious for almost forty years: seemingly forgotten, displaced by the experience of world historical shifts across continents and ideological systems, but still somehow palpable in the fabric of my own life. Forgotten, that is, until recently, when, after forty years, Davis reemerged in my intellectual orbit as a voice within discussions on mass incarceration in the United States. I am not invoking Davis here for her advocacy of prison abolition. I am recalling the imaginary place of this activist in my childhood, long archived away, because it reverberates feelings of affection across large divides. In fact, in the picture, the gaze of the young pioneer and the civil rights leader do not meet. Both share a space, but clearly inhabit very different worlds. In that sense, the picture invites us to ponder, how a kind of “empathy across distance,” a genuine concern and care for people whose history and suffering is not one’s own, can emerge on an individual and collective level? This question has guided my inquiry into the potentially transformative effects of higher education in prison, both for the instructor and for the students.1 Scholars of life-writing remind us that self-expression can be a generous and powerful ethical practice through which we can engage one another in a process of deepening our sense of direction and purpose in life (Eakin, 2004, p. 4). Sharing an abbreviated narrative of teaching a course on the Holocaust in an Illinois State Prison, I ultimately make a case for an integrative humanities education that nurtures mind, heart, and spirit (Palmer & Zajonc, with Scribner, 2010), and for love and self-reflection as democratizing educational practices. My hope is to generate a conversation about the Humanities as a publically engaged field of both intellectual inquiry and lived experience. It is through higher education in prison that we can re-envision the kind of publicly engaged humanities education that critics have called for recently in response to a profit-making model of the university; and, vice versa, through invigorating a publically engaged and integrative practice of the humanities, we can shed light on the social and ethical dimensions of mass incarceration in the United States. Every one of us has different personal and/or political reasons why we get engaged with our areas of research, teaching, and community service. What we bring to these projects and what we learn from this work about ourselves and about the society we live in is shaped, in part, by these motivations. In 2010, I joined the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois, consisting of faculty members, graduate students, and community members, actively engaged in providing college courses and programming for students at a nearby high medium-security men’s prison. Most men in

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the program serve sentences for violent crimes (often gang-related) and many come from the inner city of Chicago. Approaching the prison for the first time, I noticed I was somewhat nervous about the unknown experience to come, but I also felt an unsettling sense of familiarity. Here, we were surrounded by corn fields bathed in muted shades of pink, reminded of life’s intrinsic beauty, and right in front of us stood watchtowers, walls, and fences topped with barbed wire, enclosing an area where people live cut off from society. As if to make visible the irony (or progress) of history, I found myself looking at the same kinds of watchtowers and armed guards that I had passed every day on my way to school when I was growing up beside the Berlin Wall. It was in the moment that I approached a visibly confined space from the outside, rather than being conscious of guarded borders from within, that I realized on a deeper level why I was here, what I could bring to and learn from this project. The fall of the Berlin Wall presented a profound change in my life, providing a deep understanding of the precarious nature of history, how things can seemingly change from one moment to the next, depending on what social conditions we find ourselves in and what individual choices we make. Seeing the Wall crumble in front of my eyes, I knew I had supported a political system that had historically, and ultimately, despite its utopian potential, also morally, failed. East Germany was built on the narrative that the communist resistance against the Third Reich, against fascism, created the foundation for an antifascist state, in which discrimination based on class, race, and gender would no longer occur. Political activists trained in the Soviet Union, together with leftist writers and intellectuals returning from exile, worked to fulfill this utopian dream, creating an antifascist, and later socialist society and culture. Due to the relative economic and social equality in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the rates of homelessness, unemployment, crime, and subsequently incarceration were very low. Despite the euphoric images of people cheering at the opening of the Berlin Wall imprinted in collective memory, many East Germans who have now experienced the challenges of living in a competitive market economy feel nostalgic for a time when the basic needs of everyone were met. On the other hand, the universalist notion of people’s equality within the reigning Marxist ideology (perhaps, if for different reasons, similar to the colorblindness in the United States) created the illusion that it was no longer necessary to deal with the Holocaust and with racist and anti-Semitic feelings that continued to exist after 1945. Instead, alliances were created in the public discourse with the anti-racist, anti-imperialist movements in other parts of the world. Moreover, and more importantly, the realization of a socialist vision

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came at the price of confining an entire population within the boundaries of an antifascist state, restricting their access to other countries in the Western world. Libratory, socialist utopian, and antifascist desires turned into a mechanism and discourse of power that needed to rely on a surveillance system to manage and monitor, absorb and accommodate resisting impulses. Approaching the prison, I wondered, albeit not for the first time: How would I come to terms with the fact that, if required years earlier, finding myself in very different constellations, I might have harmed, betrayed, perhaps even destroyed others in the name of an antifascist ideology? In other words, when I started my work with a college prison program, I did not come to “help” or “save” the incarcerated students: given the deprived (if not inhumane) conditions they live in, they have to do that for themselves, each and every one of them, and on a daily basis, in order to be the dignified and engaged students they are. Rather, I came to give (my knowledge, my time, and my compassion) and I came to receive (their passion for learning, their thoughtfulness, and a space for self-growth). This kind of reciprocal engagement (or cocreation) is the starting point for a successful, critical pedagogy of empathy, a pedagogy through which we cultivate in ourselves and in the student the capacity to imaginatively participate in the life of another (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 17). Teaching an upperlevel undergraduate course on Holocaust representations, I have had the opportunity to participate in some of the most intellectually stimulating discussions I have ever had in a college classroom. As college teachers, we often say that we learn from our students, but the students in EJP raised questions that really gave me pause and opened my mind to whole new perspectives. They kept me on my toes, bringing their own note cards with comments and questions and navigating skillfully between passages (often they had read the books two or three times, before passing them on to other inmates). It filled me with a deep sense of purpose and gratitude to interact with men who are engaged in a process of intellectual inquiry, social analysis, and self-transformation. Sometimes, there was an electric stillness in the classroom that only comes from an engagement with questions that deeply matter to the ways in which we see ourselves and the world. Despite the fact that I can never presume fully to understand my students’ backgrounds and relationships with each other, I felt nourished by their sense of camaraderie and mutual support. This kind of reciprocal engagement between the students and myself created the trust and space for a deeper exploration of “imaginative empathy” through the Humanities, and more specifically, Holocaust education.

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I teach the course on the Holocaust that I offer at a Central Illinois prison in a similar incarnation on the traditional campus. One of the goals of the course is to explore the question of “What made it possible for people to disregard their own capacity for human connection, and marginalize, exclude, and finally annihilate their fellow-citizens?” Focusing on diaries, memoirs, documentaries, and historiographies we examine the political, ideological, and psychological conditions that brought about the genocide of the Jews and other victims of the Holocaust. As Christopher Browning suggests in Ordinary Men, “the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time” (1992, p. xvii). This book profoundly challenged those accounts that had privileged a de-personalized view of the Holocaust as the functioning of a cold, anonymous, bureaucratic killing apparatus. In contrast, based on careful archival research, Browning shows that men, such as the members of the Police Battalion 101 stationed in the East, faced individual choices. Contrary to common belief, the men in the Reserve Police Battalion were presented with the option of not participating in the shooting (and not being punished), if they did not feel up to the task. Rather than the power of authority (or anti-Semitism for that matter) it was the effects of peer pressure the perceived pressure to conform to established notions of strength and masculinity that turned ordinary policemen into killers of Jews rounded up in Poland. While challenging simple symmetries between different historical constellations and subject positions, we read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, set during the Vietnam War, alongside Browning’s account of the mass shootings in Poland during World War II. Offering a deeply moving presentation on O’Brien’s book, one of the students in the prison program, who himself had served as a soldier in the Vietnam war, created connections between his own actions in Vietnam and the decisions German men faced in 1942. Emphasizing the shared value of masculine toughness in Western culture, O’Brien reflects on an anatomy of war that does not allow vulnerabilities, such as grief, terror, love, or shame. He explains that the men in Vietnam “carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died, because they were embarrassed not to” (2009, p. 20). This notion of the effects of peer pressure as catalyst for violence (in relation to systemic structures of oppression) appeared to resonate particularly with students from inner-city neighborhoods. Presenting on a study that compared inner-city street life with war combat (Green, 1996), one of the students in the class posed the question: Why are the men in inner-city neighborhoods so numb, so nonchalant about life, why are they

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ultimately destroying themselves and each other? Examining the transformation of ordinary men into perpetrators, discussing the banality of evil, the reliability of witness testimony, or issues of revenge and forgiveness with students who themselves have grappled with experiences of harming, and, in some cases, causing the death others, opened up an exploration of the precarious human condition with tremendous reality and depth (even without entering the students’ personal stories). I am aware that positioning the students, and myself for that matter, as persons with a kind of consciousness and true self-knowledge to be discovered through teaching and learning runs counter to the established postmodern suspicion of authenticity and to Foucault’s critique of the carceral state (1995); and I will return to this impasse. At the risk of sounding too optimistic, I propose that, although pedagogically more compact, the complex constellation of various shifting subject positions in the prison college classroom exposes what needs to be at the heart of Holocaust and, ultimately, a renewed Humanities education: the conscious effort to cultivate in our traditional classrooms a deeper awareness of shared human vulnerabilities. For me as Holocaust educator, it means creating learning communities in which we probe human complexity: As the students pointed out, if we fully recognize that we are all capable of harming others (Primo Levi reminds us that despite all logic “compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment,” 2000, p. 265), and if we also acknowledge that we always have a choice (Browning’s book on “ordinary men turned perpetrators” is about most men but not all men), then the material compels us over and again to ask “What would you do?” And indeed “What would you do?” In that sense, the students in EJP taught me to envision a Holocaust education that overcomes the modernist ban on representation and identification. The bifurcation between realism and modernism in Holocaust studies reaches all the way back to the early twentieth century, when the artists of various avant-garde movements hoped to access the sublime through elisions and abstractions rather than through figuration and mimetic depictions of reality. The Nazis themselves rejected modernist art, clearly showcased at the exhibit of so called “degenerate art” in Munich in 1937, and favored naturalism for sentimental portrayals of pastoral nature and domestic life. Due to the Nazis’ anti-modern sensibilities and the exploitation of emotions in the Third Reich (e.g., Hitler’s dramatic speeches, the obsessively staged mass spectacles, and anti-Semitic melodramas), postwar representations of the Holocaust in Europe have drawn on the austerity of modernist aesthetics to invoke distance and a critical attitude in viewers,

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rather than feeding their imaginations with prefabricated feelings and narratives. The camera in Alain Resnais’s 1955 documentary, Night and Fog, for example, pans the long-abandoned sites at the former camp of Auschwitz in order to address the impasse around issues of remembrance and representational recall of the past. The trend toward critical distance and austerity was buttressed by Adorno’s, often misunderstood indictment that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno was not suggesting a ban on representations of the Holocaust per se; rather he proposed to reflect on the representational and aesthetic strategies at our disposal after this radical rupture in civilization. Can the unimaginable, unspeakable atrocities that occurred in Nazi concentration camps be shown, depicted, transformed into narratives and images or would this lessen the horrific nature of the destruction in the cultural imagination? From the modernist perspective, attempts such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, where visitors are invited to pick a card with a name and to follow this person’s story, run the risk of assuming deceptive symmetries and of drowning us in cheapened sorrow. For a number of reasons, including fear of simplification and sentimental excess, the bifurcation of tears and inquiry, emotional identification, and rational analysis have become commonplace in Holocaust studies and, I would argue, it is indeed foundational in interpretive theory (Myers, 1999, p. 267) and the academic humanities in general. Whether or not they know it, the incarcerated students encouraged me to insist on the possibility of a Holocaust education that is both analytical and personal, both critically engaged and attuned to our feelings. The literary scholar D.G. Myers explains with respect to survivor testimonies, the text is a call of distress and it cannot be treated as a mere surface to be penetrated or dispensed with in the analytical search for meanings. Interpretation, Myers insists, can only be subsequent to a more immediate response to human need (1999, p. 268). To pull back from this demand is to repeat the erasure of the person who suffers. Teaching the Holocaust to incarcerated men (who, in many ways, are invisible from society) helped me to understand the need to cultivate in ourselves and in our students the ability to receive and feel a text before it is interpreted. In the classroom, this “responsibility to experience” (Myers, 1999, p. 269) can be achieved by creating space for what the psychologist Mark Epstein calls “bare attention” (2004, p. 113), a suspension of the critical faculty in favor of a process in which we simply listen in a state of impartiality. This kind of nonreactive attentiveness toward everything there is to observe is at once completely natural and enormously difficult.

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And, despite common belief to the contrary, it is indeed the starting point for a critical pedagogy of empathy that develops our ability to participate imaginatively in the life of another, including the lives of those who occupy subject positions that appear foreign or diametrically opposed to our own.2 Entering the torment of another (be it a victim, bystander, witness, or a perpetrator) and remaining within compassionate proximity to that experience, or, as one of the students put it, bringing stillness and an attitude of nonjudgmental awareness to the text, is a life affirming, ethical practice that resonates far beyond post-Holocaust education. However, achieving this state of empathic proximity is in no way an easy task. One of the students commented on what he described aptly as compassion fatigue. And indeed, even more than on the traditional campus, given the inhospitable, carceral setting of this class, I was concerned about demanding too much and exhausting the students mentally and emotionally with images of suffering and violence. They reported crying, exercising, or writing in order to find release from lingering feelings and thoughts on class discussions; at other times, they appeared to be incapacitated by diffuse feelings of anger and numbness (and acknowledged that themselves). As Adorno reminds us, here an appeal to bonds with a commanding “you must” will not help in any serious way (1998, p. 194). I will not forget how I arrived as a proud, newly-minted prison educator to my first class: full of excitement and ready to get started with a radio play about the double victimization of Jewish survivors before and after 1945. It soon felt as if I were drowning in quick sand. One of the students, with the passionate support of others, kept pressing me: but Ms. Pinkert, we had our own Holocaust, referring to the Atlantic slave trade; others in the ethnically diverse group began to squabble over whose history involved more suffering; and, to my shock, although I understood later why, by the end of the class several of the students were convinced that the witness testimonies (which within the play served to call attention to the horrific acts of Nazi perpetrators) were unreliable, if not false. In short, the bonds and identifications did not emerge in the ways I had anticipated, in part because the students projected their own experience of an unjust legal system onto the seemingly inconclusive, fragmentary/traumatic recollection of the Jewish survivors who served as witnesses; in part because I was presumptuous and naı¨ ve. In that moment, some students lacked the sense of security that is needed to generate compassionate proximity3; they argued quite adamantly that the witnesses “were out to get” the accused (within the play, the Nazis). Others recovered our discussion by developing a more sophisticated distinction between moral and legal responsibility.

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Adorno wrote in the 1960s, and I think it is still valid today, society in its present form is based not on appeal and attraction, but rather on the pursuit of one’s own interest against the interests of everyone else (1998, p. 201).4 He states, “every person today, without exception, feels too little loved, because every person cannot love enough.” According to him, “the inability to identify with others was […] the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people” (1998, p. 201). But rather than appealing to love and the positive qualities of others, Adorno demands a pedagogy of self-reflection that exposes our tendency toward coldness and indifference, toward conformity motivated by fear of appearing different and weak in the eyes of others. Many of our conversations revolved around these themes. By the time we read Night, Eli Wiesel’s autobiographical account of his survival in Auschwitz (2006), even the students who had initially viewed the victims as incompetent and unequal social actors were moved by this story. And similarly, despite the fact that I embarked on this teaching project with a basic sense of compassion, I also went through a complex process of self-reflection, doubt, adjustment, and reconfirmation once I decided to confront myself with the crimes committed by the men in the class. A complex sense of care is demanded by Wiesel’s Night. At the end of Wiesel’s book the mirror image of the survivor as corpse gazes back at us. Wiesel, the survivor, states: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (2006, p. 115). And this image does not leave the reader; it haunts, it disturbs, it demands our empathy, however difficult. Emmanuel Levinas reminds us that the human face is the site of human responsibility (1996, pp. 9 10). Some psychologists argue we are wired to visually respond to a human face because we seek mutual relations and sharing (Tolmacz, 2010, p. 102). Yet this is complicated in Wiesel’s text: the face that stares back at us is the face of a corpse representing not only the “death” of the survivor in the camp, but also his feeling of being complicit with death, if not murder. Wiesel explains in his book that in the concentration camp, “it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father” (2006, p. 110). The men in my class were moved by the scene in which the young Eliezer succumbs to exhaustion, no longer able to save his father. “His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered. I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears” (2006, p. 112). The face of the corpse staring back at us in the final sentence of Wiesel’s book is, according to D.G. Myers, “the image of

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a being whose being has been annihilated” (1999, p. 285). To respond ethically means to reattach the face to being, and to enter into a relationship with that being through love.5 And again, with Adorno, this kind of process needs to occur through self-reflection. As one of the students pointed out, at the base of this process lies the deep recognition that the struggle between good and evil takes place inside each and every one of us. It is what makes us human. If we recognize that which appears alien within us, we will be more likely to accept it in others. According to Martin Buber’s ethics of intimacy (1971), rather than treating the other as object, we will be more inclined to treat the other as subject, to see each other as equals with mutual needs and goals. This kind of relationship, where one relates to the other as another subject, whose meaning is not dependent on being an object that hinders or advances one’s goals, is a prerequisite for developing concern and care (Tolmacz, 2010, p. 101). At the risk of freezing a rather tenuous and contingent process within simplistic symmetries and seemingly stable modes of identity, I perceived a shift of perspective over the course of the class. This shift enabled an empathetic relation toward the Nazi perpetrators, and it allowed the students to deepen their compassion for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Psychologists have described this kind of identity change as part of a process of reconciliation and forgiveness (Shnabel & Nadler, 2010). Again, I am aware of the incongruous mapping and overlay of the complicated and slippery subject positions I am invoking here. For one, I am not a victim and the students are not German perpetrators; for another, we are not involved in a specific or a historical crime, although the setting of course invokes a complicated network of power, criminal regulation, and control. In any event, what I am trying to describe points to one of the underlying dynamics of the class. This process consists of the removal of the negation of the other as an element in one’s own identity. Crucial to this transformation is that perpetrators need to view victims as autonomous, capable, and equal, and admit that they have been injured unjustly. Victims need to understand that perpetrators are often people who found themselves in circumstances in which most others, including the victims, might have behaved similarly (Shnabel & Nadler, 2010, p. 424). To be clear, I am not claiming that the Holocaust course initiated in any way the students’ own process of reconciliation: I have no idea where they are on their paths and I would assume that many of them have worked through this before they arrive in this college prison program. But overall, an identificatory shift with respect to the constellations involving the Holocaust was palpable. And, of course, this development was never linear and stable. One of

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the students who seemed very engaged and interested throughout the semester, announced during the last class that after studying all this material, he came to the conclusion that the Holocaust could not have happened, the numbers and facts just do not quite add up. In contrast, another, more passive student gave a passionate speech to prospective students at the end of the semester about the profound impact studying this material had on him. Stating that he had learnt to understand what it means to put oneself in someone else’s position, he beautifully articulated the very nature of an empathetic imagination. For myself, I noticed a slight shift in the various perpetrator positions I had adopted over time. Due to issues of collective guilt and the transmission of this notion in public discourse, Germans born in the 1960s have appropriated a negative attitude toward their national identity. Germans of my generation still tend to feel responsible for the crimes committed during the Third Reich, precisely because our grandparents chose not to or were unable to deal with the past. Ruth Klueger, a survivor of Auschwitz, has criticized this position, arguing that this attitude reflects a false claim to guilt, a kind of sentimental self-castigation that is the flipside of moral self-congratulation (2002, p. 311). But it seems my generation cannot help identify through rejection. Toward the end of the semester, when we discussed issues of postmemory, the students asked if I was proud to be German. I evaded an answer. They insisted and pressed me again. In the previous session, we had just finished Peter Weiss’s documentary play Investigation (1996) on the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in 1965, which chronicles the brutalities carried out by the Nazis in the camps. I referred back to the text to explain myself. Similarly to Klueger, this personal adaptation of collective guilt did not make much sense to my students. And then, suddenly, when I kept insisting, “I cannot say ‘I am proud to be German’,” I felt an awkward stirring in my heart (despite or maybe because of the rhetorical negation). Held by the students’ neutrality and love, I experienced a tiny opening toward possible change. This shift reverberated way back into the past, resetting, in a way, the constellations between my own life and that of three family generations that are inextricably linked with Germany’s war and postwar history. What emerged was a glimpse into the complexities of biography and history: the possible personal recognition of both collective responsibility for the Nazi crimes and the remarkable, if often belated, efforts of Germans to deal with their past; and an awareness of both, my participation in the potential exclusion of others in the name of an antifascist, socialist ideology, and the capacity to tap into a universalist, utopian vision of equality, best embodied in

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the GDR’s support of an anti-racist struggle, invoked at the outset of this essay. While my heart is filled with love for each and every one of my students, I cannot prescribe that love and demand it from others. As prison educators and activists, we need to continuously reexamine and revise our own humanistic preconceptions and the impasses that we bring to this work, our ways of being as teachers, as people, as neighbors in a context of incarceration that is largely unfamiliar and hidden from public view. In the tradition of Foucault’s critique of the carceral state (1995), some critics have argued that educational programs in prison aid larger structural adjustments aligned with neo-liberalism. Even if the interaction in the classroom confirms the pedagogical and social significance of offering higher education in prison and even if the potentially transformative effects of educational projects for the volunteers, administrators, and students involved seem quite palpable, we do need to be mindful of our own roles within the existing systems of regulation and control. And, of course, even if we do believe there are spaces for change and resistance within carceral structures and networks of power, then we still have to reflect on and deal with complex issues related to our privileged positioning: the power, gender, class, and racial dynamics involved in prison education programs, the “ethnographic dilemma” of recording and describing the prison teaching experience from a single point of view, or the self-rewarding attempt to touch truth, depth, or meaning through incarcerated people, to name just a few. Despite these complex constellations, my hope is that creating public discourse about this work in prison education can help expose some of the indifference and coldness in our society towards those who are “locked out.” Michelle Alexander has most recently described mass incarceration in the United States as the New Jim Crow, demanding a new social movement. Alexander points out that policy reform will continue to fail if we do not make visible the “deeply flawed public consensus, one that is indifferent, at best, to the experience of poor people of color” (2010, p. 221). Alexander reminds us of King’s insistence that indifference to social groups is actually more important than racial hostility for the maintenance of a racialized system of control (2010, p. 228), an observation that also echoes Adorno. Demanding a commitment to color consciousness (a deep understanding of the racial implications of a caste system created through mass incarceration), Alexander places faith in “our capacity as humans to show care and concern for others, even as we are fully cognizant of race and possible racial differences” (2010, p. 230). The students in the Holocaust class discussed with great passion how to instill pride in their children for their respective

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cultures, without ignoring the need for developing an appreciation of other traditions. The New Jim Crow ends with King’s dream of a society capable of seeing each of us, fully, and as we are, with love (Alexander, 2010, p. 231). This is a goal and purpose worth fighting for (and antithetical to the principle of greed in our current society and economic system). If I search the recesses of my memory, this was the dream that Angela Davis transported into my childhood in East Berlin and that resonated in my heart, alongside, or despite, the efforts of the GDR state to transform her more abstractly into an ideological icon of anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggle. How can we create this shift from denial to neighborly concern and care (including compassion for those not considered “good” or “respectable”)? How can we create and practice this kind of “empathy across distance”? Among other avenues, it can be achieved through ethically responsible, transformative humanities education on the inside of prisons and on the outside. Ultimately, efforts to change the conditions of education behind bars and those on the traditional campus are inseparably interrelated.

CONCLUSION Let me conclude with some brief thoughts on how I see higher education in prison as a springboard and gauge for a vision of the Humanities as an integrative, and publically engaged field and practice. The humanities are currently in crisis.6 Responding to an unstable global market and drastic changes in funding, universities have anxiously focused on educational goals that foster economic growth rather than well-rounded learning. Critics have reacted differently to this crisis: Stanley Fish (2008), for example, has recently argued that the Humanities simply do not have to justify themselves, given the intrinsic value of knowledge and analytical thinking provided by good academic institutions. He also insists that universities should not be involved in moral or political education. In contrast, Martha Nussbaum and others have suggested that it is precisely the ability of the Humanities to teach students to think critically, to become knowledgeable of the world, and to engage empathically that will produce the kind of civic (moral) competency that democracy needs (2010). A third position, presented by David Theo Goldberg, in a lecture on the “After Life of the Humanities,” develops a post-humanistic vision of the field. According to Goldberg (2011), our capacity to critically engage broad public multimedia literacies and networks of ideas will reshape a counter public that

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remakes, remixes, and recomposes traditional ideas of reasoning and social advocacy. Regardless of which perspective we take, the current crisis of the university presents a great opportunity to be deeply reflective about the vision and purpose of good Humanities education and our individual roles as teachers and scholars within it. In other words, we have to demand from ourselves the kind of critical and thoughtful work we expect from our students. Rather than focusing on the corporatization of the university (which indeed needs to be examined and addressed), we have to take responsibility for our own conformity to institutional standards and intellectual hierarchies that tend to foster passivity and isolation. Moreover, we need to find the passion to engage with each other about the renewed humanities education we envision for the twenty-first century. Nussbaum’s notion of a reinvigorated liberal arts education that develops knowledgeable, sensitive, and alert citizens of the world is indeed more crucial than ever to this project (1997, p. 8). But there is plenty of room to grow. Aside from the occasional setback, we do know how to engage students in analysis and critical dialogue and, and, yes, in many cases, we do teach about histories and places in other parts of the world. What appears less obvious, however, is how we can successfully provide the type of emotional and empathic education that enables our students on the traditional campus to take responsibility (through action for the whole).7 The way I see it, and I hope this resonates with the incarcerated men in my class, their sense of dignity comes from a sense of responsibility, including the recognition that they have committed crimes, that they have harmed and hurt others and that being accountable for their actions is part of a profound process of personal and social transformation. When I tell people that I teach a class on the Holocaust to incarcerated students, they usually have strong reactions. They tend to ask right away whether or not the students create comparisons between their own setting and the camps? The students reminded me adamantly that they do not want to be seen as victims, and they would find any such comparison preposterous given the horrific treatment of the Jews and others in the Holocaust. Even as they are aware that mass incarceration in the United States functions as an institutionalized form of social and racial oppression, they insist that individually most of them are incarcerated for reasons, and that they want to learn, to be intellectually challenged, and to be held to the highest academic standards. Effective humanities education that emphasizes critical thinking, world knowledge, and empathic imagination can create a space for this process. But inversely, in a time that values economic growth and virtual

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networking, the spirit and practice of higher learning in prison can also help us refocus our priorities and develop a vision of a truly transformative humanities education on the traditional campus. The students in prison programs are often those who have reflected deeply on their own lives and their aspirational role in society. From them we can learn a great deal about self-growth, personal and social accountability, and a true desire for learning. We give them the gift of our time and care: they offer us the gift of reconnecting to our responsibility in the humanities to explore what makes us human and to do this from a place of critical inquiry, purpose, and felt experience. In my view, neither political advocacy (Fish’s object of critique) nor sole reliance on abstract analysis will produce more thoughtful students, but only an approach to learning that engages students in exploring the relationship between their study of the “objective” world and the meaning, limits, and aspirations of their own lives (Palmer & Zajonc, with Scribner, 2010). If we engage in this type of integrative humanities practice in our classrooms on the inside and on the outside, my hope is that we can make walls more porous, build new pathways, and reestablish bonds. This will allow us to connect more deeply to ourselves, our students, and to the real and complex world in which we live, and so allow us to actively nurture the social change we often teach about and study. Perhaps, after all, Vaclav Havel got it right when he reminded us in the early 1990s: “Goodwill longs to be recognized and cultivated. For it to develop and have an impact it must hear that the world does not ridicule it” (1992, p. 9).

NOTES 1. For students’ perspectives see Brawn, Cabrales, and Donatelli, 2012. 2. This is similar to a mode of empathy that Kaja Silverman has termed “heteropathic identification,” an emotional response that “comes with respect for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one’s own” (in LaCapra, 2001, p. 40). 3. Some psychologists stress a sense of security as prerequisite for compassion and care (Tolmacz, 2010, p. 105). 4. The quote continues, “This has settled into the character of people to their innermost center” (1998, p. 201), leaving room for the evolutionary basis of prosociality, deformed by the present state of society. 5. Victor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, explains that in logotherapy the patient is reoriented toward the meaning of his life. Love is an important component of finding meaning (2006, pp. 98, 111).

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6. The crisis of the humanities is part of a larger crisis of higher education. See for example, Arum and Roksa (2011). 7. I am inspired by Vaclav Havel’s notion of “higher responsibility” (1992, p. 6).

REFERENCES Adorno, T. (1998). Education after Auschwitz. In Critical models: Intervention and catchwords. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press. Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited learning on college campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Brawn, M., Cabrales, J., & Donatelli, G. (2012). The transformative power of holocaust education in prison: A teacher–student account. Radical Teacher, 95(Winter), 60–65. Browning, C. (1992). Ordinary men: Reserve police battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Buber, M. (1971). I and thou. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Eakin, J. (Ed.). (2004). Ethics of life writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Epstein, M. (2004). Thoughts without a thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist perspective. New York, NY: Basic Books. Fish, S. (2008). Save the world on your own time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Frankl, V. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Goldberg, D. T. (2011). After life of the humanities. Lecture, University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, IL. Green, C. (1996). Genocide, victimization, and America’s inner cities. In C. Strozier & M. Flynn (Eds.), Genocide, war, and human survival. Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. Havel, V. (1992). Summer meditations. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Klueger, R. (2002). Forgiving and remembering. PMLA, 117(2), 311 313. LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levi, P. (2000). The gray zone. In O. Bartov (Ed.), The holocaust: Origins, implementation, aftermath. London: Routledge. Levinas, E. (1996). Is ontology fundamental? In Basic philosophical writings. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Myers, D. G. (1999). Responsible for every single pain: Holocaust literature and the ethics of interpretation. Comparative Literature, 51(4), 266 288. Nussbaum, M. (1997). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. O’Brien, T. (2009). The things they carried. Boston, MA: Mariner Books. Palmer, P., & Zajonc, A. with Scribner, M. (Eds.). (2010). The heart of higher education: A call to renewal. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Resnais, A. (Dir.). (1955). Night and fog. Argos & Janus Films. Shnabel, N., & Nadler, A. (2010). A needs-based model of reconciliation: Perpetrators need acceptance and victims need empowerment to reconcile. In M. Mikulincer & P. Shaver (Eds.), Prosocial motives, emotions, and behavior: The better angels of our nature. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Tolmacz, R. (2010). Forms of concern: A psychoanalytic perspective. In M. Mikulincer & P. Shaver (Eds.), Prosocial motives, emotions, and behavior: The better angels of our nature. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Weiss, P. (1996). The investigation: Oratorio in 11 cantos. London: Marion Boyars. Wiesel, E. (2006). Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

OF PRISONS, GARDENS, AND THE WAY OUT Michelle Brown ABSTRACT Metaphorically, the garden invokes a repertoire of skills, arts, and virtues that run counter to the act of confinement but are embedded in its disciplinary practice: spaces in punitive environments where care, growth, health, and cultivation are emphasized. Gardens and the force of law and labor are foregrounded in Judeo-Christian myths, in slavery, and in prison farms as spaces of expulsion and brutality. Yet as abandoned, fortress-style prisons dilapidate, and vines and weeds break through concrete, we can begin to ask, What might it mean to imagine the prison through the lens of the garden?

Nature always returns and eventually obscures evidence of human action. It may happen within one season or it may take generations, but eventually culture becomes compost. Kenneth Helphand, Defiant Gardens

No person or thing has been more successful at abolishing the prison than the weed and weather.

Special Issue: The Beautiful Prison Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 64, 67 85 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-433720140000064005

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When John de Haviland imagined the nation’s first penitentiary, he envisioned a prison premised upon solitary confinement, an achievement that would require intensive attention to the cell itself as a site for long-term life and its needs eating, sleeping, work, repentance. Fundamental to this design was the idea of a yard: A small space for physical exercise and the raising of a garden. The site for this penitentiary was itself a fruit orchard, giving Eastern State Penitentiary its common name, Cherry Hill. Outside of this, in white-washed cells with Spartan furnishings, prisoners were left with one opening into nature: a skylight above them, filtering fresh air and light. The “eye of God,” as it was known, was modeled as a watchful site for the divine sovereign, whose gaze might maintain each individual in perfect and perpetual communion with his maker, reflecting the idea of spiritual reformation at the heart of the early Pennsylvania system (Johnston, 1994). What if we reimagined this architectural deed as something more secular, resistant, and practical a moment reconfigured in its relation to the geography of solitude and the geology outside? In this pursuit, I take up a project of the imagination in this essay, asking how we might imagine ourselves out of the penitentiary by way of both inadvertent and intentional gardens. One way in which to think through that possibility is to ask what do we find, at the far end of Eastern State’s history, when the bodies of men have been removed and the fortress stands alone and empty. At first glance, there is only a ruin, deteriorating interiors of peeling paint and collapsing roofs. But the forces of dilapidation have powerful sources. What materializes in the play of light and darkness is the embryonic evidence of an anarchic nursery, capable through the slow time of history of bringing the prison to the ground (Fig. 1). Eastern State Penitentiary continues to loom large in the landscape of now downtown Philadelphia, its massive walls lining several city blocks. Abandoned in 1971 after one hundred and fifty years of operation, the penitentiary was left uninhabited not unlike other fortress prisons across the United States: Alcatraz, the Ohio State Reformatory, the West Virginia Penitentiary, the Idaho State Penitentiary, the Yuma Territorial Prison, and more. Retired, too expensive to demolish, reinvent, or retrofit, many of these prisons have deteriorated in rapid fashion. Many have been left unattended and, absent of human life, have become odd experiments in the American landscape of failed institutions. Others have been taken on by preservationists, developers, and urban planners, who have begun efforts to transform the grounds into commercial property, museums, tourist sites, and, alongside of each of these functions, lush gardens. In relation to these

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Fig. 1. The Eye of God, Three Decades after the Closing of the Eastern State Penitentiary. Source: Photo Used with Permission of Eastern State Penitentiary.

contemporary social realities of the aging penitentiary, I take up a project of the imagination in this essay, asking how we might imagine ourselves out of the penitentiary by way of a continuum of inadvertent and intentional prison gardens, from the anarchic (rampant) to the cultivated (therapeutic), juxtaposed against the private, community and transient, defiant gardens of late modernity. Here, the space of death and the will to live run up against one another in a tentative, hard-earned hopefulness, out of which emerges both a sociology and an ethics, obligations and responsibilities for the past and future in the present.

ANARCHY Let us begin with the prison and garden grown rampant. The prison in this imagining is the old fortress prison abandoned now for the modular

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designs that accumulate across the American rural and urban landscape of mass incarceration. This garden, densely tangled, impossible to extricate from the structure of the prison itself, is the inadvertent partner of the abandoned penitentiary. Vines, herbs, weeds, and prickly grasses strangle and break cold concrete. Extraordinary flowers grow up in small, hidden spaces with no one to name them. The roots and branches of trees move slowly through the earth and wind amid the drizzle of rain and dew, the silence of snow, and the nests and burrows of birds and ground animals. Things grow with no help from humans and in places where nothing seemingly should grow. This is the garden of garbage dumps, vacant lots, industrial wastelands, urban deserts, highways, and prisons. Strange botany. Ruderal vegetation. Overlooked, ubiquitous, proliferating across the disturbed, unacknowledged, abandoned spaces of late modernity, their roots and tendrils reaching out through discourses of exile, carcerality, life, death, and grief. In this quiet march into solitude and silence a sad promise of dissolution is periodically called forth. Literary artists have witnessed this dissolving of human works. In her epic, Beloved, Toni Morrison writes of the haunting of the post-reconstruction United States by the belligerent, unacknowledged child ghost of the Middle Passage and slavery, eventually exorcised into silence. The final passages of the book speak to the wearing of time as the final arbiter of the subaltern past, the witness of those whose voices are lost in the carceral continuum: “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather” (1987, p. 338). Flashes of this persistent dissolution materialize across prisoner accounts of incarceration alongside of a will to live invoked through small windows of atmosphere, vegetation, and animal life. Allusions to the sky, the olive tree, the leaf, the mouse, the bird as focal points for existence, conduits to the outside and a freed imaginary are common tropes in prison literature (El Saadawi, 1994; Mandela, 2000; Soyinka, 1988). The sister institutions to the prison schools, factories, hospitals share similar stories. Research finds that hospital patients with the view of a tree from their window recover more rapidly than patients without a view, that workers with some exposure to light and nature are happier and more productive (Haller & Kramer, 2006; Martinez, 2010; Simpson & Strauss, 1998). The makeshift gardens of the homeless, who with painstaking effort and deliberate care, create lifeless gardens in the blank spaces of slums, relying upon found objects stones, stuffed animals, plastic and

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cardboard refuse, piles of leaves, dead or plastic flowers speak of this complex relationship between human and plant that is rarely articulated in any other discourse than that of romanticization (Morton & Balmori, 1995). The anarchic garden is a phenomenon, practice, and commitment that materializes only in spaces bereft of broader social attention and human investment. These materializations echo what it is to be deprived of green, of plants, of trees, to suffer some sort of profound demoralization and melancholy sites where new and strange gardens rise up, defiant assertions of human and botanic will (Beatley, 2011; Wilson, 2006). In these gardens, “we can see biophilia a yearning for contact with nonhuman life assuming uncanny representational forms” (Harrison, 2008, location 517). Here, for plants and people to exist and grow is its own kind of “speech act” public and nonverbal, declaring the “need to make ourselves at home on an earth that does not necessarily make room for us,” a will shared by humans and plants (ibid, location 569). In the story of the prison, the nature I imagine is one of many, one in this articulation that has always been there, inscrutable, stoic, silent witness to the man-made suffering, pain, and violence of the carceral and its related corporeal and cadaverous spaces. Because it is the nature of natures to press on grow, reproduce, and survive even in the most static and deadliest of human spaces, it carries the promise of a continuation of life, a passing of violence and unbearability as well as a sometimes space of growth, solidarity, even sociality. This garden can recognize the lost life and sweeping past of a prison regime that depends upon silences, absences, and disappearances across space and time, the tropes and logics of mortification, immobilization, paralysis, disintegration, and death that extend forward from the birth of the penitentiary (Rodriguez, 2006; Smith, 2009). In the anarchic garden of the fortress prison, interior space is transformed in a manner that opens and nudges us outward and outside. Borders and enclosures grow confused with no clear demarcations between in and out the perimeter is lost as a ghostly, unintended biophilic space develops where nature takes on the fortress. In these invisible green zones, action is so constant, so energetic as to be unremarked upon by any human comment. Plants, no longer objects, become subjects acting on space, pulling the attention of walls, stones, birds, and steel, retrofitting place … getting the prison to do and become things for them … a ladder to the sky, a passageway for expansion, a site for unbridled sex and reproduction, seasonal conquest, a teeming, silent parliament of things (Latour, 1993, 2004). Here, there is no garden plot; rather, the gardens plot (Saguaro, 2006). Here, there is no machine in the garden; the garden rises up in the machine

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and the agrarian myth is reborn in the dynamo of concrete and steel that was once the sad blueprint for democratic citizenship (Dumm, 1987; Foucault, 1977; Marx, 1964). Perfect resistance. These gardens, scattered across the abandoned sites of public encounter, defy conventions, economies, psychologies, politics, and humans in general. This garden may be a revolutionary. An abolitionary outlaw when hired into the spaces of power and knowledge (Fig. 2). In this fantasy, geologic indifference may be our only answer to the prison an inadvertent environmental justice at the failed site of social justice that will ultimately dismantle and reinvent the prison. In this failure, something profound, barely articulate, materializes as critique: the problem of communicating a condition that is necessarily incomprehensible, without language, yet inchoate and achingly excessive in its distribution beyond the structures of civil society and social movement the sheer absence of human caretakers as the promise of prison demolition. Culture gone to compost. Here, “nature” is alien and its possibility lies in the very absence of an overly domestic relationship between gardener and garden. As Kate Soper writes, Rather than becoming more awe-struck by nature, we need perhaps to become more stricken by the ways in which our dependency upon its resources involves us

Fig. 2.

Biophilia Meets Fortress Prison Eastern State Penitentiary, 2009. Source: Photo Taken by Author.

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irremediably in certain forms of detachment from it. To get “closer” to nature is, in a sense, to experience more anxiety about all those ways in which we cannot finally identify with it nor it with us. But in that very process, of course, we would also be transforming our sense of human identity itself. (1995, p. 278)

Similarly, prison studies scholar Dylan Rodriguez writes of radical freedom for the carceral subject: “There are times and places in which the simple, audacious act of speaking to the condition of this unknowability underlines a profound hope in the lineage of liberationist alchemies” (2006, p. 255). The prison garden marks the boundaries between what can be said and what can only be felt as a wordless hope the space of death and the will to live in the same moment.1 As nature moves toward entropy and dissolution, it carries within it then a regenerative destruction and a destructive regeneration contradictions, countervailing tendencies, and always an ever-increasing, wondrous complexity. I would like to leave us temporarily in the anarchic garden not as fantastic flight from reality but precisely as a site from which reality itself could be better placed in view, reconceived, and reimagined. A place to meditate on the virtues and vices of gardens and prisons, the possibility of a way out. Art historian David Reason writes, there is an extensive web of traditions that seek to capture the essence of humanity in the emblematic garden: gardens are good to think … I hanker for those other gardens: fragile and furtive, lurking below gratings of abandoned coal chutes and sprouting like wart-hairs from the tops of walls. Growth that is rank, untidy, invasive and unplanned is hearteningly independent, cheeky and chirpy in finding its niche. (1987, p. 71)

These are the gardens from which we might launch a new theory of abolition. Abandoned prison gardens are evidence of how meaning develops in unlikely spaces … spaces left over, unused, untended, reclaimed. Mirroring homeless, transient, defiant, and community gardens, prison gardens mark trouble spots sites where ecology is reinvented in the shape of a new and unusual community of plants and persons. The social movements behind these unlikely bio-communities have always been in part ways to reclaim abandoned property, dilapidated housing, sites that capital has long left after place and home burned, collapsed, or fell apart. In the history of an ecological criminology, abandoned space is synonymous with danger, demoralizing the inhabitants left living nearby, opening up spaces of exclusion and victimization, justifying frameworks for crime control and prisons. But in another kind of imaginary, these sites are magnificently open and absent of ownership, thereby offering an opportunity to see what kind of

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lived space develops and how actors, both human and nonhuman, reimagine and act out their own relationships to space, home, selves, and others. In this anarchic zone, we are encouraged by persistent biophilic life to move beyond in- and outgroup discourses, beyond us and them. Journalist Michael Pollan writes “our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject” (2001, p. xxi). That the garden is a lifeline into the timeless depths of natural history, an immersion in the origin of life, a source of primal solace is one very powerful thing. But any discussion of nature and gardens as such, even those in prisons, begs the question of how to invest in an unpredictable future, of how to be a co-author in the unfolding of that geologic narrative across late modernity. The question of cultivation becomes unavoidable.

DOMINATION For such a conversation to occur we must take seriously the dream of cultivation gone bad, the selfish, individualistic, materialistic garden, a small history of conquest. The willingness to engage in a garden to create pleasurable private and community oases goes hand in hand with the foreclosure of spaces available for people who are not included in these efforts, including those who have, across history, created and cultivated that very garden. In contemporary gentrified and suburban space, making tenants or property owners feel a certain kind of community one that reduces “the risk they will suffer any of the uncertainties or stresses that come from joining a real community garden” is paramount (Martinez, 2010, p. 65). The gated garden for tenants only, produced without their labor, suffering, or husbandry requires nothing other than the craving for the place where all desire is gratified, all pain abolished, no responsibility other than consumption and beauty’s invisible labor. This garden of the great American middle class, mapped across most lawns in the United States, are hybrids of personal and paid labor, avenues and neighborhoods marked by the criss-cross of landscaping crews and lawnmowers that eat up yards in minutes. We still do not know the implications of immigration on American gardens, where private labor is largely outsourced by the amateur middleclass gardener to landscape services; where truck and kitchen gardens are largely, according to national surveys, tended by women who are mothers of young children and ornamental gardens the vicinity of men

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(Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2010; Martinez, 2010). Historically, however, one major variant of owning and taming the garden carries the predomination of whiteness and disciplinary market-based meanings … over the experiential, praxis-based meanings associated with the virtuous garden of one’s toil and sweat (Martinez, 2010). The much romanticized art of cultivation inevitably involves marshaling, maintaining, controlling, defining, deciding, imposing one’s own sense of order. The garden then express a dangerous collinearity with the vision of the penitentiary as it is often about ownership, enclosure, and a shifting balance between order and disorder. At its most diabolical, its idealization mirrors the prison cell: a cloistered space in which to turn inward, to meditate upon the transcendent and the source of creation, and to be shut out of the civic domain. In its finest, most well-intentioned invocation, it is bound as we are. Even amid the breadth of possibilities that enclosure might take, from asylum to convent, enclave to sanctuary, these troubled paradises will always depend, to some extent, upon the privacy of the owner, the control of labor and property. Nowhere is this imposition more clear than in the penal legacies of slavery, prison farms, and penal labor the material continuities between chattel plantation slavery, convict leasing systems, and the emergence of the modern American penal system (Oshinsky, 1997). Here, racialized agrarian labor serves less as a constitutive logic for the contemporary prison regime than a separation a removal of racialized bodies from civil society, the free world, family and community into a cadaverous, enclosed world of discipline (Smith, 2009). Post-Civil War carceral spaces like the penal plantations, Angola in Louisiana and Parchman in Mississippi, mark the lines of continuity between slavery and criminal justice and how deeply violence, exclusion, and captivity shape the American garden myth. At Parchman, black convicts worked the cotton fields, owned and managed by the state that profited from their labor. This meant long hours in the field, watched over by mounted trustees, carrying whips and shotguns, perpetually moving. In this nightmarish garden, “with its legal exclusions, its violent drama of mortification, and its poetics of living death, incarceration reproduced the dehumanization of plantation slavery in the enclosed space of the prison” (Smith, 2009, p. 258), ushering in the racial contours of the contemporary carceral regime, the new Jim Crow and new slavery of the South (Alexander, 2010; Muhammad, 2010).2 The contemporary rise of horticultural programs in prisons would seem, at first glance, to counter these legacies, and yet it carries with it these same sorts of dangers. Program directors write of the garden as a site that

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teaches of “the desire to change, cope, and make a productive life by assuming responsibility for one’s self and one’s crimes ….” (Jiler, 2006, p. 148), a treatment modality with specific programmatic, therapeutic, or rehabilitative goals designed to “responsibilize” the individual, a familiar paternalism. James Jiler, who founded the prison horticulture program at Rikers Island, writes: Therapists with the Garden Project at the San Francisco County Jail use plant growth and the cycles of nature to emphasize natural and controlled processes of personal growth. Compost is used as a metaphor for life’s mistakes and misfortunes and suggests that the individual can redirect their path in life from lessons learned. Weeding is equivalent to removing the negative thoughts, patterns of behavior and influences in one’s life, while transplanting and watering symbolize the stage of leaving the jail and maintaining a productive life outside. (Jiler, 2006, p. 36)

As Dylan Rodriguez writes, such therapeutic plans build upon “a presumed civil society audience the asserted “we” whose vaguely posited “imagination of the inmates” requires rehabilitation” and necessarily excludes the millions throughout the United States and global civil society, overwhelmingly poor, black, brown, and indigenous, who experience the trauma and legacies of having close family members or loved ones forcibly dislocated from familiar and familial kinship networks and incarcerated under the auspices of generalized inaccessibility. For this carceral public beyond and perhaps against the program director’s civic “we” the “imagination of the inmate” often entails living memories of a person whose absence is defined through a history of affective bonds and personal connection, intimate if not loving, and not by the image of subhuman, homicidal monstrosity projected by this prison educator’s mind’s eye. (2006, p. 97)

In the “correctional” prison garden, labor at its worst is a dangerous, engaged paternalism and at its best can only be palliative, not a cure or a fix capable of supplanting the dysfunctionality of what it means to imprison. Most therapeutic efforts have elements of both, but the prison garden also always echoes America’s penal past: black bodies in white gardens. That is not to say that efforts to cultivate gardens in living prisons are fundamentally misdirected. As Lorna Rhodes argues, “The only way “rehumanizing” can happen under these conditions, as many staff and some inmates see it, is to locate and display the individual’s availability for compassion, connection, and learning to mark his accessibility to a conversation that proceeds elsewhere, without him” (2004, p. 218). The smallest of efforts then is no small feat. But as Rhodes reminds us, we will never achieve our full humanity in such settings. This garden has a limited future and can only be transitory, problematic, ironic, even as it provides simple sanity and sustenance. Such bare bones pursuits magnify the critical work required to maintain the most minimal structure of address. Locked

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in a timeless, purgatorial space, where the loss of liberty and isolation from the world, the uncertain future, and the monotony of daily life are the most fundamental features of institutional architecture and landscape raises only one question: How to infuse these sedentary spaces with something more something like deliberate action, hope, and future. This is perhaps the kind of reflection that a prison garden, in all of its conflictedness, might allow a space for channeling, cultivating, creating, resisting. However, such efforts will always fall subject to the whims of authority: Will the garden be allowed? Will it persist once authorized? Will there be resources for equipment, seeds, and support? Will the custodians who oversee the labor allow the inmates autonomy and the space to think? The pragmatics of prison gardens warn that these spaces come and go with changes in administration, state budgets, and prison governance. In those small ephemeral locations that prison gardeners and prison gardens carve out, the question of how to lead a purposeful life in institutions whose purposes have failed, of how to find reminders of one’s ability to withstand emotional despair amid the forces of chaos beyond control, may take root in the midst of a makeshift encounter that evidences the human resource to cope in unbearable circumstances (Fig. 3). The prison garden raises at its most basic level the question of a cultivation whose goal is not overtly, obliquely, nor solely the dream of control, domination, or correction an effort not to render persons or plants as dependent upon us but to better explore the nature between the source of the world and ourselves. For journalist Michael Pollan, the garden is inevitably “a place that admits of both nature and human habitation. But it is not, as I had imagined, a harmonious compromise between the two, nor is it stable; from what I can see, it requires continual human intervention or else it will collapse. The question for the gardener and in a way it’s a question for all of us is, What is the proper character of that intervention?” (1991, p. 49). Jamaica Kincaid adds, How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed. What to do? Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary …. My garden has no serious intention, my garden has only a series of doubts upon series of doubts. (1999, p. 15)

We stand in the garden of the prison profoundly conflicted. And therein is perhaps our only hope. The death of sentimental, idyllic space is the occasion of cadaverous triumph. And out of the compost comes culture. As Philip Smith observes (through the metaphors of the garden),

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Fig. 3.

Rikers Island Garden. Source: From http://www.humanflowerproject.com/ index.php/weblog/comments/gardening_in_prison/.

Potential counter-discourses will spring forth weed-like from the fertile, symbol-rich soils of punishment. This is not a field where authority can easily plough under unwanted meanings. Culture will make trouble whether or not we take the time to plant the seeds of deliberately chosen counter-myth. Should we feel ethically compelled, our findings have indicated some effective pathways for such critical activity. We might invoke and mobilize sacred awe to counter the dominance of reason, or show the existence of disorders and degradations and call for a cleanup, or raise doubt and ambivalence where certainty seemed to rein, or flag category violations that abuse the primitive classifications of our civilization. Through all these means a braking influence can be exerted on that runaway train of disciplinary society. (2008, p. 183)

CULTIVATION To exhibit care, whether towards querulous people or dumb life is to manifest a virtue one that stands close to that of respect for life. (Cooper, 2006, p. 95)

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In Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan asks, “What if now, instead of to the wilderness, we were to look to the garden for the making of a new ethic?” (1991, p. 206). Let us rephrase: What if now, instead of to the prison, we were to look to the garden for the making of a new ethic? What might we learn from nature’s anarchy and the human drive to harness and cultivate it? In its most romanticized and troubling forms, the garden relies nonetheless upon a vocabulary of care. The gardener sees her calling not just as chore but as practice, a way of being. This craft may encourage a kind of intimacy, sharing, and mutuality, what philosopher David Cooper calls, a “voluntary dependence, like the relationship to the lover, the ‘best position’ any of us can be in” (2006, p. 96). The relationship between a gardener and their garden is distinct from the purely geologic encounter between hikers and the hills or fields through which they walk it is a more symbiotic sharing of interest and fortune. In this regard, a garden will always carry a certain inevitable instrumentalism as an ongoing act of (re)creation, one whose maintenance, enhancement, and transformation is marked by long-term commitment. Gardeners invoke terms like communion and cultivation and they see gardens not as episodes but narratives that take place over the length of daily life, a story stretching over time with beginnings, middles, and ends. The garden is touted as a source of structure and regularity in one’s life, a unity and pattern in existence that is seasonally directed and anchored in a particular space. In this bounded zone, change is ever present there is always something happening, something new, novel, unpredictable what gardeners experience as an effortless attention and sensitivity to one’s external life. The garden becomes a space in which we are “caught,” seamlessly aware of sentient and geologic change, mindful to what is around us the present and its momentary, fragmentary relationship between human and nonhuman worlds. In these visions, one hears associations with a higher morality, the “good life,” the promise of tranquility and sanctuary, a liberation from sensual needs, intellectual anxiety, and the demands of desire. A peaceful prison. In other ways, the cultivated garden operates as the prison’s inverse, offering a sense of engagement, agency, and sensory stimulation otherwise unavailable a link to the vivid “natural” of the imaginary. These are spaces rife with potentiality where people consciously seek to foster a culture of equitable, idealistic engagement, through, no small irony, the control of space. Here, the garden powerfully reinvents the horizon of the prison, one cultural landscape contradicting the other. Whereas the prison stops the natural scenery violently and peremptorily with the wall in front

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of you, gardens call forth the qualities of another kind of vista, one that is visually engaging, ever-extending, inviting the mind to ponder, puzzle, and seek out the secrets of a deeper reality. Gardens carry elements of mystery, complexity, and a luscious legibility. They induce wanderings, through what is immediately viewable, of imaginative expanses beyond, out of the visual field. The skill and art of gardening often involves creating visual complexity by pairing plants of distinct textures and heights, and layering varieties to create depth, adding a sense of space. In these environs, a flexible coalitional style materializes between plant and human in a way that is constitutively open, curious, and experimental. In this position, an ethical standard develops that inevitably implies submission to the discipline of care not by the target of custody, persons or plants, but rather by a reshaping of custody itself around care giving. To take on these virtues invokes something of a selfless respect for reality. It encourages a present-oriented perspective that is so immediate that a past- and future-oriented ethics descends from that moment, one that is conscious of intergenerational commitments of obligations and responsibilities that exceed one’s lifetime as part of each bounded and passing moment. Furthermore, such ethics depend upon a reimagining of foundational garden myths. For instance, the paradisical garden of Eden must be seen in its exclusive and exclusionary conditions. The fall, humanity left alone, unseen, and cut off from God, lays claim to the path of maturity, handed over to self-responsibility. Post-Eden, we are left in the garden of our making, the one we are called to keep and not the morally useless space of idle and idyllic pleasure. These are spaces in which running up against the uncertainties of life is shown to be the human condition, where people and plants must co-conspire, collaborate, form coalitions against the unpredictability and violence of life. As David Cooper argues: To engage in a project with the understanding that its outcome is only partly in one’s own hands, but without any trust or confidence in the co-operation of the world in “grace” would be futile. Hope, therefore, is a virtue induced by the same understanding of garden-practices as humility is … To make a garden is to engage in a planned, demanding long-term enterprise, one peculiarly sensitive to the slings and arrows of fortune. (2006, p. 144)

Because we are prone to ignore the social conditions, the cultural forces, the grid of contingencies and preconditions that inform our efforts that are not of our own making and doing we exist in languages beyond the sociology of the garden and the prison.

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For anyone to do anything, there must already be, one might say, a space of possibilities. And for there to be this space, there must already be some general understanding of the world and ourselves; already a sense of what matters, of what would be worth doing; already available “moods” and “attunements” that enable aspects of our world to assume a certain tone, attractive, repellant or whatever; already be a light in which things show up for us in the ways they do and invite us to treat them in this or that manner. None of what must already be in place is our own doing, but is rather the condition of our doing anything. Our achievements always presuppose what is not of our making … the very condition of possibility. (Cooper, 2006, pp. 145 146)

In this vision then is an investment of relations a space from which to recognize the most basic needs of plants and people. The garden may be imagined in its solitary anarchic space, but with human intervention a sociology necessarily occurs with multiple paths and matrices of action, oppressive at times, liberating at others. People bring a new, often violent, always unpredictable complexity. As one example, we might look to the community garden movement. In the abandoned spaces that have been taken up by community activists, a new set of social dynamics take place (Bhatti, 2006; Bhatti & Church, 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2010; Lawson, 2005; Martinez, 2010). Sociologist Miranda Martinez sees this movement as a way to understand “how creative work occurs within community movements to show how people creatively sustain and reassert local praxis … engage in complex dynamics of contestation and negotiation … see into the deeper questions of how to do politics equitably, and imaginatively, in the context of gentrification” (2010, p. 32). As Martinez maps it, this process is embedded in the visions behind the gardens’ names: The Garden of Poor People in Action; Our Garden of Sorrows; Tranquilidad. Inevitably a space in which individuals are joined and divided in the project of re-creation, the garden is a site to imagine the social laboratory the space in which we imagine how worlds should work, to plan to make the world better, to think and work through more appealing social visions. Not unlike those early blueprints of the prison. But some gardens, unlike all prisons, are ever-bridging spaces, improving the odds of encounter, requiring the work of common understanding, demanding the acquisition of new repertoires of dialogue that are more constructive than the simpler, easier, more widely available strategies of withdrawal into private spaces. This, of course, is what it means to exist in the space of community and struggle. And that struggle and contest will reveal other kinds of social fractures. Sociologist Pierrette HondagneuSotelo writes, As many writers have observed, gardens re-enchant the present, serving as sanctuary from the frenetic pace of public life, work, and competition. But I also think gardens

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A WAY OUT Why must people insist that the garden is a place of rest and repose, a place to forget the cares of the world, a place in which to distance yourself from the painful responsibility with being a human being? (Kincaid, 2001, p. 41)

No matter the contradictions, most garden theorists insist that there is an indisputable and innate affinity for the life form and its place in the world. The garden speaks of place in its boundedness and connection; it speaks of belonging, of home. It speaks of work and the meaningful activity of body and mind, Hannah Arendt’s strange composition of labor and work in the vita activa and its inevitably fading artifact. At its source is something inexplicable and continuous germination, birth, growth, and death, and their reliance upon belief, faith, and possibility. A maturation in some cases (say that of a tree) across lifetimes. A cultural vocabulary that can suture the pains of imprisonment to the beauty of the amnesiac present in its lush fortress of prison spaces (Fig. 4). Unlike those carefully cared-for post-prison gardens of dead penitentiaries, where volunteers surround the prison and dispense the attention that never materialized in its lifetime, I am interested in the defiant, anarchic gardens that materialize in the midst of madness, an enterprise of survival, will, and sanity. This garden is positioned, like life, in impermanence.

Fig. 4.

The Prison Gardens at Alcatraz. Source: www.alcatrazgardens.com.

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Most that have existed bear no trace in the historical record. Transitory, they are simply brief moments wherein humans cling to order, purpose, place, and meaning. Fragile and precarious, they pop up in the midst of scarcity where the most basic needs are lacking food, work, shelter, sociality. They speak to the will to live as manifested in found objects, salvaged trash, and ephemeral claims. This is a garden for the carceral regimes of late modernity for the ways in which we live, and find ways to live well, in the extreme conditions of depletion, despair, destitution, and inequality separated and segregated. They are the stories of how to maintain a tenuous hold on life under extreme circumstances the endless repetition of stone sky water air earth plant bird. Here, in the silence of an unknowable nature, a new form of social practice and cultural vocabulary not yet defined emerges like a fledgling seed a space in which to reinvent and recommit, to think through the garden as legal and illegal activity, as community, as contest, as appropriated by squatters, the homeless, and the excluded. In this practice, humans and plants alike know the complexity of the garden’s origins and possibilities its proclivity to human dominion, a space of spectacle and tortured aesthetics. They know that it may be only a stage, with a continuum of deception that carries within it the rise of the commercially manufactured, “weathered” plant pot, the labor of slaves and the uncounted, the epic mythic betrayal of Eden and Gethsamene, the perverse propaganda of the gardens at Treblinka and Auschwitz. It is the space of will and life in social death. Philosopher Robert Pogue Harrison, echoing Voltaire, writes “It is because we are thrown into history that we must cultivate our garden” (Harrison, location 24). He adds Where history unleashes its destructive and annihilating forces, we must, if we are to preserve our sanity, to say nothing of our humanity, work against and in spite of them. We must seek out healing or redemptive forces and allow them to grow in us. That is what it means to tend our garden … This is the world of plurality that takes shape through the power of human action. Notre jardin is never a garden of merely private concerns into which one escapes from the real; it is that plot of soil on the earth, within the self, or amid the social collective, where the cultural, ethical, and civic virtues that save reality from its own worst impulses are cultivated. Those virtues are always ours. (ibid, location 32)

Similarly, for Alice Walker’s mother, working invisibly across history, gardening is “work her soul must have” (1983, p. 241). The state of exile always runs in proximity to the dream of care, desires for belonging, home, companionship, a sanctuary for one’s sanity. Care requires a world, a relationship, a sociology. And the constant gardener is held fast by this

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irrepressible need to devote himself to something, someone and the complex twists, plots, and unanticipated ends of this labor of social justice, this prison, this garden. The prison garden, then, is the garden of reality, not reformation. Its cultivation requires a complex violence a recognition of the wasteland and a commitment to something else in that very place, knowing there shall otherwise be no earthly paradise, no prison garden, no other way out.

NOTES 1. In this vision, composting achieves what the penitentiary cannot as unthinking (natural) life reclaims the civil death of the prison a model of a restorative justice enterprise. 2. As David Garland argues, part of what makes capital punishment in the United States a peculiar institution is its precise relation to that other peculiar and prior carceral formation, slavery and its attendant racial violence (2010).

REFERENCES Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: New Press. Beatley, T. (2011). Biophilic cities: Integrating nature into urban design and planning. Washington, DC: Island Press. Bhatti, M. (2006). When I’m in the garden i can create my own paradise: Home and gardens in later life. Sociological Review, 54, 318 341. Bhatti, M., & Church, A. (2001). Cultivating natures: Homes and gardens in late modernity. Sociology, 35, 365 383. Cooper, D. (2006). A philosophy of gardens. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Dumm, T. (1987). Democracy and punishment: Disciplinary origins of the United States. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. El Saadawi, N. (1994). Memoirs from the women’s prison. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Garland, D. (2010). Peculiar institution: America’s death penalty in an age of abolition. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press. Haller, R., & Kramer, C. (Eds.). (2006). Horticultural therapy methods: Making connections in health care, human service, and community programs. New York, NY: The Haworth Press. Harrison, R. (2008). Gardens: An essay on the human condition (Kindle ed.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2010). Cultivating questions for a sociology of gardens. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 39, 498 516. Jiler, J. (2006). Doing time in the garden: Life lessons through prison horticulture. Oakland, CA: New Village Press. Johnston, N. (1994). Eastern state penitentiary: Crucible of good intentions. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art. Kincaid, J. (1999). My garden (Book). New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux. Kincaid, J. (2001). Sowers and reapers. New Yorker. January 22, pp. 41 45. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2004). Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lawson, L. (2005). City bountiful: A century of community gardening in America. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Mandela, N. (2000). Long walk to freedom. New York, NY: Holt Rinehart & Winston. Martinez, M. (2010). Power at the roots: Gentrification, community gardens, and the Puerto Ricans of the lower east side. New York, NY: Lexington Books. Marx, L. (1964). The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York, NY: Signet. Morton, M., & Balmori, D. (1995). Transitory gardens, uprooted lives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Muhammad, K. (2010). The condemnation of blackness: Race, crime, and the transitory gardens, uprooted lives making of modern urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oshinsky, D. (1997). Worse than slavery: Parchman Farm and the ordeal of Jim Crow justice. New York, NY: Free Press. Pollan, M. (1991). Second nature: A gardener’s education. New York, NY: Grove Press. Pollan, M. (2001). The botany of desire: A plant’s-eye view of the world. New York, NY: Random House. Reason, D. (1987). A hard singing of country: In the unpainted landscape. Scottish Arts Council & S. Cutts (Eds.). London: Coracle Press. Rhodes, L. (2004). Total confinement: Madness and reason in the maximum security prison. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rodriguez, D. (2006). Forced passages: Imprisoned radical intellectuals and the U.S. prison regime. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Saguaro, S. (2006). Garden plots: The politics and poetics of gardens. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Simpson, S., & Straus, M. (Eds.). (1998). Horticulture as therapy: Principles and practice. New York, NY: The Food Products Press. Smith, C. (2009). The prison and the American imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, P. (2008). Punishment and culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Soper, K. (1995). What is nature? Culture, politics and the non-human. Oxford: Blackwell. Soyinka, W. (1988). The man died: Prison notes. New York, NY: Noonday. Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mothers’ gardens. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Wilson, E. O. (2006). The creation: An appeal to save life on earth. New York, NY: Norton.

WHAT BLOOMS: THE JAILHOUSE, INSIDE OUT Chuck Jackson ABSTRACT This essay takes the cross-bayou, architectural face-off between the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) and Houston’s Harris County Jail (HCJ) as an occasion to imagine the jail reconstructed as a site for restorative social-justice programs programs that invite the community inside as does the open-enrollment university. The essay exercises a concretely located yet utopian imagination that refigures jail and university as kindred and symbiotic institutions. It envisions, story by story, how HCJ might be repurposed as “Un-UHD”: a center for the social justice activities serving the nation’s fourth largest city.

In the fall of 2005, I joined the Department of English at the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD), an open-admission, Hispanic-serving institution in the heart of the fourth largest city in the United States. UHD is a three-building campus that includes the humungous 11-story, art deco One Main building that stands at the foot of downtown, occupying the city’s

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One Main street address. The historic, many-windowed, red and white brick edifice is a short walk up the Main Street bridge from the birthplace of the city itself, Allen’s Landing, where Houston’s founders settled the city on White Oak and Buffalo bayous in the 1830s. Allen’s Landing is now a waterfront city park that is currently under development, but on any day Houstonians can be found pushing off into the bayous from the old wharf in canoes and kayaks and paddling into the water that reflects the One Main building. Geographically and architecturally tied to new urban beginnings, UHD and its One Main building serve as a permanent marker of the importance of and devotion to public, urban education. Triangulating with the One Main building of UHD and Allen’s Landing is a third site that also reflects in the bayous and that, upon my arrival, I couldn’t help but find too close for comfort: the Harris County Jail’s massive 701 building (HCJ). HCJ, located directly across the water from UHD, is also about 10-stories tall. It, too, is a short walk from Allen’s Landing, but along a different direction across the San Jacinto street bridge, about one city block to the east of Main Street. Like UHD, HCJ is made of red brick, and features rows and rows of windows that wrap around the entire structure. (HCJ’s windows are, it turns out, a fac¸ade that is meant to look as though prisoners have the luxury of a skyline view of downtown.) HCJ looks so similar to UHD that many students are shocked to learn that it is not a part of our unique urban campus. The juxtaposition and resemblance is uncanny, to say the least: to the west, the university signifies a positive futurity and mobility; to the east, in material opposition, the jailhouse signifies constraint, a warning or threat (Fig. 1). As I was getting my feet wet at UHD, disciplining myself to meet the university’s 4/4 teaching load, horror stories about HCJ made front page headlines. In 2005, for example, a group of civil rights activists, including members of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), toured the jail and compared its brutal conditions to a “slave ship” (Lozano, 2005, p. 7A). For years, neglect, disease, violence, filth, and overcrowding were endemic. A year and a half later, the Houston Chronicle told a more complete story about the problems kept from the public for a half a decade: “[S]tate and county records reveal that from January 2001 through December 2006, at least 101 inmates an average of about 17 a year have died while in the custody of HCJ. In 2006 alone, after three consecutive years of failing to be in compliance with state standards, the jail recorded 22 in-custody deaths” (McVicker & Hassan, 2007, p. A1). The report continues, “Records and interviews show that almost one-third of

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The University, the Jailhouse, and the Meeting of the Buffalo and White Oak Bayous. Source: Photo by the author.

the deaths involve questions of inadequate responses from guard and staff, failure by jail officials to provide inmates with essential medical and psychiatric care and medications, unsanitary conditions, and two allegations of physical abuse by guards” (McVicker & Hassan, 2007, p. A1). To bring attention to what had remained hidden from public view, I incorporated these articles about what was happening inside the jail, along with Angela Y. Davis’s (2003) short book Are Prisons Obsolete?, into my first-year writing classes. Based on this experience, I published an article in 2009 that argues for an abolitionist pedagogy, not only at public universities like UHD, but also at schools that might think of themselves as having no relationship with the prison-industrial complex or the people caught in its machinations (Jackson, 2009). While I have brought the subject of the jailhouse’s insides out to my students at UHD and to an academic audience, the challenge remains: to turn the jailhouse even further inside out. I still teach my first-year writing classes using the jail as a touchstone for research and writing on prisons, and the news remains bleak. In the several years since the publication of my article, little has changed. While some reports declare that, under new oversight, the jail’s interior is finally in compliance with state guidelines (McVicker, 2007; O’Hare, 2009), others describe more deaths and beatings (O’Hare, 2011), along with outbreaks of diseases such as chicken pox, shingles, and swine flu

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(Patterson, 2009a, 2009b; Schiller, 2008). Still others report on overcrowding, holding cells infested with bugs, the stench of clogged toilets, and a lack of air conditioning (Murphy, 2008; Patterson, 2009a, 2009b). Turning the jailhouse further inside out means not only bringing its horror into the light of day through a figurative exit door, but also theorizing that exit as an entrance through which to enter and proceed with a different interpretive strategy. It raises the question: how does one envision an alternative future for 650,000 square feet of prime urban real estate? What follows is a performative response to Davis’s abolitionist call “to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families” (2003, p. 10). A tall order, as Davis acknowledges, when she writes that “the prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it” (2003, p. 10). Even though seemingly right-minded and successful reforms attempt to improve conditions inside of prisons and jails, as Davis and others have shown, they are easily disestablished during times of economic and political crisis (see Garcia & McLelland, 2011). As Davis might argue, rather than hoping to ameliorate the conditions inside of the jailhouse (or the prison-industrial complex as a whole), an abolitionist perspective thinks beyond “the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison” in order to “creatively explor[e] new terrains of justice where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor” (2003, p. 20). My Davis-inspired, utopian vision draws from the UHD/HCJ relation already in place. It dwells on the possibility of an uncanny site that positively haunts the university proper, an un-jailhouse, if you will, or, if you won’t, perhaps an un-university that offers knowledge rooted in practices seemingly outside of traditional disciplinary formations. Because the two institutions so closely resemble each other, and because, while it seems like common sense to interpret their architectural semiotics as I have above, with the university signifying positively and the jailhouse signifying negatively, it is perhaps even more important to understand that, while we might want to think the university into the jailhouse, the jailhouse, if we follow Foucault, has already been thought into the university. That is, in the wake of Foucault, discipline, even when attached to knowledge regimes, is always suspect and sometimes even more pernicious in its capillary functioning of power. What I imagine after the jailhouse, and even after the university, is a site where the disciplinary regime of isolation, overcrowding, sickness, revenge, and profit transforms itself into multiple, unconventional, counterdisciplinary practices that restore and repair the city’s social and economic disparities. This is a place that re-imagines the architectural argument HCJ

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has been having in mid-air with UHD since 1991 when the jail was constructed out of a five-story cold storage facility as a beautiful and utterly new conversation. I’ll call this dream-wish, this “creative exploration,” as Davis puts it, Un-UHD.1 Rather than identify the interior divisions of Un-UHD as “floors” or “halls” or “wings” or “departments,” I foresee them all as “stories.” While each story of this structure refers to a different horizontal, architectural level fabricated from brick, mortar, steel, and the translucent material used to make what look like windows, each story also represents the brief beginnings of a narrative, a story to be told and developed as others see fit. Unlike traditional architectural practices or realist narratives, the stories of Un-UHD overlap, abruptly transition, remain unfinished, and indulge in what might seem like the preposterous. At Un-UHD, then, no one is incarcerated. There are no “prisoners” or “inmates.” Instead, there are “Amended Residents” or ARs: those involved in underground economies or those who have done harm to the Houston community and who now live and work at Un-UHD as part of a restorative social justice program. Un-UHD is a place that encourages a new type of recidivism, as a kind of positive vicissitude; among the ARs might be those who have already served time behind bars and who, in order to remain outside carceral walls, return again and again for further community building and to renew their own, personal strength. Also circulating among the ARs are others who wish to make a break with current harmful or illegal activities. Un-UHD is bustling with public activity at all hours; no longer a space of unhealthy isolation and segregation, a steady stream of foot traffic moves both in and out of its doors and up and down from one story to the next. The first story of Un-UHD unravels in a public education program that reconceptualizes and extends the missions of UHD’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Departments of Urban Education and Criminal Justice. In this story, HCJ’s current cell blocks and multipurpose rooms are transformed into classrooms, lecture halls, and seminar rooms; here ARs teach courses on how underground economies function and begin a public conversation about their connections to sanctioned forms of economic injustice in the corporate world. In a system not unlike jury duty, Un-UHD calls in law-abiding citizens, who have never been incarcerated, for a conversation with those who have broken the social contract. Seminar topics, led by Un-UHD’s residents, include Theories of Vandalism in the Time of the Unsightly Billboard; The Rolling Meth Lab and its Relation to the BP Oil Spill; I Do: Sex Work and the Wedding Industry; and

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Drug Trafficking and the Supply Chain Management Degree. Perhaps even a course called Theft: from Burglary to Enron, and one called Turf Narratives: Gangs, Undocumented Workers, the Homeless, and Houston’s No-Zoning Ordinance. These will not, it is important to note, be classes that simply ask ARs to justify their actions and to make the community accept them; they will be places where lawbreakers and law-abiders can discuss issues of responsibility, culpability, violence, and the contexts and consequences of actions that damage communities; they will be spaces where men and women take responsibility for helping restore community by initiating dialogue about what crime is and what it means. Non-offender students then participate in collectives to complete homework for seminars that contribute to a neighborhood improvement program called Home/Work Actions, performed to make the places we call home, work better. Tasks include the completion of written, visual, or mixed media-based assignments that track common-sense perceptions, in various communities, on the difference between the criminal and the legal. Students might, for example, interview neighbors, local business owners, police, teachers, school administrators, and those who work for the city in order to accumulate an archive of public perception and to facilitate a dialogue that builds public knowledge. AR seminar leaders would be responsible for disseminating City of Houston Home/Work Projects outside of class at public fora, including neighborhood association meetings, libraries, house parties, e-distribution lists, or for broadcast on Houston’s Pacifica radio station, or at Un-UHD itself. ARs facilitate the presentation of materials and, along with the students, act as embodied pedagogical links who, at the very least, help restore social ease in neighborhoods pervaded by real and imaginary fears. This first takes a turn up and into second and third stories that provide living facilities and provide a center for ARs, including the city’s homeless or near-to-homeless populations. This well-funded public housing program I’ll call it Un/House/D is built, staffed, and lived in by ARs who are trained on-site through an apprenticeship program in cooperation with the City of Houston’s Public Works and Engineering Construction Branch. ARs make the building beautiful. The old jail’s fac¸ade of windows is stripped. ARs install real windows, with no bars, providing all of those who move in and out of Un-UHD with a view of the city that has, for so long, been sealed off. ARs not only repurpose cells, dormitories, showers, and holding tanks as apartments and common living space, but do so, as far as possible, using recycled materials and other renewable resources that make the entire building the greenest architectural site in Houston. Since HCJ was once described

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as “the largest mental health facility in Texas” by the county sheriff and the chief of the Houston Police Department, Un-UHD partners with the public mental health system to creatively address the problems and possibilities of providing long-term care for those struggling with severe mental illness (Garcia & McLelland, 2011). Students from the historically experimental College of Architecture at the University of Houston, and the often times heady, theoretical School of Architecture at Rice University, place into Un/House/D as Uncanny Fellows who work with residents to create, extend, rebuild, update, remodel, rewire, and theorize Un/House/D and its connection to the future of progressive urban architecture. In turn, Uncanny Fellows are required to take and sign the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility Pledge not to participate in the design, construction, or renovation of prisons.2 At the adjacent Center for the Un/House/D, ARs share basic construction and survival skills and ideas with those still making camp outdoors and who come in to take advantage of the center’s cooling stations, recovery programs, free clinic, needle-exchange, and condom distribution center. Those struggling with addiction connect with former addicts who, in partnership with the Houston Coalition for the Homeless, now work as sober, paid, residential staff members who run recovery and detoxification programs tailored for those on the streets and along the bayous, and who have been in and out of jail or prison. Recovery coexists, in this story of the building, with a place to exchange a syringe and to pick up safer injection supplies. ARs who are ex-users work side-by-side with volunteers and medical staff to stress survival and harm reduction for those unable or not ready to kick. Since its doors first opened, HCJ, like all modern houses of detention, has booked inmates by pressing the tips of human fingers in black ink and rolling them onto a sheet of paper or, more recently, scanning the tips to make a digital recording with an Automatic Fingerprint Identification System. The next story transforms this practice into a more creative use of paper, ink, digital media, and identity. Finger Prints, the name for the creative arts umbrella housed and staffed at Un-UHD, clues ARs into the possibilities for identity- and community-exploration that lie at their fingertips. Finger Print Press, for example, works with local non-profit literary organizations to publish fiction, poetry, memoir, and autobiography produced by Houston’s poverty-level, working class, and immigrant communities. Finger Print Makers, the visual arts arm of the organization, runs an after-school program that gets young people into the studio to learn paper- and bookmaking, engraving, etching, stenciling, silk-screening, and print-making for

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broadsides, along with other arts that combine the visual with the tactile. On a rotating basis, Finger Print Players puts Houston’s cutting-edge, alternative theater and performance art troupes in touch with ARs and their loved ones to create dramatic works that address touchy subjects, including racism, xenophobia, trans- and homophobia, and the stories both of violent crime and police repression in Houston. Like all work that occurs at Un-UHD, being held accountable for inflicting harm is a crucial part of the process, and Finger Prints incorporates this accountability into all of its creative endeavors. The next story is one that has yet to be told about the cinematic possibilities of Houston and the Gulf Coast on a global scale. Un-UHD operates an independent, state-of-the-art film institute committed to uncovering the connections between race, class, and the prison-industrial complex. Currently, HCJ brags about its design as a “direct observation facility” at which “staff members continuously monitor the inmates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week” (701 Jail Home Page, n.d.). The unidirectional, punitive, and panoptic gaze will be transformed at Un-UHD into a gaze that instead looks back at criminal violence in the larger community and at state and corporate power, emphasizing a commitment to both small and long cinematic forms that focus on economic, social justice, and identitarian issues along the Gulf Coast and in the global South. Filmmakers work with ARs and people from all of Houston’s neighborhoods to produce both experimental and realist forms of cinema that counter dominant narratives about prison and criminality circulating in mainstream media; films are shot on-location, in the neighborhoods where both crime and social injustice occur, but that rarely make it to the big screen, including Alief, East Houston, the South Side, and in the Third and Fifth Wards. The top story moves us into the kitchen. The upper-most story of HCJ is known on the street for housing what it calls its most violent offenders; to the last story of Un-UHD, the kitchen is transported, and the Houston chapter of Food Not Bombs uses it to store, prepare, cook, and distribute vegan and vegetarian food food grown on the roof by violent offenders who earn this freedom in exchange for creating and maintaining an organic community garden on the building’s roof. This story about food provision and its connection to justice and peace will be located in a part of Houston that qualifies as an urban food desert. Modeled after community gardens that foster health, wellness, autonomy, and sustainability in Houston’s Third Ward (The Alabama Garden, the St. Charles Street Urban Community Garden and ECOTONE, and the Third Ward Multi-Service

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Center Community Gardens), the Downtown Rooftop Community Garden will have space for growing food as well as space to make compost, to raise fowl for fresh eggs, and more than enough space for solar panels and a rainwater collection system. Those who have carried out acts of violence will have their own designated time in the garden; when anyone at Un-UHD comes up to the roof, they will work in a garden that has been weeded and watered and cared for, and add their own support of the growing process. Over time, one and then more of the violent offenders will work with non-offenders and other ARs, all together and at the same times, until all are working both among themselves and among others. Farming, gardening, and cooking classes will encourage people from different parts of Houston to share food with ARs, along with students, professors, architects, filmmakers, the homeless, addicts, those living clean, nurses and physicians, Un-UHD staff members, activists, artists, writers, and performers. All ARs of Un/House/D share in building and maintaining a wild-looking, shady, and temperate indoor-outdoor seating area for everyone to look out over the food that grows on the roof. Let’s add a big, beautiful garden of bluebonnets, the signature Texas wildflower. In the garden up on the roof, anyone can look back at the university’s One Main building and see it from a perspective so rare and unusual that it holds in it the potential for further extraordinary beauty that has yet to be made visible. For the better part of a decade, I have stood at Allen’s Landing alone, with colleagues, friends, and students and gazed out, thinking about Foucault. Foucault’s analysis of how the panoptic disciplines us, even when we attempt to liberate ourselves from carceral logic, is tenacious (Foucault, 1979); however, watching the watery images of UHD and HCJ shimmer on the bayou, the appeal of Un-UHD remains. Un-UHD is neither university nor jailhouse. It is something altogether different. The liquid surface that UHD and HCJ share reflects how the best parts of the university might flow into (and flush out) the jailhouse just as much as it reflects otherwise: an Other model of justice centered on accountability, amendable people, education, creativity, possibility, and beauty keeps the downtown area of Houston fresh. It vivifies. Ideas flower in its wake. The red bricks of HCJ already complement the green grass and trees beneath it, and, on clear days, the enormous Texas sky above. Let’s assume that blue, Texas-grown blooms flower on top of this asymmetrical building that is, frankly, already magnificent on the outside. Let’s turn it inside out.

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Let’s resist the urge to critique the image as it reflects dreamily in the slowly passing waters of the bayou flow out to Galveston Bay, into the Gulf of Mexico, and out into the Atlantic Ocean. Let’s say that the story does not end, but begins here.

NOTES 1. Davis’s book more fully explains how the historical and material effects of race and racism; gender and sexism; and poverty, class differences, and capitalism combine to produce the prison-industrial complex as a seemingly inevitable part of contemporary life. My essay is guided by her thinking through these identity categories and their relation to decarceration strategies. 2. The pledge can be found at: http://www.adpsr.org/home/prison_alternatives_ initiative.

REFERENCES Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Garcia, A., & McLelland, C. (2011). It’s enough to make you crazy: Our county jail is not the place to treat mental illness. Houston Chronicle, January 1. Retrieved from http://www. chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7362044.html Jackson, C. (2009). What looms: The university, the jailhouse, and pedagogy. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 9/2, 315 323. 701 Jail Home Page. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.hcso.hctx.net/detention/701.asp Lozano, J. A. (2005). Civic leaders compare harris jail to “slave ship”. Victoria Advocate, July 28, 7A. McVicker, S. (2007). Sheriff says Jail is in compliance*; but the asterisk means success met under exception to state guidelines. Houston Chronicle, May 5, B3. McVicker, S., & Hassan, A. (2007). Death behind bars: Cruel and unusual? Houston Chronicle, February 18, A1. Murphy, B. (2008). County jail filled beyond capacity. Houston Chronicle, April 2, B1. O’Hare, P. (2009). County jail system passes new inspection. Houston Chronicle, August 5, B1. O’Hare, P. (2011). Arrested man’s death questioned. Houston Chronicle, February 14, A1. Patterson, R. (2009a). Jail Hell; Inmates Emerging from inside harris county jail tell remarkably similar stories of horrible conditions inside. Houston Press, September 10. Retrieved from http://www.houstonpress.com Patterson, R. (2009b). Jail Misery; without proper treatment, Monte Killian gets sicker in harris county jail. Houston Press, November 19. Retrieved from http://www.houstonpress.com Schiller, D. (2008). Chicken Pox puts jail on guard; Harris county facility institutes quarantine to contain outbreak. Houston Chronicle, April 18, B1.