Incarceration In African American Prison

The modern prison was devised by American reformers who believed that people should not be tortured and that criminals could be "reformed" by incarceration, labor, and "penitence." But with the rise of industrial capitalism, unpaid prison labor became a source of superprofits, a trend accelerated by the Civil War, and the "penitentiary" became the site of industrial slavery conducted under the whip and other savagery.

Prior to the Civil War, the main form of imprisonment--African-American slavery--was, like the penitentiary, not to be regarded as torture. Slavery, indeed, was never legitimized by any claim that the slaves were being punished for crimes or anything else. A main cultural line of defense of slavery even maintained that the
slaves were happy. This changed in 1865 when Article 13, the Amendment that abolished the old form of slavery, actually wrote slavery into the Constitution--for people legally defined as criminals: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States . . . ."

At this point, tortures routinely inflicted on slaves, especially whipping, became a standard feature of the main site of penal incarceration: the prison plantation.
The antebellum plantation was merging with the "penitentiary" to create the modern American prison system. Ironically, the sexual deprivation of the prison was an additional torture not characteristic of the old plantation, where slave breeding was a major source of profit, while the old pathological fear of Black sexuality became a prime source of the sexual tortures endemic to the modern American prison, where people of color are not a "minority" but the
majority.

The true nature and functions of the American prison started to become known through the tremendous surge of prison literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The river of prison literature poured into public culture in books, songs, journals, and movies, dramatically influencing the political movement of that period. In response came a massive suppression. Most states enacted laws making it illegal for convict authors to receive money from their writing. Creative writing courses in prison were defunded. Almost every literary journal devoted to publishing poetry and stories by prisoners was wiped out. Federal regulations were drafted explicitly to ensure that prisoners with "anti-establishment" views would "not have access to the media."(5) Prisoners were largely isolated and silenced.

The silencing of prisoners was a precondition for the astonishing next stage of the American prison. Launched simultaneously was the unprecedented and frenzied building of more and more prisons, soon filled and overfilled with the help of harsh mandatory sentences, "three-strikes-and-you're-out" laws, and the so-called "War on Drugs" (a metaphor for an onslaught against the poor about as accurate as "War on Terror" is as a metaphor for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq).

How is it possible that the American public, so revolted by glimpses of Abu Ghraib, seems to accept, even enthusiastically sponsor, the hundreds of Abu Ghraibs that constitute the American prison-industrial complex?
Intimately and intricately related to the boom in prison construction has been a boom in imagined images of prison, with the prison's walls of secrecy validating a complex set of supportive cultural fantasies that ultimately function as agents of collective denial.(6) Even superficially realistic representations, such as the Oz TV serial, end up masking or normalizing America's vast complex of institutionalized torture. Perhaps the dominant image, promulgated by the very forces that have instituted the prison-building frenzy, envisions prison as a kind of summer camp for vicious criminals, where convicts comfortably loll around watching TV and lifting weights. Just as false images of the slave plantations strewn across the South encouraged denial of their reality, false images of the Abu Ghraibs strewn across America not only legitimize denial of their reality but also allow their replication at Guantánamo, Baghdad, Afghan desert sites, or wherever our government, and culture, may build new citadels of torture in the
future