Life in Prison: An Intimate History of American Punishment

Abstract

Life in Prison: An Intimate History of American Punishment explores the relationship between punishment and intimate life – or, in other words, the ways incarcerated people love, care, desire, and build community. Historical scholarship on collective mobilization and political violence in prison has revealed a lot about prison conditions in the context of rebellion, but we know very little about how incarcerated people have lived outside of these spectacular moments of resistance. Life in Prison integrates institutional and social history to fill this critical gap, offering the first historical treatment of everyday life in the modern American carceral interior. The dissertation advances two central claims. First, I argue that American prisons have increasingly instrumentalized incarcerated people’s intimate lives to further their punitive missions. Sex, marriage, parenting, and caregiving have each, in their own way, become carceral tools. Second, I illustrate an inverse but parallel process: as prisons have become less porous and more regimented, and sentences have grown longer, incarcerated people’s intimate and interior lives have become ripe terrain for resisting the forces of discipline and control. Incarcerated people have nurtured networks of collective care, advocated for the right to visit and marry, and re-appropriated prison space in search of comfort and community. This history expands and re-periodizes our understanding of prison activism, locating resistance not only in the uprisings of the 1970s but also in the soft and ordinary ways incarcerated people survive in the everyday. Life in Prison is organized around four case studies that move forward in time – chronologically, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, and over the course of the human life cycle, from birth to death. The first chapter considers the history of the nursery program at the Framingham Reformatory for Women in Massachusetts, which operated from its founding in 1877 until 1958 and branded itself the “Child-Centered Institution.” I argue that in the absence of a formal child welfare system, the prison used its power to regulate families and set its sights on rehabilitating incarcerated women not as citizens, but as domestic subjects. The second chapter shifts focus from motherhood to sex and transports the reader from the Northeast to the Deep South. There, I unravel the history of the first and longest-running conjugal visitation program at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, which operated from 1901 to 2014. I argue that the notorious penal farm used conjugal visiting as a means of policing Black prisoners’ sexual and domestic lives: first by incentivizing sex to increase labor productivity, later by withholding sex to incentivize participation in the institution of legal marriage, and ultimately by eliminating conjugal visiting altogether to disincentivize single parenthood. The third chapter moves the reader to the neighboring state of Louisiana where I unearth the history of living and dying at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. This chapter begins in 1973, when changes in the state sentencing regime left 85 percent of Angola’s population to grow old and die behind prison walls. My research reveals the robust networks of collective care, mutual aid, and advocacy lifers developed in the face of this reality, as well as the ways prison officials instrumentalized their caregiving in service of “rehabilitation.” The final chapter moves the reader west to California and forward in time to the 1990s – the height of the era of mass incarceration. Applying the concept of rival geography to three women’s prisons in California’s central valley, I trace the transformation in prison architecture alongside the subversive project of life-making among incarcerated women. Together, these case studies reveal the centrality of love and care to the making of mass incarceration – and also to its unmaking.