Angels with Dirty Faces. Walidah Imarisha
briefly: Black and brown, female. Tired. No men by themselves; only women alone, shifting on swollen ankles they had spent all week on. Many were mothers of the men warehoused here. On their faces was stamped the dogged resignation that comes from going to see your child week in and week out in a place surrounded by razor wire.
Some waiting were like the young woman in line next to me. Her carefully ironed shirt, laid out lovingly the night before, was now creased like the frown on her face as she tried to manage three wild-as-weeds children, who shot questions about seeing daddy in rapid fire succession. The wide-faced baby in her arms shifted fitfully as the mother separated out the six diapers and two clear baby bottles allowed in.
Two bright-faced and dark-skinned boys tumbled past me, giggles streaming in their wake. Before their mothers had a chance to rope them back under control, one of the guards behind the processing desk boomed out, “No running in the waiting area!” The boys’ faces froze more than their bodies—eight-year-old bodies that would soon grow into young Black men bodies: dangerous property, to be handled only by professionals.
As an anti-prison organizer, my work takes me behind the walls, into cages where dignity is stripped and humanity denied, where rehabilitation is nonexistent and abuse is a daily practice. I have spent years visiting political prisoners, which this country denies having. Most of them are from the hopeful, chaotic, and turbulent 1960s and 1970s, when they believed revolution was a single breath away. Now they strain to draw each lungful in the stifling atmosphere of incarceration. Many of them have spent more years in prison than I have on this planet. I have been to the white-hot hell of Texas’s death row, and to the stainless steel brutality of Pennsylvania’s most infamous restricted housing unit. I have gone behind the walls, and I have the heartbreaking privilege to walk out of them every time.
That day’s prison in California looked like so many of the newer institutions: sprawling three-story concrete buildings, windows like slitted eyes squinting in the harsh sunlight. All new prisons look the same from the outside. And thanks to the prison-building boom in the 1980s and 1990s, almost all prisons are relatively new.
California prisons spread faster than a forest fire during a drought and became a symbol for prison growth across the country. 1852 marked the first California state prison, San Quentin. In the first hundred years of California penal institutions, nine new prisons were constructed. That state now operates thirty-three major adult prisons, eight juvenile facilities, and fifty-seven smaller prisons and camps, the majority of which have been built since 1984. The prison-building brushfire of the 1980s often relied on the same corporations and the same plans to build institutions quickly, quietly, and profitably. The corporations profited in dollars, and the state profited from the control of potentially rebellious bodies. There wasn’t time for creativity to grow in the shadow of gun turrets.
Now over 2.3 million are incarcerated across this country. One in one hundred adults are living behind bars, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, and over seven million are in prison or on parole. This means one in thirty-one adults is under some form of state control or supervision, by far the highest rate in the world. American prisons account fully for one-quarter of the entire world prison population. Is this the “number one” people are always shouting about?
At the California prison where I was, there had been an attempt at beautification. Art pieces decorated the sterile visiting room, including a piece from my adopted brother, all flames and burnt black tree limbs. A garden was planted along the walkway to the visiting building. The inmates tended it. It was, my adopted brother told me, a coveted job, because you got to be outside, working with your hands, instead of washing someone’s dirty underwear or scraping meatloaf off 3,769 plates each dinner service. The prison’s designed capacity was seventeen hundred, but three times as many people are crammed in: 7,538 feet in shoes three sizes too small. This meant triple bunking: three prisoners lived in a cell designed for one. The gym was no longer used to release frustration; it was used as dormitory-style sleeping, where two hundred people lived on top of each other. Fifty-four people shared one toilet.
This is not unique to this prison. The majority of prisons across the country are filled until the seams are bursting, but California is an extreme case. The entire system warehouses almost double the number of people it was designed to hold, and the federal government has been forced to intervene. In May 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling: California’s prison system violated the Eighth Amendment, the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, though not so unusual in this nation. The Supreme Court ruled the state must parole or transfer thirty thousand prisoners in the next two years.
Thirty thousand: everyone with a loved one in California began dreaming it would be them. One in five: much better odds than the lottery. We were so busy whooping with cries of celebration, the second word of the ruling was drowned out: transfer. California argued the whole time that it could solve the overcrowding issue by new construction (during an economic collapse) or by transferring prisoners to be held in other states’ prisons. Ultimately they only had the second option. They brokered deals; they sent prisoners to Texas, Arkansas, Missouri. The State of California will still continue to pay for these prisoners, but technically the California prisoner population will be reduced—for now. Yet this is only a stopgap measure.
This is not how we stop the hemorrhaging.
* * *
A visit to a prison requires precise planning and a keen attention to detail. For the honor of standing in the visiting room at that California prison, I had flown from Philadelphia to the Bay Area, rented a car, and driven two hours to stay at the local motel. This trek was not by any means the longest taken—so many drive eight, twelve, or more hours to see their loved ones. These are fraught journeys worthy of immortalization by Homer: millions of epic quests that go uncelebrated, even unnoticed.
In my more dramatic moments, I imagine myself and others challenging the prison system to be Cassandras, cursed by the gods to foretell the future to deaf ears, while our predictions of the destruction of Troy by the Spartans slowly drives us mad. There are thousands of Cassandras waiting in prison processing rooms right now.
I consider our visions of devastation just as dire as Troy’s fate, in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Prisons are this society’s Trojan Horse, proffered as an end to the “war on crime.” We have taken it in and accepted the horrific ramifications that come with it; we are one of the few countries with a death penalty, and one of the few countries that tries juveniles as adults. Our country executes many who are deemed too young to drink, to buy cigarettes, to vote. There has been a continual siege of our senses, the nightly news telling us to be scared in our skin (to be scared of darker skin). This Trojan Horse of more prisons gives a solution to our purported (and mostly fabricated) crime problem and to our perpetual economic crises. It is a solution for which we have flung our gates wide open. But rather than signal the end of a war, it has wreaked destruction we as a society do not acknowledge, do not see. Family members load into cars, climb onto van services while it is still night outside, and make a day’s drive across desolate states to see a glimpse of a loved one. For federal prisoners, this hardship may not even be an option for their families; a federal prisoner can be shipped to any federal prison in the country, and a continent is sometimes too much to cross. In order to raise money for the state budget, Arizona now charges families twenty-five dollars to see their loved ones. Families are devastated, communities rendered, and futures without bars are extinguished. Children left behind, growing up in the shadow of walls, are five times more likely to end up in prison themselves.
This cure has proven far more dangerous to the body than the disease, and that is because it was never meant to be a cure. Prisons are not about safety, but about control and containment of potentially rebellious populations. Our current prison system mushroomed after the end of legal slavery. As Angela Davis wrote, at the very time that Black people broke the shackles of slavery, the shackles of prison snapped tight on their wrists. It happened in the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for a crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This exception was coupled with the Black Codes, a set of state crimes that only applied to Black people. Davis explained in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?:
Thus,