This past Saturday marked the launch of a 30-hour juvenile justice advocacy training program (JJATP) that my organization is sponsoring in partnership with the Jane Addams Hull House Museum. Twenty people came together to discuss the history and to better understand the current manifestations of juvenile justice in Illinois. Our goal with the JJATP is to increase community members’ knowledge about the key issues facing youth in conflict with the law. Ultimately we expect that this increased knowledge and awareness will serve as a catalyst for social change.

It is worth taking a few minutes to think about the current challenges that we face with respect to juvenile justice. Just a couple of days ago, I read a profoundly troubling account of how guards at the juvenile wing of Rikers jail in N.Y. are allegedly encouraging violence among the inmates. It seems important at these moments to recall the roots of juvenile justice (in this instance particularly those in New York).

It is impossible to understand the State’s regulation of children and youth in the U.S. without considering immigration and population growth in the early 19th century. From the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, the overall population of the U.S. exploded from 1.5 million to 23 million.

Nowhere were the newcomers to the colonies more visible than in states like New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. These mostly Irish and German immigrants were poor and their children moved to cities like New York seeking work. Many of these young people’s parents were seen as unfit because their children were unsupervised and some were committing petty crimes to ensure their own and their families’ survival.

House of Refuge, Randall's Island (1855)

In this backdrop emerged several philanthropic organizations on the east coast dedicated to addressing the problem of “juvenile delinquency.” One of the most prominent of these groups was the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents (SRJD), founded in the 1820s. This group of wealthy businessmen and professionals lobbied the New York State Legislature to pass a bill in 1824 to establish the New York House of Refuge, which was the first correctional institution for youth in the U.S.

Here is how the SRJD described the goals of the house of refuge and defined what it meant by “delinquents”:

“The design of the proposed institution is, to furnish, in the first place, an asylum, in which boys under a certain age, who become subject to the notice of our police, either as vagrants, or homeless, or charged with petty crimes, may be received, judiciously classed according to their degree of depravity or innocence, put to work at such employments as will tend to encourage industry and ingenuity, taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, and most carefully instructed in the nature of their moral and religious obligations while at the same time, they are subjected to a course of treatment, that will afford a prompt and energetic corrective of their vicious propensities, and hold out every possible inducement to reformation and good conduct.”

The following is a description of the early days of the New York House of Refuge:

The reformatory opened January 1, 1825, with six boys and three girls. Within a decade 1,678 inmates were admitted. Two features distinguished the New York institution from its British antecedents. First, children were committed for vagrancy in addition to petty crimes. Second, children were sentenced or committed indefinitely; the House of Refuge exercised authority over inmates throughout their minority years. During the nineteenth century most inmates were committed for vagrancy or petty theft. Originally, the institution accepted inmates from across the state, but after the establishment of the Western House of Refuge in 1849, inmates came only from the first, second and third judicial districts (Ch. 24, Laws of 1850).

A large part of an inmate’s daily schedule was devoted to supervised labor, which was regarded as beneficial to education and discipline. Inmate labor also supported operating expenses for the reformatory. Typically, male inmates produced brushes, cane chairs, brass nails, and shoes. The female inmates made uniforms, worked in the laundry, and performed other domestic work. A badge system was used to segregate inmates according to their behavior. Students were instructed in basic literacy skills. There was also great emphasis on evangelical religious instruction, although non-Protestant clergy were excluded. The reformatory had the authority to bind out inmates through indenture agreements by which employers agreed to supervise them during their employment. Although initially several inmates were sent to sea, most male and female inmates were sent to work as farm and domestic laborers, respectively.

The young people who most often found themselves targeted by early juvenile justice statutes were Irish immigrants. Between 1825 and 1855, 63% of the youth committed to the House of Refuge were of Irish descent. Refuge youth were subjected to corporal punishment including hanging children from their thumbs and severe beatings.

Other states began to open their own Houses of Refuge for youth in the mid-19th century. However over time, these institutions began to suffer from overcrowding and the conditions of the spaces deteriorated quickly. Common practices in many houses of refuge included solitary confinement, the use of the “ducking stool” for girls, handcuffs, and the “silent system.”

Reformers such as those from Hull House began to vociferously criticize the conditions of various Houses of Refuge across the U.S. and a series of court challenges emerged to the refuge movement. The early history of juvenile justice in the U.S. is characterized by intentions falling far short of actions. The notion of humane treatment for “wayward” children gave way to harsh punishment, exploitation, overcrowding, and various other abuses. By the time of the settlement house movement in Illinois and New York, reformers (mostly women) were pushing for changes in the juvenile justice system. One of the greatest advances would be the establishment of the first juvenile court in the U.S. in Chicago in 1899. I will address the establishment of this court next week. In the meantime, I want to end with the words of Judge Julian Mack today.

Judge Mack, who sat on the Juvenile Court bench from 1905-1907, was one of the early reformers who indicted society for creating and then ignoring conditions that produced youth crime. He argued:

The fundamental duty of society is to prevent that child from going wrong: the fundamental duty of society is to recognize the causes that lead to the wrongdoing. The fundamental duty of society is to see what the economic basis is that brings the child into the court and correct that economic wrong. Tear down your hovels and your slums. Give your working man the leisure by enforced limitation of hours of work to give thought to the raising of his own family before you step in and say that he is not competent to deal with his own children.

One can scarcely imagine such a trenchant critique coming from a contemporary juvenile court judge but it would serve all of us well if they would just look back at their own history to reclaim that legacy of social criticism and activism.

Note: For some historical images of the New York House of Refuge, click here.

On the heels of the revelation that California prisoners have been subjected to drinking arsenic-laden water for years, I wanted to look back at the history of prison food in the U.S. and UK.

In the coming days, I will feature some excerpts from the first prison cookbook – the Manual of Cooking & Baking for the Use of Prison Officers – published in 1902 in England.

Today though, I want to focus on a particularly terrible time with respect to prison food – the Civil War. Years ago, I picked up a small pamphlet at a used book sale. It was called “Yanks, Rebels, Rats, and Rations: Scratching for Food in Civil War Prison Camps” by Patricia Mitchell. I never imagined that I would have occasion to write about some of what I learned from this work. But alas… one never knows where life’s long and winding roads will lead.

In her pamphlet, Mitchell (2003) describes “Civil War prison life, with an emphasis on food.” The first chapter opens with the following quote from a Confederate prisoner’s diary:

“Sept. 13th (1884). Rats are found to be very good for food, and every night many are captured and slain. So pressing is the want of food that nearly all who can have gone into the rat business, either selling these horrid animals or killing them and eating them.”

Mitchell (2003) writes: “Such was life in a Civil War prison. Men coped with their incarceration to the best of their ability, eating what was available, trying to turn gut-wrenching circumstances into some semblance of normalcy by making a pest plague part of their diet.”

During the Civil War more than 400,000 soldiers were imprisoned for periods ranging from days to years. A soldier who was a prisoner at Johnson’s Island described the food there as follows:

“Bread made of inferior flour, which was occasionally sour, was issued. The meat was rusty bacon or beef-neck. Twice in one year we had good cuts of beef, but it was so far decayed as to be offensive. Occasionally we had a few worm-eaten peas, and twice I saw some small potatoes…Rats were caught in and about the sinks, and sold freely. The slop-barrels were raked, and bread-crusts were fished out, to be dried in the sun and eaten.”

A Virginia Rebel, Luther Hopkins, described the diet at Point Lookout, Maryland:

“The food, while good, was very scant. Breakfast consisted of coffee and a loaf of bread, the latter under ordinary circumstances, with vegetables and other food, would probably suffice for two meals. The loaf was given us at breakfast, and if we ate it all then we went without bread for dinner. If there was any left over we took it to our tents…and saved it for the next meal.

The dinners consisted of a tin cup of soup (generally bean or other vegetable), a small piece of meat…on which a little vinegar was poured to prevent scurvy. My recollection is we had no other meal…[W]e were always hungry, and the chief topic of conversation was the sumptuous meals we had sat down to in other days…”

A Northern soldier in Danville, Virginia, found “rat dung in the rice, pea bugs in the peas and worms in the cabbage soup.” Michigan soldier John Ransom reported on food at Pemberton prison in Richmond, Virginia, “The ham given us to-day was rotten, with those nameless white things crawling around through it.”

To understand what would lead men to eat some of the “food” discussed above, one only needs to read the words of Randolph Abbott Shotwell, a Confederate prisoner of war at Fort Delaware:

“For three weeks I have not been comfortably warm during the day; nor able to sleep over two hours any night; have not tasted warm food; have not been free from the pangs of actual hunger any moment…How strange a thing it is to be hungry! [A]ctually craving something to eat, and constantly thinking about it from morning till night, from day to day, for weeks and months!”

This is the context within which prisoners can happily eat rats, cats, dogs, and rotten food.

Eastern State Penitentiary

Defunct prisons all over the world operate as tourist attractions, museums and even hostels, offering everything from haunted tours to the chance to stay overnight in a cell. Even more surprisingly, some old prisons are being used as wedding sites.

Alcatraz was opened to tourists by the National Park Service in 1971. Today over a million people visit the island prison each year. What meanings do people who visit Alcatraz and other prisons like Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia as tourists bring to and take away from their visits?

Some tourists undoubtedly visit old prisons because of an interest in architecture. Many of these defunct facilities were built at a certain period of time in American history and are formidable and imposing structures. Other tourists surely visit because they are fascinated with the stories of crime and “criminals” that they can hear about. These stories play the same role as the scary camp fire tales that some people remember from their youth. Still others might visit because they have an interest in the history of the United States and therefore would want to learn more about our history of punishment and social control. Michelle Brown (2009) explains that “[v]isitors arrive at the gates of closed prisons for many reasons — to retrace history, to search for ghosts, and to view otherwise prohibited places (p.90).” She adds: “Still, most have trouble articulating why they are visiting at all (p.90).” This point is an interesting one to ponder because it challenges us to interrogate our human fascination with disaster and pain.

So far, I have exclusively addressed tourism in defunct/closed prisons. There are also tourists who visit working prisons. In these cases, the prisons and the prisoners act as “living museums (Brown 2009, p.90). I am unsure if it is the same population that visits both of these types of sites: the defunct and the working prison. One would imagine that at least some of the people who are visiting working prisons today as tourists are doing so for research and informational purposes. Though Brown (2009) contends that this is “the minority of most tourists at these sites (p.91).” I will not be concerned with tours of working prisons in this post. I hope to come back to that topic in the future.

Prison tourism is not a new thing. When U.S. prisons were first opened in the 19th century, they were often the largest and most imposing structures in cities and towns. People would visit just to marvel at the impressive structures and no doubt to satisfy their curiosity about the prisoners who inhabited these places as well. Famous writers and intellectuals like Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens also made such visits to American prisons during that time.

Michelle Brown (2009) writes:

“These early ambassadors and diplomats spent days and sometimes weeks in the study of the prisons they visited, talking openly with administrators, staff, and inmates, observing daily operations, and writing about the experience in correspondance, notes, and eventually key works, citing the American prison project as a crucial democratic experiment in governance and the production of civic life (p.94).”

What I am concerned with here though is the modern phenomenon of prison tourism. Today, we lack public intellectuals of the stature of De Tocqueville and Dickens who are regularly visiting and writing about prisons. Most of the modern prison tourists are there in the role of spectators and consumers of pain and punishment. As such, I want to highlight some information about the complexities of modern prison tourism.

Michelle Brown (2009) describes a series of prison tours that she took in her book “The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle.” I was struck by this particular passage in the book that captures the inherent commercialism of these tours:

“At the gates of the prison, sally ports and administrative offices are converted into ticket desks and souvenir shops. This staging area is carefully arranged with both historical materials – signs, brochures, pamphlets, photos, posters, books, and plaques describing and commemorating the history and function of the institution as well as consumer spectacle – magnets, key chains, coffee mugs, shot glasses, T-shirts, playing cards, postcards, Hollywood souvenirs, disposable cameras, and ghost hunting equipment (flashlights, dowsing rods, etc.). At the Ohio State Reformatory and the former West Virginia Penitentiary, these discourses intersect as friends and families take photos of one another standing beside the electric chair or weapons display cases of homemade prisoner shanks and shivs. At West Virginia Penitentiary, some pose for the camera in areas designed to simulate mug shots. The entrance to prison tours consequently sets the stage for how to treat the event, emphasizing the tour as both museum and theme park – an experience to be carefully documented through the accumulation of a visual record (photos/postcards) and the purchase of souvenirs. (p.100)”

The excerpt quoted above really underscores how prison tours try to engage participants in both history and commerce at once. In some of these tours, there is also an emphasis in recounting the gruesomeness of certain crimes and in sensationalizing criminal exploits. Here again, I quote from Brown:

“Stops are made along the way at various points where stabbings, assaults, rapes, and murders occurred. These are some of the most descriptive and prolonged moments of the guided tours where escorts engage in complex narrative constructions, much like a good ghost story, emphasizing at the conclusion that all of this took place ‘right where we are standing.’ These flashpoints are also highlighted in publicity materials. At West Virginia Penitentiary, tourists are encouraged to ‘visit North Hall, where the most violent criminals spent 22 out of 24 hours,’ to ‘witness, Old Sparky which was built by an inmate to execute inmates,’ and to ‘see Charlie Manson’s letter requesting transfer to Moundsville.’ (p.106)”

Brown (2009) explains that “[t]his format lends legitimacy and authenticity to the experience, acting not only as a basic primer in institutional functions, in how inmates were housed and processed on a daily basis, but also engaging in and reproducing popular constructions and stereotypes of criminality, deviance, and danger. (p.106)”

So you might ask what’s the point in considering prison tourism?
What, if anything, is wrong with people touring defunct/closed prisons? I started thinking seriously about this issue a couple of years ago when I considered taking a trip to visit Alcatraz. When I do visit prisons, they are always working ones and I am almost always there to visit a particular person. I haven’t visited closed prisons as a tourist. I have found myself over the years uncomfortable with the idea of prison tourism and I never could put my finger on the reasons until a few months ago when I read Michelle Brown’s book.

Brown (2009) writes: “In most prison touring contexts, all human life with any direct connection to the practice of punishment is omitted.” Here is where my discomfort with this practice becomes acute. How can we think about prison without thinking about the incarcerated bodies that make up its core? The answer, I think, is that we cannot and should not lest we offer a fantastical view of prisons and how they work. This leads me to believe that prison tourism actually harms the possibility of organizing for the ultimate abolition of all prisons. These tours, rather than serving as a way to convert people into budding prison reformers, are actually more likely to distance the public from the actual realities of prison life by sensationalizing the carceral experience and by othering the prisoner. The tourist acts mostly as a detached spectator who might as well be watching an episode of Lockup, USA on regular television. Prison tourism then turns people into voyeurs of the incarceration experience rather than potential allies for transforming the current system.

For those readers who have visited defunct/closed prisons, what led you to do so? What did you learn? Am I wrong in my assessment?

Update: Thanks to Mary for sending along this youtube video of a tour at the West Virginia Penitentiary which partly illustrates what I wrote about here.

I saw a link to an upcoming documentary about the effects of mass incarceration on prisoners and communities titled ‘Broken On All Sides.’ I checked out the excerpt that was provided on YouTube and in just under 7 minutes, the filmmakers address many of the key issues of mass/hyper incarceration. It is well worth your time to watch this clip.

Here is how the project is described:

The project began as a way to explore, educate about, and advocate change around the overcrowding of the Philadelphia county jail system. The documentary has come to focus on mass incarceration across the nation and the intersection of race, poverty, and the criminal justice and penal systems. The feature-length documentary will be available for free– for activists and educators to use in order to raise consciousness and organize for change. The director, Matthew Pillischer, hopes to tour the documentary, setting up conferences in cities across the country, where a screening of the movie can kick off discussions by formerly incarcerated people and allies on how we can dismantle the system of mass incarceration.

The project centers around the theory put forward by many, and most recently by Michelle Alexander, that mass incarceration has become The New Jim Crow. That is, since the rise of the drug war and the explosion of the prison population, and because discretion within the system allows for arrest and prosecution of people of color at alarmingly higher rates than whites, prisons and criminal penalties have become a new version of Jim Crow. Much of the discrimination that was legal in the Jim Crow era of segregation is today illegal when applied to black people but perfectly legal when applied to “criminals.” The problem is that through conscious and unconscious choices, black people have been targeted at significantly higher rates for arrest and prosecution. So, where does this leave criminal justice?

Through interviews with a formerly incarcerated person, a prison guard, a prison policy advocate, a judge, a journalist, prison activists, a former city mayor, and lawyers representing prisoners, this documentary will aim to answer questions and provoke questions on an issue walled-off from the public’s scrutiny.