Today I saw this item about Rod Blagojevich being assigned his prisoner number:

Blagojevich be known as 4-0-8-9-2-4-2-4 when he reports to a federal prison near Denver next Thursday.

I wondered about the significance of reporting on this matter. Why is this news? Why would anyone care about this? I decided to do a Google search to see if other such articles were published when other well-known people entered prison. I found this item about Martha Stewart:

The Bureau of Prisons has assigned Martha Stewart an inmate register number, 55170-054, and its inmate locator Web site says Stewart is “in transit.”

This got me thinking about the role that assigning serial numbers plays in dehumanizing prisoners. These numbers are presumably assigned to help track prisoners in the system since using names might become confusing if you have 1,000 incarcerated individuals named John Smith. Yet the numbers also must represent the routinization and rationalization of the large bureaucracy that is our prison system. The numbers have plenty of other meanings too. I found this wonderful photograph created by a young person which I think illuminates this discussion.

"Prison" by Siever Karim, 2005. As part of the Image & Identity Young People's Conference

Siever’s offered the following statement of his work:

‘My ideas were based on conformity, and the suppression of cultures and personal individuality by being a number, wearing a uniform, being trapped in the cages of the social machine. I created my own police height chart and got my classmates to stand in front of it. I also made digital barcodes to symbolise the gathering of information which can be accessed so easily today.’

What a brilliant way to underscore the depersonalization of our modern culture. So powerful. I also think of that barcode as representing the commodification of human beings across our society (and in particular in prison).

Finally, I found a searing and upsetting description of the system of identifying prisoners at Auschwitz. I highly recommend reading this because it offers yet another perspective about how serial numbers are used as a way to dehumanize.

During the Holocaust, concentration camp prisoners received tattoos only at one location, the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, which consisted of Auschwitz I (Main Camp), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz and the subcamps). Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number which was sewn to their prison uniforms. Only those prisoners selected for work were issued serial numbers; those prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.

Initially, the SS authorities marked prisoners who were in the infirmary or who were to be executed with their camp serial number across the chest with indelible ink. As prisoners were executed or died in other ways, their clothing bearing the camp serial number was removed. Given the mortality rate at the camp and practice of removing clothing, there was no way to identify the bodies after the clothing was removed. Hence, the SS authorities introduced the practice of tattooing in order to identify the bodies of registered prisoners who had died.

This post is not a particularly cogent one, my apologies. I was struck by the Blagojevich press item and this got my mind rambling…