Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

3. The Racialization of Criminality and the Criminalization of Race: From the Plantation to the Prison Farm

39 3 THE RACIALIZATION OF CRIMINALITY AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF RACE From the Plantation to the Prison Farm My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall the very first kidnap. I’ve lived through the passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked, shallow graves of the millions who fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest, “unto the third and fourth generation,” the tenth, the hundredth. My mind ranges back and forth through the uncounted generations , and I feel all that they ever felt, but double. I can’t help it; there are too many things to remind me of the 23½ hours that I’m in this cell. Not ten minutes pass without a reminder. In between, I’m left to speculate on what form the reminder will take. —George Jackson, Soledad Brother Because, that’s what prison looked like. It looked like slavery. It felt like slavery. It was black people and people of color in chains. —Assata Shakur, “Assata Shakur Speaks from Exile” The black experience of incarceration during the first wave of the U.S. penitentiary system was not, by and large, an experience of (failed) redemption through solitary confinement in the penitentiary system but, rather, one of forced labor, bodily pain, public humiliation, and isolation to the point of social death. Slaves were punished for not working, for not working hard enough or fast enough, for disobeying orders, for stealing, for fighting, for “sassing,” for trying to see loved ones at neighboring plantations, for attempting to escape, or just for being in the path of a master or overseer who was drunk 40 racialization of criminality and felt like wreaking havoc or who just felt like punishing.1 After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, many black Americans found they were still not treated as citizens and full human persons; rather, they were stigmatized as criminals and exposed to a whole new set of justifications for the ongoing deprivation of their freedom. Blacks who had been forced to pick cotton as slaves found themselves picking cotton as convicts—sometimes on the same plantations as before. Their labor power was often counted the same way it had been under slavery, in measures of “full hands,” “half-hands,” and “dead hands.”2 They were not paid for their work, and when they failed to work fast enough or were caught breaking rules, they were punished—as convicts , and as slaves—with whips whose nicknames bore the stain of racist and sexist oppression, such as “Black Annie” or “Black Betty” (B. Jackson 1999, 60–61). Some of the prison farms, such as Parchman and Angola (still operating today as Mississippi State Penitentiary and Louisiana State Penitentiary, respectively) were actually built on former slave plantations; they replicated not only the look and feel of slavery but also the same geographic territory, the same fields of cotton or sugarcane. As raúlrsalinas, a prisoner at the U.S. Penitentiary, Marion, observed, “Prison is a backyard form of colonialism” (quoted in Gómez 2006, 58). Even the northern penitentiaries—whose development in the 1830s coincided with an expansion and intensification of plantation slavery in the South—managed to incarcerate black men and women at much higher rates than their white counterparts. In 1830, blacks formed 2.8 percent of the population of Pennsylvania but 46 percent of the inmate population at the Walnut Street Jail; whites, by contrast, formed 97.2 percent of the state population but only 54 percent of the inmate population (Patrick-Stamp 1995, 109).3 Some black prisoners literally bore the scars of slavery on their bodies (117). Their most common occupations prior to incarceration were physical labor for men and domestic service for women; their crimes were overwhelmingly crimes of poverty and desperation (116, 121). The very first inmate received into Eastern State Penitentiary was black. His intake record from 1829 reads: Charles Williams, Prisoner Number One. Burglar. Light Black Skin. Five feet seven inches tall. Foot: eleven inches. Scar on nose. Scar on Thigh. Broad Mouth. Black eyes. Farmer by trade. Can read. Theft included one racialization of criminality 41 twenty-dollar watch, one three-dollar gold seal, one, a gold key. Sentenced to two years confinement with labor.4 While (white) citizens of Philadelphia grew uncomfortable seeing crews of (largely white) “wheelbarrow men” in their midst, such...