A Hive of Mysterious Danger

Dostoevsky once remarked that the degree of civilization in a country can be judged by entering its prisons. In America, we have the federal system, which means our prisons are a reflection of the heterogeneity of our states and municipalities. Pick at random from the nearly 5,000 institutions that make up the U.S. prison system, and you will be hard-pressed to discover any underlying principle of order or coherence: scattered across the American landscape are huge, hulking fortresses and tiny, compact jails, prisons of unthinkable cruelty and violence and prisons that offer inmates classes in cooking and horticulture, prisons in which the inmates eat their meals in common and prisons in which the inmates never leave their cells, prisons that hold the most hardened [End Page 56] [Begin Page 58] criminals in the world and prisons that hold the drug addict who stole eighty-three dollars from the corner store last January. It used to be that lawbreakers were exiled to foreign lands, but now they are exiled right here at home, cast into domestic wildernesses of iron and stone from which roughly nine-tenths will emerge, while the rest will languish for their entire lifetimes. A common misperception is that prisons consist of only two populations, prisoners and guards, but American prisons are also home to doctors, psychologists, dental hygienists, drug counselors, math tutors, chaplains, barbers, nurses, union reps, administrators, volunteer service coordinators, all of whom go about their daily business in an environment in which the usual petty frustrations that attend working in the United States are complicated and intensified by the fact that this workplace is a prison. Here space is a precarious commodity, the air is riddled with danger and the rhythms of life are hedged around with a bewildering code of rules that bears little relation to the rules of the outside world. Here it is nearly impossible to disengage yourself; there is always the apparatus seeking you out. It goes without saying that if you were to remove the rooftops from these prisons, you would uncover a world of dramatic intensities, a world of cruelty and faith and madness and perversion and boredom and humor and tragedy and despair. But it is a world almost entirely ignored by the broader taxpaying public, a world that for the past four decades has grown steadily larger.

It's eight o'clock in the evening at Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, and the twenty or so members of English 129: Literary Existentialism have just finished reading a portion of the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche. The prisoners (for that is what all of the students in English 129 are: inmates at Auburn serving sentences ranging from two to three years to life) have zeroed in on a passage in the Genealogy of Morals where Nietzsche discusses the concept of mercy. Nietzsche isn't known for his thoughts on mercy, and the passage stands out in a book that is otherwise written in a vein of jovial contempt. There are times when my role as instructor of English 129 becomes almost meaningless, when the discussion develops its own spontaneous energy, ricocheting back and forth among the prisoners like a ping-pong ball, and this is one of those times. Nietzsche has hit a nerve, and it's not hard to guess why. Because with that peculiar sympathy for the incarcerated that is so characteristic of Nietzsche and the other authors we are studying in class this semester—Camus, Doestoevsky, Kafka—Nietzsche has postulated that, much as an elephant might ignore a mosquito buzzing around its ankle, a civilization might advance to such a degree of power that it would no longer feel compelled to punish its criminals. "It is not unthinkable," writes Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, "that a society might attain such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it—letting those who harm it go unpunished. 'What are my parasites to me?' it might say. 'May they live and prosper: I am...