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20 | 1 Of Bodies and Borders The Demography of Incarceration In Robert Joyce Tasker’s 1928 memoir, Grimhaven, the narrator describes his entry into California’s San Quentin State Penitentiary: The official jerked his thumb towards a door. The very motion gave me the key to my position. I was merchandise, duly received and acknowledged. Henceforth I was to be an animated piece of baggage. And for that I was grateful, for it fitted with the least effort into my mood. The room into which I now passed was small—a mere recording office for the registry of new-comers. A convict rose from behind a desk and came to the counter that separated us. He asked my name, nativity, and age; later, my crime, and the county from which I was sent.1 After a bath, strip search, and shoddy haircut and shave, Tasker was disoriented and had lost his sense of place. “Somewhere in the bowels of the building behind me I had become confused in my bearings, and never again could I think of east other than as south. The whole institution had manoeuvred [sic] a quarter turn.”2 In We Who Are About to Die, his 1935 prison memoirs, David Lamson outlined similar feelings of detachment and disembodiment. As he described physically entering San Quentin and being discursively entered into its record-keeping apparatus, Lamson switched from the first person to the third. Wittingly or no, he effectively saw himself through the eyes of the other prisoners watching him (as he would soon be watching others) and the eyes of the authority surrounding him. The convict clerk produces a pen and a bottle of India ink and prints a number on the [clothing]—54761. He sprawls the same number on the undershirt; the drawers; each sock; inside the shoes. That number is the Of Bodies and Borders | 21 man’s laundry mark. It is his own mark. It is himself. For as long as he is in this prison, he is 54761. . . . So far as San Quentin is concerned he will be Fifty-four seven sixty-one until he dies. The convict next enters a room full of typewriters. A young man in grey shirt and trousers runs a printed form into a typewriter and starts asking the man questions, typing the answers on the printed form. There are a great many questions —the familiar where and when born, home address, mother’s name, address, age, birthplace, father’s name, address, birthplace; and on down the line to education, religion, crime charged, plea, previous arrests or convictions. . . . He lights a cigarette, and tilts his head and squints his eyes against the smoke. These things give him an air of incurious detachment. It is as if he said, “I’m not asking these very personal questions out of curiosity , you know. I don’t give a damn, really; I just work here.” . . . Later, the new man will be brought back again to the fingerprint room in the rear of the offices, where he will be printed and have his Bertillion measurements taken. Later, he will be photographed again, this time in prison garb and with his hair clipped short. Later, he will be taken to the hospital for a medical examination. But for the present, his initiation . . . is completed. He has become a convict, following the road that all men follow in becoming convicts.3 Texas prisoner Benton Layman described a similar dislocation when he first arrived in Huntsville: “Made me kind of numb. It seemed like a dream— a bad dream.”4 Harry W. Jamison explained the feeling to prison investigators at San Quentin: “[W]hen I walked through these gates here it was like an empty feeling in your stomach.”5 Terrence Bramlett described the feeling in equally corporeal terms: “It took all the heart out of me. . . . Kind of stunned me, I guess. . . . I didn’t come to my senses until I’d been in prison a while.”6 According to Texas prisoner Andrew George, his penal initiation was “burned into my mind as with a red-hot iron, never to be erased,” part of a process that sociologist Erving Goffman aptly described as “mortification.”7 Black prisoners were equally troubled by the transition to prison, redolent as it was with the histories of slavery—especially in the South. Blues and work songs immortalized Texas transfer agent Bud Russell and Black Annie, his 28-seat truck, which delivered 115,000 prisoners from county jails...

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