Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie

CHAPTER TWO: The Punitive Habit

65 chapter two The Punitive Habit Astonishingly, many politicians seem to think that we should lead the world in prisons, not in health care or education. —nicholas kristof, “Priority Test: Health Care or Prisons?” Shadowing Alabama’s political imaginary is what Avery Gordon calls the “fundamental sociality of haunting,” the proposition that “we are haunted by worldly contacts” that we’d rather step around or over than acknowledge. The punitive habit wears blinders, dismisses criticism along with dissident signs and conflicting evidence embodied by the unrecognized. Daily routine shuns these apparitions of the contrary, yet they lurk, worldly evidence of judgment upon the polity. Unacknowledged, shunted aside, these presences produce effects that invite comparison with specters and haunting due to the way that “systematic compulsions work on and through people in everyday life”—the way the habits of judgment and feeling harden, bind, and take hold. A ghost, suggests Gordon, is “primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken.”1 Alabama ghosts fill the ranks of the undeserving poor: if you are poor, it’s your own damn fault. Ghosts are consigned to marginalizing institutions for the abject: homeless shelters, nursing homes, mental institutions. But nowhere do Alabama’s living ghosts clump more thickly as they indict the state’s practice of justice than between prison walls, out of sight except for sensationalized tv documentaries and YouTube clips spackled by stabbings with handmade shivs, bloody shoeprints, cellblock shakedowns, inmate extractions, and runamuck incidents.2 The living spirits who overfill and circulate in and out of 66 • chapter two Alabama’s prisons represent losses of every sort: forfeited lives, missing education and work skills, the lack of supportive social networks and institutions, and the absence of racial justice. Down-home punishment only begins with conviction and sentencing . Prison in the Heart of Dixie brings the hammer down upon transgressors —individuals certainly, but socially predictable as to race, class, gender, age, geography, and education. Characteristic of the punitive habit in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia is the vastly disproportionate number of African Americans in these states’ prisons and jails, as well as a white incarceration rate much higher than the national average.3 “We’re a state that’s long on punishment , but frighteningly short on justice,” concludes Birmingham News columnist Robin DeMonia, after years of reckoning the back of southern hospitality’s hand.4 In bearing down hardest upon young, uneducated, poor, black men, Alabama justice complemented the punitive national turn in the late twentieth century. “Our criminal justice system would not be tolerable to the majority,” observes David Cole, “if its impact were felt more broadly by the general population , and not concentrated on the most deprived among us.”5 In its prison practices, Alabama resembles other states, only more so. “Over the past three decades,” writes Marie Gottschalk, “the country has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in U.S. history.”6 Early into the twenty-first century, one in every hundred adults was incarcerated in a nation distinguished for “the sheer size of its prison and jail population; its reliance on harsh, degrading sanctions; and the persistence and centrality of the death penalty.” Whether measured by numbers or the rate of incarceration, the U.S. leads the world. Alabama consistently ranks among the five states with the nation’s highest incarceration rates, at least 25 percent above the national average.7 Alabama prisoners take their punishment while trying not to fall off some forgotten map. The state’s penal history, underwritten by a harsh criminal code, presents an extended narrative of racism, labor exploitation, brutality, isolation, political demagoguery, and official evasion sprinkled with moments of litigative resistance. Prior to 1860, despite an antigovernment ethos, the dominating regime of slavery, and the association of prison reform with Yankee abolitionists , all the southern states except the Carolinas and unsettled Florida built penitentiaries. As with incarceration, punitiveness has an enduring Alabama The Punitive Habit • 67 history. The last U.S. executions for robbery, burglary, theft, arson, and counterfeiting took place in the Heart of Dixie.8 If in the North the roads to the penitentiaries were paved with good intentions , down in Dixie, amid the ruins of the Civil War and Reconstruction, white Redeemers’ drive to regain...