Convicts from the Greene County prison camp at the funeral of their warden who was killed in an automobile accident, Georgia. May 1941. Source: Library of Congress

Land of the Free?

The History of Incarceration in the U.S.

09.28.18

(Contains archival audio in segments 1 and 3.) The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. This month prisoners across the U.S. took part in a National Prison strike protesting how they are used as cheap labor, and calling for an end to “prison slavery.” In this episode, Brian, Nathan and Joanne reflect on the history of prison labor, and learn more about the challenges facing those behind bars.

carceral state; criminal justice; prisons; punishment

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Segments

Chain Gang

American prisons have been a source of cheap labor since their very inception. Back in 2005, Brian talked with members of a prison work crew and asked about their experience working for low wages on the side of a road in Virginia. You might be surprised with what they have to say.

prison labor; prisons; punishment

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 1: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Joann Freeman: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines. I’m Joann Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week we explore the history of a topic that’s been in the news. Earlier this month, inmates around the country banded together in a national prison strike, to protest poor conditions and labor exploitation. Referring to the American Prison System as modern day slavery. Although the protest happened only a few days ago, the issue of having an incarcerated population as cheap labor is far from a recent development.

Brian Balogh: Back in 2005, I had the chance to hear from members of a prison work crew, and learned about their experiences working for paltry pay, on the side of the road in Virginia.

Harris Bruce: My name is Corporal Harris Bruce, from Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail. I’m the supervisor for the road gang. Today we is on Avon Street, cleaning up.

Brian Balogh: My first question for you is, is this a punishment or is this a reward? I mean, I drive by, I think punishment. But then it occurs to me, this might be better than sitting in jail.

Harris Bruce: It is. The guys enjoy coming out. I mean, they love the weather, they love the scenery. This is actually a gift.

Brian Balogh: So, what have these guys done to earn this gift?

Harris Bruce: Well, depending on the years that they got. If they were sentenced for three years or less, they can ask to come on board. A lot of guys can’t come on due to the fact they got over three years and their crimes. Like cocaine and stuff, they can’t come out. Assault charges, they can’t come out. These guys were here is mainly child supports, DUI type guys, so they can actually come out and work.

Brian Balogh: We are a history show, and certainly over the course of history, one form of punishment for people who have committed crimes, has been kind of public humiliation, public shame. So, putting people in stocks and we’ve heard about the Scarlet Letter for adulterers. Is there anything about making these guys wear orange and having them along this pretty well traveled street here that entails humiliation? Are they embarrassed?

Harris Bruce: No. No. Actually the orange is indication of the best inmates that we have in the building. The worst inmates, actually, I saw worst, the guys that can’t come out, they wear black and white. These guys right here wear oranges mainly. They are trustees and they can be trusted. I tell you, I’ll go get one.

Brian Balogh: All right.

Brian Balogh: I really appreciate you talking to us today. I wanna get a view from your perspective of what this is all about. At least Corporal Bruce says that this is a privilege to be able to come out here, get a little fresh air. Now, he’s carrying that big stick and has a gun, so I understand you have to think carefully about how you answer this question but what is it like for you to … Is this a punishment or is this a reward for you?

Speaker 6: Mentally, being away from my family, just being incarcerated period, that is punishment. You know what I’m saying? But, as far as being out here? No, man, it’s a privilege man, I like it. I get to come out here and get fresh air, you know what I’m saying? Sunlight. Lot of people don’t have that privilege. You know, they’re confined to a small space all day, and gotta look at a whole bunch of other people that’s just like them. I mean, I don’t know.

Brian Balogh: We’re standing out here by a road, people are driving by. How do you feel about the public aspect of this? Are you ashamed or do you see people you know sometimes? Anyone ever ask someone to get you a cheeseburger on the way? Or how does that work?

Speaker 6: Sometimes, it’s sometimes, I’m from Albemarle County, so sometimes depending on the area we’re in, I do feel a little ashamed but I mean, this program takes very good care of me, you know what I’m saying? I get paid for what I do, so I don’t have to call home, ask for money or anything like that, so basically I see it, they’re going to work, so am I.

Brian Balogh: Can I ask you how much you get paid for this?

Speaker 6: We get paid three dollars a day, fifteen dollars a week.

Brian Balogh: Uh-huh. Can I ask you how long you’ve been in prison?

Speaker 6: I’ve been locked up, going on 22 months.

Brian Balogh: And may I ask you when you think you’re gonna get out?

Speaker 6: I get out December the 19th, God willing.

Brian Balogh: May I ask you, and you don’t have to answer this, what you’re in for?

Speaker 6: I’m here for a violation and driving on a revoked license.

Brian Balogh: I see. Seems like a lot of time for a revoked license.

Speaker 6: Well, after they see you for a couple of times, you know more than twice, then they tend to lay the hammer down on you so.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. Do you think all this time you’ve spent in prison is gonna have any effect at all?

Speaker 6: I’ll tell you what. The last few times I came to jail, I didn’t wanna change my behavior. After this time, I can’t do it no more.

Brian Balogh: What’s different?

Speaker 6: Age. I’ve gotten older, I’ve matured. I’m 30 years old.

Brian Balogh: Thirty years old.

Speaker 6: Yep. In my adolescent days, I didn’t really care. You know, I rip around the streets, didn’t really care much. But now I have kids, I got three children. So they need a father figure, you know what I’m saying? And I gotta be a role model. I don’t want my sons to go through what I’ve had to go through.

Brian Balogh: Could I ask you how often you get to see your kids?

Speaker 6: I don’t. I don’t see them.

Brian Balogh: You don’t see them?

Speaker 6: No I don’t.

Brian Balogh: Is that the toughest thing about being in prison?

Speaker 6: Yeah. That’s it.

Brian Balogh: I can imagine. Well, I really appreciate your talking to me today, and I wish you the best of luck.

Speaker 6: Okay, thank you.

The Timeline of Serving Time

In light of the recent National Prison Strike, Joanne, Nathan, and Brian trace the history of cheap labor, rehabilitation, and protest within the American prison system. Nathan caps off the discussion by sharing a personal story his grandfather used to tell about growing up on the coast of Jamaica.

prisons

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Joann Freeman: Now, Nathan. The prison strike began August 21st and ended September 9th, and I gather that those dates are of historical significance.

Nathan Connolly: They are. The date of the 21st of August 1971 is the anniversary of George Jackson’s killing in San Quentin, California. A very important activist and theorist of prisons. And the 9th of September is when the Attica Prison Rebellion began after the killing of Jackson in September 9th in that same year of 1971. Incidentally, the 21st of August in 1831 is also the anniversary of Nat Turner’s rebellion, and so again the idea that the strike is in some ways about rebelling against wage slavery is also meant to hearken to that date.

Joann Freeman: Now, we just heard Brian’s interview of about a decade ago with that prison work crew. This year that the prison strikers were protesting the practice of using prisoners as a kind of cheap or free labor that could be farmed out, and that’s obviously, Brian, a very long story here in the US.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. It sure is, Joann. It really goes back as far as penitentiaries go. Work in prison and the value of work in prison, even before the Civil War, was really quite important to a number of local economies. At the end of the Civil War, 1865, it’s estimated that the value of work done in prisons was almost 30 million dollars. Now, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s worth billions of dollars in today’s economy.

Joann Freeman: I think running along side that, certainly for part of the long span of American history, is the idea that somehow or other, prison can reform you. That it’s a place where you go to be improved or reformed.

Brian Balogh: You’re absolutely right, Joann. In fact, I wanna share with you the name of one of my favorite societies in all of American history. It’s the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. It started in the 1780s, and Ben Franklin was a member at one point. But I’m gonna throw it right back at you, because something tells me you know more about the enlightenment ideas that informed this kind of thinking than I do.

Joann Freeman: Indeed. The idea of using prison to reform the people who are within that prison is kind of born of the enlightenment, and born of this idea that the society that you’re living in and its government can really shape your character. And so, the idea then of prisons is if you create somehow an environment that will shape the character of the people within it, that in some way or another you can reform these individuals and then release them out into society.

Brian Balogh: But Joann, you’ve got your enlightenment and I’ve got my experts. But they’re really connected in this idea of rehabilitation, because by the 20th century, social scientists, psychologists, educators, sociologists, they all come along and say, “You know we can make prisons a place where people can be rehabilitated and turned back into good citizens,” and one of the models of that was started in Massachusetts, no surprise there. The Norfolk Prison Colony, and the prisoners wore regular uniforms there. The prison was staffed with psychiatrists and educators, and the prisoners themselves actually had a role in governing the prison. And perhaps its most famous prisoner was Malcolm X and he really got experience in public speaking by joining the prison debate society.

Joann Freeman: Now you bring up Malcolm X, which then leads me to wanna ask another question, which is there’s also obviously a tradition of prison protests, too.

Nathan Connolly: There is, there is. And you know, I think we have a way of realizing now, just how important these prisons were for really unintentionally so, for place of political education. People finding ways to work the system, to figure out legal channels for getting reform or trying to make movements, that are built around people sharing legal documents and conferring about their rights, and so the Nation of Islam was one of these organizations that had a large and vibrant life inside prisons, of people learning how to make petitions to the system and try and initiate reform. But even the Civil Rights movement as a whole has a history that runs parallel from the direct action moments in the streets, to the moments behind bars, trying to secure better conditions.

Nathan Connolly: So, the fact that you have Malcolm X on the one hand but also someone like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, or any number of activists who spend time behind bars who then also are able to have a really unique vantage point from which to then raise critiques about the justice of American Society. It almost goes without saying that one really gets a sense of what democracy is worth, from behind the bars of a cage.

Joann Freeman: Now Nathan, I love your comment about how you can tell so much about American society by viewing it through the bars of a prison cell, because you know it’s hard I think today, to look at prisons with any kind of positivity given where we are. But in early America when I think about prisons, I think about this moment in time when insane asylums, and prisons, and any other numbers of kinds of places where people were sheltered and kept if they were problematic in some way, there was an assumption, a kind of optimistic assumption in early America that, if you framed them the right way and built them the right way, and sort of made it so that the environment that people were living in was just right, that it would sort of stamp their character in some kind of a way. I’m wondering when in the 19th century does it really make that flip? Like when is that abandoned? When does it really become. When does the forced labor component of it become more prevalent?

Nathan Connolly: Well by a lot of measures, it begins after the end of reconstruction, particularly in the south. You see a real inversion of the uses of formal state incarceration. Initially when you think about the incarcerated population of the postbellum period, most of them aren’t really African American, because they’re newly freed from the plantation. Only very quickly, in the wake of expanding surveillance and other kinds of responses to disenfranchisement do you begin to see people of color, particularly African Americans begin to balloon in the prison population in the south. And they actually begin to out strip their white counterparts in that particular place in society. And so the very famous or somewhat infamous formulation of slavery by another name is really a postbellum, really post reconstruction problem.

Nathan Connolly: And in that case, absolutely rehabilitation is not the issue. It’s about driving down the cost of labor. It’s about finding ways to keep politically disempowered the communities from which these people come, and in some ways, keeping a sense of order that is monitored by the law enforcement state, and that’s gonna be paying all kinds of dividends for the folks who are running the businesses that draw on prison labor, and the folks who are running for office safely, because much of the population is disenfranchised.

Brian Balogh: And the prisoners that Nathan was talking about, African American men in late 19th century America, would have been citizens if they hadn’t been imprisoned. And I have to feel that there was a lot more at stake when you are imprisoning would be citizens or, I think it’s fair to say, stripping citizenship from African Americans.

Nathan Connolly: So, I have a story for you guys. I’ll tell you a story that my grandfather tells me, and it’s about his time as a kid, and he’s not in the United States. He’s a kid in Jamaica, and he lives right off the water in Kingston, and he lives literally a stone’s throw from the outside of the wall of the Kingston Penitentiary on Tower Street. And you have to understand that in Jamaica, the people who live on the waterfront are the poorest of the poor. So, the affluent live in the hills, and the poor live down by the water with the fishmongers and by the oil and the harbor and all of that.

Nathan Connolly: He tells a story about being a kid, and just as the sun is going down and the colors on the bricks of the prison on Tower Street are beginning to turn, everyone is standing outside the prison walls, and they’re waiting, and they’re waiting. And suddenly over the walls, come these giant loaves of corn bread. Still warm, over the walls into all of the impoverished people who are living outside the prison. And crowds are gathered around and they’re scooping up these loaves off the ground. Some are catching them in mid-air to the sound of cheers, and it’s this huge mystery about what exactly is happening inside the prison to make it possible for this bread to come out, and to be feeding the poor folks on the waterfront in Kingston.

Nathan Connolly: And my grandfather tells the story, oftentimes with tears in his eyes, because for him it’s a testament to just how poor the folks were on the outside, that the prisoners on the inside were aware of this and basically providing them with surplus food, that was all being spent because of this massively bloated carceral budget that the British colonial officials had in Jamaica at the time. And for me, it strikes me as a really powerful metaphor, for a lot of the really good and powerful sustenance that can come from prisons. When we listen to what prisoners say, and you think about the poetry of incarcerated children, or all of the great thinkers whose writings in prison have moved forward a whole bunch of fields that we consider to be our own. Whether history or anything else, and so, I don’t know, I just wanted to think for a minute about how we would all be much poorer and much worse off if there weren’t folks in prison who hadn’t lost their humanity and decided to share some of that stuff that they had inside with us.

Brian Balogh: Well and what comes to my mind, Nathan and what’s so poignant for me in your story is that direct connection between the people inside the prison and the people outside the prison, and too often I think, we wanna lock people up and throw away the key. We wanna forget about that connection. We wanna forget about that vision from within the bars, as you talked about earlier, that really can make us all think more carefully about what it means to live in a so-called free society.

America’s Last Panopticon

Inmate Joseph Dole shares a radio essay about America’s last remaining panopticon prison, where inmates are watched by guards 24 hours a day.

Reverse Piano Music by Bobby Cole

prisons; privacy; surveillance

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Joann Freeman: As well as losing their liberty of course, people in prison sacrifice their privacy. Today, surveillance cameras monitor inmates’ every move. But long before those cameras were invented, prisons were designed so that guards could keep a perpetual watch on the inmates inside.

Brian Balogh: And that got us thinking about panopticons. Before you google it, let me tell you that these are circular buildings where a single watchman stationed in the center could see every prisoner inside. He can’t see everyone at once, of course, but inmates can’t tell when they’re being observed. So, in theory, they behave as though they’re being watched all the time. The concept was dreamed up by the 18th century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and there are still about half a dozen panopticon prisons in operation, mostly in Europe.

Nathan Connolly: In late 2016, officials in Illinois closed a prison modeled on the panopticon design. It was known as the roundhouse. It was a giant circular building with several hundred cells stacked four stories high, and a large guard tower in the middle. The roundhouse was built nearly a century ago, about 30 miles from Chicago. It was chaotic, cockroach infested, and deafening.

Joseph Dole: It’s akin to walking into a packed Roman Coliseum in the days of gladiators in the height of the action.

Joann Freeman: This is Joseph Dole, an inmate at the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, which includes the roundhouse. He says it’s certainly achieved its purpose.

Joseph Dole: hosts would not only have the guards watching them from the tower, but any number of the 200 or so other guys in cells across from them could be looking out of their cells into yours.

Joann Freeman: Dole never served time in the roundhouse, or as inmates called it, the F House. But he knows inmates who did. So he talked to them and asked them what it was like. And here are some of their thoughts.

Joseph Dole: Well I have walked through F House, I was never personally housed there. So, I put this question to two classmates who I know have spent significant periods of time housed there. Raul Dorado who spent many months in that house told me how there’s no natural privacy in the roundhouse. Their cell is completely illuminated. Not only the guards but everyone can see every detail in your cell. It has a psychological detrimental effect on your psyche. It feels like you’re always being watched. Especially during the most vulnerable moments of performing your bodily functions. Some level of privacy can be created by draping a sheet or blanket over the bars encasing the window on the back of the cell to block light coming in, but even then you question it and suspect that everyone can still see you. Moreover, hanging such a sheet is a disciplinary offense. Even if no one can see you, the damage is already done. The idea is inextricably lodged in your subconscious, making you not only your worst critic, but also your own warden.

Joseph Dole: Jamal Bocker similarly informed me that the constant noise also worked to deprive guys of any type of privacy. Doors constantly being kicked, people yelling at the top of their lungs, roaches crawling all over the walls. There was no escaping it. “I often felt confused and unable to focus. I struggled to concentrate on even the smallest task. I couldn’t sleep well at all, and I’d often stay awake just to enjoy a moment of relative quiet during the night, between 12 to 4 am, before the rampage of noise started again.”

Joseph Dole: Young women who are also part of a DePaul University inside outside college course taught in the grounds of Stateville Correctional Center at the dilapidated school building were allowed to tour F House before it closed down. They were visibly shaken afterwards. A few of them were in tears. They related that one of the most disturbing aspects was that the first floor of 60 or so cells, which is where guys who were in disciplinary segregation were held, was just silhouettes of humans. They listened as a number of them kicked on cell doors, while others screamed obscenities or yelled out either in pain, or requesting assistance, or simply for attention. They said it felt like being in a zoo, or insane asylum and then they felt guilty for thinking so, knowing that many of them truly are mentally ill and are often pushed to such behavior by the combination of unconstitutional living conditions, mistreatment by staff, and a denial of adequate mental health treatment.

Brian Balogh: Joseph Dole is currently serving a life without parole sentence at Stateville Correctional Center. A maximum security state prison for men in Crest Hill, Illinois. He’s also the author of A Costly American Hatred.

Words Between The Bars

For centuries, people have used letters, memoirs, and other personal writings to document the hardships of incarceration. Seth Michelson has led poetry workshops at prisons for years, and recently worked with a group of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrant youth at a maximum-security juvenile detention center. He says the words of incarcerated poets and writers throughout history echo the experience of immigrant children behind bars today.

Fluorescence by Podington Bear
Evenhanded by Podington Bear

poetry; prisons; writing

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Nathan Connolly: For some people, a way to cope with incarceration comes with a pen.

Seth Michelson: I’ve often heard of prison cells and dreary things suppose they were. Where gloom and darkness only dwells to fill the prisoner with the spare. And such they are to carnal hearts who have no savior and no God. The day rolls slow and night departs, and leaves them still a drear abode. But glory to the eternal King, who brought me to this little cell. Sweet pleasure here I find can spring. For here my God delights to dwell.

Nathan Connolly: That’s an excerpt from the poem, My Cell, Number One. It was written by abolitionist George Thompson in the 1840s, while he was imprisoned in Missouri. Thompson is one of many throughout history to document the hardships of incarceration through personal writings. The person you heard read that poem is Seth Michelson. He’s led poetry workshops in prisons for two decades. A few years ago, Michelson started going to a maximum security juvenile detention center, and there he led workshops with undocumented and unaccompanied immigrant children. Michelson recently released a book of poems, written by the kids inside the center. He says poetry became a creative outlet for them and created a unique bond within the group.

Seth Michelson: Poetry is particularly available to all of the participants, whether literate or otherwise, and according to the office of refugee resettlement, these young teens are a range in age from 13 to 17 years old, and average a second grade education. They were orphaned at a young age and grew up on some of the most violent streets of the hemisphere of the Americas. And didn’t have the literary, or let’s say, academic self confidence to think of themselves as poets, but were quickly disabused of that by their peers and with a little bit of encouragement from me. In realizing like the Mexican aphorism says, del poeta y el loco, todos tenemos un poco, of the poet and the crazy man, we all have a little bit, and saying let’s all access those things.

Seth Michelson: You don’t need to be literate to be a poet, and especially the prison writing. Histories tell us across the globe that literacy is not a foundational necessity of partaking in these important, nourishing, transformational communities of writers, in situations of immobilization and incarceration.

Nathan Connolly: I spoke more with Michelson about the history of prison writing in the US. We discussed some poets who have written about incarceration, and parallels Michelson sees to the words of the immigrant children in detention centers today. We first discussed the poet Etheridge Knight. He was convicted of robbery in 1960 and spent eight years in the Indiana State Prison. Upon his release he published a collection of works about his time incarcerated. Here, Michelson’s reading Knight’s piece, called To Make A Poem In Prison.

Seth Michelson: “It’s hard to make a poem in prison. The air lends itself not to the singer. The seasons creep by unseen, and spark no fresh fires. Soft words are rare, and drunk, drunk, against the clang of keys. Wide eyes stare flat zeroes, and plead only for pity. Pity is not for the poet, yet poems must be primed. Here is not even sadness for singing. Not even a beautiful rage, rage. No birds are winging. The air is empty of laughter, and love? Why love has flown. Love has gone to glitten.”

Nathan Connolly: So, to what extent does that poem in Knight’s words echo some of what you’ve observed through your workshops?

Seth Michelson: Well, it speaks to something that I’ve experienced in the workshops and it also pervades a lot of the writing coming from prisons, and writing of and about prisons. And in the particular case of Dreaming America and the workshops that I had the privilege to enjoy with these very special young writers, some of the best young writers I’ve ever worked with, you can see that despair. But here’s a poem by a young child in one of the two maximum security detention centers in the United States for undocumented, unaccompanied youth called Olvidó in Spanish, translated as I Forget.

Seth Michelson: “Without reason to exist, I often forget that I am real. And this makes ache the soul that I don’t have or that can’t find me as I wonder somewhere else.” So you can see a certain level of existential despair. And that despair pervades the poems in the book, and in the workshop, and in the [ouverus 00:29:34] of so many or the works of writing by so many incarcerated peoples. And another one, this one’s called El Casamiento, which means marriage.

Seth Michelson: “Yesterday in my cell, my pal asked, man, don’t you wanna marry life forever? And I answered, why marry life if I can’t divorce death?” So this oppressive sense of mortality of the captivity of the isolation of the captive body, and the suffering.

Nathan Connolly: It’s a testament too, to the universality of an experience that we tend to treat as particular, right? I mean the migrant, or the so-called refugee experience gets very small column in the newspaper, or it gets treated as a kind of add on, or a cognate to more mainstream conversations. And there’s something about, one the brevity, and obviously the power and the themes in the works that you’ve just shared. I mean the Olvidó for instance in thinking about forgetting, and when the prison asked is as designed, is meant to make you not see and forget these people. So the idea that somebody behind bars is literally forgetting themself as a consequence of the prison’s own makeup and design and power. It’s extraordinary, it’s extraordinary.

Nathan Connolly: I’d like if we could look at another poem, and maybe do a similar kind of move in terms of this connection. This is a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. Certainly someone who’s far more known. Certainly not forgotten, we’re lucky to say. She wrote a poem in 1981 called To Prisoners. Can you share that with us?

Seth Michelson: Sure, I love her work. I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark. Dark gardening in the vertigo cold. In the hot paralysis. Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences. Where it is dry. Where it is dry. I call for you cultivation of victory. Over long blows that you want to give and blows you are going to get. Over what wants to crumble you down, to sicken you. I call for you cultivation of strength to heal and enhance in the non-cheering dark, in the many, many mornings after in the chalk and choke.

Nathan Connolly: What sticks out to you about this? Least one thing.

Seth Michelson: A deep empathy. A deep love for others, which is what poetry can lead us towards. To discovering Jacques Derrida, French writer who loved poetry, and wrote philosophy, talks about poetry is a way of tracing the heart of the other, and it’s certainly true in our workshop. We have children coming together from multiple nations, countries of origin, converging on a table. Maybe having overlapping histories in certain ways, socially, politically, or deritically within the carceral system, and coming to seek a better life, pursuing the so-called American dream. And then in a workshop, exhausted, bleary eyed, terrified often struggling to endure the conditions of captivity, coming together and connecting deeply. And the poetry is groping for that. She’s reaching out the embrace the incarcerated reader, right? The call for him or her, and then also like we talked earlier, the specifics of tropes in poetry.

Seth Michelson: So here’s there’s repetition that’s so very, very powerful. We saw in Etheridge Knight, too. And this use of repetition that arrests while also intensifying. And so I think it’s the combination of the tropes with that deep love that she’s sharing so courageously.

Nathan Connolly: So we have an intimate connection with prisons and incarcerated people, even when we don’t always acknowledge it. And it’s no exaggeration to say that some of our most important breakthroughs in the world of letters are actually indebted to the thought work of those behind bars. I’m thinking for instance of someone like Martin Luther King, who wrote Letter From A Birmingham Jail, which was obviously a scathing critique of liberalism and liberal politics, that had a variety of different affects and consequences in the way that people thought about racism and its connection to seemingly political normalcy.

Nathan Connolly: I’m very curious to get your sense of somebody who spent a lot of time meditating and working in this area very deeply. What’s your sense of our appreciation of the prison as a place of knowledge production, as a bibliography that we already are dependent on, and is there some connection between the work that you’re doing now and that tradition of building a world of letters from the cage outward?

Seth Michelson: It’s inspiring me to think in multiple directions. The first thing though is probably a kind of warning to our listeners against romanticizing prison. And there’s real lived material violence against these bodies that’s excrutiating. That said, another important qualifier is to think of carefully about the exceptionalism of these fabulous and deeply influential writers that course through our minds, even unknowingly to many. Like Dr. King, in that not all people discovering new modes of writing in prison, and going to become canonical influential thinkers in transnational minds. But that doesn’t invalidate the importance of their prison writing experience, nor the significance of its contribution. Even though it’s more veiled, or less visible, or less known. It’s still partaking in this crucial process. It’s a mode of discovery, and in discovery, one of the things that’s discovered is the transformative power of language itself.

Seth Michelson: And that is to say that we need to work against rhetorics that normalize the caging of humans. You know, many of the young poets in the workshop, they’re realizing that through language, you can at least symbolically question the lived violence of captivity, and start to work against those discourses that normalize it. Where we say, “Ah, yes, these bodies need to have their rights suspended. They need to be removed from the social. Relocated to the space that immures them, that captures them within walls, and that incapacitates them, right?” Is incarceration the best answer to migration? And I think poetry can help us to find new language to sort of discover what we might formulate as alternative modes of understanding and being.

Nathan Connolly: Seth Michelson is a poet and a Professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University. He’s also editor of the book of poetry called Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention.

Joann Freeman: Well, that’s gonna do it for us today. Do get in touch. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or, send us an email to Backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Speaker 1: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the Arts, the Humanities, and the Environment.

Speaker 9: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and Professor Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joann Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.