Walls

When people build walls, at some point other people are going to throw things at them.

If you think about it, walls are one of the most defining characteristics of human civilization. Not only are they universal, but they also universally define human social relationships. As such, they have also indirectly influenced human identity.

The basic function of a wall is to separate. The decision to separate one thing from another, or to divide up this or that space, has much more social significance than one might immediately suspect. Throughout history, these decisions have defined family relations, have divided public from private space, have symbolically defined sacred space, have represented racial and ethnic distinctions, have defined nation-states, have designated battle lines, have represented ideological divides, and have differentiated the criminal from the citizen.

Many times the separation created by wall building produces or represents mutual resistance, causing (or indicating) changes to the cultures on either side of the walls. Some of these changes are imperceptible. But most are recognized within the cultures themselves. Frequently, the changes are known and embraced.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to recall the history of wall building—which is a history of conflict. More frustrating still is the fact that most of these conflicts have been irrational and in a profound sense anti-human. In retrospect, we wonder how in the world the German people could have participated in the Holocaust (preceded by the removal and confinement of European Jews); how the United States could have interned Japanese Americans during the Second World War; or how the Berlin wall could have ever been deemed a necessity by the Soviet Union.

Prisons, obviously, are all about walls. It is certainly true that we have come a long way from the days when the criminal would be pilloried or executed in the public square. As grateful as we are for the improvement, there are many of us who feel, nevertheless, that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. In the humanizing process that rendered the pillory and the hangman's noose obscene and obsolete, replaced by the confinement of the prison, the public context of criminal justice has been abandoned by the justice process. Public influence upon the mind and heart of the criminal has been removed. The face-to-face phenomenon that places the criminal in the midst of society, confronting him or her with the legitimate social condemnation and the necessary restorative conditions laid out by the public body, has ceased to exist.

The absolute separation of the criminal from the public space seems to be at the root of the anti-social nature of prison culture. Prison culture is a classic resistance culture, created within the walls of facilities breeding social ecologies that have developed in response to being alienated from the wider society and its regulative norms.

One must remember, laws, especially criminal laws, require widespread acceptance and adherence by a general culture that contains such laws as norms of social behavior. Without people who share a common culture, laws are not followed, much less respected.

A common refrain in prison is, “It may be like that on the streets, but this is prison.” That “but” contains the key insight to which I want to draw attention. The absolute removal of criminal justice from the public space has enabled an anti-social resistance culture to develop in the nation's prisons—a culture, the norms of which have developed in the course of resisting and opposing the laws of wider society.

Inmates instinctively understand this as they move back and forth between cultures, experiencing life on both sides of the walls. But I think we all would do well to understand this in connection with the history of the failure of all prison rehabilitation models—the object of which has always been the reconciliation of the criminal with society through reform of attitude and behavior—originally introduced in the prisons as a way of reconciling the criminal with society.

These models have literally been in a constant state of “reform” since the origins of the prison system approximately 200 years ago. (Many of us have been hearing about prison reform for as long as we can remember!)

Reforms repeatedly fail not because they are intrinsically bad (some are, but some aren't). Rather, they fail because they have been hamstrung by the very nature of the walls of the supporting system. The state of constant reform clearly testifies to this fact.

The penal model of absolute separation—physical, social, and interpersonal—seems to be responsible for the failure of prison reform programs, and the development of the resultant, and far more serious, anti-social nature of prison culture.

Obviously the problem is more complex than this. Criminals come to prison because they have already exhibited anti-social behaviors. But although a different set of circumstances and issues are needed to explain this original anti-sociality, the force of the fact that the absolute removal of the criminal from society is a primary factor in the development of anti-social prison culture, should not be minimized.

Absolute separation and removal is appealing because it is easy and convenient. Citizens enlist paid professionals to shoulder the hard work of criminal justice. But no professional force can ever replace the force of the public space. Its force is the force of the whole. And the whole must maintain a regulative role over the part, especially the errant part, so as to ensure that that part does not become of itself a whole in and of itself, with a resistant relationship to the whole. So that it does not begin throwing things at the walls.

Because the fact remains—most criminals come back. They re-enter society every day by the hundreds; but now as foreigners rather than errant parts. Prison, in many cases, has taught them social norms and values in direct opposition to those established in the wider society. They have experienced a kind of alienation and separation from society that they could never have experienced previously, even while engaged in their criminal behaviors. And this experience has in many cases further removed from the criminal the social norms and values needed for successful social reintegration. And like the foreigner who reverts to his or her native language and custom when confronted with adversity or resistance, at the first sight of trouble the criminal reverts to what he or she has come to know best, which is the attitude and behaviors native to the prison.