Pain, Death, and Silence in Texas Prisons in the 1930S
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`A DARK CLOUD WILL GO OVER' Pain, Death, and Silence in Texas Prisons in the 1930s ETHAN BLUE Risk managers and health officials in the sist; because, in a very real sense, all Texas Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisoners suffer from the injury of being today record a category of injury under caught in-between. Their expulsion from the curious title `Caught In-Between'. the ranks of citizens has led to their social There are a great many others, whose expendability. No longer are they among meanings are more evident: Slips, Trips those whose lives are protected by the and Falls; Chemical poisoning; Struck state, but they are not dead, either. For them, caught in-between becomes a state By/Against; Over-Exertion; Aggressive 2 Behavior. `Caught In-Between' is defined of being. as `a pinch point type injury that involves The history of legal punishment tells a mashing or squeezing', including `caught troubling story of the centralisation of in a door, between pulley, door shut on physical pain and death across a spectrum foot, etc'. Prisons, of course, are full of of medical and disciplinary practices. In these pinch points. Spaces are opened only the twentieth-century United States, penal to be sealed, passages are created with the death drew upon two distinct historical express purpose of shutting them again, currents. One was the legal execution for locking off prisoners from the rest of the crimes against morality, property, the world. Automated doors open and close, person and the sovereign, which origin- gates slam shut. Hydraulic pistons are un- ated in early modern Europe and took root forgiving. Unsurprising, then, that a hand, across colonial America. The second was a foot, or a life might be crushed Ð caught the social death of racial, chattel slavery in-between.1 in the American South.3 After the Civil In previous years, injuries specified as War, the legal status of the prisoner joined caught in-between would have been both currents into a new form of living known simply as accidents Ð a catch-all death: Ruffin v Commonwealth (1871) ruled that the prisoner is `a slave of the state. He category that hid as much as it told of how 4 a person was injured or killed. The new is civiliter mortuus', civilly dead. When differentiation of ways of listing injuries the state retracted Ð or never extended parallels the ongoing modernisation of Ð its guarantees of the protection of life Texas prisons, and their techniques of risk and property, biological death was always management. Despite such markers of a short step away. Postcolonial critic progress, injuries, illness and deaths per- Achille Mbembe described this existence 5 Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 2. 2007 as living in a death-world. His description the South, prisoners died by means that of necropolitics, the inverse of the Foucaul- ranged across a medical, legal and illegal dian notion of biopolitical sustenance of spectrum: from state sanctions like capital citizens' lives, is applicable to incarcera- execution to diseases like tuberculosis; tion: `kept alive but in a state of injury, in from `accidental' drowning to gunshot a phantom-like world of horrors and in- wounds; from inmate stabbings to sun- tense cruelty and profanity'.5 stroke. Some were listed as `natural' deaths Texas is a good place to explore pain by prison officials, others as violent illegal and death in American punishment, and killings, others still as executions fully the 1930s, seen by many as the birth of approved by the state. the modern American state, are a good But the line between these kinds of time to do so. Despite widespread poverty death was not always clear, and decisions during the Great Depression, the 1930s as to where it was drawn were subjective. held real promise. American liberalism In fact Ð and this insight extends beyond made great strides under Franklin the prison Ð there is no such thing as Roosevelt's New Deal, which expanded dying of `natural causes.' Death is a condi- the regulatory-welfare state to protect tion of life, but belief in death from `natur- American citizens' lives from economic al causes' is based on an understanding of crisis. These benefits were not evenly dis- nature as a pre-cultural, non-political, state tributed, however. White male industrial of being. All lives, and their ends, are in- workers gained the most, while white variably shaped by cultural practices, the women and people of colour, who worked power relations of which are always histor- in domestic or agricultural labour, ical, and always political.8 When three garnered far fewer protections; neverthe- black men died on a single day from `the less, important gains were made.6 Equally heat' on Clemens State Farm in 1930, the promising, lynch violence was finally dis- Texas Prison Board determined that these appearing across the South, and the deaths could not have been prevented: Southern convict lease system went into `The evidence show[s] that the utmost care a legislated 50-year remission. These were was taken to prevent these unfortunate material benefits of the New Deal order. circumstances, and that the death of these three men is not the fault of the employees Yet even granting that liberalism's un- 9 equal benefits were structured by race and of Clemens State Farm.' In extant records, gender, the New Deal had a still darker the deaths were caused by `heat exhaus- underside. Non-citizens, including hun- tion' rather than human actions, and un- dreds of thousands of Mexican nationals, fortunate circumstances, as uncontrollable were expelled from the nation in what one as the weather. scholar called a `twilight zone between These black men's death from `heat voluntary and forced migration'.7 Prison exhaustion' at everyday labour under the populations also dramatically expanded, state's care reveals the prison's function a condition made more dire by a prolifera- in institutionalizing a zone of indistinction tion of capital executions. Within growing between life and death for those marked carceral institutions, and particularly in as criminal.10 It also reveals a shift from 6 ‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’ nineteenth-century to twentieth-century with the many forms of social, civil, and modes of state formation. In the nineteenth biological death behind bars, and with century, racist lynch violence bolstered what activist-scholar Dylan Rodríguez has the relatively weak state. Twentieth-cen- identified as a `logic of death' in imprison- tury criminal justice differed in crucial ment. Such reconsideration must acknow- ways, but nevertheless continued to ledge prison abolition, rather than just guarantee a new racial and economic or- death penalty abolition movements.13 der. While the modern state might protect Yet, it is hard to know a great deal and extend subjects' lives in innovative about death. It is a difficult subject under ways, it would also permit degrees of any circumstances, `for dying is the exper- death for unruly and racially degraded ience of slipping beyond the social world criminals, as crucial Others to the category of affects and signification'.14 Death in of the citizen. prison is doubly inaccessible because so Too often scholars have treated lynch much is deliberately hidden. Even for violence, incarceration and capital punish- those inside, death, and its threat, enforces ment separately. The most common period- a veil of silence. A black Texas prisoner isation of lynch violence, which begins in once explained that just talking about how the 1880s and ends in 1930, is a symptom someone died might be dangerous. of this tendency, and meshes with the You actually can©t tell how nothing progressive story of the arrival of the happened. You got to go on the modern liberal state.11 Charles J. Ogletree, side with them if you want to live Jr. and Austin Sarat's recent From the a long time ¼ Lynch Mob to the Killing State does well to stress the connection between nineteenth- You may be cuttin© wood and they century lynch violence and twenty-first- say, ©He was cuttin© wood and a century legal execution, yet analyses cap- tree fell on him.© All the rest of the ital punishment as if it exists in isolation guys say, ©How©d he get killed?© from other carceral forms. Artificially de- Say, ©He was cuttin© and got coupling lynching, ordinary punishment, trapped by a tree.' and the death penalty has allowed many You can never tell. Things I actu- scholars to neglect a broader critique of ally seen here and things that actu- prisons. Ogletree and Sarat write, `Today, ally happened Ð you got to lie, capital punishment is the new ªpeculiar you got to lie. You tell just how it institutionº in American society', implying happened, a dark cloud will go that capital punishment, rather than the over you, and nobody never know mass carceral system of which it is a part, what became of you. You runned 12 is the genealogical descendant of slavery. away. ©Did he get away?© ©Yeah, he I disagree. It is but one element within the got away.© necropolitical regime of American incarcer- He got away in a shallow pit grave ation and its central role in modern and somewhere, in them woods some- late-modern state formation. In order to where. Ain©t nobody can come fulfil their broader political and conceptual aims, death-penalty scholars must reckon 7 Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 2. 2007 back here and tell a report but teenth and early twentieth centuries. them. So that©s the way that goes.15 White men, anxious about their patriarch- al authority in the postbellum world (and You never can tell.