Prisons and Floods in the United States Interrogating Notions of Social and Spatial Control

Prisons and Floods in the United States Interrogating Notions of Social and Spatial Control By Hannah Hauptman, Yale University On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped across the state dream of full social order, both inside and outside Southern Louisiana, rupturing New Orleans’ levees and of the prison. Strict protocols, concrete beds, steel-barred scouring a place for itself among the costliest and most poorly windows and pacing guards imply that this dream has, managed disasters in contemporary history. On that fateful in fact, been realized. Yet foods, amongst other natural August morning, an inmate at the Orleans Parish Prison disasters, provide an avenue for chaos to move through the recalled, “we awake to fnd water up to our knees and no seemingly indestructible barriers of the prison. Troughout security.”1 Te water would eventually rise to the inmates’ the twentieth century and into the twenty-frst, foods have necks. As another inmate recounted, “it was like we were left threatened or necessitated emergency evacuations of prisons, to die. No water, no air, no food.”2 As the wealthy and the free as well as the movement of inmates out of prisons to work fed the city, inmates in local prisons—whose impregnable on food protection and rescue. Only by examining both the walls held frm while the once-impregnable levees crumbled— theoretical parallels and the historical convergences between were left locked in their cells. Hurricane Katrina brutally these two systems of control can we uncover their surprisingly illustrated the confict between the apparent order of prisons intimate relationship. Recovered narratives from fooded and the chaos of foods, revealing the diferentiated value of prisons, wherein the uncontrollable met the impenetrable, life placed on incarcerated individuals and troubling notions thus provide a historical nexus for the critical deconstruction of maximum security or absolute protection. Yet while of state ambitions for complete social and spatial control. Hurricane Katrina provided a particularly stark example Teories of social and environmental control envision of the violent convergence of criminal and food controls, total mastery over subversion and lawlessness, over crime Katrina was not a unique event. Tese two structures of social and catastrophe. When put into practice, these hubristic and spatial control cooperated and clashed throughout the theories carry racist implications and often reinforce the 20th century, leaving behind an obscured, complex historical other’s oppressive efects. Te frst section of this paper briefy record that demands greater scholarly attention. analyzes the discursive parallels between these two forms of At frst glance, systems of levees and systems of prisons control and the lived efects of these similarities. Te second appear unrelated. Te former focuses on rivers and food section of this paper spatially situates these consequences control. Te latter focuses on social norms and controlling through a discussion of the historical geography of prisons illicit human behavior. Yet the vocabularies used to debate in the United States. Many of the U.S.’s largest prisons lie food prevention and criminal justice techniques closely alongside rivers, tucked riskily into the vast foodplains of parallel one another. Furthermore, the two systems have the Mississippi River or coastal waterways. For many of these physically intersected with a perverse frequency, as the state prisons, their locations are a vestigial remnant of the prisons’ consistently builds prisons on vulnerable foodplains. Tough former days as farms and plantations. For a shrinking but the state has always been and continues to be willing to place signifcant number, such as Louisiana’s Angola Penitentiary incarcerated bodies in areas with a high risk of fooding and or Mississippi’s Parchman Farms, this history lives in the thus physical danger, the design and function of a prison’s day-to-day motions of inmates’ involuntary agricultural architecture conceals the potential chaos implied—and labor. Even for prisons with no history of agricultural historically speaking, frequently realized—by a prison’s production, the state still undervalued incarcerated bodies proximity to foodwaters. and correspondingly deemphasized food risks when selecting Much like imposing, federally-backed levee systems, prison locations. Conditions of environmental catastrophe prisons project an “architecture of control” that refects like fooding exposed the way American social structures value lives on a diferentiated scale, with incarcerated lives situated at the lowest point both literally and fguratively. Te 1 Inmate #13, “Testimonials from Inmates Incarcerated at third and longest section of this paper further historicizes the Orleans Parish Prison during Hurricane Katrina,” American relationship between prisons, prisoners and foods, putting Civil Liberties Union, ACLU.org, n.d.. a diverse array of historical voices into conversation. Tis 2 Inmate #19, Ibid. 99 historical discussion, combined with broader theoretical and historical transformation has not been solely legal or cultural linguistic juxtapositions, reveals the fragility concealed and but also spatial and environmental; incarceration molds the even created by the projected stability of these twin systems geography of black communities (and often renders them and their quests for perfect control. more vulnerable to fooding) while the power relations of slavery are re-inscribed into the cell blocks and guard towers Teory and Praxis of State Control: Parallel Discourses on of American prisons. Prisons and Floods French social theorist Michel Foucault’s work complicates the American history of racial injustice that Social theorists and scholars who study social and engages many contemporary scholars. Alexander and environmental control ponder interchangeable questions: they Davis focus on the prison’s spatial relationship to the ask how a state bends unruly forces to its will and the costs of outside world—to the landscape, to the alluvial plantation- attaining these ambitions. Social control critics must address quality soils, to broader racial geographies of education spatial control through their discussions of architecture, and housing—and thus they conclude that the prison is a landscape and the built environment, while scholars of uniquely American historical product. Foucault, on the other environmental control invariably highlight the social goals of hand, emphasizes the self-contained spatial relationships any environmental improvement or management scheme. In within the prison—that of the guard to the inmate or the turn, public policymakers and practitioners—the engineers inmates to each other. In doing so, he concludes that the of these state systems of control—approach prison and food prison is philosophical, rather than only historical, born of engineering with the same mindsets and techniques. But Jeremy Bentham and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His spatial these two nodes of organization, whether discussed in the analysis of criminal control is more abstract, and it focuses theoretical or the imminent, do not simply run in fascinating on the prison’s interior structure.5 He writes that “he who is parallel, but rather intersect via instances of fooded or subjected to a feld of visibility, and who knows it, assumes almost-fooded prisons. Tis section seeks to properly situate responsibility for the constraints of power […] he inscribes in these historical intersections by exploring the illustrative himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays parallels between social and environmental control theory and both roles.”6 Tis renders the incarcerated subject able to be practice. “subjected, used, transformed and improved.”7 In Te Prison Social theorists studying prisons may not explicitly and the American Imagination, Caleb Smith summarizes the incorporate theories of environmental control into their fundamental tension that results from an inward or outward work, but their language refects the inherent spatiality of conception of prisons, asking “does the contemporary prison incarceration. Angela Davis historicizes the American prison descend from the plantation, or from the [Enlightenment’s] system by emphasizing the transition from “the prison of penitentiary?”8 Yet in spite of these etiological conficts, slavery to the slavery of prison.”3 Whether this historicism is theorists all emphasize the spatiality of the architecture correct is a question that engages many other contemporary of control. In deconstructing the form of social control scholars, including Michelle Alexander and James Forman expressed in prisons, scholars reckon with, either indirectly Jr.4 Despite their debates, these academics recognize that this or directly, questions of environmental control through their confrontation of physicality and spatiality. Conversely, scholars who focus on historical and 3 Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. by Joy James (Blackwell Publishers, contemporary schemes of environmental control take care to 1998), 74. See also: Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 27. highlight the subtler motives of social control that undergird 4 Alexander argues that harsh contemporary drug sentencing these state projects. Edward Abbey’s bold claim that “the policy has disproportionally targeted Black men and has recreated a de facto system of ostracization, cyclical poverty and imprisonment that early to mid 20th century Jim Crow laws

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