[On October 27th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]
On why it’s okay
to turn a prison into a tourist attraction—and what we could do instead.
San Francisco’s Pier 39 is one of the more interesting tourist areas I’ve
seen—because of its unique origin point, as the site of an annual (and now
seemingly permanent) gathering of sea lions; because of the collection of stores and games and entertainments that has
sprung up around that focal point, making the pier feel a bit like a
combination of Coney Island and the Mall of America; and because it’s also the
launching point for tours and explorations of Alcatraz, the island, National Park, and former federal prison in San Francisco Bay. As
a result of that latter connection to The Rock (the penitentiary, not the
action film starring Connery and Cage at their most, well, Connery and Cage),
Pier 39 also houses the Alcatraz Gift Shop, a store where you can buy, among countless other things, baby clothes
designed to look like inmates’ apparel (right down to the numbered nametags).
When I first
encountered the gift shop, I found it in pretty poor taste, a crass
commercialization of a site where over a thousand Americans were imprisoned, many for life and all in the most bleak maximum security conditions. I’d
still say that’s part of the story, although the gift shop’s earnings do
support the National Park and thus (as I understand it) the very deserving
National Park Service as a whole. But I would also say that the gift shop, like
the National Park, like the tours and explorations of the island, and perhaps
even like the action film, although that would be a stretch at best, has the
potential to connect tourists and visitors to the history of the prison—and
that such a connection, like any burgeoning historical interest, could lead as
well to further investigation and engagement with issues in the present, with
the broader histories and stories of America’s prisons and prisoners. I’ve long
since come to the conclusion that almost any method of engaging Americans with
our histories, as long as it doesn’t blatantly misrepresent or falsify that
past, is worthwhile, and certainly the Alcatraz tourism industry has the
potential to produce such engagement.
On the other
hand, there’s another Alcatraz history, one located after the prison’s 1963
closure and before its 1973 opening as a National Park, that isn’t part of the
gift shop at all, nor, I would argue, much present in the island’s tourist
narratives more broadly. That’s the 1969 takeover of the island by a group of
Native Americans affiliated with the American Indian Movement; this particular community called themselves “Indians of All Tribes” and
hoped to turn the island into a cultural center. During the nearly two years of occupation, this
activist effort certainly succeeded in raising awareness and changing national conversations, although (as was the case with each AIM endeavor) it
also produced unintended acts of destruction and violence. The history of the
occupation is thus a complex one, connected to longer-term and even more
complex histories and obviously unable to be turned into a gift shop product;
but why couldn’t Alcatraz become the site of a cultural center, one that could
include not only Native American communities and stories but those of the many
other cultures that have called and continued to call the Bay Area home? Not
sure I can imagine a more inspiring future for a former prison.
Next
prison story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d
highlight?
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