[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 the message
the Man in Black still has for us—if we can ever start to hear it.
In this
very early post on my colleague and friend Ian
Williams’ work with prison inmates (which I reposted yesterday as part of
this series), I made the case that the incarcerated might well represent the
most forgotten or elided American community (and that they’re in that bleak
conversation in any case). I wish I could say that anything has changed in the
nearly four years since I made that case [NB. This post originally appeared in September
2014, but once again I believe it fully holds up more than a decade later], but
I don’t believe it has; perhaps Orange
is the New Black will help produce a sea-change in our awareness of and
attitudes toward those millions of incarcerated Americans, and perhaps the proposed
federal changes in drug-related sentencing will begin to make a dent in
those shocking numbers, but as of right now it seems to me that the prison industrial
complex is only growing in size and strength.
More than fifty
years ago, one of the most iconic 20th century American artists and
voices began a career’s worth of efforts to force us to think about the world
and life of our prisons. I had some critical things to say about Johnny Cash in
this post, so it’s more than fair that I pay respect here to one of his
most impressive and interesting attributes: his consistent attention to that
setting and its experiences and communities, from the 1955 song “Folsom Prison Blues”
through his many prison performances, culminating (but by no means concluding)
in the groundbreaking live albums At Folsom Prison (1968) and At San Quentin
(1969). My friend and fellow AmericanStudier
Jonathan Silverman identifies Cash’s trip to Folsom as one of the Nine
Choices through which Cash most reflected and influenced American
culture, and I would go further: it was one of the most unique and significant
moments in any American artistic career.
Or it should
been that significant, at least. Forty-five years later, with our collective
awareness, understanding, and attitudes toward prisoners seemingly more
negative than ever (although studies like this 2002 one
give some reason for hope in that regard), I don’t know that Cash’s clear
recognition of the shared humanity between himself and those prisoners—and,
implicitly but clearly, between those prisoners and every other audience to
whom Cash performed—has reached his fellow Americans in any consistent way. That
might seem like a given, recognizing prisoners’ humanity—but when I read and
hear frequent
critiques of prisoner access to exercise and health facilities, to media,
to decent food, to liveable conditions, to any of the things that seem to
define American life as we generally argue for it, I’m not at all sure that
such recognition is widespread. Perhaps we must first, to quote another prison
song (sung by a man who did his own
time for drug-related offenses), Steve Earle’s “The Truth”
(2002), “Admit that what scares you is the me in you.”
Last
prison story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d
highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment