Behind the Razor Wire
Michael Jacobson-Hardy
“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
—Eugene Debs
In 1991, I began photographing in prisons and jails as a way of furthering my understanding of social class and race in the United States. I wanted to learn more about the people who fill these institutions. What are some of the social conditions that lead to incarceration? The first jail that I documented was Deer Island jail in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Male voices echoed against the cold cement walls of the three tiers of cells. “Hey picture man, take my picture. Hey motherfucker, get me out of this shit hole!” The volume of voices swelled as I stood on the floor, peering at the men inside the steel and concrete cages. Inside the maximum-security section, heavy steel bars enclosed three tiers of six-by-eight foot cells. Some of the bars had been pried apart slightly. They were black and roughened with age. A spiral staircase stood in the far corner of the narrow walkway. A guard was stationed on the second tier. At first the place was quiet, a deadening silence interrupted only by an occasional prisoner’s voice muttering obscenities. Many prisoners struck tough poses, perhaps to ward off a sense of powerlessness or to quell their fears. Some complained about poor conditions, overcrowding, and bad food.
I asked if I could go down onto the main floor and speak directly with the prisoners. The lieutenant warned that photographing from the floor might be risky—that the men were apt to yell obscenities at me. Some might spit at me or even urinate on me. I decided to take my chances and asked one young black man if I could take his picture. He nodded in agreement, then stood motionless, his olive-drab prison suit unzipped to his waist, revealing a long scar on his stomach. Epithets ricocheted down the narrow corridor of concrete walls and barred windows. The group of prison officials assigned to take me through the jail became anxious to leave this section. The lieutenant motioned for me to move on. I made my last photograph and left the maximum-security section, the voices of the angry men fading into the distance.
I photographed the medium-security cellblocks. These cells were dark, each lit sparingly by a single bare bulb that hung from above. The floors were concrete. “I’ll get out if I have to kill every screw in the joint” was scrawled on one wall. Stainless steel toilets had been installed in 1971. Prior to that, inmates used buckets that they emptied each morning. Gradually the prisoners returned and surrounded me while I photographed their cells.
Massachusetts has a multi-level prison system consisting of state prisons and county jails. County jails like Deer Island incarcerate people for up to two and a half years; state prisons usually hold men and women for longer periods of time. Jail inmates are often young men who have committed less serious offenses. In recent years, however, the trend toward mixing serious and minor offenders has developed. With the high costs of building prisons and with fewer municipal funds available at the local level for jail construction, the state has gotten into the business of financing county jails. It costs $50,000-$100,000 to build a prison cell and another $29,604 per year to lock someone inside one. In order to get state money, county jails must agree to take state prisoners who are often more violent and pose a threat to less dangerous inmates.
From 1991 through 1996, I photographed inside several state prisons and county jails in Massachusetts. I received clearance from the Department of Corrections in Boston to photograph at the North Central Correctional Institution in Gardner, a medium-security state prison. I drove up the hill to the Outer Control building and parked in a lot full of official vehicles. Like Deer Island Jail, NCCI had an unusual history. Before 1981, the prison had been used as a mental institution. The buildings were surrounded by two razor wire fences, with a high voltage wire, sandwiched in between them. A dazed man, handcuffed and shackled, was brought up the stone steps to the prison entrance.
At MCI-Shirley, row upon row of faceless prison buildings loomed on the horizon. MCI-Shirley is one of the newer medium-security state prisons. After the usual security checks, I was taken into the living units in time for “count”—the daily routine of locking all of the inmates in their cells and counting them. Some yelled back at the guards in protest but they were finally locked down. This was the first time I saw a female CO (correctional officer) in a men’s prison. I listened while the men hurled obscenities at her. I imagined how difficult this must be for her. But she told me, “It’s just a job. I try not to take it too personally.” The cells were antiseptic. No pictures were seen on the walls. I was surprised by how young the guards were. One of them remarked that prison jobs were among the most secure jobs in the country. “It’s either this or the army,” he said.
I photographed the Charles Street Jail in Boston where many well-known prisoners did time, including Malcolm X. Festering toilets and corroded sinks hung from the dank cell walls. The jail had been the subject of numerous lawsuits and had finally been closed. Four tiers of cells fanned out from the central control station.
Later, I arrived at MCI-Framingham, the nation’s first women’s prison. Founded in 1879, it had once been a place where unmarried women were incarcerated for adultery and other breaches of “public morality.” I opened the heavy steel red doors at the entrance and approached a woman behind a glass window. I told her that I had a ten o’clock appointment. Lieutenant Land had been assigned to take me through the prison. I put all of my belongings in a locker and passed through the metal detector. As we approached the main gate, a buzzer rang and two doors automatically opened and locked shut behind us. Land led me to the modular units where it had been decided that I would photograph five women. The lieutenant held the paperwork in her hand.
A black woman sat on her bunk and looked outside her barred window. I told her that she shouldn’t feel obliged to smile for the camera. “I have no problem with that,” she said. “I never smile. What’s there to smile about in this place? I feel sad all the time.” “When do I get out of here?” she asked staring off into space. One of the women suggested that I might use a different camera angle. She told me that she would like to be a photographer someday.
Two women posed next to each other for their portrait. The one on the left had the AIDS virus. “Got it using dirty needles,” she said. She would probably spend the final days of her life inside prison as a result of her own self-inflicted abuse. Both women were repeat offenders. One had been back to MCI-Framingham twelve times, the other ten. I left the modular unit and was taken to a more secure section of the prison where newly admitted women were housed in padlocked cells. I asked the lieutenant what crimes these women had committed. She told me that most of the women were incarcerated for larceny, prostitution, using and selling drugs, armed robbery, and murder. Many have children who were in the care of relatives or court-appointed foster parents.
I watched as women sewed the American flag in the prison industries program. Some of them worked for fifty cents an hour, enough to buy cigarettes at the prison canteen. Across the street was the now closed General Motors plant. Its expansive parking lot was completely empty. The parking lot at MCI-Framingham by contrast, was nearly full. The prison industry has become one of largest growth industries in the United States, competing with education, health, and welfare for tax dollars.
Lieutenant Land greeted many of the women by name as we walked the grounds. “I get to know them,” she said. “Many of these women are repeat offenders. They get out and, in six months or so, they’re back. They may leave prison but when they return, they remember me. It’s as if they never left.”
I next went to Walpole to photograph at MCI-Cedar Junction. In the 1980s the townspeople decided that they didn’t want the city of Walpole to be synonymous with the state’s only maximum-security prison. So they held a contest and changed the name from MCI-Walpole to MCI-Cedar Junction, after an abandoned nearby railroad station.
The white concrete prison walls and shotgun towers rise up from a wooded area like a medieval fortress. I entered the main building and was given a copy of a media booklet and looked it over briefly. It explained that during the history of the electric chair from 1901 to 1947, 65 men were executed. Then in the early 1970s, the electric chair was destroyed by the inmates during one of the many uprisings during that period. From 1948 until the death penalty was abolished in 1972, no one was executed even though there were men under the death penalty. These people had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. All of this could change, however, since Massachusetts Governor William Weld, a former state prosecutor, has petitioned members of the legislature every year since his term began as governor in 1992, to reinstate the death penalty.
My tour began in the superintendent’s office where I was told what I could and could not photograph, and that in the event of a disturbance at the prison, no pictures could be taken. We toured the most notorious Departmental Segregation Unit in the prison, known as Ten Block. Allegations of prisoner abuse in this area have circulated among members of the general prison population for years.
I also had an opportunity to photograph the multi-million dollar Departmental Disciplinary Unit, which was put to use in 1992. I photographed isolation units in which prisoners were deprived of sensory stimulation for long periods of time. The guard at the central control station watched them on a series of video monitors. The prisoners were locked behind heavy steel doors for twenty-three hours a day and allowed only occasional solitary exercise in the “kennels”, cages enclosed by chain-link fences. Referring to poor recreation facilities, one prisoner cried out, “Show him the real yard. You spend millions of fuckin’ dollars to hold us here and don’t give us the shit that’s legally ours.”
Isolation in the segregation units is used as a tool by the guards to control and punish inmates. Those in the Department Disciplinary Unit can earn up to four visits per month by staying “disciplinary report” free but, in recent years all contact visits have been taken away at the prison. Visits now take place behind glass walls and are monitored by guards.
Meanwhile, inside the prison industries building some men earned fifty cents an hour stamping license plates, manufacturing brooms, and ironing prison uniforms. I watched a man silk-screen the Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I photographed at the Hampden County House of Correction. The high-tech $75 million concrete, steel and glass fortress, the envy of any public education system in the country, was built on a swamp. Today’s high-tech prisons are no longer built with bars. These have been replaced by heavy steel doors and narrow window slits. The drone of prison voices is no longer heard in these units since inmates are locked in soundproof enclosures for longer periods of time. Prison psychologists report seeing more and more inmates with symptoms of paranoia caused by lengthily stays in these new enclosures. The transition from the old jail to this new, high-tech prison was difficult for many of the inmates who were also required not to smoke. The place was completely sterile. No pictures were allowed on the walls. The adjustment was so hard that during the initial move from the York Street jail, in Springfield, some of the inmates had even tried to get relocated to the maximum-security prison in Walpole, claiming that the new antiseptic facility was driving them crazy.
As a response to growing public pressure, fed by fears of violent crime, state governments are building more prisons. In 1995, Massachusetts Governor William Weld petitioned members of the state legislature to pass a $705 million bond issue to build 5,000 new prison cells. In an effort to dramatize his political agenda, he airlifted 299 of the state’s least dangerous inmates to a Dallas, Texas jail. State prison officials claimed that the airlift was done to ease prison and jail overcrowding. In February, 1996, the Massachusetts legislature passed a smaller $483 million bond bill to construct and repair several prisons and jails in the commonwealth. A disappointed Governor Weld chastised members of the legislature over the reduced bond bill claiming that “the Legislature didn’t want to charge into the future.”
Prisons in Massachusetts continue to be overcrowded and are currently operating at 150% of capacity. A 1994 Massachusetts House of Representatives study concluded that “The [governor’s] construction program [alone] could cost the Commonwealth $150 million annually and a billion dollars over the life of the bonds, and would not reduce overcrowding.” No matter how many new prisons are built, the fact is that every prison cell in them will be filled. New tough laws, including mandatory minimums and stringent anti-drug laws have flooded our prisons. Increasingly, they have become warehouses for people of color and victims of poverty, alienation, and abuse.
Over the next 10 years, it is estimated that taxpayers will pay $450 million to run the new $75 million Hampden County House of Correction in Ludlow. An official at the jail told me that in ten years, prison spending would probably bankrupt the state. Is this how we, as a society, should be allocating our precious resources? Should we be focusing on prevention rather than retribution?
At the same time, we seem to have replaced the ideal of rehabilitation with the harsh logic of retribution, but does this really make sense? Is this the way we should be spending our money and limited social resources? Does this promise to resolve the problem or does it, in fact, contribute to it further? Should we instead be focusing our attention on the sources of crime, on eliminating racism, poverty, neglect and abuse?
I asked my probation officer friend what he thought was the solution to the crisis in corrections today. He pointed to his 2-year-old son and said, “Take care of them when they’re little.” George Counter, former superintendent of the Holyoke Public Schools, one of the poorest school districts in Massachusetts, told me, “It cost $75 million to build the jail in Ludlow. It costs only $12,000 a year to pay for a Head Start teacher. So you can pay me now—or pay me later.”