"Surely the State Is the Sewer"

I arrive in Philadelphia only a little later than I planned to leave. A beautiful iron work gate that I think my dad would like graces the front door of my friend Dave's place, which he shares with other organizer folks, in West Philly. While the only house left on the block (another building’s next door), the house feels tucked into the wild garden (and cat haunt) in the adjacent lot. A trolley line runs down the street to downtown.

I make my first stop here to visit Eastern State Penitentiary. I’m fascinated by the place that Quakers advocated as an improvement over the city jail and rehabilitative reform (they’ve since issued an apology). While not the first penitentiary in the nation, Eastern State (followed by Sing Sing in New York) became a model for prison construction around the world. By the time it was built, it was the most expensive government building constructed to date and had the most modern of infrastructure: plumbing for fresh water and sewer and central heat.

Both of these details sit with me – what does it say about this nation’s ethical and spiritual (in the broadest sense) commitments that the most expensive building would be a penitentiary – the latest of technological and social marvels? What does it mean that this represented a forward-looking, if not righteous, reform?

When talking about this later with Dave, I recall a series of recent articles on Homeland Security’s announcement that it would be reforming the existing system of detention where immigrants are confined in some 350 ICE detention facilities (public & private), and city and county jails. ICE is forming a new Office of Detention Policy and Planning that will be charged with creating what ICE director John Morton called a “truly civil detention system.” The New York Times touted the move to regularize the patchwork system as “humane.” It feels like a moment akin to the establishment of ESP; how does “truly civil detention” so easily slip to “humane”?

In equating “humane” with “civil,” the Times concedes detention as humane, and fails to question detention as the civilized “solution” to migration. Stories printed elsewhere report that the “new detention centers will be more like secure dorms than jails.” The imagery of detention as a supervised summer camp or college living experience is part of the humanistic appeal of this reform. As when prison reformers who brought about Eastern State railed against the co-mingling of people who had committed different crimes in local jails, the Times claims that the problem is that the current system is too much “like a system to warehouse and punish dangerous criminals, which immigration violators overwhelmingly are not.”

The Times paints everyone in the criminal justice system as already criminal and dangerous, but this move to separate the good from the bad offender will ease the formalization of civil (in the legal sense) detention, making it a permanent feature in the political landscape. The equation of “secure” with “safety” obscures coerced confinement as an issue of freedom and of punishment, and the abuses that inevitably take place in such conditions. But this distinction between civil and criminal offenses won’t mean safety, just expansion of facilities and categories of acts that are jail-able. Indeed, even with alternatives to detention like ankle bracelets, ICE director Morton has said: "I don't think the overall number of detention beds will decrease significantly. It will remain roughly the same."

The significance of the formalization of detention was shrouded by the announcement that DHS would close the Hutto family detention center in Texas, which has been the site of concerted activist pressure. This will leave the nearby Berks family detention center as the only one in the nation, which county officials are apparently reconsidering because they’re not making enough money from the contracts.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. On our drive across the city to Eastern State, Dave tells me about what’s been going on in the city. Over the summer there have been several shootings in his neighborhood, and within blocks the row houses turn to (small) mansions as we approach the Penn neighborhood. We pass by MOVE’s new house and then the more stately rowhouses near Eastern State, which are once again in the favor of the gentry. Philadelphia faces a $1 billion budget shortfall, and the mayor’s latest budget promises to cut staffing at parks to 15 total, reduce the numbers of trash pick-ups, and there have been talks of closing the city pools. The cooler weather’s not exactly the reprieve residents would want for such an essential facility, but the successful pushback on closing city libraries is significant, and folks have also been organizing around the pools.

And so, “Surely the state is the sewer,” as Dominique Laporte wrote. And so now the prison is still being built with the latest technologies even as Philly and other cities crumble. Prison construction brought us the sewer, but now the sewers and other essential infrastructures are sacrificed to the prison. Yet, as when ESP was new, people lament how prisoners have services that the rest of folks do not. This lament is a desire to make conditions inside worse rather than treating the expansion of prison as part and parcel of the crumbling of living conditions on the outside. The extent to which the prison will be seen in contradiction to the prisons or schools or health care or roads will be a matter of political education and recognition that the reforms instituted for the inside will hardly be kept within prison walls. Projects like the ArtJail, the brainchild of Albo at Philly’s Wooden Shoe Books, links the deconstruction of public education with the construction of prison: the school to prison pipeline, and does just this work in a smart, creative way.

*Thx to Shiloh for Laporte quote. K “Surely the state is the sewer.” Dominique Laporte “The history of shit” MIT Press.