AMERICAN PRISON

American prison was published in 2017 and written by an American journalist, Shane Bauer, who
spent some time working in a private prison in the US.
He worked for 3 months to the CCA.
CCA = Corrections Corporation of America. It is one of the biggest companies that make profit out of
running prisons in the USA.
He went in there to find out how they were running prisons, how they were doing their job, if they
were giving some importance to rehabilitations, to programs that would help inmates develop
awareness of their situation and move towards a change for better.
The book is separated in two parts:
1. The first one is about his experience in this prison;
2. The second one is about the history of the American prisons seen from a business point of
view, seen as a result of the opportunity that having a large number of people in prison gives
to the American government and private businesses to make profit out of it.
The book is all about the conflict between rehabilitation in the inmates and profit from the inmates.
It s all about whether society wants to use prisoners to make money or whether society decides that
the prisoners are human resources that in many cases can be rehabilitated and given back to society
with a new awareness and a new attitude towards life, honesty, behaving in a certain way.

Convict lease: is the way that the American government found for making the profit out of prisoners.
It has a lot to do with connections between government officials and business men for both making
profit out of prisoners.
If the government issued regulations which allowed convict lease on a larger scale, people could make
a lot of money. And these people who could invest and make a lot of money obviously were very
keen to do something in exchange for the politicians and officials that were promoting that kind of
attitude.
Terrell Don Hutto is the boss of CCA and the book is about the transformation of prisons into human
warehouses.
Warehouses: where people are stored as they were objects and taken out of that only for purpose to
putting them to work. It has a lot of implications with the history of slavery.
The state is spending a lot of money in prisons, and it is the result of the war on drugs, which was
started by Bush and Reagan in the 1990 and which was supposed to be a way of counterattacking the
large number of drugs that were being sold in the USA.
In order to enhance the war on drugs the government created laws and regulations that made even
more possession of drugs liable for many long sentences, in fact a lot of people were sent to jail for
this.
Most of the people sentenced to jail for that were black: they represented the poorest part of the
population and they filled prisons.
So prisons became filled with a lot of black people and that meant building new prisons, so it means
federal expenses.
A convict lease was a rude way for getting some of the money there.

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 During the ten year pick of prison constructions new prisons were built in the USA and States
were spending 1 billion dollars a year to build new prisons but they couldn t do it fast enough.
Everybody talked about privatization . P. 27
We start to talk about privatization, to privatize the prisons.
According to a survey in the past 50 years only one university has been built in California and 150
new prisons have been built in the same state. Which means there are no investments for education
but a lot in prisons, which are not places where people are going to be re educated.
The story begins with two people that realized that privatize the prisons would mean making a lot of
money.
They started to do that in the south of the USA, which is more conservative and has more positive
attitude to the idea of building new prisons with the threat of safety and all that garbage which is
been used to promote state violence.

Hutto, this man who became the president of CCA, had used what he learned about running prison
plantations in Texas to run the entire Arkansas prison system out of profit.
The plantation system in Texas was prison plantation system and it is very well developed.
In 1865, when the civil war ended and slavery was declared illegal, all the plantations in the south
needed somebody to work there.
In some cases they get the slaves (black, free men now) and give them some money to continuing to
work. They got a little pay which had consequences on their rhythm of work, they were not pushed,
they were not afraid of punishments anymore.
Now that they were free, they didn t really put too much attention in working, so the business started
going slower.
That s also the beginning of the development of the idea that black people are lazy, they don t to
work, they only want to have fun, which is the common idea of the white racist Americans.
This kind of lazy was a resistance on cruelty of withe people during the slavery period.

The who guys realized that the prisons plantations in Texas were working really well, they were
making a lot of money.
So these guys decide to take the same system to Arkansas and he found this company, which became
very famous and notorious for the way they are handling prisoners.
The first prison was a motel converted into an immigrant detention center in Houston, Texas:
immigrant detention centers are becoming new prison business in the US.

The immigrant detention is in the centre of debate now in the USA because Trump wants to build a
wall in the USA and Mexico and all the people that were coming in from Mexico illegally, without a
passport or maybe with a passport but without a Visa, are kept in this immigrant detention centre.
There has been a lot of protests going on because of the very inhuman conditions these people are
kept.
The last one was in October 2019 because a committee from the government went to visit one of
these centres and people started screaming because they don t have water, showers. Texas is very
hot.

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The last report, that these people who went to visit this detention centre gave, was that most of the
people were not allowed to shower for more than 20 days, with temperatures going up to 40°.
They are been given very cheap and deteriorated food so there are a lot of digestive and stomach
problems, they are not given proper toilets and so one of the people who visited said that the smell,
the stench, was so terrible that he couldn t stay there.
The other thing which has been very criticized now is the fact that in this detention centre they
separate children from their parents.
Some people have compared these detention centres to concentration camps.
In many of these places there are no faucets for drinking water and the immigrants are called by the
guards to drink water from the toilets.
This is the current situation and it comes straight from this kind of business attitude.
It is quite interesting that the people who created the CCA started out by converting a motel into an
immigrant detention centre.
And immigrant detention centres are becoming more and more the new prison business in the USA.

There are more people trying to get into the USA and so there is more interest in building new
detention centres. And sometimes the government is not fast enough to create all the conditions for
building these centres of detention and so they give private corporations the opportunity for doing
it themselves.

Privatization gave States a way to quickly expand their prison systems without taking on new debt.
This means that if you privatize a prison you can build more prisons without using public money, which
is something that is very popular in the USA because if the government doesn t have to pay, private
people are paying for that and they can build as many prisons as they want. P.28
This is called the perfect manage of fiscal and tough on crime conservatism.
That is a conservative attitude which is very aware of fiscal pressure, that is taxes that people would
have to pay to build more prisons, and, at the same time, this attitude to be tough on crime which
was actually started by Reagan has the best solution to sort out criminality problem in the USA.
It comes from the idea that the best thing to do when somebody commits a crime is to lock him up
in prison and throw the key away.
The problem is that not all of these people who are being kept in jail are going to spend the whole
life in jail, even though in the USA there is a very large number of people who have a life sentence
and in Italy too.
But a large percentage of people who are actually in jail eventually come out of jail.
Some after a few years, some after ten years, fifteen years and they do come out.
If the government does not give the inmates the opportunity to recognize their crime and to take the
responsibility of what they ve done to society it is sure that when these people get out they will be
even worse than before.
Most of the inmates who have been interviewed said that they have not changed once they ve served
their sentence, they don t become aware of their crime.
There is no possibility for them to become aware of their crime.
Most people give very childish and silly justifications for the crimes they committed.
But the point is that if there is no attitude to help them become aware of what they did, they will not.

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If you are locked up in a cell 23 hours a day and you can only go out one hour a day and you are not
allowed to speak to anybody, the most common thing that happens is that you go out of your mind,
you start having psychological and mental problems.
This is the tough on crime attitude. The question is, is there a good solution? Is that something that
changes society for better and makes society safer? That allows good citizens to feel good about the
society they live in?
This is the main attitude and the excuse for that is that, on the one hand, being tough on crime is saw
to the public as the best solution for dealing with criminals and, on the other hand, if you privatize,
the government doesn t have to spend money and so you don t have to pay taxes.
This is wrong because sometimes private prisons are so badly ruled that the government has to
intervein with more money and sometimes they spend more money than they would spend if they
had run prisons by themselves in the first place.

Beginning of the economical solution: ‘ Companies would fund, that is they finance, and construct
new lockups, new prisons while the courts would keep them full with a very tough attitude against
crime by condemning people to very long sentences even for misdemeanors. (= small crimes).
Third strike: is a federal rule in the USA, said that when you are arrested committing the same crime
for the 3rd time, then you have to spend 20 years in prison. This is being presented to the population
as a very healthy attitude to prevent crime, basically it produces more criminals and it doesn t solve
the problem.

In 2017 the company (CCA) ran more than 80 facilities (prisons). That means a lot of money. The
government gives some money for every prisoner so that they can run the prison.
P. 39 Whatever tax payer money (= soldi dei contribuenti) CCA receives from the government ,
because of course the government gives money.
The deal is I have a company, I have money, I can build a prison and pay for the cost of building it.
The government will give me some money for each day that an inmate spends in prison and with that
money I have to run the prison, unless I want to put more money to give more services and facilities
to the prisoners but that has never happened.
No matter how small money the government gives to these companies, they have to make some
profit out of that. Profit is the bottom line.
For instance, CCA receives about 34 dollars per inmate per day.
The cost of a public prison for prisoners per day is 52.
The government gives 34 dollars to this company and they end up saving 18 dollars, so it is cheaper
to give some money to a private company than to run the prison by themselves.
Some states pay CCA as much as dollars for prisoners per day. So the company has . billion
dollars in profit, in revenue, and that s million dollars in net income, which means more than
dollars for each prisoner in its care .
Even the idea that private prisons save tax payers money is controversial.
One study estimated that private prisons cost 15% less than public prisons and another one says that
public prisons are cheaper.

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It is difficult to calculate if a private prison is cheaper or more expensive because the daily life in
prison changes continuously. It depends, if there is violence, there are more costs.

If the situation is very difficult then we ll need more policemen looking at the inmates.
If people get sick, they need to spend money to hospitalise them.
It is not always like that: a lot of people get really sick and they are not taken to the hospital, nobody
takes care of them.
Some of them just die. For example, a woman was pregnant and she was alone in the process of
giving birth to the baby, she was screaming and crying. She lost conscious.
This official violence comes out when you start developing the idea in a population that you have to
be tough on crime in order to create a safer society. It is not something in which we are familiar with
in Italy.

EUROPEAN SLAVES
There is a relationship between penal practices and American revolution.
Many people who went to America in the 18th century were convicts coming from England. There
were too many people in prison in London and so many inmates in England were told that they would
be let go if they accepted to be embarked upon a ship and sent to the US.
As soon as they got there they would have been taken to plantations to work (violent situation).

BIRTH OF THE PRISON

In the 16th century prisons were not very common, a certain amount of illegality was considered okay
by the government. When there was a big crime they would transform into theaters.
The man who committed homicide would be taken to the public square to be executed.
Executions in public showed that the king had a lot of power over the bodies of his subjects, he could
take their life away.
The army was big display of political and military power during the executions: it was like a parade to
show the king s power.
Later on they start building prisons because crime becomes more generalized and the legal structure
of justice becomes more detailed.
They start categorizing different types of crime and write down what is the minimum and the
maximum amount of time that somebody has to spend in jail if they have committed a crime,
according to which kind of crime.
Jails are beginning to get filled and that is what is called the birth of penitentiary.
Jail before was a place where people could spend some time because they had done something
wrong, but it was not so organized.
Also, the people who are in jail have not committed anything really tragic.
You spend ten years in jail in the USA if you steal 3 bottles of Coca Cola, you can imagine how many
people who have done stupid things are spending years in jail.

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P. 41
The 1st penitentiary in the USA was called Panopticon, built up as a place where the eye of the police,
guards (opticon) can look at everything (pan).
It was built as a circular structure where all the cells are looking towards the same sector of the
penitentiary. The door is in the back, but the front doesn t have a door, it has bars.
In the middle of this circle there was a tower where all the guards were standing, and they can see
each inmate trough the bars and the inmate cannot hide because there is no object that they can use
to hide.
Is the idea of prison as a total control.
It implies one of the worst punishments: losing your own privacy, you belong to the state.

This concept of penitentiary which came out at the end of the 18th century, still shares something
with the idea of the public execution. What do they have in common?
Public display. The prisoner is like on a stage, its daily life and death, in the case of the public
execution, are under the eye of everybody.
Obviously the penitentiary does not allow everybody to look at the prisoners, because you cannot go
in, unless you have a permit or something, but still it shares this idea of public display.
The more we move on towards the present and the more prisons become secret about what happens
inside.
In prison you can t take photographs, it is like a military target. The pics could be used to escape from
prisons.
What has happened is 180 degrees change from the idea of the public execution, which made the
convict a form of performers that there was a spectacularization of the prison.
The prison becomes a place that nobody knows anything about.

Prisons at the beginning used to be into the city, in the middle of the community.
Little by little people are taken away from cities and usually relegated into places that are quite far
from any urban areas.
That is not always the case in Italy for instance, but even in Italy there are some places (like Asinara
and Caprera) where people are forgot, which is another obstacle to rehabilitation because
rehabilitation also implies contact with the outside.
People are going in prisons to teach, to give courses, to do psychological work and so on.
American prisoners have no access to psychologists or psychiatrists and there is one prison in Chicago
which is very large where the director is making a big effort to recognize inmates with physiological
problems.
They interviewed inmates when arrested and according to their state of mind they tried to put them
in groups where it will be easier to provide some medication and help.
This is the only one case and it has to do with the fact that director really cares for the people who
are there.
If another director comes in maybe he doesn t care, and people just want to go into cells with other
people with many psychiatric problems which is a good basis for driving everybody crazy and for
making even people who don t have metal problems problematic themselves.

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When prisons are far away from inhabitant areas they become like violence, difficult because even
the people who volunteer maybe don t have the money to get there.
It is a very complicated thing, especially in the USA where you have big distances, because USA is not
only Chicago, NY or LA, it is also Arizona, Yuta, Texas, which are places with very long stretches of
uninhabited land and the prison is 50 miles away from the closest city.
If somebody wants to go there and teach as volunteer, they have to drive 50 miles and pay for the
gas so it makes it more difficult to recreate a situation in which these people could possibly be
rehabilitated.
Rehabilitation does not necessarily mean that you go out of prison, it means that the time you spend
in prison is used for teaching you something, for helping you become aware of what you have done,
for helping you develop a more correct attitude in society.
This is the idea of the birth of penitentiary.

Once British they (British convicts) have reached America, the merchants auctioned their human
cargo into involuntary servitude under private masters, usually to work on tobacco plantations.
Planters often preferred convicts to slaves. They were cheaper and, because they served limited terms,
they didn t have to be supported in old age. P. 56
If you think about slavery in central and south America, the climate and the living condition were so
hard that people usually died after max years of being in a plantation, because they weren t
giving enough food and water. They were punished very harshly to do their work strong enough.
So the life spent was very short.
But if you move up to the North of USA, and especially to the northern States of the South, in these
states that belong to the South but are more up North like Virginia, Washington, the climate was ok
and the more North you move, the smaller the plantations are, because if you go to the Caribbean
they could have three or four crops a year because the weather was so hot, the heat was so strong
that they could have two or three crops.
But in the North maybe they had only one. So they couldn t afford to have a lot of slaves and, when
during the winter it was cold enough not to be able to work the land, these people were employed
doing other things, which also meant they wouldn t die, because their living conditions were a little
better.
And so they would age and when they got old, the slaves had to take care of them. They were given
them minor jobs but then at one point they wouldn t be able to work anymore and that would
become a cost for the owner.
For this reason, planters many times preferred to have convicts from Great Britain because these
people would have to spend some years and then they would go.
This is also called indentured servitude: it means that you would be taken from Great Britain to the
USA and they would tell you that in order to be free you would have to work without gaining any
money for 5 or 10 years.
A lot of people needed some money for food and clothes and the plantation s owners would give
them more, but they had to pay for it with time. They would develop a debt with the planter and that
meant working for more years than what the indentured servitude had originally estimated.
They developed a debt and so they kept working, eventually they were like slaves.

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In order for them to be free somebody would have to pay the debt to the planter.

Felons constituted the largest body of immigrants ever first to got to America.
What we normally consider the duty of America, the place where people went from different
countries and melted all together.
The melting pot = a place where people with different traditions, cultures, attitudes come and
develop a sense of community together and build the richest and most famous mission in the world.
This is the fairy tale, it s not really like that, but people who created the United States were slaves,
who were bought or kidnapped in Africa and convicts coming from New York.
These are the two categories of people.

In fact, Between 1718 and 1775 more than 2/3 of convicted felons were transported from Britain to
America. In total 50 thousand people. Approximately one quarter of all British immigrants to
America in the 18th century were convicts.
One quarter might not seem to be a very high number, but it means that 1 out of 4 people, who
decided to emigrate in the USA, did not actually decide, they chose it because it was better than
staying in prison or at least that s what they thought before getting there and being turned into
slaves, which was probably worse than living in a British prison. This is the situation in early America.

This kind of slavery, of Europeans coming from Great Britain mostly, was administered by the state
rather than plantations owners.
Even early penal reformers from the justice system believed that forced labor was common sense.

Theft constituted 90% of crimes committed by men. It is the time where there is not so much
violence.
Penal reformers, that is people who want to change prisons to make them better and to change the
law, were Protestant elites = intellectuals, lawyers, judges, that were protestant because they were
the main religion and it still is in the USA.
American protestant elites have this idea of the work ethic and they thought that crime was not
caused by poverty, but by a lack of a work ethic : people were lazy, didn t want to work, didn t think
that working was a good idea, they would rather do nothing and then commit crimes, mostly theft.
Then the new idea of Protestant elites, which is still common in the USA, that rehabilitation by the
logic, is not the result of psychology, group meetings, confrontation with people who committed the
same crime, confrontation with the victim of the crime, as sometimes happen very much in England
and Belgium for instance in these days.
But rather was the result of hard labor and discipline, that is the worst the conditions of living in jail,
the more likely the idea that the convict once being free from jail would not try to commit another
crime, because he was too afraid of having to go back and living in the same living condition. It is a
stupid idea.

In prisons where there are rehabilitation programs, the rate of people going back to prison is 18-25%.
It means that if the prison makes the effort of producing rehabilitating program the people who come
out of prison are trying to stay within the boundaries of society.

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Whereas in prisons without a rehabilitation program, 70% of people go back to prison.
Only 25% of the people are officially to be considered as criminal, the others had made a mistake and
they recognized it and they do something about it, and they get out.
This is something about the way business, manipulation and politics run prisons in the USA and do
not allow people who come out to be rehabilitated.
And so the idea of rehabilitation is substituted by the idea of hard work and discipline.

P. 57 : Then there was Benjamin Rush, one of the people who signed the declaration of the
independence from England in the USA who said that employing criminals in public labour will render
labour fabric kind disreputable and also white men declined labour because in the states of the South
where people employed black to work, working in a field, being a farmer, was socially considered like
being a slave, because only black slaves would be working on a farm.
So If you were working on a farm and you were white you were considered as a slave.
In fact there is a common term that came out in the 1920/30 and it is called white trash.
It identifies the small amount of white people in the south at the time who did not have enough
money to live on, so they have to go and work for a planter.
Planters were not really keen on giving job to these people because would have to pay them
something, which is more than the cost of holding slave.
White people who work in a plantation were considered like slaves.
And because of the high level of criminals, labor was seen as something degrading.
According to Benjamin Rush, the problem was not forced labor but its publicness: people were
working, but it was bad for the population to see them working.
During the 20th century, in the 30s, 40s and 50s, they had this chain gangs, that is groups of prisoners
who were chain together and maybe would be work out in the streets so everybody could see them.
People didn t really like to see them because it made it uneasy to see somebody who was into that
situation.

Benjamin Rush (end of the 18th century) is already pointing that direction: prisoners should not be
seen, they should be hidden, they should not be public.
For that reason, he proposed the house of repentance in which convicts could reflect on their crimes
while continuing to be profitable to the state out of public view.
It is important because it gets all the categories which tell you how the idea of justice was pointing
to an experience almost religious.
The idea is that being in a prison is like being in a monastery. You are there by yourself, you cannot
talk to other people. That gives you time to think.
But of course, it is a joke, because the monks go to a monastery or the nuns who decide to live a life
of prayer, silence and reflection, and they have the intention of doing that: they want to do it.
If there is no intention it doesn t make any sense, but the idea behind it is that there is some kind of
rehabilitation in a situation in which people are put in a place where they won t be able to see other
people. They could reflect on their crime.
If you don t build the conditions for people to start taking responsibility for their crimes, they will not
do it because people interviewed in prisons answer that they don t feel bad.

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Why? Because I m paying for my crime, I have to spend ten years in this place which is cold in the
winter, hot in the summer, people are violent, the food is bad, the health is not really taking care of.
That is the punishment. Once I spent my ten years in prison, I will have paid .
It is not like that. They will not have paid anything.
The people who are victims of the crime will not be happy because the person who has committed
the crime against them is spending time in prison.
Society will not be happy because this people would go out exactly as they were before. Most of the
time they would be worse.

There was a study that was done two years ago where they interviewed people who were the
relatives of somebody who had been killed and who pushed for the person who had committed their
crime to be sentenced to death.
Imagine if a relative of yours is killed, the person who has did the murder is arrested, taken to prison
and you are so sad and upset by what happened that you start spending money in order to make sure
that the person is sentence to death, because you think that that person needs to be punished.
Some capital executions in the USA are public, that is a selective number of people can go and watch
the person while he or she is being killed with an injection or electric chair. You need to have a reason
for going there.
So they allow journalists and members of the family of the person who has been killed because these
people think that they get some kind of payment for what happened to them.
From this psychological study it turns out that people, after watching the execution of the killer of
the relative, they go into total psychological crisis and become depressed.
Once the person who has committed the crime has been executed you realise that you are not getting
back the person that was killed and there is no satisfaction in the fact that another person has been
killed.
The study proves that this kind of insistence on punishment for crime does not pay.
This is not to say that a crime should to be left unpunished, but the idea is that the punishment for
the crime is to convince the criminal to undergo a process or rehabilitation.
On YouTube Aldo Moro s daughter was really furious because of what happened when Aldo Moro
was abandoned by the state, by its party and later on she decided to admit a couple of people from
the red brigades who were the commando that had kidnapped and then killed the father.
The problem is that you are left with some kind of pain which is not going to be solved by the fact
that somebody has to get killed or get into prison.
There is a word that both criminal and the victims have to do together in a way if they both agreed
to do that and that s called Restorative Justice .
It means finding a solution, if not a reason, to live on after the loss of somebody that you love.

People should be sent to a house of repentance, they should be spending time reflecting on the crime
but at the same time they should be profitable to the state.
This idea of profit is always there, we keep people away from society so that nobody sees them, but
at the same time we have to make some money out of that and create profit.

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The first penitentiary was built in Pennsylvania in 1795 ad it is created on the basis of Panopticon. It
is invented as a means of penal reform.
20 years later after the birth of the first penitentiary in 1795 in the USA, a lot of people (critics) started
saying that it was not working, not because people were not being rehabilitating, but because they
were not generating the revenue that Rush promised.
Because the idea is that if you have people in prison the best you can do with them is making money
out of them.
Also, people started realizing that a lot of crimes which were committed at the time were amplified
by the existence of the penitentiaries, because people in prison would learn how to make other
crimes.
That s also the idea of Foucault in Discipline and Punishment : the prison is a factory of criminals.
It does not produce good citizens, but criminals. People who live in prison are more criminal than
they were when they got in. So the prison is meant to produce more criminals.
They believed that by gathering criminals in one place, penitentiaries were teaching the science of
robbery rather than reforming people.
The interesting thing is that prison becomes a substitute to the plantations because most of the
crimes were committed by black people, like slaves who managed to run away and amplify some
means of surviving without being caught and so on.
Because of that all the abolitionists, people who were from the North of the USA and were fighting
for the abolition of slavery, for the declaration of slavery as something illegal, were at the same time
in favour of the construction of prisons: They thought that it was a good idea to keep criminals in
prisons, away from society.
Less slaves, more prisons: slaves had to be left free, but people who did not behaved according to
the rules of society had to be taken to a penitentiary.

P. : Arguments for the abolishment of slavery and the erection of penitentiaries sometimes went
hand in hand.
To prevent collective action, the penitentiary enforced a strict code of silence, banning all
communications between convicts.
In fact when Charles Dickens, the famous Victorian novelist, went to the USA, he reported of all the
places that he visited and that report is contained in a book called American Notes.
In American Notes he talks about prisons because Dickens parents were put in prison in England and
when people were arrested, if they had a family prisons sometimes allowed even the children to go
to prison and live with their family.
Dickens never lived in a prison, but a couple of brothers of him had, so he knew everything about the
prison system in Britain and he thought it was horrible, but when he went to the States, he found out
that discipline in American penitentiaries was much worse.

The main rule in a penitentiary was to prevent any kind of communication and so it was prohibited
to talk.
You spent years in prison and for years you wouldn t be able to talk. And if you did, they would
put you in isolation or they would give you some very harsh punishment.

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Of course people developed ways of communicating, but Dickens talks about entering an American
penitentiary as entering a cemetery.
There is this sensation of death, nothing is alive and people have to work all day in the penitentiary,
they just don t stay there, they have to work 12 hours a day.
Quotation: Auburn s captain promised to turn inmates into silent and insulated working
machines… , that is to dehumanize people, to turn them into machines that work, produce and that,
like a computer, don t speak.
…who would work by day and spend the nights confined to their cells to reflect on their crimes… . It
is a very harsh method.
…whipping, forbidden after the American Revolution, was reinstated by the New York legislature,
allowing every guard to mete out a summary lashing of any convict. Anyone caught talking was
whipped .

The idea of whipping prisoners, which you can see in the practice of a very long time gone past, was
still on in Texas in the 1960s.
So 50 years ago in Texas there was still whipping prisoners as a form of punishment.

P. : Forcing inmates to labour for private contractors, they said, relieved taxpayers of the cost of
imprisoning them and helped transform them into productive, labouring citizens.
Costringere i detenuti a faticare per dei datori di lavoro privati sollevava i cittadini dal costo del
carcere e aiutava a trasformare i detenuti in cittadini produttivi e desiderosi di lavorare.
The lash (= frusta) was a superior form of punishment because it affects the immediate submission
of the delinquent, his labour is not interrupted a single instant.
Tocqueville, who was a reformer and he visited many American prisons, said that the silence within
these vast walls is that of death.
And also he and Beaumont commented: We felt as if we traversed catacombs, there were a
thousand living beings, and yet it was a desert, solitude. As a result of this new level of control local
manufacturers set up their equipment in the penitentiary and its factory produced tools, rifles, shoes,
clothes, and more. For a day s labour, contractors paid the state about half of what they would pay a
free worker .

In the end of the 19th century they did the other way around.
The government would send inspectors to a penitentiary in the South and there was no one in the
penitentiary because they were all being sent to work out in the fields.
It was cheaper for them to keep them there for the night, so they would build small barracks with no
windows, the heat was incredible during the night, and these people were chain and they would be
taken back to these barracks and out again in the morning to work.
A way that the penitentiaries were no longer used at that time.
For a day, slaver contractors paid the state about half of what they would paid free workers.
That means if you start a business and you have people working for you who are convicts, the
government is paying the 50% of what the government would pay if they had to keep those safe
people in prison and so it was a big advantage for the government and for the people who run the

12
business.
They would pay the 50% and the government also was spending much less than what the usual cost
would be for the tax payer .
This privatization of prison production allowed for America s first prison boom .
USA are constantly going through a prison boom.
We need more prison because if the public opinion is constantly being convinced that the only way
to rehabilitate the criminal is to keep that person in jail for as long as possible, so that he doesn t go
around and possibly he does not commit any more crimes, that means that there is a goal for building
new prisons, which is constant not only in the USA but also in Europe, Italy as well.
They keep thinking that they have to invest money to build new prisons.
Money should be invested into rehabilitation, that is the only way out of criminality. It is not cameras
in the streets that make society safer, it is rehabilitation.
With cameras you can see somebody who is committing the crime and it is easier to find this person
and take this person into jail. But you don t solve the problem of criminality.
You solve this problem if you work with people who already are in jail and put them in a situation
where they start doing something to get out of their behaviour, to realize that committing the crime
creates problems for a community, not only for the person victim of the crime.

14 states build penitentiaries and in prison it becomes the regular form of punishment.
Stating incarceration means more slavers for private contractors. The business has already started.
They put more people into prisons, they build more prisons, the State pays less money, the company
makes profit.
Also the penitentiary becomes like a factory.
There is no difference between a penitentiary and a factory, in both places people are working all day
long but of course penitentiaries at some point were making more profit because people were not
allowed to take breaks and so it wouldn t be long before American penitentiaries were entirely
controlled by private companies, so there is a strong privatization of the penitentiary at least in the
first part of the 20th century.

BIRTH OF THE MODERN PENITENTIARY

The modern penitentiary is based on the idea of the panopticon which was created by an European
architect.
In a panopticon there is a structure with a tower in the middle: this is already some kind of modern
penitentiary.
Basically the panopticon was invented later on.
Before, up to the 1st half of the 19th century, in USA prisons were on a much more escape, they were
not so big and there was no need for controlling everybody because people were very few.
In South only white people were in prison, because black people who committed crimes were
punished on the plantations, and also they weren t considered as human being so they can t stay in
prisons (that was only for human being).
The reformers believed that by putting criminals in the same place, in the penitentiary, was like
teaching them the science of robbery so there was a big movement against penitentiary, a lot of

13
people were in favour of death penalty for major offenses and therefore they didn t see the
importance of having a penitentiary.
What happens is that even the abolitionist from the north, which want the abolition of slavery, were
on the other hand in favour of creating penitentiary and in favour of organize criminal s life.
There is a big movement now both in US and also in Europe against life sentences: people who go to
jail and have a life sentence with no expectation to coming out jail, obviously are not much taken in
care.
One of the main problems of the beginning of penitentiary was how to prevent people from getting
in touch with each other and organizing some kind of resistance against the prisons system: the
panopticon was the best solution for that because it puts every convict in a single cell and they look
all towards the centre without any possibility of communicating to other convict.
One of the most cruel and common practice was the rule of silence: people were not allowed to talk,
there was a strict code of silence, all communications were banned, include talking to other inmates,
not only while they are working (which might have been some sense) but also in the cells.
A lot of prisoners elaborate a different code of languages, such as with hands or making noise, but
even these was punished.

Jack London: Star rover (Il vagabondo delle stelle) = is the story of a convict who has to respond to
the rule of no talking and he develops a sign language, so he could change information with other
convicts.
Even Dickens visits penitentiary while travelled US and he was very much impressed. He described
prisons as a sort of cemetery because of this rule of silence.
The prison administration said that the idea was to turn inmates into silent and insulated working
machines.
This is already the beginning of a very important change in the way American prison system looks at
inmates.
The idea of rehabilitation is completely abandoned, and the idea of profit substitutes the idea of
rehabilitation: profit instead of rehabilitation. Profit goes together with dehumanization.
There is a debate about people who commit crime and about the possibility to look at these people
not as if they were the crime they have committed, but as human beings. So you commit a crime, but
the crime does not define you 100%, there is something else.
And it is by appealing to this something else which the idea of rehabilitation is based on, because if
you keep equating human being to the crime, he/she has committed than there is no space for
rehabilitation.

In the beginning half of the 19th century the idea of rehabilitation is not even going through the mind
of the organizers of the prison.
When prisoners are just sitting in prisons and doing nothing, the idea of profit comes right away
(because there are always people sitting there with nothing to do and they could work so they could
make a profit for the state).
Prison legislation is very complicated in United States and the expenses (federal and states funds)
which are spent for prisons, are very high so people always concerned of prison administration to
find ways of paying for all their expenses: putting inmates to work was one of these.

14
The problem is that because these kind of solution does not imply rehabilitation, it tends to be cruel,
because if you don t put somebody to work in order to rehabilitate that person, then you can have
him work hours, h h, it doesn t really matter: the more that person will work and the more you
will get a return.
The inmates would work by day and spend the nights confined to their cells to reflect on their crime.
This is a very old fashioned idea which is still running most prisons all in the world an most prisons
in USA.
USA has the largest number of inhabitants in prison (of all the nations in the world). It s like a
penitentiary state.
The idea here is: if you put people to work during the day, and the work is so hard, when they go back
to their cells in the evening, they will feel humiliated by what they have to do and so they will start
thinking about becoming better people.
We know that the human mind doesn t work like that: if you put someone to work without any
possibility of changing, any possibility of doing something different, any possibility of rehabilitation,
that person will not develop repents, he will not reflect on his crime, he will develop hatred against
the prison system and basically against society. This is the base of recidivism (= recidività) that is the
fact that people go out of prison and after a few years they go back to prison because they keep
committing the same crime they had committed before. This means that prison didn t rehabilitated
them.
The idea of safety, which is very much related with prison, is very controversial because people are
in prison because they commit crimes. They are a threat to society and so society locks them up in
prisons, but then during the period they stay there, something should be done so when they come
out, they are less likely to commit the same crime, they are better citizens.

What is the main idea for making sure that people will not commit the same when they go out?
How do you prevent people from committing the same crime when they come out of prison?
What is the main concept? If you have just come out of prison, what does a person have to do in
order to rehabilitate?
They have to take a responsibility: the person in prison has to recognize that he has done something
wrong to the victim of his crime and to the society as well.
After that he can start working to change some of the attitudes that person have.
If you put someone to work 14h a day he will not take any responsibility, they will actually take an
attitude which is very common among prisoners in USA: the idea that he don t have to pay back
anything to society or to the victims of their crime because the state is deciding that you are going to
pay by spending extra month or years in jail. And after you spend those you have the idea that you
payed whatever you have to pay to the society.
That is a very childish and old fashioned idea in order for people to pay their debts, their
responsibility for what they have done, and they have the willing to change something in their mental
category. So eventually when the sentence will be finished, they will change their attitude, they will
try to do something else, and of course this implies also that when people who are in jail go outside
there must be structures which help them to the process of readjusting to society. For a person who
spends many years in prison it is very difficult to be kicked out on the street and start living as if

15
nothing has changed. That s because living in jail is very traumatizing and except for people who are
really dangerous, crazy and you can t do anything else than keep them in jail , the rest of the people
should be re educated.
The number of really dangerous people who are in jail is extremely low in USA. In USA 80% of people
are in jail for committing petty crimes. This is also because of the 3rd strike system: if you commit the
same crime for the 3rd time, you have to spend at least 20 years in jail, no matter how stupid the
crime is.
This is the basis of what is called mass incarceration, that is a very common thing in the USA,
everybody knows about this: more and more people are put into prison. The reason for that is
historical: when they started realizing that inmates would work and make money for the state, they
started putting more people in prison. And also putting a lot of people in prison means overcrowding,
eventually means funds that state has to pay for overcrowded prisons; but eventually it means
business because if prisons are overcrowded you have to build new prisons, which is very expensive
and it takes a lot of time. In the USA a lot of private companies are now building prisons because they
do it faster than the state.

Forcing inmates to labour for private contractors, relieved taxpayers of the cost of imprisoning them
and helped transform them into productive, labouring citizens.
This is another central idea: you put people in prison than instead of having to pay taxes, that the
state would use in order to pay for prisoners expenses, you put these people to work and the idea
behind it is they eventually would become productive citizens. But you can imagine somebody who
is obliged to work, he has to work for an incredible number of hours a day, in very awful and difficult
conditions, he is not going to interiorize the idea that when he goes out, he would want to be a
productive citizen.

We felt as if we traversed catacombs, there were a thousand living beings, and yet it was a desert
solitude.
Privatization of prison production allowed for America s first prison boom: this is also very relative,
because there have been waves of prison booms in USA, that is legislators and business men who
were driving politicians and giving them money, and these politicians would push the idea of the
necessity of building new prisons.
A state does not have an infinite amount of money to spend, they have to take care of everything: so
the amount of money which is spent on justice, leave alone trials, judges looking on how the
punishment is administered, they either invest money in rehabilitation, and on the long run it will
prove a good idea, as many cases have proved, in those states where they push on rehabilitation and
they invest money in rehabilitation, the crime race have been going down quite a lot because people
are being thought about the mistake they made after of course they take the responsibility for what
they did.

The alternative to that is building more prisons, is giving less services to the inmates (courses,
books...) and it is also creating a market, which is not very extended in the USA for creating new ways
for prisoners to communicate with the outside.

16
In most of the cases we see that inmates have a chance to see a relative or a friend once a week or
once every two weeks: that system is being slowly eliminated because it is implying a lot of costs. You
have to have a lot of guards taking the prisoners from their cell to the area where the conversation
have place, you have to search them to make sure that they don t have weapons, you have to search
them on the way back to make sure that nothing has passed between visitors and the inmate, you
need security throughout the visits (there is a camera controlling, guards walking up and down).
It means a lot of money; so if the presupposition behind the prisons system is to make money, to
make profit instead of rehabilitating inmates, all the aspects of daily life in prison can be transformed
into something which makes profit, and visits are one of the biggest moneys making aspects of
contemporary prison in America.
They have something like skype visits, to make it sound as if it was easier because sometimes relatives
live so far and they have to drive for hours to reach the prison, because prisoners are constantly
moved.

Prisoners who were being interviewed say that, because mass incarceration is so developed,
sometimes you get arrested where you live but there is no room in that prison, so they are taken
somewhere else because there are no spaces available.
In fact there are even companies who are checking on how many free beds are in different prisons
and they charge the state: it s like a hotel system booking, but it is a prison bed booking system.
You have an inmate, you don t know where to put him because all prisons around are full, you call
this company and they tell you where there is room for prisoner, because prisons are not all the same
(minimum, medium and maximum security). There is a big problem with transgender prisoners
because they never know where they should be in prison: with the men or with the women.

Going back to the visit system. So they have Skype visits which are very expensive.
They have phone calls that are extremely expensive: they charge prisoners or the families 4 or 5 times
the cost of a regular call. Most of prisoners come from poor environments, not very many rich people
are in prison because even if they are arrested, they have enough money to pay for a good lawyer
and they have more chances to get out of prison; and so poor people don t have money to pay for a
lawyer and they have a defending lawyer from the state.
People who are from very low social environments and have no money, are charged a lot of money
for making phone calls. There are inmates complaining because if they want to talk to a person and
spend 10 mins on the phone, they are charger 20/25 dollars.
There are also companies that provide e mail systems or in some prisons you can buy little tablets
where you can t go anywhere on the internet but you can go into the e mail systems) and you can
send as many e mails as you want and somebody from the outside charges your tablet and every
time you write an e mail you spend 20 or 50 cents.
People in prison tend to spend a lot of time writing e mails so the bills are astronomical sometimes.
So there is this business of making profit from communication.
Communication with the outside and with the family is one of the most important things for an
inmate, because is the only way to keep some intimate connection with society, they can watch tv or
read newspapers but they don t get an intimate relationship with the life outside the prison, in order
to get that they need to talk their families.

17
When that is made almost impossible by these profit-based attitude, the result is that the people
who have less money are more likely to become violent because they have no way of discharging all
their tension through communication with the family.
It is a system which is meant to multiply the possibility of crime, not to reduce it, because by
multiplying the possibility of crime and by giving harsher sentences, you can guarantee that prisons
are always full, and if prisons are full you make more money.

The other attitude which is very common among private prisons is that they work exactly like a hotel.
If you have a hotel with 100 rooms and a restaurant, you need a certain number of people working
in the kitchen, a certain number of people cleaning the room and so on.
So if you have 100 people you make the best profit, if you have 10 people the profit is only 10% but
the expenses are still 100%: if you need 40 people working in the hotel and there are 100 guests you
make more profit, and if there are 10 guests you make less profit.
The attitude in reference to prisons of making profit is to put as many people as possible in prison,
because once you pay for employers, security, all that, than the largest is the number of inmates and
the better is the economical result (the expenses are the same so you will make more money).

The prison business has become one of the major sources of income in USA. There are companies,
for instance, they realized that American prisons are extremely violent.
They realized some people were stabbing each other by using plastic bottles, and so one company
invented bottles that are like balloons: so after the water is gone you throw away the balloon, you
can t do anything with it.
Prisoners are not allowed to use normal knives and forks, so companies created those objects in
plastic. But they hurt each other with plastic knives, so companies created carton silverware (which
is made more or less with the same material they use for milk cartons, they are very difficult to use
because they have no consistency).
All these things are creating a lot of stress in prison, and stress is not responded through
rehabilitation, it is responded by stricter rules, so the tension grows more and more.
So, there is a lot of tension inside, there are no services and when people come out, they re worse
than before they entered the prisons.

CHAPTER 8
Going back to 1840s, a steamship (battello a vapore), is moving slowly along the Mississippi and there
is a white man on this ship, doctor David Hines, who is in shackles manette because he s been
convicted of stealing a slave from somebody and selling him in Mississippi.

The presence of whites and blacks in prisons: this was a major issue in the south because, of course,
racial separation was and still is very strong in the south. White people don t want anything to do
with blacks. White supremacy is still a major idea,
So because of that the idea of the penitentiary is actually quite difficult to handle in the 1840s and
50s before and also after the civil war.

18
Creating a penitentiary would mean creating a place where whites and blacks are mixed together,
and the ideology of racial supremacy doesn t want that because prisoners are treated like slaves:
they re physically punished, they work more than anybody else, their lives have no importance.
You don t want to put a white man in the same situation because it would erase the difference
between whites and blacks, and that would mean that even the white man can be treated as
propriety, and that takes away all the idea of supremacy of the white man.
There is also a more subtle reason for not wanting them in the 19th century: that is that white men
in prison might become friends with black men.
If that happens, they might start feeling sympathetic with the blacks, and therefor these white people
might become a threat to white supremacy. By leaving together with blacks, they would start maybe
seeing them as human beings and therefore erasing that distinction which is at the basis of racial
separation.
During the 19th century in USA, in the south, there is a whole debate which is called the pro slavery
debate. What was happening before the civil war (that is before 1861) was that in the north there
were a lot of abolitions who push the idea of attacking the south in order to give end to this cruel
treatment of black people.
We know now that in the abolitionist circles there were also a lot of people who push this idea
because the reason was not to free the slaves, but it was to take possession of the agriculture market
which was a big source of income in the south.
The slave question was a really good excuse for attacking the south.
There were pamphlets and books and people talking against slavery, talking about the freedom of
human being and so on.
Actually some of these people sent down south, some of the material, hoping that some of the slaves
would in some way get a hand of these materials, be able to read these materials, and therefore
become aware that the way they were being treated was no necessarily legal, that they have some
rights and they should make sure that their lives are respected, but because slaves were not allowed
to learn and read, these things didn t help at all. Black people in the south were kept in the condition
of total inferiority.

The other idea against penitentiary was a sort of political idea: the state shouldn t get an income from
the prisoners because that would be unethical = you start using inmates to work to make a profit but
that is not the porpoise of the state.
The purpose if the state is to make sure that there is justice all over the citizens.

This slavery debate was the philosophical responses in the south from intellectuals who live in the
south and work for the south. These intellectuals tried to prove having slaves was not only a very
good idea from the economical point of view, but also it didn t create any problems from a moral or
ethical point of view: they said that the bible talks in many different places about slaves (a lot of bible
characters have slaves, they were owners of slaves).
Slavery is a very old thing, it didn t come out with the USA in the 17th or 18th century, there were
slaves in Rome, in Greece and in many other societies.

19
The other argument was a little more genetical: they were saying that whites are coming directly
down from God: God created Adam and Eve, and they were whites, and they generated human kind.

There is a sort of wired theory: they said that black people derive from monkeys, so there was some
kind of evolutionary change from animals (from monkeys), and they gave all sort of scientific
explanation for that.
These were not really meant to respond to the abolition of slavery, they were meant to keep the
white people of the south convinced that slavery is good: it was a form of brain washing, of
manipulation, to make sure that whites wouldn t start to take position against slavery.

These ideas that blacks do not come down from God, they are a development of natural resources
like animals, comes all the way down into the 20th century (such as in movies)
The thing become so big that in 1980s (when people start dying from AIDS) at one point, the
department of health of the USA found a resolution in order to tell people what they have to avoid
not to get infected by AIDS, and so they said haemophiliacs ( = people who have to take blood from
other people) should be aware because maybe the blood which is being transferred in their bodies
might be HIV infected, of course heavy drug users might use the same syringe with AIDS people, and
also they said another major source of AIDS was from Haiti.
Why? Because there was a French researcher and this doctor found out that in Africa there were
some monkeys which had an endemic form of HIV: they had HIV in their blood, but it was part of their
system they were not affected by that.
Haiti symbolically represents something very dangerous to the USA. In 1801 the slaves in Haiti which
was at that time a French colony, which was called the pearl of the Caribbean because it was a
beautiful country and a lot of French aristocrats went to live there and they bought lands and slaves,
and they were making huge properties by sending to France legal drugs: sugar, coffee, tobacco
In 1801 one of the slaves organized the revolt and black people all over the island of Santo Domingo
started killing whites and revolted. They took power and so Haiti became the 1st black republic of
America: there was a black government and all the whites either escaped or they were killed.
Many of these French planters (= the owners of the plantations) escaped north because the closest
place to escape to was USA: French people from Haiti, when the revolution erupted, the ones who
made it escape took their boats and stared sailing north (New Orleans, Louisiana, because it was
French possession).
When they escaped there, they started telling all the French planters in Louisiana about the horrible
situation in Haiti, and the cruel revolution, and the fact that black slaves killed men, women, children
in a very cruel way. So the word spread around in the south of the USA that they really needed to be
very much aware on what was going on with plantations because at one point the ration between
whites and blacks in the south was 1 to 8: for each white person there were 8 black people, so from
the numerical point of view it was very easy to overthrow the power of whites.

How did they prevent that? By imposing stricter rules: slaves weren t allowed to wear shoes because
that prevents them from running , they wouldn t be allowed to meet in groups of more than 3 or 4
people (to prevent some kind of political meeting), they would not be allowed to read and many

20
other things, and also punishments for mistakes or punishments for bad work became more and
more cruel. The idea was to scare slaves to make sure they wouldn t try to do something as it
happened in Haiti.
The news of the the revolution in Haiti were kept top secret, and because of that Haiti became the
symbol of the possibility of slave insurrection. The events of Haiti created a very big fear in the south
of the USA, they were all afraid, so they started organizing groups of citizens that walked around the
city during the night to make sure that slaves were sleeping.
America has always looked down at Haiti as a potentially dangerous place.

In the 1969 70 a lot of famous people went to Haiti for vacations and it became fashionable to go
there in vacation, all the big rock stars went there.
Even though big companies were making a lot of money, the majority of people living there were still
poor and they also had some connection with farmer French colonies in Africa, because of course
Haiti was a French colony and they speak a language that is a mixture of French and African.
Some of these states in Africa needed people to work, to build houses, roads, bridges and so they
created a contract with Haiti and Haiti sent people from there to work in Africa for 3/6 months.
The urban legend that came out of there, which was at the basis of the resolution of the health
problems in the USA was that during these work trips a very strange sexual chain was created.
Haitian workers would go to Africa to work, they would have sexual contacts with local women.
As in many African countries, magic things were diffused. These women whenever they couldn t have
a child instead to see a doctor they would go to sorcerers (stregoni) and the sorcerers would do
something to help women to became pregnant. Women had to mix their blood with animal blood
which were considered to be very fertile animal. The most used animals were a monkey that had HIV.
Then these women had sexual contacts with Haitians who received infected blood. Then these people
will be back to Haiti, and Haiti was one of the major tourist destinations at the time.
So these people would prostitute themselves to American gay people, who were there in vacation.
If we look at this sequence in a more hierarchical way, you have:
US CITIZENS, then we have citizens that are considered less: they are still Americans, but they are
gays
US GAYS: they have sexual contacts with HAITIAN WORKERS.
These workers in the past went to Africa to work and they had sexual contacts with AFRICAN
WOMEN.
These African women, whenever they couldn t have babies, would go to the sorcerers and
have their blood mixed with MONKEYS.
This is the symbol of the different genealogical creation of black people.
At the bottom of the like we have monkeys, but the monkeys are also the symbol, in 19th century in
USA, of the different genealogy of blacks, because they don t come from God, but they come from
the development of monkeys.
So the monkey is responsible for the ignorance of black women in Africa, who don t realize that
they re doing something very dangerous for their health.

21
It was about 1980 when all this came out: all of a sudden nobody wanted to go to Haiti for vacations
anymore. All the clubs, all the resorts, all the hotels closed and so there were no jobs available and
this was when Haiti became one of the 5 poorest countries in the world (and still is).
After a couple of years it was discovered that AIDS was not passed on this way, and the researcher
who told these crazy stories hat to say sorry and that he was wrong.
The Haitian government had to interview with the United Nations to oblige the department of health
of the USA to issue another resolution saying I m sorry, I made a mistake, it s not the people from
Haiti who are the cause of AIDS .
At that point it didn t really make a difference if the department of health issues a different
statement. It s like when people are accused of committing a crime and you see on the newspaper
that they killed people: when they find out that person is innocent newspaper usually doesn t give
too much attention to that unless it is a big case.
They don t give this attention because people are more interested in crime than in innocence: it
doesn t make the news that somebody is innocent, it does make the news that somebody is guilty
and then if he s not guilty who cares .

This way was the final result of the bad publicity that Haiti have been taking from 1801 (the time of
Haiti revolution). It was like a confirmation of the fact that black people are very dangerous and bad,
and also it goes hand in hand with the danger of contamination which is at the basis of the racist
thought in the USA: you don t mix with the blacks because you might be contaminated.
That was also the idea against the penitentiary, because it was a place where blacks and whites would
mix up.

In the first part of the 19th century, cities in the south, where there are a lot of slaves become very
rich, in fact New Orleans was on the track to surpass New York as the country s economic capital.
New Orleans now is probably the poorest city in the USA, because of the hurricane and because the
government needs a lot ff money to reconstruct hurricane damages, people are left to themselves,
people who leave there are descendants of slaves and so the level of poverty is incredible.
But at that time New Orleans was really rich because it was the country with the largest slave market.

All of a sudden, they realized in the south that penitentiary wouldn t be threat to white supremacy,
it would actually support it, because after the end of the civil war there are a lot of slaves that don t
have a job and are committing small crimes.
If you put them to prison and put them back to work: in a way you are recreating the situation you
had before the civil war, and the freak was the 13th amendment = nobody can be kept in a condition
of slavery, unless they have committed a crime.
So if you want more people for you to work for free you just make sure that people who commit
crimes are punished in a stronger way, and that even small crimes are given a long prison sentence
because that will fill up the prisons, and by filling up the prisons you re going to have a lot of people
who will work for free and make a profit.
You can see how totally far away from the idea of rehabilitation are these.

22
The thing became so big that people started getting curious about prisons and there is a whole part
of tourism in the USA, which is called prison tourism.
There are famous prisons like Alcatraz, an island in front of san Francisco.
It was a very famous prison: it was supposed to be the most difficult prison to escape from.
After its closure it became a touristic place because so many people who live there have written
novels, stories and many movies were set in that island. They started out taking people to visit
Alcatraz and showing them where the condemned would be kept, what were the punishments.
It was a way of gothic thing: the pleasure of seeing the signs of suffering and the sign of cruelty, and
in fact this idea of visiting jails was already on in the 19th century.
For twenty five cents entrance fee, visitors could come and watch the convicts spinning cotton,
making cloth and pounding steel : even the business of visiting prisons or ex prisons become a form
of income.
The most important part of all these is that during this time they realized they could make so much
money with inmates work that they changed the working schedule: before it was from 8 to 10 hours
a day, after the change inmates had to work from sunrise to sunset.
This is a repetition of the working condition of slaves in the plantations.

PRIVATIZATION
In 1844 the state privatized the penitentiary because they realized that if the private company is
interested in using prisoners and prisons, they will work much faster than the government does,
because the government doesn t have any interest in prisons prisons are officially not made in order
to make money, are made to punish criminals).
To make more profit, private companies, would build prisons much faster. 10 years ago the state give
the permission to build many new prisons in USA, and all these private companies were claiming that
they would finish the construction of big prisons in 2 years, instead of the regular 5/6 years that the
state needs in order to finish a prison (we know that private business is much faster because there
are more interests in profit).
The US military, in 1846, was asking prison administrations to produce shoes for horses (horseshoe =
ferro di cavallo), so prisons start becoming really productive.
Some of the lessees, companies that were using prisoners (= when you lease prisoners, the person
who gets the lease is the lessee, and the state is the leaser: the state leases and the lessee takes the
lease) were constantly complained that they had not enough prisoners.
They criticized courts and the legislation for imprisoning people in jails rather than in the penitentiary,
because if they had smaller offences prisoners would not be taken to penitentiary, they would be
taken to a small jail, but the private companies were running the penitentiaries so they wanted more
prisoners to be taken there: by putting them in jail, they were depriving them of labour to which were
entitled under the contract.
So there is political pushing for having more prisoners in the penitentiary: in fact 6 years after the
complaint, the number of inmates increased more than 50%.

23
This is not rehabilitation, it is profit. People in jail are constantly traumatized, and they cannot be
good people: they constantly live in the past, they are constantly manipulated and taken back to the
time when the trauma happened for the 1st time. Prisons make this trauma worse.
The state of Louisiana made money with prisoners even before the civil war: it is not just the effect
of the civil war that makes it possible to create penitentiary and make money.
In these penitentiaries, in the first half of the 19th century, women would be imprisoned together
with men. They would have sexual contact, so children would be born in prisons.
From a legal point of view what are these children? They re not free human beings because they are
sons of women slaves, and the state takes the opportunity to say that these children are property of
the state (and then when grow up they can be sold, used for work).
In 1848, Louisiana passed a law declaring that children born in the penitentiary of African American
serving life sentenced (women), would become property of the state.
The women would raise the kids until the age of 10, at which point the penitentiary would place an
ad on the newspaper: 30 days later they would be auctioned (= asta). The money received from this
human sale would be used to fund schools for white children.

In Louisiana, after the end of the civil war, Samuel Lawrence James said that he could still use former
slaves to make money: they don t have to work in a plantation anymore, the 13th amendment
abolishes slavers for everyone but keeps slavery as a punishment for a crime (this was a trick).
He started planning a penitentiary that would be working as a factory.
The whole prison system could be run as a business.

Social consequences: some companies which invests billions of dollars in the prison business end up
making a lot of money, but society pays a very high price for that because if you completely forget
rehabilitation and just think about profit, you cannot expect for run this kind of business with people
who spent all their lives in prison in a violence environment, humiliated, no schools, no recreation of
any kind, no rehabilitation programs they produce violence.
Violence is the social cost of this kind of attitude which start at the beginning of the 19 th century in
the USA.

One of the things about modern prison is that the rehabilitation is present and goes through
psychiatry and psychological services.
Most convicts go through traumas before they go to prison and even more traumas while they are in
prison, so they need sometimes rehabilitation.
The issue in American prison are generally people with drugs (drugs = medicines). That is the easiest
way to cope with psychological disorders, because it s inexpensive and it also provides more security,
because people are going to be given painkillers, drugs for depression, so they are very sleepy, and
they react in less violent ways. Pharmaceutical industries make a lot of money out of drugs sold to
prisons.

24
Pag 103
Cracking down on black political consciousness in prison is common nationwide. In Texas, Adolf
Hitler s Mein Kampf and David Duke s My Awakening are allowed, but books by Sojourner Truth,
Harriet Beccher Stowe, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright are banned. Alabama banned Douglas
Blackmon s Pulizer Prize winning Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans
from the Civil War to World War II, which chronicles the convict lease system in Alabama.
This is something that comes straight out of the 1960s, when some African American convicts started
developing a political consciousness, studying the plantation system, the slavery system, the
punishment system, and they started to realize that it was systematical to black people to be
dehumanized in the American system, not only in prison but also outside the prison.
They were Angela Davis, George Jackson and Malcolm X (they are the three most important activists):
they are people who were sent to prison and who eventually started developing a consciousness
about the situation and started writing about this. They became very popular among black
community outside the prison because they were talking about the American system in a very direct
way which was not the way of Martin Luther King.

Martin Luther King was a protestant minister, he came from the South and so he was very well known
for being a very good orator (somebody who speaks very well in front of a big audience).
He doesn t take a revolutionary position, he takes a position of creating reforms and of teaching
people through a religious idea (the idea of God and the idea that we are all brothers and sisters) to
convince people that actually blacks and whites can live together and they can mix with each other
outside of any context of violence.
In the s we re just coming out of a period called the segregation period . Segregation means
that, little by little after the end of the civil war, black people started moving all over the USA: many
of them moved to the big cities in the north looking for jobs in New York, Boston etc.; others moved
west and others also relocated in Midwest states, like Ohio, Nebraska, where agriculture was the
main form of business and where they could get the job of farmers.
In mid cities black people did not get a proper treatment: they were still considered inferior and
they were still discriminated. Segregation is the most common result of discrimination.
It means that, because of black people did not mix well with white people, many schools started
creating segregated school business: it means that if you live in a black neighborhood, you will have
to go to school in that neighborhood, so all the students will be black and there will be no racial
tensions.
The racial tensions really started at the beginning of the 1960s because people like Angela Davis,
George Jackson, Malcolm X, started to go against discrimination.
Apparently, segregation was a way of avoiding racial contrasts, but actually it was a way of keeping
blacks separated from whites and also keeping the quality of white schools at a much higher level
than the kind of education in black schools.
Some of the black neighborhood were really dangerous/bad, so nobody wanted to teach there, only
the most desperate teachers wanted to go (the ones who were desperately looking for job who would
accept teaching there).
Martin Luther King always talks about the possibility of mixing blacks and whites.

25
MLK gave a very famous speech in Washington in called I Have a Dream it made MLK known
as the best African American speaker). It took place at the Lincoln Memorial (inside the Lincoln
Memorial there is a huge statue of Abraham Lincoln). Abraham Lincoln was the President of the USA
at the time of the Civil War (1861 1865) and he was the one who declared slavery illegal.
For many African American people, Lincoln was the man who destroyed slavery and set blacks free.
In that speech MLK convinced many white Americans that he didn t want to make a revolution, he
didn t want to have a black republic, he was actually insisting on a Christian idea of putting people
together.
Of course the problem was that white Christians in the south are totally racist and so their idea of
Christianity is quite different from the idea that MLK had.
The title of the speech I Have a Dream is the dream of integration, the idea that it is possible to
integrate whites and blacks.
One of the most interesting features of the way he talks was to use silence a lot, he gave very long
pauses, because of the imposing tone of his voice he captured the attention of the entire audience.
The end of the speech is exactly the contrary of what Angela Davis, George Jackson and Malcolm X
did when they wrote their political business.
MLK talks like a preacher (he is a preacher), you can feel the way of his rhetoric: he speaks very slowly,
lot of pauses between sentences.

One of the main issues in the south was that, even though black were considered full citizens, they
used tricks, so the blacks would not be able to vote.
In order to vote in the USA you have to go to the city office and get a ballot (scheda elettorale); but
in order to get it, you have to prove that you are an American citizen and you know something about
the USA which gives the confidence of giving you a chance to vote if you don t know your country
you shouldn t be able to vote . This can be used very much as a form of discrimination.

Malcolm X, among many other speeches, he gave one that was really interesting and also one that
shows you his kind of political attitude.
This speech was called The Ballot or The Bullet : it means that you either are going to give us a
chance to vote or you will have to face the fact that we are going to kill white people.
He wrote a very famous autobiography where he talks about the good effect the prison had on him.
He was a small drug dealer in Brooklyn, New York. He was taken to prison and he met somebody who
told him he should start reading books and so he read a lot (history, geography, languages,
philosophy, literature and little by little he developed an awareness of African situation in USA. That s
the way he became a political speaker.
He was killed: somebody says he was killed by the FBI, somebody says by the CIA, we don t really
know who killed him. He was a very famous figure for the Black Nationalism. It was like the Black
Panther Party: they were organizing black neighborhoods, they were pushing the idea of a full black
nation. (Malcolm X was very close to their political activism).

George Jackson was sent to prison for stealing $70 in a gas station and he was given a sentence of
one year, but then he had to go in front of the parole committee (comitato per la libertà provvisoria),
which decided that he didn t become a good citizen, then they would extend the sentence from one

26
to three (he had spent more or less half of his life in prison = la sentenza veniva prolungata di anno
in anno).
Little by little he became to be considered one of the most dangerous African American speakers in
USA.
When he was in prison, his brother kidnapped a judge, to free George Jackson in change for the life
of the judge, but police killed all the people involved, including the judge. That made the situation of
George Jackson obviously worst.
One day there was a riot in prison, he came out of the building and one of the guards from the roof
killed him.
His book is Letters from the Soledad Brothers . Soledad was the name of the prison where he was.
Some of the letters are to friends, some to the family, and all of the letters have a political context.
He talks about the necessity for African American revolution in USA.

On the other hand, Angela Davis became one the most famous African American feminist. She started
her career after the University, after being in prison for some years.
Most of the time black writers will immediately go to talk about social issues, because the private life
of blacks in the USA is very much affected by social issues and by political decisions.
A very interesting element that has to do with education is funding of bilingual groups. Bilingual
groups are usually groups of American citizens who were born outside the USA.
The most well known are the Chicanos: American citizens who have Mexican origins. They are
American citizens, but they speak Spanish at home, they watch Spanish speaking television etc.
Many of these groups are very poor, they have a very little education, they don t speak English at
home so their English is not proper, many of them don t go to school, or they have gone to school for
a while and then they drop out the school because their parents were in prison, or they are working.
The USA gives money for the education of bilingual groups, they try to promote bilingual education.
Other bilingual groups are Chinese Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, Korean
Americans.
One of the problems is that this money for bilingual groups was never given to blacks, because all
these people (Chinese, Italian, Korean, German Americans) came to USA because they wanted a
better life conditions or they wanted a second opportunity. Blacks did not want to go to USA, they
were actually sold by other tribe members in Africa or they were kidnapped by whites and shipped
to America.
When the blacks reached the USA, they would be sold to plantations and the people made sure that
the groups of blacks coming from the same area in Africa and speaking the same language would be
separated from the start: it was impossible for them to keep on speaking a language that whites
would not be able to understand and that would become eventually dangerous.
What kind of English they were listen to? They were listening to people who were working in
plantations as slave drivers (= people who were controlling how fast they worked and how well they
worked). The only blacks who learned English well were children who were let free to play with
children in the plantations (sometimes some of them would be able to look at the books).
So blacks are left with no original language: the African languages they spoke, have been totally lost
for banning them to speak them. But the English that black people learned is not the proper standard
American English and in fact it became the African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

27
Some people say that it is not American English, because it has some bad features which are
considered bad English: such as car - cah , the - da , I m going - I be going , I they go - I they
goes .
But some linguists claimed that these are no longer mistakes, because when you have social group
that speaks a language, even if from a syntactical point of view, some of the ways of pronouncing or
writing down words is wrong, when all the people that belong to the same group, pronounce, speak
and write down in that way, it becomes a rule of that variety of the English: it can be considered a
language.
There is a movement called English Only . The English Only Movement is the movement which tries
to prevent African American people and mostly also Mexican people from speaking their own
language; it tries to take away the linguistical identities of Mexicans and Africans.

CHAPTER 12
Pag. 120-121
It talks about Angola prisons, that is the country in which slaves came from Mississippi.
In Angola prisons and around them they organize bull fights where humans are fighting bulls and
white people bet on who is going to win. The penitentiaries started up as a place where corporations
and enterprises could make money.
The main problem in places like Mississippi (it is one of the most racist place in the south of the USA)
after the end of the Civil War, they realize that one way of continuing the slavery system is by using
former slaves as convicts, making the punishments and the sentences harsher to transform them in
convicts, so they sent to prison a lot of people.
African Americans were flooding the penitentiary system, mostly on larceny convictions.
They didn t know what to do with them and then they soon realize that they could make money with
them.

Pag.122-123
In a joint committee of senators and representatives deputati inspected the Louisiana State
Penitentiary and found it nearly deserted. The looms that used to be worked all day and all night, are
now silent as the tomb . The warden and the lessees were not at the prison. It is pretty difficult to
find out who are the lessees or, indeed, whether or not there are any , the inspectors wrote in their
report. Where were the convicts?
Almost as soon as James s prison factory was running, he d abandoned it .
James is the man who transformed the prison into a factory after the end of the Civil War and started
to make a lot of money. Soon enough he realized that it was very much profitable to contract some
prisoners with other companies who needed more work.
So instead of working in a penitentiary as a factory, he d discovered that he could make a lot of more
money subcontracting his prisoners to labor camps, where they were made to work on levees and
railroads. A convict doing levee and railroad work cost one-twentieth that of a wage worker.
This is very indicative of a problem that will soon come up. The problem was that white workers are
against the convict lease system because it takes jobs away.

28
If you pay a company who leases a convict to you and the price you pay is one twentieth of what
you pay to free worker this means that a new social group of unemployed white workers is going to
come out and get big very quickly.
What happens is that they started sending a lot of prisoners to work and of course the people start
to ask more prisoners, because with more prisoners, more money they earn.
In Mississippi transferred its lease to Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux
Klan .
The Ku Klux Klan is the white more supreme group in the USA who talks about the necessity of keeping
the blacks down. They do everything possible to manipulate and segregate the blacks and sometimes
they also commit homicides, hanging blacks supposed for having committed crimes that they haven t
never demonstrate.
What they were trying to do was to send as many blacks as possible to prison, knowing that they
would be leased to private companies and then the state would give them money from this private
company, so instead of being cost convicts would become profit, which is exactly what was already
happening with the slaves.
By the US commissioner of labor reported that, where leasing was practiced, the average
revenues were nearly four times the cost of running prisons.
It became a very seductive idea for a lot of legislators to use the system, because instead of spending
money for running a prison, they would make money out of the prison and so it would be very good
for their political career because they would be able to cut down taxes for citizens.
By some twenty-seven thousand convicts were performing some kind of labor in the South at a
given time.
This is the famous pig law , which was designed exactly for the purpose of putting more people in
prison. The pig law said that if you stole something of $10, a cow or a pig, it was considered the grand
larceny and you could get a sentence of up to 5 years.

Pag 124-125
After the adoption of this law, the number of state convicts quadrupled from 272 in 1874 to 1072
three years later.
The number of people being incarcerated in US is growing in an incredible way.
Nearly all these new convicts were black. So states ensured more years of work by charging convicts
for the cost of conviction. you have to pay it, and if you don t have money to pay it, you spend
more time in prison.
If you are in prison, you are charged money for your maintenance of prison = the state keeps you in
prison because you committed the crime but when you are towards at the end of your sentence and
you are allowed to go to work during the day, the prison keeps some percentual of the money that
you earn to pay the expense for having you in prison for a long time.
It s no coincidence that the number of black prisoners increased nearly percent in that period.
By using convicts, the labor was cheaper, didn t strike, and it could be driven at a pace that free
workers wouldn t tolerate. One Mississippi report claimed its convicts do thirty percent more work
than free borers, being worked long, hard and steadily. The South s penitentiaries had become

29
large rolling cages that followed railroads building or ramshackle stockades deep in the forests,
swamps, and mining fields.
The advantage of using convict was that they were cheaper, they didn t strike, they could work for a
longer time that a normal person would work, because they didn t have any rights, so they could be
kept in working for a very long time. People were kept in these rolling cages, which are cages where
the people keep lions, and at a very high temperature, the rate of mortality was very high.
There are no substantive memoirs by prisoners during the convict leasing era. The most detailed
account of a convict labor camp was J. C. Powell s The American Siberia, published in . Powell
spent fourteen years guarding convicts for a Florida railroad company and a major turpentine firm.
Powell gives a devastating report of the living conditions, most of the people were sick, they were
not given any medical attention.

Pag 126-127
During that night a long chain was stretched down the middle, to which the convicts were strung by
smaller chains attached to the shackles on their ankles. After a day s work, the men would sit on the
platforms, get chained up, and eat a dinner of salt pork, cowpeas, and corn bread.
Sometimes escapes happened, and some people knew their conditions, how these convicts were
treated, and helped the convicts who escaped. These people started hating the people who were
running the prisons for their cruel behavior. In order to make sure they would give back the convicts,
the companies started training dogs, foxhounds, to find the convicts somewhere in the swamps.

Pag 129
A convict under James s lease was more likely to die than he would have been as a slave. In 1884 the
editor of the Daily Picayune wrote that it would be more humane to punish with death all prisoners
sentenced to a longer period than six years , because the average convict lived no longer than that.
People working in those conditions couldn t survive more than six years. A convict with a sentence
with more than six years, already knew that he was not coming out.

Pag 130
In the deadliest year of Louisiana s lease, nearly percent of convicts perished. Between 1870 and
, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under James s regime.
The pattern was consistent throughout the South, were annual convict death rates ranged from
about 16 percent to percent.
In South Carolina the death rate of convicts leased to Greenwood and Augusta Railroad averaged
percent a year from 1877 to 1879. In 1870 Alabama prison officials reported that more than 40
percent of their convicts had died in their mining camps.
There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. In , eleven years
before Samuel L. James s death, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and
Correction: Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to
take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these
convicts: we don t own em. One dies, get another .

30
What allowed for these totally cruel practices is the fact that the justice system was constantly
feeding prison with new prisoners. So they could kill as many as they wanted, the blacks were not
their property.
Convict leasing started up as a very smart idea to make money from some private business; but then
little by little it became a business run by corporations, because it needed big investments and it
allowed a large revenue.

Chapter 14 page 151

An Alabama state health inspector described conditions at one camp, run by a smaller company.
Prisoners drank water piped in from the river, the same river that other convicts located upstream
used as a toilet. It is a water that no population of human creatures inside or outside of the prison
walls should be condemned to drink.
Why did all the Southern states avoid doing something about? The prison business came up to make
all the way up to 10 percent of the budget of the state. That means that in the budget of the state,
10 percent was the prison business.

Pag 152
Even children were leased to him Thomas O Conner . In Tennessee leased convicts under
eighteen years of age; fifty-four of those were under sixteen, three were twelve, and one only ten years
old.
They managed to take money in any possible way from convicts.
Another thing which was very common during the slavery time, was dividing the slaves according to
their physical conditions; they had standards for defining the value of the slaves according to age, to
physical aspect, etc. .
Slaves were classified as full hands (the people who could work full time), half hands (people who
had some problems, not totally fit) and dead hands (they could be only employed in the house).
The problem is that, in this business, they actually organized some working camps where they did
easy work (that was very profitable) and so they would put the convicts who were not in good health
to work there.

Pag 153
As brutal as it was, an report by the US commissioner of labor in Alabama defended the system.
Convict labor is more reliable and productive than free labor, it said. Mine owners say they could
not work at a profit without the lowering effect in wages of convict-labor competition.

Pag 154
In , Alabama Inspector of Convicts W. D. Lee told the annual congress of the National Prison
Association in Cincinnati, We have difficulties in the South which you at the North have not. We must
not be held to too strict an accountability. We have a large alien population, an inferior race. Just what
we are to do with them as prisoners is a great question as yet unsettled. The Negro s moral mental
sense is lower than that of the white man. We say that he has been degraded by three or four
generations of slavery. I will not consent to that. While slavery is degrading, the Negro in slavery has
reached a higher state of civilization than he ever reached anywhere else. What would become of him

31
away from the white man, I do not know . Another inspector, Dr. Albert T. Henley, added, It is almost
impossible to reach the Negro by means applied to the white convicts. We waste time in trying to
make a Negro think he needs reformation. Like with slavery, racist ideology and the profit motive
went hand in hand. If reformation of black criminals was impossible, the logic went, we might as well
make use of them in the mine.
At one point the business had become so nefarious that white workers begin to organize strikes and
rebellions, because these people were all unemployed because employ white men cost more, blacks
were much cheaper.
Tennessee became the first place in the South to abandon convict lease. Convict leasing is slowly
abandoned.

32