Matthew Byrne
Life Sentences
What do we make of
the flowering vine
that uses as its trellis
the walls of a prison?
—Jackie Wang
One wintry afternoon, smiling sadly at my reflection in the mirror, I spent quite a long time deciding what to wear. “Playing dress up” might be the more accurate phrase, but that sounds flippant, infantile even, and in reality I had a lot riding on this outfit. It was March. Rain slashed a window somewhere behind me and bloomed across the glass as I rummaged through my closet. I heard the dull, liquid patter only rarely—on account of the thin stream of adrenaline gurgling in my ears—and decided to budget an extra ten minutes for the inevitable traffic.
Strange, the ritual of getting ready for work and how it concentrates the mind and empties it of extraneous concerns. After deliberating for the most of half an hour, I spread an outfit over my duvet, running the fabric of each garment between my thumb and index finger as I set it down. A silly habit, but I like doing it. It’s almost meditative in its simplicity. I’m anxious by nature, so I do what I can to muster a teacher’s flinty composure. And truth be told, I needed all the sangfroid I could get because that afternoon I was to teach at a prison.
Teaching in prison goes something like this: you sign paperwork and attend a stuffy orientation led by a chipper woman in her sixties. She will strike you as pleasant enough at first, though soon you find her eagerness to name-check ‘celebrities’ at her institution unsettling. It grates at your sense of propriety. That or a professorial-type hosts the course. Either way, these women teach you to appropriately interact with your future students. There is a protocol for this sort of thing, you are told. Follow the protocol.
What else? Oh, expenses. How could I forget? You’ve got to cough up $90 for the requisite TB test. A rakish nurse practitioner will embed a small bubble of tuberculin antigen beneath your skin ($55) and examine it a few days later for signs of rash ($35). Transportation costs require consideration, too. Crossing the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge each week will put you back $7, so plan for the tolls—in addition to the gas.
Then there is the matter of your wardrobe. You are told what to wear. A rulebook specifies outfits, and there are so many rules to remember: greens and yellows are forbidden; no shorts or denim; absolutely nothing blue. Only reds, browns, pinks, and black pass muster. Finding an ensemble within these structures is harder than it sounds, especially if like me you are colorblind. Best to stick with recognizable black and earthy tones and pluck that wrinkled brown polo and those scratchy black slacks from the bottom of your closet. These clothes, loaded with the weight of bureaucratic fiat, became my uniform every Thursday evening.
I have always arrived early to teach. Very early. As in over half an hour early. I’m chronically late, so I figured washing up at an embarrassing 2:40pm for a 3:15pm slot beats tardiness, an inexcusable offense for the correctional officers posted at the gate. They exuded extraordinary discipline. Probably ex-military come to think of it, what with their ramrod straight posture and glassy expressions. They never liked me, and I always found them a bit frightening. Something about the way they looked me over—I had never had anyone examine me so thoroughly before (if you’ve ever been to a maximum-security prison, you’ll know what I mean).
The guards don’t take too kindly to infringements on the dress code, so I was careful to obey their edicts, not wanting to jeopardize my students’ learning on account of a sartorial slip-up—which was the kind of thing I worried about on the drive to the prison. Are these pants too blue? What about my jacket, is it actually brown? If I didn’t act quickly enough, anxiety would work itself into my pores and sediment debilitating layers of doubt under my skin. Luckily, a little sunshine usually did the trick. So every few minutes between road signs for Oakland, an exit for Berkeley, the highrise furnaces at Chevron’s Richmond Refinery, I would catch a gentle shaft of sunlight peeking through the fog and lean in.
Soon enough, the road rose beneath me, and Marin County crested over the horizon. From there, directions are simple. A sharp left turn after the Francisco Boulevard exit takes you at last to salt-licked Main Street in the tiny coastal city of San Quentin. Every city in America has its Main Street, but my destination, of course, has a reputation that precedes it.
Everyone knows about San Quentin. Everyone knows about Scott Peterson and Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, each of whom served time there. Everyone knows that Johnny Cash was in San Quentin, too (to perform people usually forget to qualify, but who am I to quibble). Even my family in Ireland knows about the prison. I remember the sharp inhale at the other end of the phone when I told an aunt I was teaching there. Her voice dropped to a stern whisper. The subtext crackled, You had better watch your back.
Evidently, everyone knows the stories about San Quentin, but few know about its Gold Rush origins or its death row. Still fewer know that in 1980, the state of California planned to decommission the prison and replace it with two new 500-bed operations. Then-governor Jerry Brown even brought in an architect to draw up the plans. He prepared designs and laid the blueprints for what promised to be two model prisons oriented towards rehabilitation. By 1982, it appeared San Quentin really was on its way out.
But the prison held on. So did its death row: the largest in the nation. What a strange distinction for one of the most famously liberal cities in the world. Can it even be true? San Quentin’s palatial façade is so ordinary for this affluent corner of California that it’s hard to imagine the building houses a gas chamber that suffocated a total of 194 human lives since 1937 before being finally rendered inoperable in only 2019. But it did.
The chamber in question consisted of a dentist’s chair sealed inside a deep-sea diving bell that prison officials apparently purchased from a carnival in the 1930s. What carnival ever used a diving bell? None that I’ve ever heard of. Maybe the eponymous freak show in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story anthology. But only in an outtake: a pulley snaps, and poor unfortunate Evan Peters sinks slowly to a watery grave at the bottom of some ocean. Or maybe he drowns when a seal breaks. Or when the air hose comes loose. In any case, death comes as no surprise to us viewers.
Nowadays, that execution chamber is just a symbol, an undead reminder of what was done here. Here is proof positive of extraordinary human suffering; here is the casual cruelty of mass incarceration and our proclivity to seal away “problem people” and let them die alone. But like any snippet of truth that morphs into a symbol, the reality is something else entirely.
Most prisoners who died in California didn’t die in that diving bell. No, deliberate abandonment and institutional malfeasance were the main culprits. In the case of deaths by medical neglect alone, the body count clocked in at “at least one person a week, every week, for decades” (one district judge, ex-pressing his dismay in a 2005 class action, specified that “this statistic, awful as it is, barely provides a window into the waste of human life occurring behind California’s prison walls”). The mound of corpses piled higher and higher until eventually the United States Supreme Court stepped in and ordered the state to let up and finally start releasing its inmates, ruling in Brown v. Plata (2011) that it had egregiously violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights.
To alleviate strain on its medical infrastructure, California was to release around 46,000 inmates and bring the state’s inmate population down to at most 137.5% capacity; it could not simply “build itself out of [the] crisis,” as it had attempted to do for years now. Not this time. For decades, despite boasting one of the most dysfunctional prison systems in the nation (as the Supreme Court cited a 1995 case which found “overwhelming evidence of the systematic failure to deliver necessary care to mentally ill inmates”), California had pursued a growth-only policy in an abortive attempt to resolve its myriad institutional failures. As a direct consequence of this policy, the state counts a carceral archipelago so vast that when it began to release inmates per the Plata ruling, the move created, incredibly, a nationwide decline in the United State’s total prison population.
I’ve read a lot about prisons and jails, but that statistic—“at least one person a week, every week, for decades”—has stuck with me. There is something unconscionable about the whole arrangement: how every seven days, as one person leaves a California prison in a pine box, 57 new prisoners replaces their corpse.
They say they deserve it. Prisoners getting their comeuppance, their just-desserts (that’s the line pundits like to run with whenever something terrible happens). And audiences eat it up. I think about everyone who jumped to defend former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio after he proudly referred to one of his Arizona jails as a “concentration camp.” Or my neighbors who complained when inmates got vaccinated against COVID-19 before they did. A part of me says I shouldn’t blame them for letting fear fuel their reaction, but the other part resents them for their callousness. No amount of suffering, it seems, is ever satisfactory.
Surviving a spell in San Quentin, or any prison for that matter, is no cake-walk. It’s not for nothing that some inmates refer to the penitentiary as “The Arena”—though I imagine a few of the root challenges of prison life will probably share more in common with your own life, dear reader, than you may initially think. Make a star map, and plot the overlap. There are, of course, the crushing pressures of lost liberty, circumscribed life-chances, and the mark of a criminal record that characterize incarceration, but consider the fundamentals. Grinding routine, general loneliness, and existential ennui—the daily indignities of life—are the same anywhere. They’re universal.
Prisons, too, are universal—or at least they have been since the nineteenth century. What’s not universal, however, is the distinct configuration of prison life in the United States. Sentences here are long, longer than perhaps anywhere else on Earth. Staring down the barrel of three, seven, thirty years or even an entire lifetime behind bars, life feels both longer and shorter than you ever imagined. Especially shorter now that you’ve lost years to this wretched institution, but yet longer still, since every waking moment is drawn out like taffy on a stretcher. “I wonder how they keep it up,” Mitsuki Miyawaki, better known as Mitski, sings on Laurel Hell, “When today is finally done, there’s another day to come, then another day to come, then another day to . . .” I heard that lyric the February she released her album and couldn’t help but appreciate—marvel at, in fact—the monumental scale of a human life, filled as it is with long, sometimes unbearably empty days. She wasn’t singing about prison life, of course, but she might as well have been.
Prison, by its very nature, is an exercise in filling empty days. Humdrum, prosaic work. Family visits, for those with willing relatives, maintain social bonds. Phone calls can substitute, but they’re often prohibitively expensive. Letters, too, are a godsend, especially if family lives far away. Many have given up on their loved ones, though; their compassion and patience long ago exhausted. Solitude populates the quiet corners of prisons, and these small notes, one of the last modes of communication left to those inside, bring solace to lonely hours. Visitors and their kind words may momentarily stave off low spirits, but, more often than not, serving time means holding a very lonely vigil for your sins.
Money, time, and often hope all sink into the chasm that is a prison. We presume, for an incarcerated person, the loss of faith, a descent into darkness. This has been serialized. We’ve seen it on television, read it in novels and biographies, and heard it from academics. The story, at this point, almost writes itself: nothing seems to stand a chance. At best, the terror of imprisonment might ease into surrender as recognizable landmarks, gestures, and faces congeal into a new routine, a “new normal.” Better to just tuck those old memories away in a cherished drawer for safekeeping, before melancholy overcomes you.
Then again, maybe not. Although it’s dark inside a prison, even for a temporary visitor like me, your eyes gradually adjust to the concrete firmament. When they do, you realize that, despite the challenges, many eke out a kind of life here, however fenced in or enclosed they may be.
San Quentin wasn’t the first prison landscape I became familiar with. Before life’s pendulum swung me back to California, I had taught and been taught by incarcerated students in Washington state. Eight hundred miles north of San Francisco, the scenery changes. Smoky mountain blues, wooded edges, and abandoned lumber mills—this drive along I-5 recalls David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. There’s an allure, a subtle charm: the distinct color palette of chocolate browns, dull rust, and shadowy menace. Secrets abound here.
Under Washington’s muted grays, the sky feels lower. Confinement is in the air. Not far off State Route 16 lies the largest women’s prison in Washington State. Until about a decade ago, when women inside agitated for college programming, it was also the state’s most violent. One official who ran the volunteer orientation quipped that the prison’s initials were short for “We Can’t Count Women,” referring to occasional errors made during “head counts.” The joke also spoke to what passes for humor inside prison walls.
During my time each week with these women, they shared their hand-written essays and let me scrawl edits on them. The essays were as cathartic as they were sharp, especially when their coursework tackled issues of power. One week, we read the transcript of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which preaches a novelist’s gospel—the importance of storytelling and the obligation to read broadly and generously—but also, importantly, scrutinizes power. For Adichie, narratives have long served as tools of dispossession and slander as well as of community empowerment and repair. A key difference, she suggests, is where a story begins: narrating a corrupt and bankrupt Africa achieves a different ending than opening a story with the European “Scramble for Africa” and looting of a continent. More stories mean more clarity in a world made hazy by disinformation and spin. We’re brought closer to truth, but we never quite get there, and that’s alright. “When we realize,” Adichie says in her regal Nigerian accent, “that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
I wasn’t really buying it at first—a prison is an inferno no matter how many stories we tell about it—but my students convinced me by highlighting a piece of Adichie’s argument I hadn’t previously considered. Rewriting a domineering narrative, one rife with tropes, talking points, and stereotypes, has emancipatory potential.
I never asked why anyone ended up in prison—what did it matter, anyway?—but every student would narrate snippets of their lives as evidence in their essays. These brittle windows into The Big House surprised me not because of their content, but their frankness. Trauma stalked the edges of our conversations: the majority of women in prison or under other forms of correctional supervision are in that position because they are survivors of poverty, abuse, or gender violence, so I anticipated difficult conversations about harm and justice. But their essays also explored atonement. Some shared stories of addiction recovery, others of rekindling connections with lost relatives, still others of mentoring younger peers and enrolling in anger management courses, all while working toward a college degree. Most of us, they’d write, find our- selves within the confines of the prison after some sort of misdeed, but we’re more than our worst decisions. Adichie, I think, would agree.
I came back the week after we discussed “The Danger of a Single Story,” and the week after that. We’d always exchange pleasantries—rolling our eyes at how unhinged the 45th president was—and to commiserate about the difficulties of juggling a tricky course load. Then, we would dive into their writing. We’d discuss the power of narrative, agency, and memory to restore a sense of humanity. Precisely, it turns out, what the prison categorically denied them.
These days, it is almost impossible to get a story out of prison. Officials carefully manage the information that gets in and out of their facilities. Since the mid-1970s, such policies have had the imprimatur of the highest law of the land. In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld California legislation that denied face-to-face interviews with certain prisoners in Pell v. Procunier. In a separate case decided the same day, Saxbe v. Washington Post Co. (1974), the Court upheld the restrictions on a federal level. Predictably, press access to prisoners has largely been curtailed and a vital stream of reporting has all-but dried up. Major publications do still cover issues of incarceration, but only rarely.
The magazines that maintain an editorial focus on prisons (Prison Legal News and The Abolitionist) are generally small outfits run by dedicated activists and volunteers. Inmate-edited newspapers like San Quentin News and The Angolite are rare birds, statistical anomalies studied lovingly by a few academics and journalists. Mostly, we just get mugshots.
If we trace the history of photography and find its intersection with the history of criminalization, this shouldn’t come as a great surprise, as the two share an umbilical connection. The first news image ever circulated in print was of an alleged criminal. In 1847, a French newspaper published an image of a young man under arrest. He stands defiant, smirking at the camera, perhaps proud of his deed. His arresting officer lies out of frame: all we see of him is a white glove resting on our young delinquent’s shoulder. His crime has been lost to history, as has much of anything about the image itself (I can’t find a caption or a publication date, much less the name of the newspaper). Context has peeled away, just as the mercury highlights and shadows have. All that’s left is a man’s likeness that has been scrutinized by an audience of thousands, marking the birth of photojournalism.
It reminds me of a collage by the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead . . . (SD18) (2019), that I came across at San Francisco’s de Young museum. The collage was huge, impossible to miss, and composed of more than 3,200 miniature mugshots in black-and- white: half in front, the other half in profile. The composition of each image was flat, austere and unforgiving. Acne scars and wrinkles marred the faces on display, and makeup, where not absent, is poorly applied. Alas, a bureaucrat shot these images: for the piece, Paglen mined the archives of the American National Standards Institute, a non-profit group whose database of mugshots taken from people convicted and merely accused of crimes has been used to train all sorts of facial-recognition software and technologies.
Who do these faces belong to? Hard to say. No names or identifiable attributes accompany the photographs. Gender can be discerned, and sometimes so can race but not as often as one would imagine. This is because Paglen has redacted the wall of faces with thin blocks of bright white ink, in effect adding another layer of privacy (or maybe mystery?) to the piece. With no ability to fix the viewer with a gaze, the faces lack agency. They can only be looked at, like creatures in bell jars. They’re nobodies, the white blindfolds suggest at first blush, faceless and, therefore, evacuated of personhood. Most importantly, they’re nobodies because they’re convicts.
Another fitting metaphor: it’s not glue that holds the mugshots in place but mounting pins, what’s used to skewer taxidermy butterflies and dried insects upright in shadow boxes, their little carcasses suspended above a label and a catalog number. Why does this choice feel so deliberate? And so painful: the tiny needles pressed through thousands of delicate silver gelatin prints?
Before finding Paglen’s work, I had never considered imprisonment in visual terms, which I suppose is his point. No one does. Prisons are so ordinary, and crime so quotidian, that it seems obvious, redundant even, that such buildings proliferate across our vast country. That crime exists seems explanation enough; the look of things is entirely beside the point.
But aesthetics matter a great deal, much as we might prefer to cast prisons and the people inside them usefully out of sight. By and large, prisons remain fearsome precisely because they are uncharted territory in our natural world. For many of us, it’s a site we rarely encounter: a sight unseen. Buried far from city centers and the world of the living, there’s often little physical evidence that a prison even exists in the social landscape of our daily lives at all. We often can’t find them if we go looking, so their influence on our daily lives often goes unnoticed. Since faith traffics in imagery (“seeing is believing”), a prison’s invisibility lends itself to secrecy, oblivion, mystification, fearmongering, and acquiescence.
San Quentin has a gift shop. Did you know about this? They call it a “hobby shop.” It’s in a small, nondescript building just outside the prison’s East Gate. If you didn’t know to look for it, you’d probably walk right past it. Individuals who, in another life, might have been art instructors or perhaps artists-in- residence instead sell their wares here, in this little “hobby shop.” No faces accompany the pieces, only surnames and identification numbers issued by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Regular hours are posted: 12:30pm to 2:30pm, Monday through Friday. There’s a strict cash-only policy. Change must be exact. The store has a page on Yelp.
By the time I finished my afternoon of teaching, the hobby shop had already closed. The Bay’s crisp fog had burnt off by then, and the sun was usually shining, the pleasant smell of morning rain still hanging in the air. I said my goodbyes to the other volunteer instructors who shared a time slot with me and walked to my car. I’d always be sweating: not out of fear, but out of exhaustion. I’d turn on the ignition and prepare to debrief on my trip back home, a habit that a friend of mine got me into to help process the contradiction of leaving a place of entrapment. Part meditation and part therapy, I’d think out loud, on and off, for the most of fifty minutes, gathering my thoughts about the prison and why its roots seem to dig as deep as the roots of the United States itself.
Some of the first people brought to the Americas were prisoners. Four of the ninety crew mates that Christopher Columbus sailed with were convicts. Later, imperial England would send its felons to toil on the continent. Georgia, The Peach State, began as a penal colony; so did Louisiana and Virginia. The enslaved peoples of West Africa, traded as chattel by Columbus and others of his ilk, were prisoners of a different sort. Triangle merchants sold them to black-hearted overseers and cutthroat magnates in the American South running rice-, sugar-, cotton-, and tobacco-growing operations. Harvesting these cash crops was “the chief business of slavery,” as the historian Barbara J. Fields puts it: murderous work that exposed the murderous ambitions of wealthy Southern businessmen. But it was only through the mass incarceration of Black people on plantations that the business remained so fabulously lucrative for so long.
How to explain incarceration’s creep?
Though cages may date back centuries, modern prisons came about much more recently. Long-term incarceration arose only with the advent of two world-historical developments: the concept of “individual rights” protected by the State and the abolition of slavery. Before this particular moment, prison sentences tended to be quite short—much shorter than they are now—and were handed down mostly to poor White men mostly for property crimes and crimes of poverty, meaning essentially no people of color before the Civil War and hardly any women or children “before the Progressive period [ . . .] were in any prisons anywhere,” according to the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And yet regimes of confinement dictated the rhythms of everyday life. To do otherwise was to go against the day’s prevailing logics: Black folk were to work in the fields, White women to remain at home, and Native Americans to be impounded in reservations—each of which locked individuals into their own kind of prison. It was precisely because of the visible unfreedom of everyone else that new “liberties” like “universal” suffrage or “majority rule” could be awarded exclusively to affluent White males. After Jubilee in 1865, however, prisons would grow in number and popularity, coalescing around a conviction that they would be “the great equalizing institution,” writes the scholar Sara M. Benson, now that “in theory, everyone was equally subject to state punishment.”
They weren’t, of course and never would be, as the United States could never quite satiate its appetite for revenge. Today, U.S. prisons warehouse an estimated 1.8 million human lives, while jails and immigrant detention centers hold millions more captive, in a multi-billion dollar business. But this wasn’t always the case. At some point or other, the uniquely American decision was made that “more is better.” So, our leaders built and built and built, following the grinding common sense of maximalism—all to teach us a lesson about power. Incrementally, this is to say, elites molded prisons into a tool of social control that would offer those who fell out of line a glimpse of hell on earth: living death (a stint in The Big House or the mere threat of it, it seems many of us have come to believe, ought to keep the troublemakers in line). Years multiplied, and now “about 1 in 40 adult U.S. residents [are] under some form of correctional supervision,” according to statistics from the Department of Justice.
I smile sadly and glance over my shoulder, past the nearby traffic. The Bay was especially beautiful that day. A pair of boats were gliding across the water, polished smooth by the Pacific sea breeze, and for a moment, only a glimmer, I wanted to burst into tears. There comes a moment in thinking about social problems like mass incarceration when everything starts to look like a fait accompli. Resistance feels futile, and there seems to be no way out. I can only speak for myself here, but it can be demoralizing to realize just how entrenched such institutions are, and how slow they are to respond to sea-changes in public demands. Lest it be forgotten, prisons predate democracy in the United States. But I guess I still believe in the power of stories to change people’s minds— stories like those my students told me, stories like the ones behind Paglen’s collage, hopefully like this essay. I want to believe in it. In some ways I think I need to. It sounds corny, but with no easy or obvious rescue from the emergency of mass incarceration, I have to believe an alternative exists. Perpetrators can surely be held accountable for their actions and make reparations for them without being disposed of in cages. This is no easy balance to strike, but I have to believe it can be done.
In my local Oakland, California, for instance, the architect Deanna van Buren is heading a nonprofit, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, that specializes in architectural solutions to mass incarceration. Its mission is explicitly abolitionist; van Buren and her team don’t design “better” prisons or jails as this is a nonstarter. Instead, they build alternative models of justice that treat both the root causes and the ongoing effects of harm: mobile classrooms that help students study for their GEDs; “restorative economics” programs that offer job training for gainful employment; a trailer that transports women released from prison to safe transitional housing; and “peacemaking circles” that permit perpetrators of violence to face their victims and atone.
Similar projects are breaking ground in other Oakland neighborhoods (generationFIVE and The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective) as well as in Chicago (Project NIA), Philadelphia (Philly Stands Up!), Detroit (Restorative Justice City), New York (The Fortune Society), Newark (The Newark Community Street Team), Denver (Colorado Circles for Change), and Syracuse (The Near Westside Peacemaking Project). Some are prototypes; a few are well-oiled machines with connections across the United States (Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence). Most serve a small neighborhood and run on slim budgets, but their impact is outsized.
The trick of accountability here, these groups recognize, is to not mistake it for punishment by another name—because if you’re not careful, you might lose yourself to it. For revenge is a savage adjudicator, and life sentences are forever.