Aid & Abet

My 18-year-old niece, Emily, is visiting this week from Pittsburgh, PA. On Friday, we went to Alcatraz – I haven’t been there since the ’90s, and she really wanted to go. Well, she loved it – I think it was her favorite part of the trip.

In the picture, we’re on the ferry boat heading to the island. The tours, which run every half hour most days, are usually completely sold out. When you get to the island, you can walk around to the different building and see what it would have been like to have been a prisoner or a guard there. The warden and some guards (and their families) lived on the island, some lived in San Francisco. The cellblock features an audio tour with narration from former guards and prisoners. The prison closed in the ’60s.

The tour is educational, and in general I think that they do a good job of telling some of the stories. However, for me it is an opportunity to reflect on the nature of prison, about whether having people in little boxes is a good thing for society. Of course, this isn’t really discussed by the docents or on the audio tour. They focus primarily on the worst criminals who were housed there (like Al Capone or the Birdman), and on attempted escape attempts. I want the place to be treated with more reverence – that this was a place that people spent their lives, and what did it do to them? You hear tourists talking about how difficult it would be for them to live in these tiny cells, what do they think it does for the people who DO spend time in them?

The whole issue of prison reform/abolition is so complicated and overwhelming for me, and I respect my friends who work with organizations that focus on prison-related activism, from Free Battered Women which works with women who are in prison for crimes related to their abuse, or Critical Resistance which seeks the total abolition of prisons. I am glad for those groups and that work.

I also wish that more radical theorists tackled the issues of anti-social behavior within society and how to deal with it in a better, more merciful, just, productive, beneficial way. I mean, last year the Washington Post said that 1 in 100 adults in the US is in prison: “With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.” That number alone should be able to convince anyone that the system (meaning the whole system, not just prisons) is not working for anyone. But, numbers don’t convince anyone, really – it’s real stories of how prison has influenced people’s lives (like the story of these women) that really illustrates the craziness of it all.

But visiting a prison as tourism, I just can’t get over how odd that is.