Abstract
When discussing Machiavelli many years ago, political philosopher Sheldon Wolin coined the phrase “the economy of violence.” Machiavelli, he noted, highlights the presence of violence in political life. For Machiavelli, the “hard core of power is violence and to exercise power is often to bring violence to bear on someone else’s person or possessions.”2 Rather than trying to eliminate violence altogether, political leaders should manage it carefully. The politician, Machiavelli recognizes, cannot continually use violence without losing the respect of the governed. In fact, the “indiscriminate exercise of force and the constant revival of fear” create “widespread apprehension and hatred.”3 The politician must therefore use violence selectively and dramatically. Machiavelli fully recognizes that violence constitutes only one ingredient in sustaining political order. Institutions, personal charisma, common values, and a desire to share a common good all contribute to order. Nevertheless, Machiavelli counsels political leaders to always remember that violence remains a significant factor in political life.
Power may comprise anything that establishes and maintains the control of man over man. Thus power covers all social relationships which serve that end, from physical violence to the most subtle psychological ties by which one mind controls another.
Hans Morgenthau.1
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Notes
Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth J. Thompson, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. Sixth Edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 110.
Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 197.
Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, 198–199.
For an intriguing book on Walla Walla that features remarkable photographs, see Ethan Hoffman and John McCoy, Concrete Mama: Profiles from Walla Walla. Photographs by Ethan Hoffman. Text by John McCoy. Forward by Tom Wicker (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1981). Peter Remick wrote a riveting account of life in Massachusetts’ Walpole Prisons. In the early 1970s, inmates at Walpole exercised considerable power, and the result was widespread violence
For Remick’s book, see Peter Remick, In Constant Fear. As told to James B. Shuman (New York, NY: Dutton Press, 1975).
Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 42.
Darius M. Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 285.
For the discussion of these techniques, see Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 72, 289. For one account of the metal gag, see David J. Rothman, “Perfecting the Prison,” The Oxford History of the Prison. Edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 109.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 4.
For the use of the whip in the South, see David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), 149–150
Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books,), 128–130,201–205.
Steve J. Martin and Sheldon Ekland-Olson, Texas Prisons: The Walls Came Tumbling Down. Foreword by Harry M. Whittington (Austin, TX: Texas Monthly Press, 1987), 7. Also see Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise ofAmerica’s Prison Empire 94.
Thomas O. Murton and Joe Hyams, Accomplices to the Crime (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 7. For an additional discussion of the Tucker telephone, see Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 179.
For an excellent account of the courts and prison management, see Malcolm M. Feeley and Edward L. Rubin, Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America’s Prisons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The authors discuss Arkansas on pp. 51–95.
For one example of how public pressure changed modes of punishment, see Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).
In this section, I rely entirely on Alexander W. Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression: Social Control and the American Reformatory-Prison Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1994).
James B. Jacobs, Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society. Forward by Morris Janowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Burt Useem and Peter Kimball, States of Siege: U.S. Prison Riots, 1971–1986 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 15
For a fascinating study of prison riots in the 1950s, see Vernon Brittain Fox, Violence Behind Bars: An Explosive Report on Prison Riots in the United States (New York: Vantage Press, 1952).
United States District Court, N.D. California, Madrid v. Gomez, 889 F.Supp. 1146 (1995), Section II, A, “Excessive Force,” 1159–1200.
David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, “The Rape of American Prisoners,” The New York Review of Books, Volume 57, No. 4 (March 11, 2010), available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/25/the-way-to-stop-prison-rape/.
Caroline Isaacs and Matthew Lowen, Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona’s Prisons and Jails, American Friends Service Committee, May 2007, section vi, available at http://afsc.org/sites/afsc.civicactions.net/files/documents/Buried%20Alive.pdf.
For an older but still important document on violence against inmates, see Amnesty International “USA: A briefing for the UN Committee against Torture,” January 1, 2000, available at http://repository.forcedmigration.org/show_metadata.jsp?pid=fmo:4056
For an excellent discussion of court cases dealing with torture in prisons in the past few decades, see Fred Cohen, “Isolation in Penal Settings: The Isolation-Restraint Paradigm,” Criminal Justice and Behavior, Volume 35, No. 8 (August, 2008), 1017–1047.
For a well-known account of the Attica riot, see Tom Wicker, A Time to Die (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co, 1975).
For details of the New Mexico riot, see Roger Morris, The Devil’s Butcher Shop: The New Mexico Prison Uprising (New York: F. Watts, 1983)
Mark Colvin, The Penitentiary in Crisis: From Accommodation to Riot in New Mexico. With a Forward by Ben M. Crouch (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 1992); and Useem and Kimball, States of Siege: U.S. Prison Riots, 1971–1986, 85–114. Peter Remick also details the violence that plagued many prisons in the 1970s; see Remick, In Constant Fear.
For two historical accounts, see Terry A. Kupers, “How to Create Madness in Prison,” Humane Prisons. Edited by David Jones (Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing, 2006), 47–59
Richard H. Lamb and Linda E. Weinberger, “The Shift of Psychiatric Inpatient Care from Hospitals to Jails and Prisons,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, Volume 33, No. 4 (2005), 529–534.
Georgelle Hirliman, The Hate Factory: A First-Hand Account of the 1980 Riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Inc., 2005), 27.
David A. Ward and Gene Kassebaum, Alcatraz: The Gangster Years (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2009).
David A. Ward and Thomas G. Werlich, “Alcatraz and Marion: Evaluating Super-Maximum Custody,” Punishment and Society, Volume 5, No. 1 (January, 2003), 53–75. Ward and Werlich minimize the dangers of solitary confinement, and I don’t find their analysis persuasive.
For accounts of what happened at Marion, I rely on the following sources: Shalev, Supermax: Controlling Risk through Solitary Confinement, 18; Eddie Griffin, “Breaking Men’s Minds: Behavior Control and Human Experimentation at the Federal Prison in Marion,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, Volume 4, No. 2 (1993), 1–8
Stephen L. Chorover, From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980)
A. E. Gomez, “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972,” Radical History Review, Volume 96 (Fall, 2006), 58–84
Raul Salinas, Raul Salinas and the Jail Machine: My Pen Is My Weapon. Edited by Louis C. Mendoza (Austin, TX: Center for Mexican-American Studies, The University of Texas Press, 2006 )
Loren Karacki, “An Assessment of the High Security Operation at the USP-Marion” (Bureau of Prisons Monograph, May, 1987)
Stephen C. Richards, “USP Marion: The First Federal Supermax,” The Prison Journal, Volume 88, No. 1 (March, 2008), 6–22, available at http://www.convictcriminology.org/pdf/scrichards/USPMarion.pdf
For the larger context of Cold War psychological research sponsored by the US government, see Derek S. Jeffreys, Spirituality and the Ethics of Torture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 54–75, and Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2006). I thank Eddie Griffin for corresponding with me about his difficult experiences at Marion. I learned much from our correspondence.
Gomez, “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972,” 63. For Schein’s work on coercion, see Edgar Schein, Inge Schneier, and Curtis H. Barker, Coercive Persuasion; A Socio-psychological Analysis of the “Brainwashing” of American Civilian Prisoners by the Chinese Communists (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
For a discussion of how the Marion model came to Massachusetts, see Bill Newman, “Marionizing Massachusetts,” The Massachusetts Review, Volume 37 (Spring, 1996), 81–96
Russell Immarigeon, “Marionization of American Prisons,” National Prison Project Journal, Volume 7, No. 4 (Fall, 1992), 1–5
For the Lexington case, see Mary K. O’Melveny, “Lexington Prison High Security Unit: U.S. Political Prison,” in Criminal Injustice: Confronting the Prison Crisis. Edited by Elihu Rosenblatt (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 322–334
Amnesty International, “The High Security Unit, Lexington Federal Prison, Kentucky,” August 1988, available at http://anamericanradical.com/amnestyinternational-report-lexington-hsu-1988.pdf.
Robert Perkinson, “Shackled Justice: Florence Federal Penitentiary and the New Politics of Punishment.” Social Justice, Volume 21, No. 3 (1996), 117–132.
For the use of dogs, see Human Rights Watch, “Cruel and Degrading: The Use of Dogs for Cell Extractions in U.S. Prisons,” October 9, 2009, available at http://www.hrw.org/print/reports/2006/10/09/cruel-and-degrading-0. I first learned of this report from Colin Dayan’s book, see Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 219.
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© 2013 Derek S. Jeffreys
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Jeffreys, D.S. (2013). Solitary Confinement and the Economy of Violence. In: Spirituality in Dark Places. Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311788_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311788_3
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