Politicians have double billed prisons as solution to crime and unemployment and this narrative has shaped the United States’ political economy to promulgate mass incarceration. The prison population in the U.S. has quadrupled since the mid 1970’s. It is the highest in the world at 2.2 million incarcerated people. The analysis of the prison system is focused on a “set of relationships” that affects our daily landscapes in ways we may not always see. For example, in Detroit, we see how the corporation Quicken Loans is privatizing the city, building luxury condos and parks that not only keep people poor out but also increases problematic policing in surrounding neighborhoods. In Ferguson, a long procession of black residents’ lines up to pay traffic finds outside of a middle school turned makeshift courthouse, a damning portrait of American democracy.
The documentary style is unusual because it is divided into vignettes with no cohesive or chronological narrative structure because the links are associative. Story says that all the documentary prison films and non docs take the same shape. They go inside a prison, point a camera at a black man in a cell and the narrative will expose what is going on. The violence, the injustice of this person’s incarceration or it tells a redemptive story arc, or a transformation or an innocence story. A theme that cuts through the film is about money and capital and prison’s relationship to money and capital. The issue of exploitation through resources, labor, and industry different than the problem of prisons or even the scourge of prison labor. The prisoners are bored and not allowed to work. Then they get out of prison, and they’re not allowed to work. The idea of exploitation must be through differently regarding prison landscapes. In Appalachia their aspirations for a future and their desire to feel like they have worth in the world are being exploited by the promise of prisons being built in their town. Prisons are being built on top of closed coalmines. It I an exchange of one dirty industry for another. Prions deal with extracting people from their communities like coal is being extracted from the coalmines.
What struck Brett Story about Ferguson was telling the tales of implication of those of us who think that we have no relation to the prison system or even benefit from having the prison system. The Black Lives Matter movement had issues that stemmed from the killing of Michael Brown by police authorities. Some communities are still segregated racially that were still in place because of the redlining of the 1950s and 1960s. Today these areas are over policed because the revenue model is generated based primarily on police fining people of color for minor infractions like traffic violations. In these scenarios they’re still about crime, they’re still about how wrong the person was identified or deal too harsh of a punishment, but they don’t undermine anything in our imagination and the twinning of the problem of crime and the situation of prisons. Prisons are a set of relationships.
There are twelve scenes. It turns out there’s over a million different permutations to order them in. Story wanted to begin the film on a prison bus but was interested in messing with the idea of the familiar and the strange. There is something very familiar and universal of being on a night bus. Where are you when you’re just on the highway, you’re everywhere and you’re nowhere. She wanted to recreate that sense of familiarity and universalism and then totally upset it. Prisons aren’t just a metaphor in this film, they’re a real space, let’s not forget them.
The Prison in 12 Landscapes seemed to be inspired by 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould. This film’s vignette format and the use of The Goldberg Variations does reflect that film. Do who do you build momentum and coherence when you are making up a film made of a bunch of vignettes? Story says it rests on the viewer’s intelligence and her film resists the filmmaker’s need to editorialize and tell viewers what to think. Life doesn’t work like the affective experience if you follow one person through their emotional journey and find out what their childhood was like. Story thinks it is a shame if cinema is only deployed to do what could be done better in an essay.
Against a ‘humanizing’ prison cinema
Prisons used to be built in urban centers across the United States, now they are built far away and out of sight. They are also more difficult to access publicly, let alone represent through media. If only the public knew what was going on inside today’s prisons, then the same public might be animated to demand that the violence end. What does it mean to make something ‘visible’ and why do we think seeing has the power of dislodging? Films themselves hinges on the putative relationship between making visible and making human. Conventional prisons offer a vision of social change tethered to the humanization of the prison’s captives. Brett Story’s work emerges from a desire to make cultural work that enables and reinforces a politics of prison abolition. It also emerges from a deep dissatisfaction with conventional prison documentaries. Story explores the difference works of visual representation that ritualize a violent order rather than disturb it not just to show the terrible within the real, but also to make strange something that’s been normalized within the social landscape. Once rendered something strange, the prison might be rethought altogether.
Some other films of humanizing prison films are In the Land of the Free, Herman’s House, The House I live In, and Mothers of Bedford. These films seek to make change by contributing to what critical criminologist Michelle Brown calls “a visual iconography of social suffering.” Simply exposing the prison’s internal scenery of violence does little to denaturalize the prison as reified facet of modern capitalist life, or to challenge the carceral order as the legitimized system of social differentiation. The visual focus on the human-in-a-cage, I’d argue further, limits our ability to grasp the social relations, historical processes and material logics that productively bear on the prison regime’s existence and its continuation. The problem with a prison cinema of humanization: so long as it stays, narratively, visually, and analytically, within the bounds of the prison system, it must resign itself to the limited scripts and attendant logics prescribed by dominant discourses about crime and punishment.
Prison abolition is a movement aimed at changing the relationship that produces the kinds of events and behaviors for which prison and other carceral formations, operate or seem to operate as the solution. The goal of dismantling penal facilities co-exists with the seemingly disparate aims of interrupting interpersonal violence, providing livable housing or guaranteeing a minimum income, for these are all social problems for which the prison serves as a surrogate solution. The conceit of Story’s film is simple: it is a film about the prison in which one never sees a prison. The film unfolds instead as a journey through a series of landscapes across the United States where prisons do work, make space, and effect lives.
One reason to bring viewers through such places is to upset expectations about how and where the prison can be found, while at the same time demystifying the spaces of everyday life taken to be ‘free’. Within the narrative structure of the film, we not only find the prison and its logic operating in these ‘outside’ spaces, but we are also presented with a more complex picture of the different kind of work that prisons do, and don’t do, than offered by conventional representations of carceral space. When one approaches the prison as a set of relationships, one can find the prison at work in a vast array of spaces and places all around us. One finds the prison, for example, in a tiny slice of green AstroTurf at an awkward intersection in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, upon which a portable plastic swing set has been planted. It turns out that even a ‘pocket park’ can have carceral power, as in this case in which its sitting was driven by the goal of forcing 33 registered sex offenders to move out of the halfway house located nearby, in accordance with state restrictions against sex offenders living within 2000 meters of a park or a school.
One can also find the prison in the day labor agencies that litter urban centers across the country or at the work sites where their day laborers are deployed. A cast majority of the people employed by these agencies are ex-prisoner, who are paid below minimum wage and offered no benefits or job security for their work. This trend can be traced to the laws that dictate in many states that felons must tell their potential employers if they have been convicted of a crime, thus rendering them highly vulnerable to exclusion from the formal labor force. In this re-seeing the lines between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ become blurred; the prison is no longer just an exceptional edifice ‘over there’ but a set of social relations to which the audience members also belong, participate in, and bear responsibility for.
It is in this sense that a cinematic excavation of the prison’s external geographies not only help demystify the prison itself as a social and historical construction, but also to construct an alternative analytical framework – one that disarticulates crime from incarceration. The recognition that the prison system is intimately bound up with the organization and the ideology of wage labor. The fact that at the present one must work to earn a living is taken as part of the natural order rather than as a social convention helps further the case whether through demands for full employment or a guaranteed basic income or something else, for centering the problem of wages and surplus labor as a necessary part of abolitionist struggle.
The task of coming up with alternatives to the prison as a fix for harm and violence is not only an onerous one for any individual or movement but it reproduces the wrong question and paralyzes the prison critic in the impossibility of the task. To suggest instead, narratively, and aesthetically, that the prison constitutes a set of relationship, or that carceral spaces enact forms of productive work that bear little actual relation to the issues of crime and safety is to offer a means of looking back at ourselves with “different kinds of eyes”
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