Abstract
One of the landmark United States Supreme Court of Justice jurisprudence cases in the long history of litigation against imprisonment is Ruiz vs. Estelle. As a Colombian legal scholar worried about prison studies, state punishment, and how to tame prison violence through the grammar of rights, one has been used to reading such a history of other far-distanced, geographically, and culturally, prison settings through legal language with its so-called neutral and universalistic stand, with its distance and cold-hearted impersonal posture towards the subject who raised his voice against imprisonment. However, one never had the chance to read David Ruiz's side of the same tragedy nor to glance at the scenario in which it unfolded. I was deeply touched when I read Prison Life's chapter on Eastham Unit -the former 12,970 Texas acre farm transformed into a maximum-security facility- one of the four cases thoroughly depicted by Ian O'Donnell in his influential book. Ruiz, a second-generation migrant raised in Chicago who was imprisoned most of his life, is the starring actor of one the four-act magistral prison cultural drama composed and beautifully performed by O'Donnell, in which I regard one of the best books on prison life I have ever read.
If, as I humbly suggest, the reader approaches Prison Life. Pain, Resistance and Purpose, not exclusively as an outstanding contribution to the cumulative knowledge on prison social order, from Sykes and Clemmer, passing through James Jacobs, to the most recent and compelling ethnographic work of Didier Fassin, but also as a piece of literature, a powerful and touching narrative on the travels of an institution which adapts to and its shaped by the context in which it embeds, he/she will find a human story on violence, pain, resistance and purpose. At the same time, the reader will find a rigorous academic critique of Gresham Sykes’ understanding of prison life. The orthodox canon on prison life studies supposes that the theoretical findings -which emerge from specific located prison settings, from the New Jersey State Maximum Security Prison and his pains of imprisonment and deprivations to Goffman's Queens Elizabeth Mental Hospital under-covered field work resulting on his total institution model-, may direct and easily be used to understanding and depict, for example, prison settings located in specific places such as Ethiopia or Colombia.
As helpful as the deprivation and importation model, as well as the discussion on totality and permeability of institutions, had been for the development of a rich and vast literature on carceral studies, O’Donnell proposes a theoretical posture hinging on the importance of context, a situational approach to prison settings located in their own geographical and temporal milieu, to properly depict and compare prison experiences through the categories of regulation and integration.
Each of the four chapters tells a history of the prison, its inhabitants, and its milieu. Prison Life's first scene is set in Northern Ireland, in the H Blocks, where once Laurence McKeown, a member of the Irish Republican Army doing time for five life sentences, grabbed the prison yard's iron mesh with his fingers, smiling back to the volunteer photographer who smuggled a camera into the block.
Through the book, the reader may find photos, figures, and pictures of persons and scenarios carefully chosen to recreate the atmosphere of each location and its relationship with the surrounding social environment. Each scene is carefully constructed. The photos of the prison market, dinner time, and dormitories where Chalew Genibo peacefully reads a book in his cell in Isir Beth, Ethiopia, recreate a prison world like the ones situated in Latin-American, from La Modelo prison in Bogotá to Lurigancho in Lima. A gated village, as O'Donnell describes this sort of hybrid situation, in which prison life is very much like the everyday life of free citizens.
Ian O’Donnell's cultural travel around prison worlds ends in the terrible supermax ADX Florence, in Colorado. Isolation and breaking human bonds are at the core of the supermax experience. Minimum human contact and banishing face-to-face encounters are the most important social interactions. Violence and sadness are embodied in the powerful tattooed face of Jack Powers, struggling to survive in the ultimate version of the infamous Alcatraz. This powerful book's closing scene portrays the supermax's totalitarian delirium. It shows the ultimate purpose of punishment: pointless pain, like the void and emptiness of Fassin's carceral condition.
Prison Life is a powerful cultural prison drama, beautifully written and portrayed, with the sensibility to the life of those imprisoned men starring each of the four main episodes of this carceral studies must-read piece. O'Donnell had done monumental research that indeed paves the way for enhancing our shared understanding of imprisonment, here and there, located, embedded, shaping our world as much as is moulded by ours.
