We're running late. (Should I mention, as usual?) The combination of
downtown traffic and bad navigating choices means we're in danger of
missing the boat. Literally. Mark makes "Ack!" noises as we pull into an
expensive parking garage, and a "Fuck it!" after glancing at the
dashboard clock.
We run, grab our tickets, and get in line behind a family of four.
The two children are under ten, and as the line lurches forward I wonder
what could possibly be instructive about the destination we're all
headed for, that a seven year-old might learn something. After a
(very cold) ten-minute ferry ride with at least two hundred other
sightseers we're on The Rock. Alternately described by travel guides as
"a perfect vacation spot" and "a must-see," Alcatraz Island is the
former federal penitentiary turned national historical park, bird
sanctuary, and public attraction. Available for a dollar at self-serve
kiosks at the dock, a brochure states, "This story begins in 1859, when
eleven military prisoners arrive on the island with the first Army
garrison, and ends in 1963 when the last inmates are transferred and
Alcatraz is abandoned by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons."
Wary about stealing in front of state employees, I hesitate before
taking one.
How does a federal prison
become a popular tourist attraction? Prisons, like police and armed forces, are
a part of the coercive machinery of the state. For thirty years
Alcatraz served a dual function in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons system as
both an institution of severe incarceration and exemplary symbol
of state control. Today, recreational convicts may board the Blue and Gold
fleet to visit the island penitentiary and inhabit the ghostly
life spaces of its inmates. Fundamental to its conception as a
set of civilizing agencies, the state presents the prison as a civics lesson
but a fun, "interactive" one. Operated by the National Park
Service the Alcatraz tour promises an adventurous landscape, more real than the
wax museums or celebrity restaurants on the mainland but just as virtual -- a
place of punishment turned educational theme park.
The hike into the interior of the island is
measured from cannon to guard station, a memorial landscape dotted
by the instruments of both war and imprisonment. An audio
tour -- narration provided by two Alcatraz correctional officers and former
inmates-- is available in the lobby of the prison, outside the souvenir shop.
Most of the green-jacketed attendants are of color; the supervisor who
tears the ticket stub is white, and a former Marine. Told to follow the
blue line into the cellblock, another sign obligingly let us know when
to push "play."
The audio tour seeks to provide a concentrated historical
memory of the cellblock and the meaning of the prison. The assumption
might be that without the audio tour, you might not know what you're
looking at. You might miss the value of a particular stretch of
cellblock, the nuance of steel bars. The audio tour interprets for you.
Almost everyone wears headphones and follows the prescribed route, turning
when told and looking when instructed to do so, even when what's there to
see is long gone. (Are we supposed to imagine surly inmates in their
cells, dressed in prison blues?) There are pasteboard panoramas with
mugshots and pull-quotes about Alcatraz's more infamous inmates (Al Capone
and "Machine Gun" Kelly, among them) and a disastrous 1946 escape
involving the prison librarian. In some cells the products of years of
confinement are displayed behind plate glass -- landscape paintings and pencil
drawings of inmates, paper mache heads left by a trio of escapees.
With a shrug (his) and a baring of teeth (mine) Mark and I
find ourselves following orders, ducking through doorways on cue. We
move through the cellblock, touching those places where the plaster
has rotted away, fingering the exposed steel rods beneath the
painted surfaces, the debris accumulating in the crevices: rocks,
pull-tops, cellophane wrappers, dust. Doorsills are graffiti-ed with
hearts and recent dates. The gun gallery --the caged balconies from which
guards monitored the cellblocks-- looms above us; the locks that once
held machine guns, perhaps, still in place. And even though a steel
firebox mounted on the wall of the D-block is pierced by bulletholes, no
one approaches; the other tourists are busy standing between the
radiators to look up at the Birdman's former cell.
We are invited to step inside the "hole," a series of cinderblock
cells with no light fixtures and thick steel doors. There is tourist
trash in the sink --a Calistoga bottle, candy wrappers-- and the toilet
is filled with lumpy concrete. The voice of a former inmate echoes in my
head, "I would take a button and throw it up into the air. I'd turn
myself around and around and then drop to the floor to search for the
button in the dark. And when I found it I'd do it all over again." The
floor is cold to the touch.
Well-equipped tourists pan the cellblocks
through viewfinders and eyepieces. I could say something (simplistic)
about the filtering of reality through a televisual screen, but it's not
as if the experience of touring a prison isn't already a bizarre
cultural production and always interpreted through one ideological lens
or another.
The tape skips --I go from an inmate memory of prison food to the
rat-tat-tat of a gun battle-- and I have to rewind.
The audio tour and several brochures also detail escape attempts --
inmates who steal Army uniforms, saw through bars, dig tunnels with
spoons, throw themselves into the frigid waters of the Bay. That most
end in the deaths of the escapees is stated matter-of-factly, and the
manner of their deaths sometimes elaborated upon in chronological order.
"He was shot by guards. They died inside the prison walls from gas. He
died from hypothermia and exhaustion, swimming to the Gold Gate Bridge.
He was executed." A map locates the numbered spots on the island where
these attempts occurred, and where their deaths presumably took place.
I think we are supposed to be impressed by the technological and natural
advantages of the prison, by its high walls, its frigid moat and once
state-of-the-art machinery. Impressed by the prison's record of failed
escapes and by extension, its success as a penitentiary, the scent
of misery that must have permeated even the concrete here. Last but
hardly least we are expected to congratulate the state for its capacity
for (imagined) reform. The prison tour suggests the U.S. Bureau of
Prisons decommissioned Alcatraz because it was a carceral relic, after a
national campaign for prison reform in the 1960s brought attention to
rehabilitation. We are prompted to believe that the state abandoned the
Rock in a fit of enlightenment, and that the carceral system in the time
since has improved.
I don't think Mark and I are impressed.
Amusement parks and other tourist sites attempt to provide the
illusion of carnival, of spontaneous pleasure, in a rational and
controlled environment. Rides, theaters, employees in wacky animal
costumes, carefully cultivated paths that seem to wander.
Alcatraz is a disciplined and disciplinary space in which the rational
and controlled environment is the attraction -- you
arrive to see the apparatus of state control in effect, or its
aftermath. To witness a certain display of power-- the barbed wire, the closet-sized
cells, the exposed toilets, the bars over windows, the series of locked
steel doors, the poverty of prison existence, the extremity
of governmentality. The regimentation of everyday life (narrated by
inmate and guard), the spectacle of the repression of unruly bodies (asked
to imagine the prisoners in their cells), the map of escape attempts
and murdered inmates -- all this is both the exhibition and the lesson.
Here, the exercise of power is the story but how it happens is
the question.
We learn that arriving prisoners were given a copy of the
"Regulations for Inmates, U.S.P." and expected to keep this in their
cells at all times. Regulation number five of fifty-three states, "You
are entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention.
Everything else is a privilege." I am reminded of French theorist Michel
Foucault who famously examined the modernization of the carceral system,
the coercive technologies of both discipline and punishment enacted
minutely on the body of the convict. Isolated in individual cells and
subjected to seemingly ceaseless surveillance, the prisoner is taught to
regulate his own behavior, to internalize the eye of power. The
disciplinary regime of the prison is thus the calculated manipulation of
the body and its elements, gestures, environment. To terrorize, to make
the convict a docile and self-regulating body.
What purpose does a national park play when it once served
as an institution of confinement? Monuments, national parks and
tourist spaces are meaning-making machines that are produced not only by
material means but also historical processes and symbolic gestures. Their
function --undoubtedly instrumental and ideological -- cannot be hidden; they make
visible those histories that are appropriate to the political project.
(It is an act that also produces its opposite: a repressed history, a
state of amnesia, a marginalized population, a contest of meaning. But
how to access it--?) But the available, official resources provide
the tourist a specific ideological lens and historical memory. Rather
than activating an interrogation of historical circumstance,
the institutional memory of Alcatraz is deployed as self-evident because
the site is open to public inspection. The interpretative discourse
insulates the visitor from the lifespace represented here, while
controlling its representation and lodging it firmly within the official
historical record.
::
Mark and I move impatiently around
other tourists pausing in doorways and gaping. We watch them pose one at
a time behind the bars of the open cells, turning to smile and grin at
the camera. A joking, jocular gesture. They make faces, laughing and
reaching their arms through the gaps. I step past a well-padded,
middle-aged white man into an open cell the size of my closet, ruining
the photograph his wife takes to run my hand over the painted
cinderblock.
The pretense of occupying the identical space of a prisoner is
encouraged. The audio tour suggests you grip the bars, pace the length
of the cell. The brochure volunteers a typical scenario, a Choose Your
Own Adventure without the choice: "You arrive at U.S. Penitentiary
Alcatraz in shackles.... Once on the island and in the cellhouse, you're
stripped searched and issued prison clothes." The dramatic reenactment
ends on a dire note, "Will you live by the rules and leave Alcatraz when
your time is served? Or will you test the rules? Will you be caught and
punished? Will you die in a shower-room or recreation-yard stabbing?
Or will you escape?"
Mark is unforgiving. He mutters, "I hate that they're smiling and
laughing. I wanted to lock them in a cell and leave 'em there overnight
in the dark and the cold."
It feels weird. The function of displaying
power, its coercive technologies and making it visible for all to see,
reimagines the docile body of the convict as a sign of state control and
punishment. Like all the stories about failed escapes and long years
spent in isolation, the detailed descriptions of locks, doors, and metal
detectors, the pretense of inhabiting the lifespace of an inmate serves
the display of power, if only to impress upon the visitor the totality
of the disciplinary regime. The prison tour deliberately references the
allure of the historical cinematic record --The Rock, Birdman of
Alcatraz, The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption
, all featuring the singular prisoner as rebel protagonist-- and
invites a fantasy of temporary identification. (It works better
without real bodies -- the fantasy is more complete and less complicated.) What
is most ordinary in the context of the tourist destination becomes a
source of fascination for the visitor -- cows being milked on a farm or an
inmate's daily routine.
But the fantasy breaks apart. Occupying that imaginary space is
impossible because the cell door is open; as a visitor you can always
step outside the confines of cinderblock and steel bars to see yourself
from the side of power. It is unlikely any of the tourists will ever
find themselves incarcerated. Aggregate buying power makes the
middle-classes the prime consumers of such historical displays. The real
appeal of such fantasies may be that they express to desire not to
know the material and social conditions of the prison-industrial
complex in the present, or the stories of complicity with various forms
of state power. The United States has a prison population that is
overwhelmingly working-class, poor, and of color. The fantasy of
identification reiterates the efficiency of Alcatraz as a penitentiary
and the state as a force of control. Invited to admire the case
hardened, tool-resistant steel bars from inside the cell, the Alcatraz
prison tour does not seek to terrorize visitors with the display of
coercive technologies but to place them on the side of power, to
understand the prison and the carceral system as operating "for the good
of all." Or as social theorist Tony Bennett remarks about museums and
exhibitions (and the prison tour fits right in), "This power subjugates
by flattery, placing itself on the side of the people by affording them
a place within its workings; a power which placed the people behind it,
inveigled into complicity with it rather than cowed into submission
before it."
We return the tape recorders to the attendants and wander around the
grounds, depressed. I think we don't know how to respond, or recuperate
the experience. One of three souvenir shops on the island is just inside
the administration building and we step into the fray. (There is another
shop at the wharf where the boat docks.) That a penitentiary inspires so
much commercial kitsch involves some kind of blind spot; really, I just
don't know what to say anymore as I take in the display. There are
"genuine reproductions" of Alcatraz prison silverware and guards' key
sets, coffee table books and testimonials from guards and prisoners
alike, and a 1960s recipe pamphlet put together by the guard's wives.
(How about Warden So-and-So's wife's peach cobbler?) Postcards of the
bird sanctuary, plaster statues of the lighthouse and the main building
holding the cellblock, and an exact replica of the booklet of rules
given to each inmate upon arrival. It is near Christmas, but maybe the
shop always does so much business; the register rings and rings.
We skip the thirteen-minute documentary about the 1969-1971
occupation of Alcatraz by the American Indian Movement, on purpose. Did
we have to see it to know which side was the "right" side? Walking
through the back of the dim auditorium we hear snatches of the
narration: "...finally public support had dwindled and the Army was able
to move in and take back Alkatraz...." Reboarding the ferry a few
people are carrying their new souvenirs in plastic bags that read, "I
did time at Alcatraz" above a broadly drawn caricature of a figure
holding the bars in front of him. We're finally tired and just want to
go home.
Mark takes a photograph.
::
Thanks to Mark for taking me sightseeing even though he knows I
"ruin" everything because I can't turn off the critique. Thanks also to
Jeff Ow who has a whole love/hate relationship for the other island in the Bay
Area-- Angel Island, an immigration and detention center for Chinese
migrants-- on his website http://www.flowerdrumsong.com). And thanks also
to John Burke for his political commitment and analytic insight, as
always.
There are any number of activist
sources about prisons; some of them are the Sentencing Project (The
Sentencing Project / 514 - 10th Street, NW / Suite 1000 / Washington, DC
20004 / http://www.sentencingproject.org),
the Prison Moratorium Project (http://www.nomoreprisons.org),
and Critical Resistance (http://www.criticalresistance.org
).
On the micro-level of surveillance and regulation, talk shows (my
personal obsession) are turning to home video to apprehend social
transgressions -- young girls are filmed in tight clothes, mouthing off,
and teenage boys are caught dressing in black tights and make-up by
worried parents. Tomboys are asked, "Don't you want the boys to think
you're pretty?" and transgendered guests are called upon to "stop
lying," and admit to their partners the imagined truth of the body. This
"evidence" of "bad" behavior is turned over to a viewing public for
collective judgment and to the talk show hosts for "correction" (by
drill sergeant or makeover). The recent trend in sending unruly teens to
boot camps and jails -- and filming their humiliation ("You think you're
tough? You're nothing!") and eventual "rehabilitation"-- is a
disciplinary spectacle requiring the group participation of the
audience, jeering and cheering at appropriate intervals.
It sucks.
If you want, write. Mimi Nguyen / POB 11906 / Berkeley, CA 94712-2906
/ slander13@mindspring.com.