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FROM COOK CounTy JAIL

CALL:

SHERIFF Tem DART

   

 
     
 
   
    

AS OF APRIL Sih ,OVER-
200 PEOPLE INLARLERATED

 

  
 

       
  
     

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FoR More Info + CALA SCRipTs:
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Same Shit, Different Day

White Pestilence & the Early Military
Movements of New World Frontier Conquest

1. COVID-19 Tips Sheet
2. Pestilence and Genocide
3. Infection Hot Spot: Watch-ing

disease spread and kill on slave

ships

4. Forced Passages: The His-
torical Present of (Prison)
Slavery

 
 

As of May &*

COVID-19 Response

120, Ilinois, United States of America

Confirmed Cases

 

Staff Staff Incarcerated Incarcerated

Locations . Individuals Individuals
Confirmed Recovered

Confirmed Recovered

 

Crossroads ATC
Danville

Elgin Treatment Center
Fox Valley ATC

 

General Office
Graham

Hill
Jacksonville

Joliet Treatment Center |

Kewanee LSRC

2
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oO
3
0
DCT

wielre ie et de ee

 

Logan
Menard

North Lawndale ATC
Parole

Pontiac

Sheridan

eCuUNHEN Nw Ni Hole fb HE Ulo Hw
N

HR OUNNN AW

Southwestern IL
[statevitie 75 64 139 |
|stateville NRC 34 25 =

Western IL 1 0 oO
Total 157 117 176 | 146

 

 

 

 

 

 
More things to know about the
From our friends at virus

If you have a runny nose and
sputum, you likely have a
common cold

If someone sneezes with it, it
takes about 10 feet before it
drops to the ground and is no
longer airborne. Cover your
) sneezes and coughs! Then
wash your hands.

  

A WEEKLY ANARCHIST SHOW Drinking lots of water is effec-
tive for all viruses and gener-
ally good advice always.

 

ash your hands frequently as the virus can only live on

your hands for a limited time, but a lot can happen then, you
can rub your eyes, pick your nose unwittingly and so on.

. It is difficult to tell COVID-19 symptoms apart from com-
mon flu symptoms. Both should be taken seriously but
COVID-19 is much more serious.

3. Any one who has diabetes, hypertension, preexisting breath-
ing problems, or who is being treated for cancer is at at
heightened risk for COVID-19.

. People above 60 in age are also at heightened risk for
COVID-19.
8. There are tests for COVID-19 but there is not yet a vaccine
or cure,

Sources: Centers for Disease Control, WebMD, flat-

“WEAPONS OF
MASS DESTRUCTIN

tenthecurve.com

 

DO Wash your hands

For more than 20 seconds with soap and warm water. Unlike
some really stubborn viruses (like polio), viruses in the corona-
virus family typically don’t survive longer than a few

hours on most surfaces hard surfaces; though it can be up to
days.

 

Bleach or ethanol are more effective at decontaminating sur-
faces than they are disinfecting human skin. So don’t
hoard the hand sanitizer, that should be used only when you do
not have any access to a soap and water sink.

Vigorous hand-washing with soap really is vital to reduce
transmission.

If you do nothing else at all, do wash your hands.

 

DO Stay connected

 

but avoid crowds. It is best to stand at a distance from people. 6
feet or more fest from infectious droplet spread. The higher
your underlying risk factors (age, recent major surgery, cancer,
immuno-compromised, asthma, diabetes, etc), the more you
should avoid crowds.

 
Do NOT shake hands

get creative with zero-contact greetings. One awesome side
benefit is that contactless greetings don’t even need to be
agreed-upon in advance. Unlike handshakes, hugs, kisses, etc,
there is no need to have an understood protocol. Do what
works for you.

Do NOT touch your face

That is the most common way the virus enters the body. It is
really hard to avoid; this is also why we advise staying home
and avoiding crowds. It is also why top-down measures (event
cancellation and imposed quarantine etc) work. The average
person, even ones with baseline good hygiene, touch their
constantly already without thinking about it. Especially with
allergy season coming up, please keep this in mind.

 

 

Do NOT touch public surfaces

with your fingers; get creative. Where possible, use knuckles
rather than finger tips (e.g., for elevator buttons, light switches,
etc.). Open doors with your hips rather than your hands.

   

You may use your elbows to open door handles, if it’s an op-
tion. Use a sleeve to open a doorknob if needed.

COVID-19 Hot-line
We have created a hot-line for incarcerated or detained people

to call when they have COVID-19 symptoms, when there is an
outbreak in their unit, or when they are being denied adequate
sanitation and/or medical care for COVID-19. Our aim is to be
an ear and a voice for the unheard. We want to know where
and when there is an outbreak so that we can help mobilize
support networks and media to lift up the demands of people on
the inside. Number to call: 410-449-7140.

  
  

 

 
JAIL+COVID

 
Pestilenceand

Genocide AMERICAN
HOLOCAUST

The Conquest of the New World

DAVID E. STANNARD

HE SPAIN THAT Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind just

before dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos and

out into the Atlantic, was for most of its people a land of violence,
squalor, treachery, and intolerance. In this respect Spain was no different
from the rest of Europe.

Epidemic outbreaks of plague and smallpox, along with routine actacks
of measles, influenza, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid fever, and more, fre-
quently swept European cities and towns clean of 10 to 20 percent of their
populations at a single stroke. As late as the mid-seventeenth century more
than 80,000 Londoners—one out of every six residents in the city—died
from plague in a matter of months. And again and again, as with its com-
panion diseases, the pestilence they called the Black Death returned. Like
most of the other urban centers in Europe, says one historian who has
specialized in the subject, “every twenty-five or thirty years—sometimes
more frequently—the city was convulsed by a great epidemic.”* Indeed,
for centuries an individual’s life chances in Europe’s pesthouse cities were
so poor that the natural populations of the towns were in perpetual decline
that was offset only by in-migration from the countryside—in-migration,
says one historian, that was “vital if [the cities] were to be preserved from
extinction.”"?

Famine, too, was common. What J. H. Elliott has said of sixteenth-
century Spain had held true throughout the Continent for generations be-
yond memory: “The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand
hungry eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of the
population starved.” > This was in normal times. The slightest fluctuation
in food prices could cause the sudden deaths of additional tens of thou-
sands who lived on the margins of perpetual hunger. So precarious was
the existence of these multitudes in France that as late as the seventeenth
century each “average” increase in the price of wheat or millet directly
killed a proportion of the French population equal to nearly twice the
percentage of Americans who died in the Civil War.*

That was the seventeenth century, when times were getting better. In
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries prices fluctuated constantly, leading
people to complain as a Spanish agriculturalist did in 1513 that “today a
pound of mutton costs as much as a whole sheep used to, a loaf as much
as a fanega [a bushel and a half) of wheat, a pound of wax or oil as much
as an arroba (25 Spanish pounds). The result of this, as one French
historian has observed, was that “the epidemic that raged in Paris in 1482
fits the classic pattern: famine in the countryside, flight of the poor to the
city in search of help, then outbreak of disease in the city following upon
the malnutrition.”® And in Spain the threat of famine in the countryside
was especially omnipresent. Areas such as Castile and Andalusia were
wracked with harvest failures that brought on mass death repeatedly dur-
ing the fifteenth century.” But since both causes of death, disease and fam-
ine, were so common throughout Europe, many surviving records did not
bother (or were unable) to make distinctions between them. Consequently,
even today historians find it difficult or impossible to distinguish between
those of the citizenry who died of disease and those who merely starved
to death.

Roadside ditches, filled with stagnant water, served as public latrines
in the cities of the fifteenth century, and they would continue to do so for
centuries to follow. So too would other noxious habits and public health
hazards of the time persist on into the future—from the practice of leaving
the decomposing offal of butchered animals to fester in the streets, to Lon-
don’s “special problem,” as historian Lawrence Stone puts it, of “poor’s
holes.” These were “large, deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies
of the poor, side by side, row upon row. Only when the pit was filled with
bodies was it finally covered over with earth.” As one contemporary, quoted
by Stone, delicately observed: “How noisome the stench is that arises from
these holes so stowed with dead bodies, especially in sultry seasons and
after rain.”
Along with the stench and repulsive appearance of the openly dis-
played dead, human and animal alike, a modern visitor to a European city
in this era would be repelled by the appearance and the vile aromas given
off by the living as well. Most people never bathed, not once in an entire
lifetime. Almost everyone had his or her brush with smallpox and other
deforming diseases that Seft survivors partially blinded, pock-marked, or
crippled, while it was the norm for men and women to have “bad breath
from the rotting teeth and constant stomach disorders which can be doc-
umented from many sources, while suppurating ulcers, eczema, scabs, run-

ning sores and other nauseating skin diseases were extremely common,
and often lasted for years.” !°

Street crime in most cities lurked around every corner. One especially
popular technique for robbing someone was to drop a heavy rock or chunk
of masonry on his head from an upper-story window and then to rifle the
body for jewelry and money. This was a time, observes Norbert Elias,
when “it was one of the festive pleasures of Midsummer Day to bur alive
one or two dozen cats,” and when, as Johan Huizinga once put it, “the
continuous disruption of town and country by every kind of dangerous
rabble (and} the permanent threat of harsh and unreliable law enforcement

. nourished a feeling of universal uncertainty.” '! With neither cultur-
ally developed systems of social obligation and restraint in place, nor ef-
fective police forces in their stead, the cities of Europe during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries were little more than chaotic population agglom-
erates with entire sections serving as the residential turf of thieves and
brigands, and where the wealthy were forced to hire torch-bearing body-
guards to accompany them out at night. In times of famine, cities and
towns became the setting for food riots. And the largest riot of all, of
course—though the word hardly does it justice—was the Peasants’ War,
which broke out in 1524 following a series of local revolts that had been
occurring repeatedly since the previous century. The Peasants’ War killed
over 100,000 people.

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The wealthy had their problems too. They hungered after gold and
silver. The Crusades, begun four centuries earlier, had increased the appe-
tites of affluent Europeans for exotic foreign luxuries—for silks and spices,
fine cotton, drugs, perfumes, and jewelry—material pleasures that required
pay in bullion. Thus, gold had become for Europeans, in the words of one
Venetian commentator of the time, “the sinews of all government. . . its
mind, soul . . . its essence and its very life.” The supply of the precious
metal, by way of the Middle East and Africa, had always been uncertain.
Now, however, the wars in eastern Europe had nearly emptied the Conti-
nent’s coffers. A new supply, a more regular supply—and preferably a
cheaper supply—was needed?"

Violence, of course, was everywhere, as alluded to above; but occa-
sionally it took on an especially perverse character. In addition to the hunting
down and burning of witches, which was an everyday affair in most lo-
cales, in Milan in 1476 a man was torn to pieces by an enraged mob and
his dismembered limbs were then eaten by his tormenters. In Paris and
Lyon, Huguenots were killed and butchered, and their various body parts
were sold openly in the streets. Other eruptions of bizarre torture, murder,
and ritual cannibalism were not uncommon.22

Such behavior, nonetheless, was not officially condoned, at least not
usually, Indeed, wild and untrue accusations of such activities formed the
basis for many of the witch hunts and religious persecutions—particularly
of Jews—during this time.”* In precisely those years when Columbus was
trekking around Europe in search of support for his maritime adventures,
the Inquisition was raging in Spain. Here, and elsewhere in Europe, those
out of favor with the powerful—particularly those who were believed to
be un-Christian—were tortured and killed in the most ingenious of fash-
ions: on the gallows, at the stake, on the rack—while others were crushed,
beheaded, flayed alive, or drawn and quartered,

On the very day that Columbus finally set forth on his journey that
would shake the world, the port of the city he sailed from was filled with
ships that were deporting Jews from Spain. By the time the expulsion was
complete between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews had been driven from their
homes (their valuables, often meager, having first been confiscated) and
then they were cast out to sea. As one contemporary described the scene:

It was pitiful to see their sufferings. Many were consumed by hunger, espe-
cially nursing mothers and their babies, Half-dead mothers held dying chil-
dren in their arms. . . . | can hardly say how cruelly and greedily they were
treated by those who transported them. Many were drowned by the avarice
of the sailors, and those who were unable to pay their passage sold their
children.?*

This was the world an ex-trader of African slaves named Christopher
Columbus and his shipmates left behind as they sailed from the city of
Palos in August of 1492. It was a world wracked by disease—disease that
killed in massive numbers, but, importantly, that also tended to immunize
survivors. A world in which all but the wealthy often could not feed them-
selves, and in which the wealthy themselves hungered after gold,?* It was
a world, as well, of cruel violence and certainty of holy truth. Little won-
der, then, that the first report back from that Atlantic voyage, purportedly
to the Orient, caused such sensations across the length and breadth of
Europe.

THE CONQUEST

OF THE NEW WORLD

 
Columbus’s second voyage was the true beginning of the invasion of the
Americas. The royal instructions authorizing the expedition had directed
that the finest ships in Andalusia be outfitted for the trip and that they be
commanded by the most expert pilots and navigators in the realm. Seven-
teen ships made the voyage and aboard those ships were more than 1200
soldiers, sailors, and colonists—including a cavalry troop of lancers and
half a dozen priests. Along the way, at the Canary Islands, some other
passengers were boarded: goats and sheep and cattle, and eight pigs, were
placed on deck and in the holds below.

In early January of 1494 the fleet arrived at the place on the northern
coast of Hispaniola that Columbus had chosen to build his New World

capital, his town of Isabela. No sooner were the ships unloaded, however,
than sickness broke out among the crews. It quickly spread among the
natives, who had come to greet the ships with gifts of fish and fruits, “‘as
if we had been their brothers,” recalled one of the men on board.*® Within
a few days, the Admiral’s surgeon reported, a third of the Spaniards had
fallen ill, while natives everywhere were dead. Columbus directed groups
of the healthy among his crews to explore the island’s inland regions and
find the fabulous goid mines they all were sure existed. But many of those
men returned to the ships, having come down with the mysterious illness
along the way.

For years historians have speculated as to what the epidemic was that
laid low so many Spaniards and killed so many native people. Carl Sauer
thought it might have been some sort of intestinal infection, while Samuel
Eliot Morison diagnosed it as either malaria or something caused by
“drinking well water and eating strange fish.” Most recently, Kirkpatrick
Sale has opted for bacillic dysentery—although he too lists malaria or even
syphilis as among the likely culprits.*” Others have thought it everything
from smallpox to yellow fever. While it is possible (even probable) that
more than one disease was causing the afflictions, the reported symptoms
had nothing of the signs of syphilis, and malaria was not then present in
the Indies or the Americas, nor would it be for many years to come.*° For
the same reasons, it could not have been yellow fever or smallpox that
was wreaking all this havoc, and it certainly did not derive from something
the Spanish ate or drank, because it spread like wildfire not only among
the Spanish, but with particular virulence among the Indian people all across
the island.4! No. the most recent and original medically informed hvpoth-
esis—and the one that goes the furthest in explaining reported symptoms,
including high mortality, and the extraordinary contagiousness—identifies
influenza as the cause, influenza carried by those Canary Islands pigs.**

If, as the Spanish physician and medical historian Francisco Guerra
now contends, the epidemic that ravaged Hispaniola in 1494 was swine
influenza, it would have been a pestilence of devastating proportions. For
it now appears that it was swine flu that swept the world in 1918, killing
off at least 20,000,000 people before it finally dissipated. Like other peo-
ple in the Americas, and unlike the Spanish, the natives of Hispaniola had
no previous exposure to the virus—nor to the numerous other diseases
that historically, in other parts of the world, had spread from domesticated
animal hosts. Other than smal] dogs in some locations and llamas in the
Andes, few animals were domesticated anywhere in the hemisphere. And
of the many plagues that in time would overwhelm the Americas’ native
peoples, influenza—of various types, from both humans and non-human
vectors—was second only to smallpox and maybe measles as the most
rapid epidemic killer of them all.*?

Whatever it was, in any case, the imported pathogen moved among the
native people with a relentlessness that nothing ever had in all their his-
tory. “So many Indians died that they could not be counted,” wrote Gon-
zalo Fernandez de Oviedo, adding that “all through the land the Indians
lay dead everywhere. The stench was very great and pestiferous.”** And
in the wake of the plague they had introduced, the Spanish soldiers fol-
lowed, seeking gold from the natives, or information as to where to find
it. They were troubled by the illness, and numbers of them died from it.
But unlike the island natives the European invaders and their forebears
had lived with epidemic pestilence for ages. Their lungs were damaged
from it, their faces scarred with pocks, but accumulations of disease ex-
posure allowed them now to weather much. So they carried infections with
them everywhere they went—burdensome, but rarely fatal, except to the
natives that they met.

Following the Admiral’s orders, reconnaissance parties were sent out
across the island and off to Cuba, Jamaica, and to other nearby lands. The
Spanish plagues raced on ahead. Still, the natives, as Columbus had ob-
served during his first voyage, continued to be kind and generous to their
guests, and so innocent in the use of dangerous weapons that when Co-
lumbus “showed them swords,” he said, “they grasped them by the blade
and cut themselves through ignorance.” *5
Wherever the marauding, diseased, and heavily armed Spanish forces
went out on patrol, accompanied by ferocious armored dogs that had been
trained to kill and disembowel, they preyed on the local communities—
already plague-enfeebled—forcing them to supply food and women and
slaves, and whatever else the soldiers might desire. At virtually every pre-
vious landing on this trip Columbus’s troops had gone ashore and killed
indiscriminately, as though for sport, whatever animals and birds and na-
tives they encountered, “looting and destroying all they found,” as the
Admiral’s son Fernando blithely put it.“6 Once on Hispaniola, however,
Columbus fell ill—whether from the flu or, more likely, from some other
malady—and what little restraint he had maintained over his men disap-
peared as he went through a lengthy period of recuperation. The troops
went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives, trying to force
them to divulge the whereabouts of the imagined treasure-houses of gold.

The Indians tried to retaliate by launching ineffective ambushes of stray
Spaniards, But the combined killing force of Spanish diseases and Spanish
military might was far greater than anything the natives could ever have
imagined. Finally, they decided the best response was flight. Crops were
left to rot in the fields as the Indians attempted to escape the frenzy of the
conquistadors’ attacks. Starvation then added its contribution, along with
pestilence and mass murder, to the native peoples’ woes.

Some desperate Hispaniola natives fled to other islands. One of these,
a cacique named Hatuey, brought with him to Cuba as many of his sur-
viving people as he could—and what little gold that they possessed. Once

 

FREE OUR BLDERS\
there, in a place called Punta Maisi, he assembled his followers together
and displayed for them the treasures that they had, explaining that this
was what the Spanish troops were after, that these apparently were objects
of worship to the murderous invaders. Whereupon, to protect his people
from the greed and savagery of these vile strangers, he threw the gold to
the bottom of a nearby river.

It didn’t work. The Spanish found Hatuey and his people, killed most
of them, enslaved the others, and condemned their leader to be burned
alive. Reportedly, as they were tying him to the stake, a Franciscan friar
urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven,
rather chan descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the
Christians went, he would rather go to hell.‘”

The massacres continued, Columbus remained ill for months while his
soldiers wandered freely. More than 50,000 natives were reported dead
from these encounters by the time the Admiral had recovered from his
sickness.** And when at last his health and strength had been restored,
Columbus's response to his men’s unorganized depredations was to orga-
nize them. In March of 1495 he massed together several hundred armored
troops, cavalry, and a score or more of trained attack dogs. They set forth
across the countryside, tearing into assembled masses of sick and unarmed
native people, slaughtering them by the thousands. The pattern set by these
raids would be the model the Spanish would follow for the next decade
and beyond. As Bartolomé de Las Casas, the most famous of the accom-
panying Spanish missionaries from that trip recalled:

Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons
and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly
slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was 2 general rule among
Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh
and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of them-
selves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut
an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would
send him on saying “Go now, spread the news to your chiefs.” They would
test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place
bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half wich one
blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs.’

At least one chief, the man considered by Columbus to be Hispaniola’s
ranking native leader, was not burned or hanged, however. He was cap-
tured, put in chains, and sent off by ship for public display and imprison-
ment in Spain. Like most of the Indians who had been forced to make that
voyage, though, he never made it to Seville: he died en route.
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Infection Hot Spot

Watching disease spread and kill on slave ships.

By Manuel Barcia

 

The Portuguese Slaver Diligenté captured by
Pearl with 600 Slaves on Board, Taken in Charge to Nassau,

 

 

by Lieutenant Henry Samuel Hawker, 1838. Smithsonian Na-
tional Museum of African American History and Culture.

On May 5, 1825, the crew of the
French brig Le Jeune Louis gath-
ered together shortly after their
surgeon, Denis Béjaud, died of
dysentery, the same disease that
had killed the ship owners’ repre-
sentative on board, Jean-Baptiste
Ménard, less than two weeks be-
fore. Probably sitting around a ta-
ble in the captain’s cabin, they set
out to write and sign a short

declaration in which they ex-
plained the despairing situation
they found themselves in. As they
sailed in the vicinity of Ascension
Island heading for Cuba with a
human cargo in their hold, they la-
mented the ravages that dysentery
and ophthalmia had caused both
to themselves and to the slaves.
Affected by these two diseases—
and probably also by others they
did not mention—they attempted
a head count of the remaining Af-
ricans, noting that out of the 344
they had embarked near Cape
Formosa in the Bight of Biafra,
304 remained alive, but were all
suffering from one or more dis-
eases. At sea, far from their de-
sired destination, and being “una-
ble of caring for the cargo, and
hardly able to maneuver the ves-
sel” due to the blindness caused
by the ophthalmia, they probably
thought that all was lost, as each
of them signed his name on the
small sheet of paper.

By mid-June, however, 229 Afri-
cans and a handful of sailors, in-
cluding the captain Frangois
Demouy, had made it alive to Ha-
vana, where the French consul,
Jacques Marie Angelucci, and the
cosignatories of the vessel took
care of restoring their health and
of justifying the voyage before the
Spanish and French authorities,
after producing many documents,
which included the death certifi-
cates of a number of Africans.

Before too long they also expe-
dited the loading of the vessel,
sending it back to Europe less
than two months later with a
cargo of sugar boxes belonging to
Cuban planter and prominent
slave trader Gabriel Lombillo.

Perhaps better than any other, the
case of Le Jeune Louis encapsu-
lates the dangers associated with
slave-trading expeditions to the
coast of Africa during the illegal
period that followed the signing
of bilateral treaties between Brit-
ain and a number of slave-trading
nations and states. Not only were
the crew and the slaves exposed to
fatal, debilitating, and incapaci-
tating diseases, but within days of
departing from the African coast
they were left without the man re-
sponsible for the hundreds of
slaves they had on board and,
more significant, without their
only health practitioner. In addi-
tion to all these tribulations, Le
Jeune Louis had been previously
stopped and searched at least
twice by anti-slave-trade patrols
since departing from Bordeaux,
and had been forced to remain in
the Bight of Biafra for approxi-
mately four months, sailing back
and forth to the island of Principe,
until a full human cargo was fi-
nally procured.

 

Folk art model of a slave ship.
Smithsonian National Museum
of African American History and
Culture.

Slave ships likeLe Jeune
Louis turned into shared spaces
where disease struck the over-
whelming majority of those who
were on board during the Middle
Passage. That dysentery, ophthal-
mia, and fever attacked and
claimed the lives of French slav-
ers and enslaved African alike re-
veals the precariousness of human

life and the limitations of medical
treatment to combat these dis-
eases.

In particular, for the crew of Le
Jeune Louis, spending four
months in the Bight of Biafra
seems to have become a death
sentence for many: a long expo-
sure to slave-trading contact
zones, where diseases—tropical
and otherwise—were exchanged
on a regular basis took a large hu-
man toll, both among them and
among the Africans they
crammed in the bowels of the ves-
sel.

Slave ships were archetypical
contact zones. On them, African
slaves and their captors lived in a
common, reduced space for
weeks or months at a time, shar-
ing air and fluids. As a result, a di-
verse variety of viruses and bacte-
ria were also exchanged. By the
time the slave trade was declared
illegal in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, health practitioners through-
out the Atlantic knew this all too
well. They were aware of the dan-
gers associated with sharing such
spaces at sea, far from any other
medical facilities, and they often
discussed them in their work.
The reality was that the slave
ship’s environment was just as le-
thal as the geographical ecosys-
tems where the diseases carried
on board had originated. This was
especially the case after the slave
trade was banned by most of the
Atlantic states from the mid-
1810s onward. The resulting
modifications in the shipping and
accommodation of Africans on
slave vessels as a result of the
work of anti-slave-trade patrols
led to hurried processes of loading
the ships, often overlooking such
thorough health inspections of en-
slaved men, women, and children
as had taken place in the previous
decades.

These changes were widely dis-
cussed at the time by anti-slave-
trade cruisers, by diplomatic of-
ficers, and even by slave dealers
across the Atlantic. Although
slave vessels’ sizes, speed, and
conditions on board changed at
times dramatically over the years,

the existing historical evidence
points to an overall worsening of
the conditions during the Middle
Passage after the slave trade be-
came illegal. Regardless of their
respective sizes, overcrowding
became a main feature of the
slave trade during this period.
Practically every one of the docu-
mented voyages for these years
reveals ghastly conditions on
board. Reduced and dirty spaces
for human habitation, lacking
clean air; spoiled water and food;
punishment, tortures, and rapes;
ever longer journeys; slave re-
volts; encounters with privateers,
pirates, and anti-slave-trade pa-
trols; and particularly the ravages
of disease—all combined to cre-
ate some of the most desperate
conditions ever experienced by
human beings in the modern
world.

Slave dealers were not impervi-
ous to some of these episodes and
maladies, either. The instructions
they were almost always given at
the start of their transatlantic voy-
ages suggest that investors and
owners of slave-trading expedi-
tions were keen to avoid risks,
particularly those concerning the
possible spread of harmful dis-
eases among their human cargo.

In 1839 the captain of the Brazil-
ian vessel Especulador, Francisco
Jozé de Abranxes, was prompted
to carry out a slave-trading voy-
age to Anha, in Mozambique,
making sure that the slaves he
transported would arrive in the
best possible conditions, as the
ship owner, Jozé Joaquim
Teixeira, confessed to be tired of
suffering setbacks in his slave-
trading expeditions. Almost at the
same time, in Havana, Pedro Mar-
tinez recommended | slave-ship
captain Andrés Jiménez—later on
the main slave dealer at the Galli-
nas River—‘to treat the bul-
tos [slaves] as well as he could,”
since his job would be judged ac-
cording to the conditions in which
they would arrive. Jiménez was
also strongly encouraged to use
his experience in order to avoid
any possible slave revolts during
the Middle Passage.

The Slave Ship, by J.M.W.
Turner. Photograph © Tate
(CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A rat leaving a ship via the moor-
ing rope, thus spreading the
plague, by A.L. Tarter, c. 1940.
Wellcome Collection.
 
n spite of the occasional ef-

forts to take care of human

beings who were unavoida-
bly crammed within small, filthy,
hot spaces, diseases were a main
feature of the Middle Passage.
Health practitioners often
shipped on slave vessels to look
after both the human cargo and
the crew. In some cases, these
practitioners were Westerners
who had received medical educa-
tion in Europe or the Americas.
On the Voladora, in 1829, the
surgeon was one “Doctor Juan
Hidalgo,” a native of Rota, near
Cadiz, who was said to be “un-
married and a professor of medi-
cine and surgery.” Likewise,
when in 1854 the ship La
Luisa was captured off the mouth
of the Manati River near Trini-
dad in southern Cuba, the ves-
sel’s surgeon, Joaquim Cordeiro
Feijéo, was said to be a member
of the Society of Medical Sci-
ences in Lisbon and an experi-
enced surgeon who had been at-
tached to the Portuguese troops
in Luanda in previous years.

In most cases, however, health
practitioners seemed to have
come from more humble back-
grounds, and some ship officers,
boatswains, or cooks doubled as
surgeons on board of slave ves-
sels. African-born and Creole
practitioners, called sangradores,
were the norm for many expedi-
tions during the period. For ex-
ample, in 1821 Alexander Cun-
ningham and Henry Hayne, Brit-
ish Mixed Commission court
judges in Rio de Janeiro, had the
opportunity to interrogate a man
named José Joaquim de Moraes,
who was described as a free
black or preto forro “of Gége na-
tion,” who confessed to be a
“schooner’s sangrador,” a profes-
sion for which he was officially
registered at Rio de Janeiro.
Manoel Francisco Silva, also an
African-born free man of Gége
nation, worked as a sangrador on
board the brig Bom Caminho two
years later, while Estanislao
Ysidro, a Creole born in Brazil,
was recorded as the sangrador of
the schooner Bela Eliza in 1824.
Sangradores were usually Afri-
can-born or African-descended
health practitioners who had ap-
plied and attained official li-
censes from the Brazilian author-
ities to exercise their bloodletting
knowledge on land and at sea.
According to historian Tania Sal-
gado Pimenta, sangradores were
at times “the only therapeutic re-
course for those who were sick”
on board ships, thus becoming
essential for the success of Portu-
guese and Brazilian slave-trade
expeditions to Africa after 1820.
The daily work of sangradores,
surgeons, and other health practi-
tioners was a harrowing one,
fraught with deadly hazards and
meager rewards. Slave-trading
crews and the slaves they em-
barked were often the victims of
endemic and epidemic diseases
difficult to diagnose and treat,
even when medical supplies were
available. A number of narratives
and documents, including corre-
spondence, left by slave traders
illustrate the environment to
which health practitioners and

their patients were exposed. Ref-
erences were common to sick
and dead captains and crew
members—including health prac-
titioners.

African slaves fared much worse.
The private letters written by
some of the slave-ship captains
of the period to their employers
and partners shed light on the
morbidity and mortality that of-
ten affected those men, women,
and children they carried against
their will across the ocean. The
captain of the Brazilian schoon-
erbrig Aracaty, Joaquim Anténio
Lima, in a letter sent to his part-
ner Joaquim Pereira de Men-
donga in early 1842, described in
detail the loss of several hundred
slaves on his previous slaving ex-
pedition to Africa, and reported
losing a number of slaves on his
present voyage before being de-
tained by a British man-of-war
after departing for Rio de
Janeiro. In a similar incident, the
crew of the Vigilante, a Spanish
slave vessel that had been at-
tempting to get a human cargo
near Cape Lopez in 1838, sailed
at once for Santiago de Cuba af-
ter the captain concluded that
there was no point in remaining
any longer off the coast of Af-
rica, as the slaves they had
bought were dying faster than
they were able to replace them.

The cases of other equally full
and lethal slave ships filled the
reports of Mixed Commission
and Vice-Admiralty courts, often
leading to renewed calls for the
abolition of the slave trade.
Rarely, however, did the A fri-
cans have the opportunity to de-
scribe their own traumatic expe-
riences in the Middle Passage.
One of the few exceptions was
the case of Antonio and
Dominga, two young Africans—
about eleven or twelve years
old—who had been sold and em-

barked at the port of Boma on the

Congo River sometime in late
1857 or early 1858. Antonio and
Dominga, whose real names
were Bata and Manyeré Curo, re-
counted their difficult time be-
fore Spanish colonial officers in

Havana weeks after their arrival.
They testified that during the
Middle Passage they were given
only one cracker per day, and
“that they were all very hungry,
that they would ask for some-
thing to eat, and they would get
nothing.” They also recounted
that as many as fifty of their
companions had died of disease
and hunger, and that their bodies
had all been invariably “thrown
to the sea.”

The testimonies taken from Afri-
cans aboard the schooner Arro-
gante in 1838 were even more
striking, as some of them accused
the ship’s sailors of murdering
one of the Africans, and of sub-
sequently cooking his flesh and
serving it with rice to the rest of
the slaves.

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Forced Passages Dylan Rodriguez

This essay considers the prison as a center for the reproduction of the Ameri-
and mass-based

 

can “Homeland” as a global locality, regimenting antisoci
civic and social death. | make two central arguments. First, I contend that the
epoch of white-supremacist chattel slavery and its constitutive transatlantic ar-
ticulation—the Middle Passage—elaborates the social and political logic of the
current carceral formation that has been named and theorized as a qualitative
“prison-industrial complex.” There is a material and historical kinship between
the prison as a contemporary regime of violence and the structures of racial-
ized mass incarceration and disintegration prototyped in the chattel punish-
ment and bodily disarticulation of enslaved Africans. Second, I argue that a
foregrounding of the lineage of radical intellectuals imprisoned in the United
States articulates a theoretical vernacular of death, one that disrupts hege-
monic and “progressive” counterhegemonic public policy, academic and activ-
ist discourses, and their alleged critiques of prisons, policing, and the prison-
industrial complex.

The Prison Regime as Middle Passage

In deploying the term “prison regime,” | am differentiating both the scale and
object(s) of analysis from the more typical macro-scale categories of “the prison,”
“the prison system,” and, most recently, “the prison-industrial complex.” The
conceptual scope of this term similarly exceeds the analytical scope of prison
policy and “the prison (or prisoner's) experience,” categories that most often
take textual form through discrete case studies, institutional reform initiatives,
prison/prisoner ethnographies, and individualized biographical and autobio-
graphical narratives. Rather, my working conception of the prison regime in-
vokes a “meso” (middle, or mediating) dimension of processes, structures, and
vernaculars that compose the state’s modalities of self-articulation and “rule”—
that is, its arrangement of official juridical as well as spatial dominion at the lo-
calized site of the prison.

I consider the terms of dominion to include both the conventional defini-
tion of a discrete territory controlled by a ruling order/state, as well as its ety-
mological meaning derived from the Latin root term dominium, a conception
of power that posits “absolute dominion in tangible things.” The specificity of
imprisonment as a regime of power is its racial chattel logic, or structure of non-
humanization: To the extent that the (black) prisoner or “inmate” is conceived
as the fungible property of the state (according to the Thirteenth Amendment
to the US. Constitution, the “convict” is ready-made for actual “involuntary ser-
vitude,” or enslavement), the captive is both the state’s abstracted legal property/
obligation and intimate bodily possession. Orlando Patterson's explication of
the roots of slavery offers a useful framework through which to comprehend
the root structure of this carceral-punitive regime:

The Romans invented the legal fiction of dominium or absolute ownership,
a fiction that highlights their practical genius. . .. By emphasizing the cate-
gories of persona (owner) and res (thing) and by rigidly distinguishing be-
tween corporeal and incorporeal things, the Romans created a new legal
paradigm, ... An object could only be a tangible thing, More important...
property was no longer a relation between persons but a relation between
persons and things. And this fiction fitted perfectly its purpose, to define one
of the most rapidly expanding sources of wealth, namely slaves.

Foregrounding the notion of dominium as the exercise of “inner power over
a thing,” Patterson's discussion provides a dynamic backdrop against which to
sustain a theorization of “prison” and “imprisonment” as processes, rituals, con-
{frontations, struggles, productions. The prison regime constitutes an essential
figure in the articulation of the state's intelligibility to its presumed audiences
(including and beyond the formal polity) as well as to itself Thus, to conceive
a radical genealogy of the prison regime is to suggest that imprisonment, or
captivity, encompasses a range of state and state-sanctioned practices, from the
stridently ritualized to the arbitrary and informal, that manifest an otherwise
abstracted sense and structure of “authority.” Patterson continues,

Those who exercise power, if they are able to transform it into a “right,” a
norm, a usual part of the order of things, must first control (or at least be in
a position to manipulate) appropriate symbolic instruments. They may do so
by exploiting already existing symbols, or they may create new ones relevant
to their needs”
The prison regime, in the process of attempting control over the symbolic, works
through the mediating material of the prisoner as an embodied subject (to be
distinguished from notions of the prisoner as “object” or objectified body). A
persistent, guiding tension for the prison regime is therefore that between the
power of dominium (absolute ownership, a power that is oblivious to consensus
from “other areas of culture”) and the regime's gestures toward “authority” as a
production of respectability, common sense, and consent around the apparatus
of its rule.

‘This working conceptualization of the prison regime resonates with Michel
Foucault's theorization of the displacement of the unitary sovereign power in
modern and postmodern social formations. Foucault is famously concerned
with the production of regimes of power through situated apparatuses and in-
stitutions (e.g., the asylum, the clinic, the prison, the military). In his lecture of
January 14, 1976, Foucault contended:

Our object is not to analyze rule-governed and legitimate forms of power
which have a single center, or to look at what their general mechanisms or
its overall effects might be. Our object is, on the contrary, to understand power
by looking at its extremities, at its outer limits at the points where it becomes
capillary; in other words, to understand power in its most regional forms
and institutions, and especially at the points where this power transgresses
the rules of right that organize and delineate it, oversteps those rules and is
invested in institutions, is embodied in techniques and acquires the material
means to intervene, sometimes in violent ways.*

‘The prison’s operative “capillary” sites, where it exceeds official directive and
juridical norm, are nowhere better excavated, documented, theorized, and cen-
tered than in the body of praxis generated by imprisoned radical intellectuals.
Here, the theoretically conservative notion of “the Prison” asa formal state insti-
tution, defined by centralized protocols and rules, is displaced by a conception
of the “prison regime” as a technology of power that works through the bodies
of designated agents (guards, doctors, wardens, prison educators) and performs
and materializes on the bodies of an immobilized subject population.
Foucault's “capillary power” may be recontextualized here as a literal desig-
nation for the materiality of the prison regime's method of violence as it mani-
fests on the imprisoned subject's bodily capillaries, that is her or his viscerality—
blood, skin, nervous system, organs. It is also a metaphoric designation for the
manner in which power circulates, materializing through the form and move-
ment ofits outermost points. Capillaries, in the medical definition, are “the tiny
blood vessels that connect the arterioles (the smallest divisions of the arteries)
and the venules (the smallest divisions of the veins).” These blood vessels form
crucial sites of passage for the transfer of the body's life-sustaining nutrients
as well as for the spread of disease, infection, and impurities. “Although min-
ute, the capillaries are a site where much action takes place in the circulatory
systemn.”>

The prison, as a capillary site for the production and movement of power,
exerts a dominion that reaches significantly beyond its localized setting. This
is to argue that the emergence of a reformed and reconceived prison regime as
“a site where much action takes place in the circulatory system” of power and
domination, has become central to constituting the political logic as well as the
material reproduction of the United States’ social formation. The Prison regime,
in other words, generates a technology of power that extends beyond and out-
side the institutional formality of the Prison. Similarly, a radical genealogy of
this regime must think significantly beyond and behind the current historical
moment to comprehend fully the logic of its formation and sustenance.

Scholars such as Angela Y. Davis, Alex Lichtenstein, David Oshinsky, and
others have closely examined the material continuities between U.S. racial-
chattel plantation slavery and the emergence of the modern American pe-
nal system. These studies bring crucial attention to the centrality of white-
supremacist juridical, policing, and paramilitary regimes in the production of
a carceral apparatus during the late nineteenth century that essentially repli-
cated—and, arguably, exacerbated—the constitutive logic of the supposedly de-
funct slave plantation. Lichtenstein, for example, argues convincingly that the
from chattel slave to black prison labor in the post-Civil War South
exemplified the “continual correspondence between the forces of moderniza-
tion and the perpetuation of bound labor.” He writes,

 

In the postbellum South, at each stage of the region’s development, convict
Jabor was concentrated in some of the most significant and rapidly grow-
ing sectors of the economy. Initially Southern prisoners worked on the rail-
roads. . . . This decisive shift from private to public exploitation of forced
black labor marked the triumph of the modern state's version of the social
and economic benefits to be reaped from bound labor, in the name of devel-
oping a more ..."progressive” economy. Thus, from Reconstruction through
the Progressive Era the various uses of convict labor coincided with changes
in the political economy of southern capitalism.

By way of contrast Davis, in an extended examination of Frederick Douglass's
historical understanding of the post-emancipation criminalization of black
communities, offers a theorization of how “the prison system established its
authority as a major institution of discipline and control for black communities
during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.” yielding a lineage of
“carceral regulation” that arrived at “crisis proportions” a century later. Most
important is Davis's foregrounding of the seamless linkage between the formal
abolition of extant forms of racial chattel slavery in 1865 and the somewhat
unheralded (albeit simultaneous) recodification and moral legitimization of a
revised institution of enslavement, which would occur through the auspices of
criminal conviction and imprisonment:

When the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1865, thus legally abolish- ;
ing the slave economy, it also contained a provision that was universally cel- |
ebrated as a declaration of the unconstitutionality of peonage. “Neither slav-
ery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or jj
anyplace subject to their jurisdiction.” That exception would render penal \\

servitude constitutional—from 1865 to the present day.”

\
i

‘Tracing the contemporary prison regime's points of origin to the juridical
and material developments of the post-Civil War South—in particular, to its
twinned and mutually constituting crises of economic modernization and
‘managing/controlling a suddenly nominally “free” black population—is essen-
tial for a radical genealogy of the U.S. prison. To the extent that “the post-Civil
War southern system of convict lease . . . transferred symbolically significant
numbers of black people from the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.”®
the formation of the U.S. prison must be seen as inseparable from the relation
of white freedom and black unfreedom, white ownership and black fungibility,
that produced the nation’s foundational property relation as well an essential
component (with Native American displacement and genocide) of its racial or-
dering. In fact, the prison can be understood through this genealogy as one of.
the primary productive components of the USS. nation-state’ internal coherence
(vis-a-vis the production of white supremacist hegemony through black bodily
immobilization and punishment) and modernist expansiveness (as the prison
replaced the “irrational” horrors of chattel slavery with the juri
ity” of the prison).

Lam interested in stretching both the historical reach and conceptual bound-
aries of this genealogical tracing, however. While there are always and neces-
sarily forms of passage into the temporalities and geographies of death, such as
those of the slave plantation and post-emancipation prison, the contemporary
case of the prison regime constitutes a site and condition of death that is itself
form of passage. This is to say that the prison is less a “destination” point for
“the duly convicted” than it is a point of massive human departure—from civil
society, the free world, and the mesh of affective social bonds and relations that

 

“rational-

produce varieties of “human’ family and community. Hence, labor exploitation,
the construction of unfree labor (what some have called a “new slavery”), and
the mass confinement of a reserve labor pool are not the constitutive logics
of the new prison regime, although these are certainly factors that shape the
prison’s institutional structure, Whereas forced labor (formal prison slavery)
was at one time conceived as the primary institutional tool for rehabilitating
imprisoned white men,’ the proliferation of mass incarceration in the current
era has reinscribed a logic of extermination.

Sharon Patricia Holland’s meditations on the entanglement—in fact, the ver-
itable inseparability—of death and black subjectivity indicts the very forma-
tion of a white Americana and its accompanying social imaginary vis-a-vis the
never-ending presence (and imminence) of racial chattel slavery:

Itis possible to make at least two broad contentions here: a) that the (white)
culture's dependence on the nonhuman status of its black subjects was never
measured by the ability of whites to produce a “social heritage”; instead, it
rested on the status of the black as a nonentity; and b) that the transmuta-
tion from enslaved to freed subject never quite occurred at the level of the

imagination.”

Extrapolating Holland's central theses, I would add that, indeed, what has oc-
curred is an inscription of the black nonhuman “nonentity” through the cate-
gory of the imprisoned—hence illegal/extralegal/convict—subject. This is to
argue that while the white social imagination has been unable to assimilate
the notion of a “freed (black) subject” in its midst beyond cynical or piecemeal
 

gestures of “inclusion” (which is to say that ultimately it really cannot assimi-
late blackness at all), the actual “transmutation” has been from the white social
imagination of the slave to that of the (black) prisoner, or what Frank Wilder-
son theorized in the previous chapter as the new black “prison slave.””

The status of the enslaved-imprisoned black subject forms the template
through which white Americana constructs a communion of historical interest,
mobilizations of political force, and, more specifically, the production and pro-
liferation of a regime of mass-based human immobilization. Thus, my theoreti-
cal centering of black unfreedom here is not intended to minimize or under-
state the empirical presence of “non-black” Third World, indigenous, or even
white bodies in these current sites of state captivity but, rather, to argue that the
technology of the prison regime—and the varieties of violence it wages against

 

those it holds captive—is premised on a particular white-supremacist module
or prototype that is in fact rooted in the history of slavery and the social and
racial crisis that it has forwarded into the present.

‘The contemporary regime of the prison encompasses the weaponry of an in-
stitutionalized dehumanization. Italso, and necessarily, generates a material ren-
dition of the non- and sub-human that structurally antagonizes and de-centers
the immediate capacity of the imprisoned subject to simply self-identify. Pub-
lishing in 1990 under the anonymous byline “A Federal Prisoner,” one impris-

    

oned writer offered a schematic view of this complex process, which is guided
by the logic of a totalizing disempowerment and social disaffection:

The first thing a convict feels when he receives an inconceivably long sen-
tence is shock. The shock usually wears off after about two years, when all his
appeals have been denied. He then enters a period of self-hatred because of
what he’s done to himself and his family.

If he survives that emotion—and some don't—he begins to swim the
rapids of rage, frustration and alienation, When he passes through the rapids,
he finds himself in the calm waters of impotence, futility and resignation.
Its not a life one can look forward to living. The future is totally devoid of
hope”

‘The structured violence of self-alienation, which drastically compounds the
effect of formal social alienation, is at the heart of the regime's punitive-carceral

logic. Yet it is precisely because the reproduction of the regime relies on its own | {
i

incapacity to decisively “dehumanize” its captives en masse (hence, the persis-
tence of institutional measures that pivot on the presumption and projection of
the “inmate's” embodiment of disobedience, resistance, and insurrection) that
it generates a philosophy of the captive body that precedes the logic of enslave-
ment. Thus, the regime’s logic of power reaches into the arsenal of a historical
apparatus that was an essential element of the global formation of racial chat-
tel slavery while simultaneously structuring its own particular technology of
violence and bodily domination. What, then, is the materiality of the archetypal
imprisoned body (and subject) through which the contemporary prison regime
has proliferated its diverse and hierarchically organized apparatuses of racial-
ized and gendered violence, most especially its technologies of immobilization
and bodily disintegration?

[am arguing that a radical genealogy of the prison regime must engage in
historical conversation with the massive human departure of the transatlantic
Middle Passage, an apparatus and regime of capture and forced movement that
outlined its own epochal conception of the non- and subhuman, the proto-
typing of normative black punishment in a white new world, and the blue-
printing of the abject (and durably captive) black presence under the rule of
Euro-American modernity. The Middle Passage foreshadows the prison as it
routes and enacts chattel slavery, constituting both a passage into the tempo-
tality and geography of enslavement (crystallized by Patterson's conception of
slavery as “natal alienation” and “social death”) and a condition of existence
unto itself—in particular, a spatially specified pedagogical production of black
slave ontology.

I am especially concerned with the capacity of historically situated white-
supremacist regimes to prototype novel technologies of violence and domina-
tion on black bodies—articulating in this instance through what Eric Williams
considers the overarching “economic” logic of a transcontinental trafficking
in enslaved Africans—which in turn may yield technologies of power that
become available to, and constitutive of, larger social and carceral formations,
even centuries later. Thus, while the contemporary prison regime captures and
immobilizes the descendants of slaves and non-slaves alike, I consider its tech-
nology of violence to be inseparable from a genealogy of transatlantic black/
African captivity and punishment.

While the human volume of the Middle Passage has been a subject of em-
pirical and methodological debate since the publication of Philip Curtin's The
Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), a loose consensus among historians has
been attained since the 1999 release of the Cambridge University Press Trans-
Atlantic Slave Trade database. David Eltis, drawing from a rigorous review of
previous literature and elaborating from the Cambridge University data set,
suggests a figure of about 11 million “exports of slaves from Africa” between
the years 1519 and 1867" Eltis, Curtin, Herbert S. Klein, Paul Lovejoy, David
Richardson, Joseph Inikori, Stanley Engerman, and others have further esti-
mated that between 12 percent and 20 percent of the enslaved perished during
the transatlantic transfer, with a total of between 10 million and 15 million of the
enslaved eventually reaching the Americas, It is important to note, for the gene-
alogical relation I am examining here, that the vast majority of the seaborne
deaths were the result of conditions endemic to the abhorrent living conditions
of the slave vessels (the effects of contractible disease and malnutrition, for ex-
ample, were exacerbated by the conditions of mass incarceration). Many others
committed suicide and infanticide in an attempt to defeat the logic of their gen-
dered biological expropriation and bodily commodification, while unknown
numbers were killed in the process of attempting to overthrow their captors,
‘The scale of biological death during the Middle Passage was astronomical and
clearly genocidal.

Further, this process underwrote the innovation of a distinctive maritime ar-
chitecture—literally, a seaborne and ship-bound geography devoted to the ac-
cumulation, storage, and biological preservation of an enslaved human “cargo.”
This technology of incarceration, famously portrayed by late-eighteenth-
century British abolitionists in their lithograph “Stowage of the British Slave
Ship Brookes” (see figure below), rendered a profoundly graphic conception of
the racialized sub- and nonhuman as the spatial and existential underside of
an expansive European New World millennium. Yet this mass-scale, transcon-
tinental kidnapping must be examined in the context of the coerced transition
that it induced by fiat."*

‘The Middle Passage constituted a liminal spatial and temporal site, a mo-
ment of commodity transfer between European business partners, as well as a
profound site of transformation for the human beings mass incarcerated in the
cargo holds of ships. It encompassed a moment of transition between discrete
conditions of subjection and domination (from the upheavals of colonial con-
quest to the settlement localities of enslavement) as well as formed a condition
 

Figure 2 “Stowage of the British Slave Ship Brookes,” circa 1790.
Broadside, Rare Book Room, Library of Congress, Portfolio 282-43.

of existence unto itself. Confined to vessels floating in the Atlantic, enslaved
Africans were, for their captors, precious live chattel investments in a limbo
state between colonial conquest, enslavement (simultaneously commodity and
labor value), and physical extermination. The Middle Passage was, at its spatial
core, a site of profound subjective and communal disruption for captive Afri-
cans: Manifesting an epochal rupture from familiar networks of kinship, liveli-
hood, and social reproduction, the voyage was the threshold of geographic, sub-
jective, and bodily displacement for the transatlantic imprisoned. This African
“New World” diaspora, fundamentally constituted and mobilized through con-
quest, genocide, and enslavement, was and is defined by a structure of imma-
nent alienation from the material and psychic contexts that made operational
indigenous African sociocultural forms and made their unique renditions of
human community intelligible and consistent.
‘The manner in which the Middle Passage allegorized and materialized this
unique destruction of human community, particularly its displacement and
interruption of indigenous African tribal and communal subjectivities, illu-
minates how the construction of this seaborne mass incarceration entailed a
production of power and domination that pivoted on significantly more than
the logistical or economic pragmatics of a live commodity transport. While the
human cargo certainly held a lucrative potential profit for slavers incumbent
on their ability to bring their stock physically to market, there was far more
at stake in the three-centuries-long institutionalization of this itinerant trans-
atlantic “pri

The Middle Passage was essentially a pedagogical and punitive practice
that deployed strategies of unprecedented violence to “teach” captive Africans
and coerce them into the methods of an incipient global ordering. Evidentiary
fragments of this complex practice are reflected in the gathered historical data,
which reveal that rates of survival for the enslaved during the era of the Middle
Passage generally equaled or surpassed the survival rates of the European slave-
ship crews. While the precise overall mortality rate of enslaved Africans during

  

the transatlantic voyage remains a contested figure, Stephen Behrendt contends
that, since “the primary aim of merchants was to minimize slave deaths in the
middle passage to ensure a profitable voyage,” the mortality rates for European
crews were consistently higher than those of their captives, at times doubling or
tripling their relative death counts. For the merchant slave traders, “minimiz-
ing crew mortality was a secondary consideration” to that of preserving their
human chattel.” Curtin’s focus on the mid- to late eighteenth century similarly
reveals that “the death rate per voyage among the crew was uniformly higher
than the death rate among slaves in transit at the same period.” He argues in
regard to this discrepancy in mortality rates that “the data are so consistent and
regular . . . that this can be taken as a normal circumstance of the eighteenth-
century slave trade.” Perhaps what is exceedingly horrific about the carceral
technology of the Middle Passage is that it led to the death of breathtaking raw
numbers of enslaved people while relatively successfully preserving slave life
for the sake of auction and fungible bodily circulation.”

Thus, the planned survival of enslaved Africans was symbiotic to—rather
than a logical contradiction of—their mass incarceration in vessel cargo holds.
‘This structure of planned bodily preservation and mass bodily immobilization
reflects the peculiar technology of domination and violence that conceived and
persistently refigured the Middle Passage as a primary, long-term labor for the
emergent transatlantic European and Euro-American civilization. Establishing
an epochal precursor to the carceral technologies of the landlocked US. prison,
the Middle Passage simultaneously (1) re-mapped enslaved black bodies; (2)
prototyped a conception of the imprisoned/slave as the categorical embodi-
ment of the sub- or nonhuman; and (3) reconfigured multiple scales of geog-
raphy, constituting new conceptions of the continental (Europe/ Africa/“New
World”) and (transatlantic) oceanic, while inventing new localities in the slave
ship and plantation. Thus, the apparent commitment to preserving slave life
on board the ships was more than an economic decision. Rather, keeping en-
slaved captives alive was integral to the production of the Middle Passage as a
productive and socially constitutive modality of mass-based imprisonment that
collapsed ontological violence into a regime of profound bodily punishment.

Elaborating the slave ship as precisely such a capillary site of power, Vincent
Harding's incisive analysis of the Middle Passage further elaborates the symbio
sis between the incipient white-supremacist racial formation of the transatlan-
tic conquest and settlement and the ontological relation that characterized the
capture, enslavement, and transfer of Africans:

The ships were even more than prisons. Ultimately they provided black
people with an introduction to the Euro-American state, for they were mini-
states with their own polity, their own laws and government; the common
sailors were the ships’ own indigenous oppressed class. . .. At the core of the
mini-states, prisons, and kennels it was always possible to discover the social,
economic, and political scourges arising out of Europe: racism, capitalism,
and the deep human fears they engender. The tie of the ships to European
capitalism was evident in the decision to call them “slavers,” and in their rela-
tionship to the slave “factories,” and to the industrial factories at home which
made the goods that they brought to trade for humans. To maximize profits,
the ships had to herd as many Africans aboard as possible, and to exploit
their own white crews.”

Harding brings attention to the technologies of human containment that were
invented and refined at the site of the slave vessel. This portable and moving
confinement, he tells us, was invested with an intensive and sophisticated —~and
profoundly brutal—technology of incarceration. Olaudah Equiano, predating
Harding's analogy of the ship as white nation-state, reconstructs his first im-
pression of the slave vessel in his 1789 memoir The Interesting Narrative of the
Life of Olaudah Equiano: “I could not help expressing my fears and apprehen-
sions to some of my countrymen: I asked them if these people had no country
but lived in this hollow place (the ship).””"

It was within the logic of this power relation—one that significantly exceeds
the contained binary relation of torture as a structure of personalized violence
and extracted “suffering’—that bodies were re-spatialized and space was re-
embodied:

The width allowed for each individual was no more than sixteen inches, and
the passage between each of these rows of human packages was so small that
it was impossible for a person walking by, however carefully, to avoid tread-
ing on them. Thus crammed together, like herrings in a barrel, they con-
tracted putrid and fatal disorders, so that those who came to inspect them
in a morning often had to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain
their dead carcasses from the bodies of their wretched fellow-sufferers to
whom they had been fastened.”*

Such horrified European and Euro-American abolitionist descriptions of slave-
ship geography, and the white humanist outcry they superficially convey, might
be usefully reread in the context of Harding's interpretive framing. The death
space of the slave ship, and the genocidal epoch of the Middle Passage, confined
and produced bodies that were ambivalently situated between the categories of
labor value, social death, and biological death. Less ambivalent, however, was
the constitution of enslaved Africans as an emergent ontological category lurk-
ing just outside—and irreversibly, productively against—the historical telos of
the European Enlightenment and modernity’s mankind.

“This ontological subjection, forged over a three-century span through the
carceral technology of the Middle Passage, foreshadowed the enduring labor
of generating the racialized unfree as the condition of possibility for the civil
society of the white and free. As such, the humanist sensibility expressed by
elements of the nineteenth-century European and Euro-American slavery and
slave-trade-abolitionist movements begs the question of who, figuratively and
literally, was entitled access to the domain of the “human.”

Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Carl Pederson, editors of the
1999 collection Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, offer a conceptualiza-
tion of the transatlantic slave trade that can assist in complicating our tempo-
ral and spatial conception of the contemporary regime of imprisonment: “The
Middle Passage . . . emerges not as a clean break between past and present but
as a spatial continuum between Africa and the Americas, the ship's deck and
the hold, the Great House and the slave quarters, the town and the outlying re-
gions.” A genealogy of the contemporary prison regime awakens both the his-
torical memory and sociopolitical logic of the Middle Passage. The prison has
come to form a hauntingly similar spatial and temporal continuum between
social and biological notions of life and death, banal liberal civic freedom and
totalizing unfreedom, community and alienation, agency and liquidation, the
“human” and the sub- and nonhuman. In a reconstruction of the Middle Pas-
sages constitutive logic, the reinvented prison regime is openly articulating and
self-valorizing a commitment to efficient and effective bodily immobilization
within the mass-based ontological subjection of human beings.

Torture’s Excess: “It Was Like Dying”

‘The contemporary prison, working within the genealogical lineage of the Middle

Passage, constantly prototypes technologies premised on a re-spatialization of

bodies and coercive re-embodiment of spaces. Robert Perkinson’s descrip-

tion of the internal geography of the Florence, Colorado “control-unit” prison,

among the first federal super-maximum prisons to be introduced in the early

1990s, invokes and refracts the historical image and imaginary of the slave ship's
| cargo hold:

{ Each cell contains a three-foot-wide cement bed slab, a concrete stool and
i desk, a steel sink and toilet, and a three-by-three shower stall. A fluorescent
| ight panel glares from the wal, illuminating other amenities like an clec-
tric cigarette lighter, an inmate duress switch (since the cells are essentially
soundproof), an air grate, and, in some cells, a small television. Double doors
shrink the cells by another three feet, trapping unreachable space between
| _ bars and the outer door. Only two window sits allow external light into the
| cage, one on the steel door staring into the empty hallway and another body-
| Jength sliver facing an empty courtyard. The shower, along with food slots in
} the door, allow for total isolation.
“Thus, the Florence apx’s very layout determines that it can be nothing
but a chamber of sensory deprivation, designed to press inmates to the brink

 
of insanity by its very architecture. Modern electronics allow constant sur-
veillance and supervision while prisoners themselves remain physically in-
visible, locked away from any direct human view or contact in compart-
ments of solid steel.*

Extrapolating the immobilizing logic of the Florence apx (Administrative
Maximum Prison), the September 2001 issue of Peacekeeper, the official pub-
lication of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (ccPoa),
offers a propaganda piece valorizing the super-max prison’s evolution into
more sophisticated carceral techniques:

Imagine the ultimate Big Brother of the prison system—tracking inmates
twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Well, guess what? It exists. Big
Brother has arrived at Calipatria State Prison. . .

Every inmate wears a wrist-worn transmitter called pass unit, which
stands for Personal Activated Security Sensor. When an inmate arrives at the
facility, he or she is enrolled into the system database by the system opera-
tor. The information typically entered consists of the inmates name, inmate
identification number, housing/bed assignment and meal type. . . .

‘The transmitter is installed on the inmate's non-dominant wrist. It is
secured with screws that are tightened with a special torque screwdriver. The
clips can only be removed by breaking them. . . .

Officer A. Felty . . . believes the system is a great deterrent. “The inmates
realize they are being constantly monitored and supervised, even when the
officer's eyes are not on them. . . . Basically, he knows that escape is not an
option, the removal of the bracelet is not an option because he is being con-
stantly monitored—whether the officer is watching him or not.”

‘The totalizing spatial logic of Calipatria’s “Big Brother” conveys a peculiar con-
vergence between high technologies of panoptic discipline and the banal nor-
malization of ritualized and immanent physical violence. Disciplinary biopo-
litical state power rearticulates through the state's self-justifying monopoly on
legitimate forms of coercive bodily disintegration: This is to argue that, far from
simply inscribing a more invasive and comprehensive form of discipline over
its captive civically dead subjects, Big Brother represents a multiplication of the
potential sites and scenarios of subjection and physical punishment. This high
technology re-maps prisoners’ bodies onto a virtual terrain, abstracting their
bodily movements and gestures into a computerized grid of obedience and dis-
obedience, submission and violation. Such innovations effect a re-spatialization
of the prison itself, marking the extension and veritable omnipresence of the
state’s capacity to practice a violent domination over its “inmates,”

While such advanced technologies of imprisonment are an epochal leap
from the carceral practices of the Middle Passage, as a production of power and
dominion they are constituted by an analogous—and, in some places, materi-
ally similar—social logic and historical trajectory. Located within an extended
current genealogy of the slave vessel, there is a resurfaced familiarity in the
prison’s discursive emphasis and material production of effective mass capture,
immobilization, and bodily disintegration. It is worth invoking Hortense Spill-
ers’ meditation on the captivity of the Middle Passage as a manner of illustrat-
ing a central genealogical linkage between apparently discrete and epochally
distant carceral forms: “On any given day, we might imagine, the captive per-
sonality did not know where s/he was, we could say that they were culturally
‘unmade,’ thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that exposed their des-
tinies to an unknown course.” Echoing and recontextualizing Spillers, Jar-
vis Jay Masters account of his initial entombment in San Quentin's death-row
prison resonates a spatial and bodily encounter with the prison’s more common
modes of isolation and circumscription. His narrative echoes those of impris-
oned African survivors of the transatlantic transfer (such as Cugoano, Equiano,
and others) while supplementing the ccpoa’s rosy tribute to the onset of the
high-technology prison”

I will never forget when the steel cell door slammed behind me, I stood in
the darkness trying to fix my eyes and readjust the thoughts that were tell-
ing me that this was not home—that this tiny space would not, could not be
where I would spend more than a decade of my life. ...

1 spread my arms and found that the palms of my hands touched the
walls with ease. I pushed against them with all my might, until I realized how
silly it was to think that these thick concrete walls would somehow budge. ...
‘The bed was bolted into the wall like a shelf. It was only two and a half feet
wide by six feet long, and only several feet above the gray concrete floor"

Old and new technologies of incarceration have collaborated in the emergence
of the contemporary prison. Masters's description of the San Quentin cell re-
veals the constitutive logic that unifies “low” and “high” carceral technologies in
the production of the prison regime while invoking the captivity of the Middle
Passage as living and lived memory. To absorb the geographical breadth and
technological depth of the prison regime's elaboration is to come face to face
with the unprecedented levels of autonomy granted to—and extracted by—the
prison to shape the social (and carceral) worlds. It is also to find an insurgent
critique of imprisonment that moves from the sometimes eloquent, though
consistently displaced, theoretical languages articulated by captive radicals and
revolutionaries.

Interviewed in 1970 about his first experience under state captivity, the ven-
erated imprisoned liberationist George Jackson recounted:

‘The very first time, it was like dying. . . . Just to exist at all in the cage calls for
some heavy psychic readjustments. . . . I never adjusted. I haven't adjusted
even yet, with half my life already spent in prison. ... Capture, imprisonment,
is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in his life2*

Speaking from the experimental “High Security Unit” in Lexington, Kentucky,
some twenty years later, the political prisoner Susan Rosenberg echoed Jack-
son language in a manner that reveals an essential—though rarely elabo-
rated—facet of the prison regime. Testifying in the award-winning 1989 docu-
mentary Through the Wire, Rosenberg said:

[The High Security Unit is] a prison within a prison. . . . The High Security
Unit is living death. . .. | believe that this is an experiment being conducted by
the Justice Department to try and destroy political prisoners and to justify
the most vile abuse of us as women and as human beings, and [to] justify it
because we are political”

Since the time of Rosenberg’ testimony, the technology of the Lexington High
Security Unit has circulated and metamorphosed, virus-like, through state and
federal prisons across the country. On any given day, tens of thousands are held
captive in these “super-max” prisons, while more than 2 million are incarcer-
ated under the rule of Jackson's “cage”—that is, the venerable jail/prison/de-

tention center. These various carceral forms have astronomically increased the | !

numbers of both social and political prisoners held captive in conditions of
low-intensity physical and psychological torture, as well as those subjected to
high-intensity punishment and state-sanctioned mental or emotional disorder-
ing" In the meantime, the expansion of youth prisons, mental-health facilities,

 
and Homeland Security and immigrant detention centers in the past decades
has been accompanied by a proliferation of conditions easily likened to both
traditional and revised definitions of solitary and mass-based torture. Jamal
al-Harath, in the aftermath of his release from the US. prison camp in Guanta-
namo Bay, Cuba, in March 2004, concisely surmised the logic of his detention
on flimsy suspicion of connection to Afghanistan's Taliban and the al-Qaeda
network: “The whole point of Guanténamo was to get to you psychologically. ..-
‘The beatings were not as neatly as bad as the psychological torture. Bruises heal
after a week, but the other stuff stays with you.””? Echoing Jackson's meditation
on captivity as an approximation of death, and surfacing the indelible marks
that “existing in a cage” permanently inscribes on body, soul, and psyche, al-
Harath illuminates a form of subjection that exceeds the formal temporal and
spatial boundaries of imprisonment. The Guantanamo detention, he says, will
always stay with him, even as he reassumes the formal status of the free person.
in his homeland of Britain.

‘Thenotoriousroutines characterizing the rise of California's Security Housing
Unit (s110) prisons further extrapolates the particular white-supremacist logic
that persists within the spectacle of the tortured imprisoned body. The video-
taped 1994 murder of the black prisoner Preston Tate at the Corcoran State
Prison sHw by correctional officers—one of whom prefaced the fatal shoot-
ing by announcing, “Its going to be duck-hunting season’—obtained national
attention in the mid- to late 1990s, accompanied by widespread reporting of
the Corcoran guards’ amused coercion of sHU prisoners into gladiator-style
prison-yard fights (shooting many of them under the auspices of “trying to pro-
tect another inmate or guard”). Perkinson, however, brings attention to the
site of st1v’s unseen, where regulated regimes of bodily violence are partnered
with the “application of sophisticated technology to control prisoners’ routines,
movements, and even thoughts more than ever before.” His investigation of
the si1u/super-max prison’s normative practices of psychological torture and
bodily punishment illustrates a: structuring—and, perhaps, paradigmatic—nar-
rative for the regime's legitimated and lawful disintegration of particular racial-
ized captive bodies:

On April 22, 1992, for example, Vaughn Dortch was stripped naked and
pulled out of his cell by a Pelican Bay sont [Special Operations Response
Team] squad. According to court records, prison guards then carried Dortch
shackled and gagged to the infirmary where six guards pressed him into a
steel tub of scalding hot water for several minutes. Dortch, who is African
American, told “60 Minutes” that the guards promised to give him a “Klan
bath” and scrubbed him with a bristle brush until his skin started to peel
away. “Looks like we're going to have a white boy before this is through,” one
of the assailants joked.*

Similar incidents are reconstructed in mind-numbing fashion throughout the
memoirs, testimonials, and correspondence of people imprisoned in suv and
super-max facilities under U.S. sanction.* The sheer mass and repetition of {
such accounts render implausible the claims, frequently voiced by official and |:
lay defendants of these punitive regimens, that such scenarios amount to a col-'
lection of isolated and exceptional episodes. In fact, it is clear that the Pelican, !
Bay “Klan Bath” represents an allegory of both the disavowed regularity and #
racialized logic of the direct bodily disarticulation that forms the primary ma-
terial expression of the prison regime’s immediate dominion, at the spatial site
of the captive’s body.

Even the terms of “torture” may be insufficient nomenclature for this tech-
nology of immobilization, however. Conventional definitions consider the in-
flicting of bodily violence to be the means to some end, whether it is extracting
information, coercing confessions, terrorizing populations, or otherwise, The
United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or De-
grading Treatment or Punishment, by way of prominent example, states:

‘The term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether
physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as
obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing
him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having
committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason
based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted
by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public
official or other person acting in an official capacity.

 

‘There is, however, no structuring exterior or ulterior motive to the state's tech-
nology of violence and domination in the super-max prison or within the
broader production of the prison regime. The structurally manifest political
desire of the prison regime's technology of immobilizing (and deadly) violence
is, in the case of Jackson's inaugural imprisonment, Rosenberg’s High Security
Unit, Tate's fatal su yard, and Dortch’s Klan Bath, intrinsic to the biopolitical
technology of the “torture” itself—that is, the isolation, social liquidation, and
immobilization of human beings on scales of flexible magnitude.

‘The organizing logic of the prison-industrial complex writ large is echoed
and embodied in the vernacular of death spoken by radical captives such as
Jackson and Rosenberg. Both, among countless of their (currently and for-
merly) imprisoned cohorts, invoke a conception of the prison within a con-
tinuum of dying, or “being dead,” that crucially expands the historical scope of
the prison regime's genealogical linkages to other forms of human domination
and massively structured bodily violence.

The prison has become, akin to the Middle Passage, more than simply a
means to an end. It is, in objective and in fact, an end in itself. The logic of
prisonment in the age of the prison-industrial complex involves a particular
kind of social extermination that fundamentally alters the network of relation-
ships (affective, economic, and otherwise) in civil society. The prison, in the
lineage of the slave vessel, has become essential to the production of a new so-
cial formation: The technologies of social reproduction, juridically formalized
civil death, and mass-based social death converge and collapse as the durable
geographic (spatial) production of this regime. In turn, this spatialized intersec-
tion of oppressive technologies “places” and signifies the bloodwork of white

multicultural’) life and subjectivity, as it is insistently and fatally lived against
black and Third World death and ontological subjection.

 

Notes

1. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 31; emphasis added,

2. Ibid., 37.

3. Ibid., 29.

4 Michel Foucault, “14 January 1976,” in “Society Must Be Defended,” 27-28; emphasis
added.

5: MedTerms Online Medical Dictionary, s.v, “Capillary.” available online at http://
‘www.medterms.com.

6. Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor, 188-89.

7. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison,” 75-76; emphasis added.

8. Ibid., 75.

9. See Garland, “The Rationalization of Punishment’; Rotman, “The Failure of Re-

form.
10. Holland, Raising the Dead, 15.

u1, Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal.”

12. A Federal Prisoner (anonymous), “A Mount Everest of Time,” San Francisco Chronicle,
“Sunday Punch” sec., October 7, 1990, 2.

13. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.

14. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.

15. Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Outlining the his-
torical debate over this figure, David Eltis, David Richardson, and Stephen Behrendt
write that the empirical research that followed publication of Curtin’s classic text
“focused on the two centuries after 1660 when the transatlantic traffic in Africans
peaked, [and] has used archival shipping data unavailable to Curtin. Usually inter-
preted as more reliable than Curtin’s, the new findings have nevertheless tended to
corroborate rather than challenge Curtin's original estimates of the totals involved.”
See Eltis et al., “Patterns in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1662-1867,” 21. By way of
reflection on this debate among historians of the human volume of the transatlantic
slave trade, Joseph Inikori and Stanley Engerman wrote in 1992, “Inikori has sug-
gested a global figure of 15.4 million. This figure has been contested by some schol-
ars, and while the process of revision continues, it seems probably that the ultimate
figure is unlikely to be less than 12 million or more than 20 million captives exported
from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade.” See Inikori and Engerman, The Atlantic
Slave Trade, 6. Paul Lovejoy, another decade earlier in 1982, arrived at a figure re-
markably close to both Curtin’s and Eltis’s, suggesting 11,698,000 “exported” enslaved
Africans between 1450 and 1900, with approximately 9,778,500 surviving the trans-
atlantic transport. See Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 477-78.

16. In addition to the books and articles already mentioned, it is worth noting the follow-
ing texts for the purposes of providing a broad historical overview of the scholarship
addressing the trade in enslaved Africans and the Middle Passage: Bennett, Before
the Mayflower; Blassingame, The Slave Community; Carey, The Slave Trade; Curtin,
‘The Atlantic Slave Trade; Diedrich et al., Black Imagination and the Middle Passage;
Eltis and Walvin, The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade; Harding, There Is a River;
Kay, The Shameful Trade; Klein, The Middle Passage; Lott, Subjugation and Bond-
age; Manning, Slave Trades, 1500-1800; Northrup, The Atlantic Slave Trade; Patterson,
Slavery and Social Death; Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade.

7. See Behrendt, “Crew Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth
Century,” 66; also quoted in Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 47.

18. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 282-83.

». Postma, whose text culls from the recently available Oxford University cb-RoM
database The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (2000) writes: “Because slaves were valuable
investment property, ship captains kept careful records in logbooks and mortality
lists of the dates and causes of death. . . . These records survive for about one-fifth

.
of the documented slave voyages and are now accessible through the Cambridge
University Press Database. They show that on average twelve percent of the enslaved
did not survive the ocean crossing, though there was considerable variation from
one transport to another, Before 1700, death rates tended to be higher, averaging
‘more than twenty-two percent. They decreased to about ten percent by the end of the
eighteenth century, but rose again to nearly twelve percent during the years of illegal
trading in the mid-nineteenth century.” Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 43-44.

). Harding, There Is a River, 10-11.

Equiano, Equiano’ Travels, 27.
Copley, A History of Slavery and Its Abolition, 124.

. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Carl Pederson, “The Middle Passage Be-

tween History and Fiction,” in Diedrich et al, Black Imagination and the Middle Pas-
sage, 8; emphasis added.
Perkinson, “Shackled Justice.”

 

. Nichol Gomez, “Big Brother Is Watching,” Peacekeeper, September 2001, 39.
. Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” in Spillers, Black, White, and in Color,

2s.

_ In addition to Cugoano and Equiano, examples of narratives that articulate an auto-

biographical or generational memory of the Middle Passage can be found in such
collections as Gates and Andrews, Pioneers of the Black Atlantic. The narratives of
Mary Prince (1831), Old Elizabeth (1863), Mattie J. Jackson (1866), Lucy A. Delaney
(:891), Kate Drumgoold (1898), and Annie L. Burton (i909) are similarly compiled in
Gates, Six Women's Slave Narratives. The narratives of James Albert Ukawsaw Gron-
niosaw (1772), William Wells Brown (1847), Henry Bibb (1849), Sojourner Truth
(1850), William and Ellen Craft (1860), Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861), and Jacob D. Green
(1864) are anthologized in Slave Narratives. The autobiography and other narratives
of Frederick Douglass are gathered in Gates, Frederick Douglass.

Masters, Finding Freedom, 4-5.

Yee, The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison, 121; emphasis added.

Nina Rosenblum, dir, Through the Wire (videocassette, New York: New Video Group,
1991); emphasis added.

. According to a 1994 headline article in the Progressive, the opening of California's

Security Housing Unit in 1989 at Pelican Bay State Prison led to thirty-six other states’
following suit in the subsequent two years. “California Governor George Deukme-
jian said, in 1989, that Pelican Bay would serve as ‘a model for the rest of the nation.
Unfortunately, he was right. At least thirty-six states have already built ‘super-maxi
prisons like it, according to a 1991 report by Human Rights Watch’: Paige Bierma,
“Torture behind Bars: Right Here in the United States of America,” Progressive, vol.
58, no. 7, July 1994, 21.

 
32, “Brit Tells Tale of Torture at Guantinamo,” Windsor Star, March 13, 2004, C4.
33. While there is 2 significant body of reporting on the Corcoran incidents and the sub-
sequent criminal trials of several guards, the following articles offer a clear overview
of the fundamental issues. The comprehensive 2002 California Prison Focus (cpF)
report “Corcoran State Prison 2001-2002: Inside California's Brutal Maximum Secu-
rity Prison,” is available online at the cP website, http://www prisons.org. The fol-

 

lowing news articles are listed in reverse chronological order: Jerry Bier and Mike
Lewis, “Eight Correctional Officers Indicted: Corcoran State Prison Officials Ac-
cused of Orchestrating Inmate Fights as Entertainment,” Fresno Bee, February 27,
1998, home ed., a1; Tom Kertscher, “Controversy at Corcoran Prison Is 10 Years Old:
First Inmate Shootings Occurred Nine Months after Facility Opened,” Fresno Bee,
February 27, 1998, home ed., a16; Pamela J. Podger, “Corcoran Whistle-Blower Deals
with Consequences Two Years Later: Richard Caruso Is Suing the State Department
of Corrections,” Fresno Bee, November 3, 1996, home ed., 16; Associated Press, “rat
Probes Fatal Shootings of Prison Inmates by Guards: Seven Convicts Killed at Cor-
coran Facility since 1988,” Fresno Bee, October 28, 1994, A16.

34. Perkinson, “Shackled Justice.”

35. While I have refrained from extensively quoting such texts here for the sake of space,
as well as to protect the anonymity of those who have a possibility of obtaining parole
release, a significant collection of personal and legal correspondence, as well as un-
transcribed audio-recorded interviews, has been amassed by cpr in its interviews
with people imprisoned in suv facilities. cpF can be reached at 2940 16th Street B-s,
San Francisco, Calif. 94103; phone: (415) 252-9211; email: info@prisons.org. Similar
material is being gathered by the organization Justice Now of Oakland, California,
which focuses on the conditions of women's prisons. Justice Now can be contacted
at 322 Webster Street, Suite 220, Oakland, Calif. 94612; phone: (510) 839-7654; em:
cshaylor@earthlink.net.

36. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,”
adopted December 10, 1984; emphasis added,

 
 

odd Hyung-Rae Tarselli
We Love "Violent Offenders" Too
ep
Much love to all those joining In the demand for
prisoner release as a public health response. Much
appreciation to all the officials working hard to
release non-violent offenders. Please also
remember that violent offense does not equal
violent person. Apart from coerced confession,
wrongful conviction, and draconian criminal
statutes, please consider trauma, brain
development and the complexity of survivorship,
especially as it concerns gender violence, inside and
outside prisons, Please also consider that no one Is

merely the:sum of their worst acts nor are we the
same person our whole lives.

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DEMAND tae LAT ACTIONS N.
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