Inside and Outside Prison Walls
The small city of Auburn in Central New York was once larger and more prosperous. In the nineteen century, it was known for book publishing and piano manufacture. The founding of the International Harvester Company bolstered the local economy and provided abundant jobs for decades.
Auburn’s most prominent citizen was William S. Seward, governor of New York, aspirant to the Presidency, and Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, best remembered for the purchase of Alaska (“Seward’s Folly”). Gravely wounded in 1865 by a confederate of John Wilkes Booth, he retired to his Auburn home.
Seward has been eclipsed as an Auburn hero by Harriet Tubman, “The Moses of Her People,” as she came to be called. From her cottage about a mile south of Seward’s mansion, Tubman ran a trunk line of the Underground Railroad, which transported many fugitive slaves to points farther north. Tubman herself led many of these dangerous missions. Her house has recently been restored and a center built in her honor next door to Seward’s home. Both are buried, not far apart, in Auburn’s historic Fort Hill Cemetery.
The most enduring Auburn landmark, however, is its prison, one of the first in the United States. Built between 1819 and 1823, it is now officially known (in bureaucratic gobbledygook,) as Auburn Penitentiary Correctional Facility. The street name is simply Auburn Prison.
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville (author of Democracy in America) and his friend Gustave de Beaumont were commissioned by the French government to survey American prisons. Their 1839 report, The Penitentiary System, focused on differences between incarceration practices at Auburn and those in Philadelphia.
Auburn was the first prison to use a contract labor system, in which convicts were compelled to do congregate but silent work, some outside the walls, where even strict supervision could not realistically really suppress interchanges. Convict labor was used to defray the costs of the prison. Silence in separate cells was mandated at night.
The Philadelphia system, by contrast, enforced silence and isolation at all times. The objective -- complete domination of the inmates -- was reflected in the prison’s architecture. Whereas Auburn provided limited open space, Philadelphia exerted total domination from a panopticon: a circular bunker at the center, where the tentacle cell blocks converged. Every prisoner was visible from this control center.
Auburn Prison’s other (dubious) distinction was its installation of the Electric Chair. Invented by a Buffalo dentist, it was initially deployed in Auburn, Clinton, and Sing Sing. An electrician, also from Buffalo, devised the complicated wiring. But the final version was built by convicts in Auburn’s furniture shop!
The Electric Chair was not motivated by any desire for “humane” execution. Rather, it enacted the bitter rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse for monopoly over electrical power. Edison advocated Direct Current; Westinghouse challenged with Alternating Current. Westinghouse won out at first, but Edison overtook him by stealing his design and perfecting his own AC devices, including the Electric Chair.
The first to be electrocuted, on August 6, 1890, was William Kemmler, for the murder of an Erie County woman. The second electrocution came two years later. The lever was pulled by the hooded Edwin F. Davis, the anonymous New York State executioner, who, like a nineteenth-century circuit rider, travelled from prison to prison. In all, he performed hundreds of executions, fifty-four at Auburn.
From the start, the apparatus proved to be imperfect, and the consequences were horrific. The heavy oak Chair, later dubbed “Old Sparky,” broiled its occupants alive amid the stench of their sizzling flesh and cindered hair.
Things had improved in time for the electrocution of Chester Gillette, the notorious murderer of his pregnant lover. The crime, a national sensation, became the basis for Theodore Dreiser’s gripping novel, An American Tragedy (1925) and its Oscar-winning film adaptation, A Place in the Sun, (1951).
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As a Professor of English at Syracuse University, I taught American literature in Auburn Prison during the late 1980s. These were my first observations: the entrance surmounted by an imposing statue of “Copper John” in the uniform of a soldier from the Revolutionary War; a weary waiting room like those in shabby railroad stations.
I awaited a call from the reception desk. I was escorted upstairs by one of the Corrections Officers (known as COs) and led through a baffle of locked gates and then downstairs into the rectangular, concrete yard, flanked by cellblocks in a vaguely neo-Gothic style.
Inmates can espy anyone traversing the yard, and they hoot and holler. If it’s a woman crossing, the catcalls get louder and viler. The yard opens into “Muscle Beach,” where workout apparatus is located. Against the western wall, topped with coils of razor wire, lies the school, named for Thomas Mott Osborne (see below). The classrooms are nondescript except for the panic button on the wall near the blackboard. The greatest fear of outsiders, however, is not trouble from the students, but their own incarceration in the event of a sudden lockdown.
My students, screened for suitability, were generally attentive, and they did their “cell work” faithfully – except when papers were “coauthored” by other inmates. As soon as I caught on, I required all writing be done in class.
A few inmates were among the best students I ever taught. The best of the best overall were, very rarely, allowed to apply for transfer to other maximum prisons with a path to a graduate degree. I once asked my finest student why he had ended up inside when he was so obviously capable of outside success. He replied that the only career he could ever imagine was to become CEO of a drug operation.
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My greatest moment in Auburn Prison came when, in 1987, I was chosen by the entire student body to deliver their Commencement Address. Such a privilege was exceedingly unlikely for an unfamous English professor, and I expected this to be my only opportunity.
As the graduates proudly processed up the center aisle, a pianist was playing the traditional music for such occasions: Edward Elgar’s Triumphal March.
Awaiting them was the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. He wore a dark blue robe, with lighter blue velvet slashes on the sleeves, a matching velvet plaquette, and a hood, draped open across his back, which displayed a white satin lining with a chevron in Syracuse orange. His blue beret bore golden tassels.
My own outfit was far less splendiferous. Like the graduates, I was wearing an ordinary black academic robe and a plain mortar board. The only adornment was my own hood: white lining with a red chevron, signifying that my doctoral degree was from Indiana University. Each man received a baccalaureate diploma as well as a handshake from the Dean and took a seat.
This was my cue. There are certain difficulties, I said, attached to the genre of the commencement address, especially under the circumstances. Outside graduates are ordinarily young adults, whereas you are grown men, some with frosted hair. Ordinarily, outside graduates and their families largely come from a homogenous background, which is predominantly white, middleclass, and suburban, whereas you are predominantly men of color with straightened urban backgrounds. Outside graduates, on the threshold of promising possibilities, are filled with hopeful expectations, whereas your futures are inescapably linked to the past.
Then there’s the rhetoric of the commencement address itself, which is customarily given to vacuous abstractions and pickled quotations from “great minds.” What could I say that would not be just as banal or patronizing? To this point, I quoted a paragraph about speaking before a prison audience – in fact, an audience at Auburn Prison:
Although a sad audience to look upon, it is, as I have found on previous occasions, a most wonderfully sensitive and responsive audience to address. . . The speaker soon finds himself stimulated and carried along, as by a strange and powerful force he has never felt before. It is an exciting and exhilarating experience to talk to a prison audience; but one must take good care not to be a bore, nor to try any cheap oratorical tricks; for it is not only a keen and critical audience, it is a merciless one.
These are the words of Thomas Mott Osborne, aka Tom Brown, number 33,333X, in whose honor the school was named. Osborne was a prominent citizen of Auburn during the early twentieth century. Heir to an industrial fortune, he nevertheless dedicated himself to public service as a multi-termed mayor of Auburn and later as a prominent prison reformer.
As Chair of a State Commission on Prison Reform, Osborne asserted that “it was impossible for those of us on the outside to deal in full sympathy and understanding with the man within the walls until we had come into close personal experience of similar conditions.” To gain such experience, Osborne arranged his own incarceration for a week at Auburn and later wrote a book about it: Within Prison Walls (1914).
Although his real identity was known to all, Osborne insisted on being treated as an ordinary inmate as far as possible. Tom Brown worked in the basketweaving shop. He marched to meals, slop bucket in hand. He found the food decent enough on the whole, except for the coffee, which the inmates called “bootleg” – presumably, quipped Osborne, “because old boots are the only conceivable source of its taste and smell.” Osborne even passed a night in a “punishment cell”: a barren box of riveted iron wedged between the boilers and the Electric Chair. During his week inside, Brown witnessed violence, venality, and sullen boredom. Almost against his will, he found himself becoming resistant to arbitrary authority and petty discipline, an attitude he imagined was shared by his fellows.
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Because outside education is not geared to inside students, its governing assumptions become clear and dubious. To state those assumptions in a general way, let me borrow a distinction from the eccentric writer Albert Jay Nock. In his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), Nock avers that “education is one thing and training quite another. Education is a process contemplating intelligence and wisdom and employing formative knowledge for its purposes, while training is a process contemplating sagacity and cleverness and employing instrumental knowledge for its purposes.”
Nock assumes that few persons are truly educable and, furthermore, that the goal of schooling at whatever level is the indoctrination of students into social and intellectual norms, thereby rendering them docile and “productive” citizens, Nock concludes that the “system of popular instruction is bound to lean heavily to the side of training.” Behind this system stands, according to Nock, the modern State, which is “distinctly uninterested the cultivation of intelligence and wisdom . . . [having] no uses to which persons of intelligence and wisdom can be put.”
Inside, the differential between training and education is more pronounced. to be more exaggerated. One frequently adduced goal for educational programs in prisons is that they train inmates to survive outside, where sagacity and cleverness seem a surer means of success than any degree of intelligence and wisdom.
I found, however, that the inside might offer an opportunity for education rather than training precisely because the commencement of insiders is necessarily deferred. In a strange way, this might be an advantage. Rather than a site for imposing training, prison might possibly be a laboratory for activities of mind unchained from merely practical considerations: a place for mind work rather the designated labor at Auburn: stamping out all the license plates for New York State!
What Nock calls “formative knowledge” I take to be the knowledge of formations: the knowledge that is made up literally as we go along in any classroom, even if teachers think they are transmitting things already known, a package of received facts and concepts. Formative knowledge, the stuff of education itself, is not merely passed on, but recreated transactively. The goal of education should be a vigilant reexamination, even in the process of producing knowledge, of its very means of production.
I think that such ideas are more easily asked and perhaps more deeply answered inside, where the students are acutely sensitive, through their encounters with the complex system of authority, to the constitutive nature of rules. Better than many students outside, inside students intuit that authority itself the exercise of power through human agents, including their own teachers. Like Osborne, I have found inmates to be both “keen” and “critical”: unwilling to accept authorized knowledge at face value they know that knowledge is two-faced, simultaneously revealing itself and concealing its origins.
The job of the teacher inside is not to import received knowledge from outside, but to help students explore how and why it came to be received and thus to affirm their inside perspective This approach leads inevitably to questions about the production of knowledge -- how it is can be hidden from scrutiny because taken for granted.
Good teaching should be reciprocal, an intellectual as well as emotional interchange between teacher and students. If both fail to learn anything from the very act of teaching, then no real learning is going on.
A good example was a course I taught on American autobiography. I tailored the reading list so as, I supposed, to make it be more relevant to inmates than my outside version would be. I included more books by Black and Brown authors than I did outside, and I also dropped women writers except for one. I also ordered a couple of autobiographies by former inmates, thinking they might be especially welcome.
They weren’t. In fact, the students were annoyed by my notion of what they would prefer to read. They suspected that such books, which prison authorities had been known to distribute, were cynical and manipulative means of control by modeling what good “rehabilitation” and “correctional” should be.
Much to my surprise, the most popular autobiography was the one that seemed farthest removed from their experience: Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. This is among the most sophisticated American autobiographies by virtue of rigorous examination of its accuracy.
The book consists of several episodes centered on the traumatic circumstances of McCarthy’s early life. She was orphaned, along with her siblings when their parents died in 1918, at the height of the Spanish Flu epidemic. The children were sent to be raised by their father’s parents, who proved to be harsh and abusive.
Each chapter is followed by a test of its own truth, as McCarthy interrogates the validity of her evidence, in part by seeking the recollections of her siblings. McCarthy finds considerable evidence of half-truths and distorted memories. That is, the autobiography is recognized as first cousin to the fiction that McCarthy was famous for writing.
The inmates loved this book because, as I came to understand, because they related to McCarthy’s account of her tormented childhood, which resonated with their own experience. They also understood how a “test of truth” in the criminal justice system was, in their experience, thoroughly corrupt. The best story, spun by the better lawyer, won the day and decided the fate of the defendant. One student, in fact, asked me after class if he might ask McCarthy to act as his attorney. I had to report that she was dead and therefore unavailable. But she surely would have understood his request.
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Pell Grants
When I taught at Auburn Prison, higher education for convicts was funded by Pell Grants, a national network of financial aid. Inmates’ eligibility was suddenly abolished in 1994 by the United States Omnibus Crime Bill, the passage of which was spearheaded by Senator Joe Biden. This crackdown was motivated by “tough-on-crime” posturing during the Clinton administration. Without Pell Grants, 95% of all such prison programs vanished.
The brother of the distinguished writer, John Edgar Wideman, is serving life without parole. Here is Robert Wideman’s powerful reaction to the abolition of Pell Grants, to be found in his brother’s book, Brothers and Keepers. “This was one of the worst days I remember in prison. I had seen men killed and had days of personal tragedy that were more painful. But to see higher education taken away was a travesty.”
It is important to recognize that such programs have been deeply resented by Correction Officers, who complain bitterly that while they can’t afford to send their own children to college, especially expensive ones like Syracuse, incorrigible criminals get a free ride. Surely, Correction Officers have had a point, and I lobbied the Dean to provide scholarships specifically for their children. As I recall, however, only three were created.
The ban stayed in force for seventeen years, but the availability of Pell Grants for inmates was reinstated in 2002, and college programs have flourished again. Doris Buffett, sister of Warren Buffett (probably richest man in America), contributed more than $600,000 to support the revival of the Auburn programs.
During summer, Auburn Prison used to stage an art exhibit of inmate work on the grass between the front wall and the spiked fence along the sidewalk. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which estimates that nearly half of all Americans have a relative who’s been imprisoned, has pledged $125 million, $40 million of which has already been disbursed, to arts and humanities organizations focused on mass incarceration. The project is named Imagining Freedom.
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As part of its series on American prisons, The History Channel presented “Big House Auburn,” first showing on May 29, 2003, at 11 PM EST.
About the Author
John W. Crowley, Ph.D.
John W. Crowley is Professor Emeritus, Syracuse University.