Excerpt from “Ecology of Fear”
Excerpt from “Ecology of Fear - Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster”
Vintage Books, 1998
By Mike Davis
From Chapter 7, “Beyond Blade Runner,” Part 9, “The Gulag Rim,” (pp.411-414)
The road from Mecca follows the Southern Pacific tracks past Bombay Beach to Niland, then turns due south through a green maze of marshes and irrigated fields. The bad future of Southern California rises, with little melodrama, in the middle distance between the skeleton of last year’s cotton crop and the aerial bombing range in the Chocolate Mountains. From a mile away, the slate-gray structures resemble warehouses or perhaps a factory. An unassuming road sign announces “Calipatria State Prison.” This is the outer rim of Los Angeles’s ecology of fear, and it has no equivalent on Burgess’s chart.
Calipatria, which opened in 1993, is a “level 4,” maximum security prison that currently houses 10 percent of California’s convicted murderers, 1,200 men. Yet the guard boothat the m ain gate is unmanned, as are 10 of its 12 perimeter gun towers. If the startling absence of traditional surveillance looks negligent, it is deliberate policy. As Daniel Paramo, the prison’s energetic public relations officer, explains, “The warden doesn’t trust the human-error factor in the gun towers; he puts his faith, instead in Southern California Edison.
Paramo is standing in front of an ominous 13-foot electric fence, sandwiched between two ordinary chain link fences. Each of the 15 strands of wire bristles with 5,000 volts of Parker Dam power — about ten times the recognized lethal dosage. The electrical contractors guarantee instantaneous death. (An admiring guard in the background mutters: “Yeah, toast….”)
The originial bill authorizing the high-voltage “escape-proof” fence sailed through the legislature with barely a murmur. Cost-conscious politicians had few xcruples about an electric bill that saved $2 million in labor costs each year. And when the warden quietly threw the main switch in November 1993, there was general satisfaction that the corrections system was moving ahead, with little controversy, toward its high-tech future. “But,” Paramo adds ruefully, “we had neglected to factor the animals-rights people into the equation.”
The prison is just east of the Salton Sea — a major wintering habitat for waterfowl — and the gently purring high-voltage fence immediately became an erotic beacon to passing birds. Local bird-watchers soon found out about the body count (”a gull, two owls, a finch and a scissor-tailed flycatcher”) and alerted the Audobon Society. By January, Calipatria’s “death fence” was aninternational environmental scandal. When a CNN crew pulled into the prison parking lot, the Department of Corrections threw in the towel and hired an ornithologist to help them redesign the fence.
The result was the world’s only birdproof, ecologically responsible death fence. Paramo has some difficulty maintaining a straight face as he points out $150, 000 in innovations: “a warning wire for curious rodents, anti-perching deflectors for wildfowl, and tiney passageways for burrowinig owls.” Calipatria has also built an attractive pond for visiting geese and ducks.
Although the prison system is now at peace with the bird lovers, the imbroglio roused the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) to question management’s right to “automate” the jobs of the 30 sharpshooters (three shifts per tower) replaced by the fence. To proceed with his plan to lethally electrify all the state’s medium and maximum security prisons (23 of 29 facilities) in the coming years, Director of Corrections Joe Gomez may have to negotiate a compromise with the CCPOA that preserves more of the “featherbed” gun tower jobs.
Calipatria’s four thousand inmates, most of them from the tough ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles County, shed few tears for either the ducks or the guards. Their lives are entirely absorbed in the daily struggle to survive soul-destroying clautrophobia and ever threateneing racial violence. Like the rest of the system, Calipatria operates at almost double its desing capacity. In the state’s medium security facilities, squalid tiers of bunk beds have been crowded into converted auditoriums and day rooms much as in overflwoing county jails. In “upscale” level-4 institutions like Calipatria, on the other hand, a second inmate has simply been shoehorned into each of the tiny, six-by-ten-foot one-man cells.
When “double celling” was first introduced into the system a decade ago, it helped fuel a wave of inmate violence and suicide. Civil liberties advocates denounced the practice as “cruel and unusual punishment,” but a federal judge upheld its constitutionality. Now inmates can routiniely expect to spend decades or even lifetimes (40 percent of Calipatria’s population are lifers) locked in unnatural, and often unbearable, intimacy with another person. The psychological stress is amplified by a shortage of prison jobs that condemns nearly half the inmate population to serve their sentences idly in their cells watching infinities of television. As behavioral psychologists have testified in court, rats confined in such circumstances invariably go berserk and eat each other.
The abolition of privacy, together with the suppression of inmate counterculture, are explicit objectives of “new generation” prisons like Calipatria. Each of its 20 housing units is designed like a two-story horseshoe with a guard station opposite. [See the series on this blog, “Jurassic Park Pseudo-events, and Prisons, for an explanation of the “panopticon,” which is a prefiguration of what Davis describes here. -SG] Yet another variation on Jeremy Bentham’s celebrated eighteenth century panopticon prison. thei “270 plan” (referring to the guards’ field of vision) is intended to ensure continuous surveillance of all inmate behavior.
Billy Kelly:
Cruel And Unusual Punishment?
Recent editorial in the ‘august’ NYTimes follows below my comment.
I had just finished reading Christian Parenti’s inestimable “Lockdown America†so was somewhat conversant with the subject. The numbers are nothing short of shocking. If the 11 million figure is correct that means 3-4% of our population is experiencing the degradation that is illustrated in the remainder of editorial.Or living in the absolute fear that it might occur.
When sexual acts are mentioned, and same-sex acts at that, it can only mean that a violent, usually homo-sexual, rape has occurred. Yet to my utter astonishment the Times makes no mention of this well known horror. It is taken for granted. A given to be expected as part of doing your time.
What’s the solution? Give them rubbers!
Our new found, born-again, ‘Christian’ morality establishment has undertaken the task of protecting us from the mere mention of anything sexual, let alone homo-sexual. If a hint of such is brought up it evokes an instantaneous hue and cry from ‘our’ guardians of all that is good and worthy, blessed and god-like. Yet that very same cadre of guardians not only condones but might even abet the promotion of a penal system which fosters such cruel and unusual punishment.
There is no humor to be found in this irony.
An irremediable debasement of all that we consider to be human and civilized. This systemic breakdown of humanity is rightly condemned as it has been shown to be so prevalent in our ever-burgeoning archipelago of gulags overseas. Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and so forth. Yet who can be surprised when these very same conditions are a very real and integral part of our own internal gulags. Did Ashcroft or Gonzalez ever consider some policy briefings or position papers on that? Does the geneva Convention apply internally?
April 29, 2005
EDITORIAL
A Simple Way to Fight H.I.V. and AIDS
In any given year, perhaps a third of the people infected with hepatitis C and more than 15 percent of those with AIDS spend time behind bars. With infection levels far higher than in the outside world, the jails and prisons are a potential public health menace. Officials have a special duty to curb the spread of disease among the more than 11 million people who pass through the system each year.
No one knows for sure how many people pick up H.I.V. while incarcerated. But a 2002 survey of prisoners’ own estimates found that about 44 percent of the inmates were probably participating in sex acts. Researchers suspect that about 70 percent had their first same-sex experiences in prison. If those estimates are anywhere near accurate, the risk of infection behind bars is substantial, and the men who contract H.I.V. in prison return home to infect wives and girlfriends. Still, condoms are barred or unavailable in 95 percent of the country’s prisons.
The national picture could well change if the California Legislature passes a timely bill, introduced by Paul Koretz, a Democrat from West Hollywood, that would require California’s corrections system, the nation’s largest, to allow public health and nonprofit groups to distribute condoms. In documents filed in support of the bill, Mr. Koretz notes that prevention programs make financial sense, too, given that treating an H.I.V.-positive person outside prison costs California nearly $23,000 a year.
Distributing condoms does not encourage sex in prison - that appears to be going on anyway. And data from Canada and American jurisdictions found no evidence that sexual activity goes up or that security declines once prisoners have access to condoms. On the contrary, jurisdictions that adopt such programs tend to keep and build upon them. Corrections officers usually support the programs once they have been proved to be effective.
PUNK FACTORY
“Rape is both absolutely central to, and yet largely invisible within, the politics of incarceration. Hundreds of thousands of men and women alike suffer this most horrible of physical and emotional tortures as an unwritten part of their sentences. Andunlike most rape on the outside, rape in prison is usually not a one-time event; instead the victim is often forced to live with and serve their tormentor for years on end. In that respect prison rape is more akin to child sexual abuse or slavery. Women, as we will see below, are routinely raped by male guards, while male prisoners are generally raped by other convicts.”
25 May 2005, 5:59 amChristian Parenti; Lockdown America; p.184
Stan:
The issues of imprisonment, rape, and colonization are so intricately fused I beleive them to be inextricable. (Billy, who posted above, knows this better than most, as an impacable enemy of colonization — both American and British.) There is a link on this site to a prison rape website. I relied quite heavily on “Lockdown America” for the series (posted earlier here) on prisons (”Jurassic Park”). It is a must-read. Thanks for posting an excerpt, Billy.
Abu Ghraib showed the clearest connection we might see between the prison expansion here and the attempt to subjugate populations abroad, and how closely this is connected to the culture of rape — of violence constructed as sex, and sexuality constructed as violence… the centerpiece of masculinity.
On Mike Davis’ book, however, I would recommend it for its sweeping attachments to the reality of urbanization in late capitalism. Prisons are only one aspect of this work. It is, in my estimation, one of the finest and most original applications of socialist epistemology to an interdisciplinary examination of concrete circumstances I have seen.
25 May 2005, 7:48 am