Incarceration In African American Prison

The modern prison was devised by American reformers who believed that people should not be tortured and that criminals could be "reformed" by incarceration, labor, and "penitence." But with the rise of industrial capitalism, unpaid prison labor became a source of superprofits, a trend accelerated by the Civil War, and the "penitentiary" became the site of industrial slavery conducted under the whip and other savagery.

Prior to the Civil War, the main form of imprisonment--African-American slavery--was, like the penitentiary, not to be regarded as torture. Slavery, indeed, was never legitimized by any claim that the slaves were being punished for crimes or anything else. A main cultural line of defense of slavery even maintained that the
The antebellum plantation was merging with the "penitentiary" to create the modern American prison system. Ironically, the sexual deprivation of the prison was an additional torture not characteristic of the old plantation, where slave breeding was a major source of profit, while the old pathological fear of Black sexuality became a prime source of the sexual tortures endemic to the modern American prison, where people of color are not a "minority" but the
Intimately and intricately related to the boom in prison construction has been a boom in imagined images of prison, with the prison's walls of secrecy validating a complex set of supportive cultural fantasies that ultimately function as agents of collective denial.(6) Even superficially realistic representations, such as the Oz TV serial, end up masking or normalizing America's vast complex of institutionalized torture. Perhaps the dominant image, promulgated by the very forces that have instituted the prison-building frenzy, envisions prison as a kind of summer camp for vicious criminals, where convicts comfortably loll around watching TV and lifting weights. Just as false images of the slave plantations strewn across the South encouraged denial of their reality, false images of the Abu Ghraibs strewn across America not only legitimize denial of their reality but also allow their replication at Guantánamo, Baghdad, Afghan desert sites, or wherever our government, and culture, may build new citadels of torture in the