We must "dream bigger" about jails

An interview with Professor Melanie Newport about the history of jailing in Chicago and the ineffectiveness of "rehabilitation" around the country

Are you there, Skippie?

It’s me, Ben, equally as excited to reenter your inbox as I am for next week’s release of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret—the film. Admittedly, I’ve never read past the title of the book, but as a youth, I spent a considerable amount of time asking my mom, Margaret, if she found religion by the end of it. The new movie is a welcome reminder of my timeless sophistication.

Far less welcome? The recent spate of news about egregious, almost unspeakably, graphically inhumane conditions in jails around the country, which came right on the heels of an interview I conducted with Professor Melanie Newport at UConn. Professor Newport is the award-winning author of This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration. 

As Professor Newport and I discussed, much of jailing history is rooted in kind of good intentions, and she uses Chicago as a case study to illuminate how would-be jail reformers have done more harm than good over the last 120 years. A transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the full audio of the conversation, which includes Professor Newport reflecting further on jails’ ties to the rise of mass incarceration, as well as the challenge of finding sources that jails typically don’t want people to have access to:

We must "dream bigger" about jails

See you next Friday. Have a nice weekend!

Your skipper,

Ben

I was flabbergasted at the Liza Minnelli point of the conversation.

Ben: Professor Newport, thank you so much for being here today.

MN: Thank you as well.

Ben: Sure thing. Today, I'd like to explore the history of jail “reforms” in Chicago and reflect on the effectiveness of jail rehabilitation writ large.

Before going any further, may I ask what the difference is between a jail and a prison, and why you focused on jails in Chicago versus elsewhere?

MN: Sure. A prison is where people who are sentenced for crimes with a sentence of more than one year are sent when they've been found guilty. Conventionally, jails are places where people may serve short sentences. More frequently, jails are places where people are detained before trial because they don't have the money to pay a financial guarantee called bail (or bond) to ensure that they’ll show up for court.

Nobody's ever really written a national-level study of jail history in the US, largely because there’s so much to cover. I focused on Chicago because, for a long time, local newspapers paid a lot of attention to the city’s jails, so there are good primary sources records, and because there was such a cast of characters whose stories help represent how views of jails have evolved over time. I’d never been to Chicago before I began the book but it’s been rewarding to engage with the city through this history.

Ben: Funny, from an outside perspective, you seem like a deep-dish person through and through to me.

So digging into the history, when were the first jails built in Chicago, and how did they play “a central role in upholding racial capitalism,” as you write?

MN: The Cook County Jail (Chicago is in Cook County, Illinois) emerged in tandem with the founding of the county in the 1830s. Jails were foundational not just to racial capitalism, but to settler colonialism, bringing order to new frontier societies. In Chicago and around the country, jails were places where people were incarcerated for things like failure to pay debts or public drunkenness.

In Chicago, state laws required free African Americans to prove their freedom or be jailed in case enslavers might want to claim them. One of the stories that I came across talked about a slave sale that happened on the steps of Cook County Jail. When no one came forward to claim him, one of the city fathers bought him for $.25 and then set him free. The city’s liberals patted themselves on the back for not re-enslaving this man, which represents the limited views of racial advancement that have surrounded jails from the start.

Ben: Moving into the early 1900s and speaking of people patting themselves on the back, can you discuss how Cook County Jail Warden John Whitman initiated jail reform in Chicago?

MN: John Whitman was a Progressive, meaning he was part of a reform movement where, as I teach it, middle-class people wanted the rich to behave more like them in a more honorable, less ostentatious way. And they wanted the poor to behave like they were middle class, too—to learn how to be more faithful, diligent, and less criminal, in their view.

So John Whitman saw an opportunity in jailing people to transform who they were. He’s significant in jail history writ large because he was one of the early proponents of jails as places of rehabilitation—more specifically, places where Black people could be reformed. 

What’s particularly interesting is that there were also people at this time who said that local jails should be abolished altogether.

Ben: You quote famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow as saying that jails should be eliminated because they do “not accomplish what they pretend to accomplish. If you had wiped them out, there would be no more criminals than now.”

MN: And he said those things at Cook County Jail to prisoners. Meanwhile, Whitman was saying, no, no, no, jailing is actually a good thing. The Progressive press touted his reforms, and prisoners allegedly gave testimonials of how wonderful it was that he gave them access to things like books and a piano. Whitman’s vision won out over Darrow’s.

Ben: As you argue, this push for rehabilitation insinuated that there were people who needed to be rehabilitated; that many (Black) people were criminals in need of reform, as the racial pseudo-science of the day suggested.

Could you talk about the intensification of this criminalization after World War II?

MN: In the early Cold War period, people in government from federal to local levels saw themselves as protectors of democracy, and one thing that really corroded democracy was people breaking the law, right? You need the rule of law for self-governance to prove its credibility. 

So politicians grew acutely concerned about crime among young people, or “juvenile delinquents.” Around this time, politicians began thinking about drug use, too, and as Matt Lassiter, a series editor for my book talks about, they thought about drugs through a racialized lens. There was a widespread belief that the people selling the drugs were Black, and the people consuming them were vulnerable young white people who needed protection, leading ultimately to more young Black men being incarcerated.

Ben: I found it really interesting that you frame the Civil Rights Movement as, to a large extent, a backlash against the incarceration that followed. 

MN:  Absolutely, it was. In the late 50s and early 60s,