Abstract
Rehabilitation remains one of the main goals of correctional institutions. In achieving rehabilitation successfully, there should be a variety of professional and community actors invested in treating, evaluating, and advocating for the incarcerated. Across the Caribbean, particularly in areas with strong colonial presence, attempts at rehabilitation practices have been made. Alberto Ortiz Díaz’s Raising the Living Dead demonstrates an array of individuals involved in the rehabilitation of Puerto Rico’s incarcerated population during the mid-20th century (1917–1964). Importantly, Ortiz Díaz (2023) examines correctional rehabilitation through the United States’ 1917 imposition of citizenship on Puerto Ricans, as well as preceding Spanish colonial policies and practices related to criminal legal adjudication and punishment. Ortiz Díaz expounds on how health and medical professionals, incarcerated persons, families, friends of the incarcerated, and community members have long cared for those in Puerto Rico’s carceral settings. With an emphasis on the history of one prison—Oso Blanco—Ortiz Díaz depicts the chronological development of rehabilitative efforts, its challenges and triumphs, the testing of human subjects, and a shift toward punitive punishment in the latter part of the 20th century.
Raising the Living Dead begins by illuminating the role of biomedicine conducted by physicians toward achieving rehabilitation. Those who entered Oso Blanco since 1933 were subject to observations, clinical assessments, and extensive documentation of the markings and characteristics of their physical bodies. Criminologists will recall that the early 1900s was strongly influenced by the scientific findings of Cesare Lombroso (1876). While today, purely biological explanations of crime are recognized as misguided, they were very influential on Puerto Rican rehabilitation. Upon entry, incarcerated persons were subject to inspections of their physical beings to make conclusions about their criminality. Incarcerated persons were rehabilitated through treatment of infectious diseases, while also subject to unethical and illegal experimentation. The social and economic disparities in Puerto Rico that may have led to the physique of the incarcerated went unacknowledged by corrections administrators and their official practices. As inquiries of positivism advanced, so did their role on correctional rehabilitation.
Between the 1930s and the 1950s, psychological and psychiatric treatment created new pathways for assessing the eligibility of an individual to be rehabilitated. Colonial practices expanded to include psychometric testing and experiments on the incarcerated to find a test of best fit. Rehabilitative treatment included electroshock therapy, psychotherapy, and lobotomies. Language barriers between staff and the incarcerated became evident, as translating psychological concepts and measures became difficult. Moreover, these barriers generated questionable reliability of individual diagnosis. Oso Blanco created a Classification and Treatment Board tasked with evaluating the rehabilitative potential of the incarcerated. Poor outcomes on psychometric tests at Oso Blanco rarely interfered with these evaluations as other indicators were used to establish an individual’s potential for release.
In the latter part of the 1940s and well into the 1950s, Oso Blanco expanded its use of social rehabilitation. Parole officers and social workers were instrumental in aiding the rehabilitative efforts of the incarcerated. Practically, parole was contextualized as humanized punishment, with the goal of eventually having incarcerated persons rejoin their communities. Incarcerated persons also gave firsthand descriptions into the relationships they held with their case workers and how they were beneficial to the rehabilitative process. Rehabilitation expanded into the community and included an evaluation of the social relationships and environments that the incarcerated held. This posed a challenge for incarcerated Puerto Rican’s, as Ortiz Díaz argues that “it is difficult to re-socialize someone who has presumably never been socialized” (p. 64). Background investigations conducted by social workers and parole officers of incarcerated people indicated that racial, geographical, and cultural differences dictated whether successful release was possible and, importantly, whether an individual could recidivate.
In the mid-20th century, incarcerated persons were given access to programming that included individual improvement in the areas of religion and spiritualism as alternative and supplemental mechanisms of rehabilitation. Incarcerated persons in Oso Blanco used these outlets as therapeutic options by following written scriptures, oral readings, attending courses held by religious leaders, while simultaneously practicing Catholicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Witchcraft, and Hinduism.
The arts and humanities were sacred for many incarcerated people well into the late 1970s. Access to a library and its resources allowed for the incarcerated to advance their knowledge and literacy skills. The incarcerated became aware that poetry, reading, music, art, and films served as assets toward rehabilitation. Ortiz Díaz notes that literacy skills among the incarcerated were at the sixth-grade level but improved and allowed them access to other programs that required the ability to read and write. Over time, Oso Blanco saw an immense increase in total program participation.
Oso Blanco and then Governors of Puerto Rico exercised colonial policy by granting executive clemency throughout the mid-20th century. A wave of communal advocacy was apparent as friends, neighbors, and family members approached government officials about their incarcerated loved ones seeking clemency. While some incarcerated persons were successful, others were turned away. However, all those involved in seeking clemency educated themselves in the legality of the administrative process.
Raising the Living Dead concluded by noting drastic changes in correctional institutional policy due to evolving changes in the politics of Puerto Rico. Incarcerated people who achieved release from Oso Blanco began migrating to different areas of the United States’ mainland. Migration boomed among Puerto Ricans and nationals of other Caribbean nations toward different parts of the globe. The 1960s in Puerto Rico began with a visible shift in rising crime rates, economic challenges, and political turmoil over what rehabilitation ought to be. As a result, attitudes in Puerto Rico changed and adopted more punitive practices toward the incarcerated. Thus, other colonial influences on criminal legal practices became evident. Mandatory minimum and maximum sentencing practices were handed down, contributing to what became known as mass incarceration. In 2004, Oso Blanco closed its doors but lives on in various literature, film, and narratives about its significant role in mid-20th century rehabilitation practices in Puerto Rico.
As a historian, Ortiz Díaz successfully emphasized the role of colonialism in correctional practices during the mid-20th century and how they remain today. The inclusion of the names of the people who experienced institutionalization and how they strived toward rehabilitation in Puerto Rico makes Raising the Living Dead standout. Ortiz Díaz recounts how medical, psychological, legal, and communal efforts contributed to the revival of the incarcerated in Oso Blanco, and sometimes back into Puerto Rican communities. Producing individual case studies that give context to the many rehabilitative procedures situates the reader as if they themselves are also with the living dead. These individual stories demonstrate how the incarcerated encountered, navigated, and survived Puerto Rican correctional settings throughout the mid-20th century.
This book is significant in that it provides an in-depth evaluation of the incarcerated bodies through archival research—a methodological tool that consistently provides value to other ways of knowing the historical elements of crime, punishment, and those marginally affected by it. This book calls on scholars interested in the effects of colonialism by the United States and other Western countries to examine the historical rehabilitative and reintegrative efforts in correctional settings (and perhaps other segments of criminal legal systems), as well as whether those incarcerated in various United States territories were subject to positivist testing of their physical beings; the role of social workers, probation/parole officers, communities, and medical professionals in the rehabilitative process; and the types of clemency practices that existed throughout the 20th century. Further inquiries are necesaary to understand whether contemporary correctional policies and practices meet the needs of incarcerated persons in the 21st century.
For example, the United States’ military presence and its criminal legal policies have impacted other territories, such as Guam. There is limited evidence about the Indigenous groups like the Chamorros and their experiences with Guam’s carceral settings. Families and correctional professionals in Guam may provide insight into the experiences of their loved ones who were or are institutionalized. Additional areas of interests should also include the colonial aftermaths of France, Spain, and Portugal on African and Asian nations. These sorts of examinations can draw comparisons between colonial powers and their infliction of criminal legal systems in global south nations, the types of programming offered during incarceration, and the extent of investment in reintegrating individuals as part of the rehabilitative process.
Rehabilitation at its core is rooted in correcting individual behaviors that have violated established criminal legal policies. However, in mid-century Puerto Rico, rehabilitation was an all-encompassing effort to engage with, evaluate, and reintegrate those who entered the prison system. Rehabilitation by raising the living dead involved numerous individuals with similar goals and an investment in the humanity of those incarcerated. As Ortiz Díaz wisely stated, “power is not just about structures . . . it is also about what kind of individual people (authorities and others) choose to do with it and why” (p. xiv). As carceral settings are alive and well in the 21st century, Ortiz Díaz reminds us of the significant amount of work yet to be completed to obtain criminal justice in colonial territories like Puerto Rico and beyond.
