Measures of Restraint: The Remaking of Carceral Space in the Postwar United States

The Progressive Aporia

While rejecting the sentimental rhetoric of the progressive movement, postwar reformers built upon the novel conception of the prison system forwarded by the previous generation of reformers. Departing from the inflexible discipline of early American penitentiaries, 19th-century reformers argued for the specialization of institutions to reflect the contemporary classification of offenders into psychological and social subclasses. Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight’s 1867 Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada established the program for American prison reform into the early 1930s. Wines and Dwight (1867) advocated “the thorough study of each prisoner, and the adaptation of the discipline . . . to his personal peculiarities” (p. 14). The natural variety of offenders, in their words, necessitated “the classification of prisons themselves, the various classes of offenders being committed to prisons designed specially for their reception and treatment” (Wines & Dwight, 1867, p. 115). To support an efficient system of classification, progressive reformers proposed the creation of state-level bureaucracies capable of managing human and material exchanges among newly differentiated institutions. A modern prison system would describe a network of relations among specialized prisons under a given jurisdiction.

While Wines and Dwight called for institutional variety, their followers in the early 20th century developed a generic form for the “specialized” prison. Identifying the cause of crime in the disorganized social conditions of the contemporary industrial metropolis, progressives envisioned the reformed prison as an ordered pastoral idyll, governed according to a paternalistic model of moral community. New institutions for women, children, and White first-time offenders resembled contemporary college campuses, featuring cottage-style dormitories and rigorously ordered greenery. Celebrating the new institutions, prison architect Alfred Hopkins (1930) waxed that the “spirit of ennobling environment never fails to make its appeal whether it be expressed in the sheltering structure of college or cathedral, or within the high enclosure of prison walls” (p. 139). Progressives sought to influence the offender through a total moral and aesthetic experience, in which an appeal to sentiment would replace the harsh disciplinary order of earlier institutions.

While the pastoral prison was central to progressive rhetoric, reformers did not forward this model as a universal institutional type. As Wines and Dwight (1867) argued, the success of reform institutions relied upon the exclusion of the “worst class of offenders” (pp. 115–116). In other words, the success of the progressive moral community depended upon the transfer of recalcitrant prisoners to more restrictive institutions. Reform criminologists identified specific social and hereditary types as more receptive to sentimental influence than others (Schuller, 2018). Notably, the discourse of progressive penology rarely addressed the status of prisoners of color in the new system.

Loath to adopt the progressive model, Southern states built their prison systems upon the ruins of the antebellum racial order. This is meant in the most literal sense—new institutions were often constructed on the site of former plantations, facilitating the re-inscription of the antebellum racial order in the practices of Jim Crow legalism (Lichtenstein, 1996). In prisons like Mississippi’s Parchman Farm and Louisiana’s Angola Penitentiary, prison administrators and private industrialists treated prisoners of color as disposable commodities; journalist and former Angola prisoner Wilbert Rideau vividly described conditions on the prison farm in its earliest years:

Flogging was practiced in epidemic proportions, and laggards in the field were brutally beaten on the spot to spur increased productivity, their haggard bodies pushed to the limits of human endurance, their blood soaking the soil. They died at the rate of forty-one a year. (Rideau & Wikberg, 1992, 23)

Northern reformers bemoaned the state of southern institutions yet failed to advocate for the extension of progressive reform to Black prisoners. To progressives, the treatment of Black convicts under the southern institutions provided ample evidence for the need for reform; in the words of Theodore Roosevelt (1913), however, Black convicts themselves posed “a difficult and discouraging problem” to White reformist sensibility (p. 5). Black prisoners were not to endure the conditions of southern prisons but nor were they to be permitted inclusion in the penal communities of the north. Progressives tacitly accepted the racialized system of confinement in the south as the precondition for their own experiments in reform penology.

The Rule of Standards

In the 1930s, federal penal officials declared progressive experiments in reform penology insufficient. The Wickersham Commission, inaugurated by President Herbert Hoover in 1929 to investigate the state and federal justice systems, delivered an incisive critique of the progressive model. The Commission concluded that the model of the pastoral prison could not address the growing scale of confinement in the States. While progressive reformers aggressively publicized the success of a few model reformatories in the northeast, they failed to change conditions in the overcrowded, warehouse-style institutions that housed the majority of the nation’s prison population. “[W]here general [reformist] influences have appeared,” the Commission’s report stated, “they have been so adapted, modified and absorbed into the older local pattern as to leave our national penal system nearly as complex, varied and unstandardized as it was before” (National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement [NCLOE], 1931, p. 5).

The introduction of the term unstandardized signified a major shift in reformist ideology. While progressive penology emphasized individualization, the Wickersham Commission hinted at the need for a set of functional protocols applicable to a variety of carceral contexts. The report claimed that the 3,000 institutions reviewed in its investigations “represent[ed] 3,000 different examples of administrative arrangements, methods of control and of policy in dealing with the human material incarcerated in them” (NCLOE, 1931, p. 5). The answer was the development of a set of “organized practices” which could regulate a diverse range of penal institutions (NCLOE, 1931, p. 5).

Federal penal officials could not intervene directly in state penal policy. Instead, they undertook an aggressive modernization of the federal prison infrastructure, meeting the demands of a new influx of federal prisoners while providing an eminent example of efficient administration to state and local governments. In a 1928 report to the Bureau of Efficiency, the ambitious penal bureaucrat James V. Bennett (1928) characterized the ethos of the new reform effort:

The need for a coordinated system of Federal correctional institutions to overcome congestion, to rationalize the treatment of Federal offenders, to relieve the States and cities for persons foreign to their laws is imperative. In this ever-ramifying and perplexing problem the Federal Government requires first of all a plan—a correctional policy—broad, humane, and farsighted. (p. 141)

Upon assuming the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1937, Bennett began shaping the organization into a model bureaucracy. Upon his promotion, he mandated that all personnel in the bureau were to become members of the Civil Service, a move intended to allay the problem of political patronage that had long plagued penal bureaucracies (Keve, 1991, pp. 163–164). He circulated personalized memos among federal prison administrators, establishing a familiar tone while demanding strict adherence to Bureau standards. “Housekeeping has been allowed to deteriorate in some places to the point where it is almost a disgrace,” he wrote in one form letter addressed to “My Dear Warden,” appending a series of recommended improvements at the end of the letter (Bennett, 1948). Under Bennett, the Bureau adopted the familial ethic characteristic of bureaucracies and corporations of the early 20th century, regulated by rigid organizational protocols yet unified by a growing sense of professional kinship.

The Bureau established itself as a clearinghouse for modern penal thought in the years following the end of the Second World War. In collaboration with the American Correctional Association, the leading professional organization for prison employees and administrators in the United States, the Bureau issued a series of manuals outlining model protocol for institutional administration, discipline, and construction. The American Correctional Association (ACA) published a slim Manual of Suggested Standards for a State Correctional System in 1946; expanding upon this slim volume, the organization published revised editions of this text as two editions of the Manual of Correctional Standards in 1954 and 1959. ¹ The manual expanded significantly in scope over the course of these revisions, with the 1954 edition covering such matters as the nutritional content of specific institutional meals and the ideal resume of a prison chaplain. These manuals appeared alongside a new professional publication entitled the American Journal of Correction [AJC], which described successful examples of institutional modernization through glossy photo spreads and adulatory prose.

A 1958 article in the AJC described how an institution might approach this literature. In “How to Rate Your Prison by a Manual of Correctional Standards,” A. Lamont Smith described the difficulties of penal reform in the American context. “Unlike secondary schools, colleges, hospitals, and similar institutions, prisons have no central rating agency, although this has often been advocated by observers of prison administration” (Smith, 1958, p. 6). Smith (1958) described how the dissemination of standards throughout a typical institution might gradually improve conditions:

Several hundred institutional employees . . . compared their own practices with the recommended standards, but, more significantly, they immediately undertook to improve certain of their procedures. The benefits which resulted from this process of self-evaluation were accomplished without the issuance of orders—being generated from within, and not by coercion from without. Thus, the self-assessment led to insight and improvement in much the same manner as the clinical process operates in individual psychotherapy. (p. 34)

Guided by the Manual, penal workers would undergo a process of self-correction and improvement. The well-intentioned employee need not absorb the entire text to achieve this goal—as Smith (1958) noted, the individual need only “read the related” chapters and “improve certain of [their] procedures” to bring their institution closer to the standard (p. 34).

It is worth comparing Smith’s rhetoric with the terms of progressive penology. Progressive reformers defined the prison system as a series of specialized institutions unified under a centralized bureaucratic apparatus. By contrast, Smith argued for a uniform protocol operative in every institution that belonged to the system. This entailed neither the adoption of a single institutional model nor the development of several complementary models; rather, each institution was to conform to “pattern[s] of guidance” regarding minute aspects of institutional administration (Smith, 1958, p. 7). The standardization of an institution—whether it is a maximum-security prison or a pastoral reformatory—resulted from the aggregation of minute adjustments in discipline and employee behavior.

In the view of postwar reformers, the rule of standards offered a simple solution to the problem of institutional morale. The 1946 Manual of Suggested Standards for a State Correctional System set the tone for the discourse of standards by postulating a deterministic relationship between adherence to protocol and morale among prisoners. As the Manual stipulated:

[I]f one wishes prisoners to accept the idea that there is satisfaction in an honest day’s work well done he and his staff must work hard, day in and day out, to prevent . . . loafing on the job, low quality and quantity of production, incompetent foremen and instructors, and theft or wastage of materials. (American Prison Association [APA], 1946b, p. 1)

In other words, guards need not appeal to the moral sensibility of the incarcerated to achieve order in the institution. Progressive reformers struggled to conceive an institutional form conducive to the development of a moral community; sidestepping such intangibles, the authors of the Manual simplified this problem by describing moral order as the natural outcome of procedural adjustments.

The ideology of standards, moreover, provided an answer to the aporia raised by the southern prison system. As Naomi Murakawa argues, federal law enforcement officials most often attributed the failures of the justice system to individual “bad actors” and regional prejudices. From the reformers’ perspective, then, the uncomfortable proximity of the southern prison to the antebellum plantation was not an expression of the prison system as such—rather, it was the expression of the errant human factor that remained unsystematized in contemporary carceral culture. “[P]rocedures and professionalization,” Murakawa (2014) argues, would not necessarily eliminate violence in the American justice system but would rather “define [the] acceptable use of force” (p. 18). If violence could not be eliminated from prisons, in other words, its exercise could be made more predictable.

The Recombinant Institution

The form of postwar institutions reflected the aggregative approach to prison reform. Published by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1949, the Handbook of Correctional Design and Construction outlined a comprehensive vocabulary for prison design. Abandoning formal distinctions among institutional types, the Handbook defined a set of standard design components that could combine to form a variety of institutional settings. The text described each prison as the expression of a common institutional infrastructure, reinforcing the ethos of standardization outlined in the Manuals of Correctional Standards.

The Bureau’s modernization effort dovetailed with a contemporary shift in architectural discourse. The interwar mechanization of the building industry and the increasing technical complexity of architectural commissions rendered old methods of spatial representation obsolete. Prefabricated materials and standardized measures were not necessarily new to Western architectural practice. However, the unprecedented scale of military and industrial expansion in the early 20th century demanded architectural and infrastructural systems capable of coordinating the normative (and often destructive) operations of capital on a global scale. While architects in the Western tradition traditionally subordinated the standardized part or the isolated measure to an ideal of aesthetic totality, drawing upon classical architectonic principles of hierarchy and symmetry, the partitive logic of extensive technical systems and the mass-produced building component now dictated the planning process. While architects in the early 20th century illustrated their plans through lush perspective drawings, Hyungmin Pai (2002) notes, postwar architects were more likely to represent their work as an “encyclopedic accumulation of diagrams” addressed to specific structural and programmatic problems (p. 217).

While stressing the importance of disparate systems over any notion of total form, however, the Handbook asserts that the architect is “to provide all the major administrative, custodial, service, and industrial facilities in a structurally unified group, all envisaged in the original plan” (U.S. Bureau of Prisons [USBP], 1949, p. 60). The incorporation of mass-produced infrastructural elements into institutional design threatened to leave the modernization of the prison system in the hands of private interests. As the authors of the Handbook lament, prison administrators often referenced “the catalogues and promotional talks of prison equipment companies” when they wished to improve their facilities (USBP, 1949, p. 6). The pages of the American Journal of Correction offer ample evidence of this trend. As an advertisement for the Southern Steel Company (1959) demonstrates, equipment companies offered not only a set of standardized security components but also a “complete consulting service,” “including cost estimates, equipment design, floor plans, functional requirements, [and] completed plans and specifications” (p. 17).

Why did the authors of the Handbook insist upon the unity of the prison complex? On a technical level, prison architects would employ the same techniques and materials employed by other designers in the postwar era. The authors of the Handbook, in this sense, seem to desperately assert the status of the prison as a unified architectural object at a time when fragmentation is increasingly the rule. However, the Handbook repeatedly emphasizes that the components of the prison must feature a greater degree of coherence than contemporary urban ensembles. As the Handbook argues:

Unlike a city, however, [the development of communal facilities] cannot be left to the haphazard growth of competitive community life. They must be so planned as to make it possible, within a controlled community, for them to function at maximum efficiency and in their proper relationships. (USBP, 1949, p. 188)

In other words, the prison demanded a kind of ordering unique to the carceral territory. Examining the special relevance of the mechanical module to prison planning will help articulate this distinction.

Drawing upon the late work of Gilles Deleuze, Martin (2003) describes modular design as a vital technology in the fashioning of the postwar subject. The hard, inflexible plans of prewar modernism dictated precise patterns of movement and behavior—in Deleuze’s (1992) language, architects wished to employ architecture as a kind of “mold” for subjects, theorizing a deterministic relationship between the plan and the behavior of users. One may recall Jeremy Bentham’s plan for the Panopticon as an exemplary “mold”; as described by Michel Foucault in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, the Panopticon exemplifies the diverse technologies and “techniques for making useful individuals” which proliferated during the Enlightenment (Foucault, 1977, p. 211). The Panopticon and other early modern carceral techniques addressed the subject as a moral and psychological specimen—more precisely, the modern individualized subject itself came into existence as an effect of the rigid routines and disciplinary mechanisms at work in the Panopticon and other Enlightenment institutions.

At first glance, the Panopticon would seem a direct antecedent to the system of standards introduced by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the postwar period. As the late works of Foucault and Deleuze suggest, however, the emphasis upon the disciplinary “mold” tends to fade as post-Enlightenment regimes abandon an intensive focus upon individual subjectivity and instead focus upon the notion of the population as an aggregate of statistically defined phenomena. In contrast to the rigid disciplinary “mold,” techniques of modulation define the exercise of power in what Deleuze (1992) terms control societies; as he writes, one might imagine modulation as “a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other . . . or a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (p. 4). Control no longer concerns the individual but rather “dividuals,” the discretized fragments of the erstwhile subject as represented in “masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5).

Control society tends away from the bounded institution and toward a complex of dispersed ambient effects that contribute to the normalization of transindividual statistical flows. In the realm of architecture, Martin (2003) argues, the infinite permutations of the postwar module divide the “individual into an ever-finer set of indefinitely variable (yet enumerable) regulating codes” (p. 5); the subject of the modern corporate landscape is not a “subject” per se but rather an aggregate of human and social data as delineated by the contemporary physical and social sciences. Abandoning the rigid, hierarchical plan for an endlessly adaptable array of modulating elements, postwar architecture offers less a set of rigid prescriptions than an open matrix within which an agreeable illusion of choice can be maintained.

In 21st-century scholarship, Foucault and Deleuze’s observations have stabilized into static historical models. Without much effort, we could fit the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Prisons into a reductive version of this framework; the plans outlined in the Handbook would represent a rough synthesis of control techniques (the conceptualization of the prisoner as the concern of distinct technical systems) and disciplinary enclosures (the coherent “whole” of the prison’s “controlled community”). However, Foucault (2007) himself discouraged thinking of discipline and control as successive regimes in a linear historical narrative; as he emphasized, “[m]echanisms of security do not replace disciplinary mechanisms” but rather become “the dominant characteristic” in “a series of complex edifices” (p. 8). This qualification aside, Foucault’s hesitation to elaborate the relationship among diverse regimes at a single moment means that his work is of limited effectiveness in analyzing the racialized exercise of power in Western European society. Examining the development of the Jamaican legal system after the Enlightenment, for example, Diana Paton (2004) has noted that the landowning class of the colony used disciplinary techniques as a means of reinforcing and expanding rather than eliminating the more violent exercise of power under the plantation system; as she writes, “the imposition of pain supposedly characteristic of premodern forms of power” was “intimately joined to the strategies of surveillance characteristic of modern discipline” in the prison-plantation complex of the early 19th century (p. 11).

Paton’s argument will help us to avoid two potential pitfalls. As long as the history of the prison and prison architecture remains focused upon pure material archeology—in other words, a search for the traces of past subject formations in the material record of architecture and other control mechanisms—one will remain limited to the teleological account of the development of European society to ever more subtle, ambient, internal forms of control; as the corporeal techniques which still govern life in prisons and American cities are “off the record,” so to speak, we will end up with, at best, an incomplete account of the development of officially sanctioned forms of White subjectivity since the Enlightenment.

On the other hand, one must not simply append an account of an atemporal, diachronically static brutality to this account. This view would emphasize the disjunction between the sleek appearance of the new carceral institutions built after 1950 and the horrific acts of violence that continue to be exercised within them. Against the emphasis of the Foucauldian narrative of the development of novel control techniques, critical race theorists like Frank Wilderson III (2003) will emphasize the unique case of racialized violence, which reveals a static exercise of brutality lying beneath any apparent change in technical externals:

Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible . . . Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty [Emphasis mine]. (p. 25)

What is overlooked here is the way in which the persistence of archaic forms of violence in racialized regimes can itself, paradoxically, inflect the development of new forms of control. Instead of positing the simultaneity of an advanced apparatus of control and archaic forms of punishment, in other words, we might see how technologies like the mechanical module defy a standard teleology of power. The reconfiguration of corporeal punishment through the introduction of refined techniques of restraint in the new prisons attests to a potential brutality inherent in the contemporary mechanical decomposition of the human figure in design; the solitary confinement cell is as likely outcome of this new technological regime as is the open office.

This is not to say that either eventuality was literally inscribed in the mechanical module and other technologies definitive of the postwar landscape; rather, the quantitative disassembly of the subject, while encouraging the development of “soft,” ambient forms of control and exclusion, simultaneously sublimates the sanguinary techniques it is traditionally thought to displace in its form. Writing as a prisoner of San Quentin in 1972, George Jackson noted the affinity between the contemporary metropolis and the “reformed” postwar institution. “Simple pig types can only learn to function by rote and in cycles,” Jackson (1972) wrote, with the consequence that every “massive department or bureau or regiment with hundreds of personnel” required “the strictest regimentation” and “systematized patterns of thought and behavior” to coordinate the simplest action (p. 65). Similarly, Jackson (1972) noted that the “super-technological city-state has grown so complex that it is completely dependent upon its thousands of related parts” (p. 84). The standardized routines of the contemporary carceral institution and the cyclic behavior of the commonplace urban “pig” rely upon the “thousands of related parts”, which serve as the substructure of the emergent cybernetic state.

As Martin (2003) writes, modular planning enabled the White subject to attain “an organic connection to the functional whole of society by virtue of his or her own ‘individual choices,’ made within a system that was designed to offer variety by providing interchangeable elements in standardized formats” (p. 5). By contrast, people of color were defined within this new system less as quasi-volitional quasi-subjects than as dangerous material subject to refined methods of corporeal restraint. We might speak less of the migration of carceral techniques to the urban environment than the subsumption of both under a single infrastructural field of operations.

Circulation and Constraint

The technology of the mass-produced module allowed architects to establish distinctions among postwar institutions by defining distinct patterns of circulation. Previously, a maximum-security penitentiary and a reformatory each possessed distinct aesthetic vocabularies. Now, architects differentiated institutions by modulating the intensity and flexibility of the human flows throughout them. The Handbook delineates the design problem of the prison in these terms:

A prison is a place, generally speaking, where every function must be separated, for purposes of control, classification, and segregation. Yet every function and facility should be consolidated so far as possible for the greatest ease in moving prisoners, for facility of supervision, and for convenience in general operation. (USBP, 1949, p. 51)

Having fragmented the prison into distinct components, postwar architects took the hypothetical movements of prisoners, guards, and materials throughout the prison as the basis for new designs.

New minimum- and medium-security institutions allowed the incarcerated a degree of free movement. The Handbook cites the federal correctional institution in Seagoville, Texas as a model for future minimum-security institutions (Figure 1). Here, the relationship of the prison plant to the landscape is reversed vis-à-vis the institutions of the previous generation. In progressive institutions, open spaces were typically enclosed within a rigid institutional ensemble. Here, the individual units of the prison actually occupy the landscape, as they are arranged around a series of courtyards in a campus-like formation. The meandering paths of the campus show a perfunctory engagement with the rural setting, linking the dispersed structures through broad, symmetrical paths around the perimeter. In effect, the architects create a zone of open circulation within a strictly defined boundary.

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Figure 1.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Federal Correctional Institution, Seagoville, Texas, 1940–1945, Photograph.

Such is the allure of “the institution’s rehabilitative program,” claims the text, that prisoners “have lost the traditional impulse to escape” (USBP, 1949, p. 15). One should also note the care taken by Seagoville’s architects to delineate the relationship between the institution and the world beyond its borders. As the Handbook notes, a modern prison must contain “all the basic utilities necessary in a small city” (USBP, 1949, p. 298). The plan for Seagoville includes an onsite power plant, located outside the main cluster of buildings in abeyance with the Handbook’s recommendation to “have the power plant built outside the wall or compound . . . to prevent malicious tampering by inmates or seizure in any possible escape break or riot” (USBP, 1949, p. 298). More importantly, the plan details the proximity of the facility to nearby road and rail lines, establishing a relationship between the institution and external transportation networks. The “freedom” enjoyed by Seagoville’s population depends upon a strict articulation of the relationship between the prison and extra-institutional networks of circulation.

By contrast, the Handbook describes strict architectural constraints upon movement within super-security institutions. The term “super-security” designated a special category of prisons above maximum-security institutions. The precedent for super-security prisons was Alcatraz, opened in 1934 to house high-profile federal convicts in the Prohibition era. As Bennett (1970) wrote, “Alcatraz serve[d] a very worthwhile purpose in taking out of the other federal prisoners who, if they were permitted to remain, would make necessary a much more repressive program and complicate rehabilitative opportunities” (p. 113). Among contemporary institutions, Alcatraz appeared a relic; while eschewing the “chains” and “heavy threatening rustication” which Anthony Vidler identifies as hallmarks of pre-Enlightenment institutions, the remote setting and the visual inaccessibility of Alcatraz evoked these associations in absentia (Vidler, 1977, p. 101). Once the institution closed in the early 1960s, the American Correctional Association published a telling obituary:

We then went to the infamous D block which had been used as a disciplinary treatment unit at Alcatraz. Stories and indeed volumes have been written about this housing unit, most of it unflattering and untrue. The reporters were amazed that we did not have the dungeons nor the black holes they had heard about . . . Some reporters were still skeptical and wanted to know if the trapdoor from the cell block didn’t lead down to some dungeon. We had to show them this was not true. (Wilkinson, 1964, p. 5)

For the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the demolition of Alcatraz was a potent symbolic event. Designed specifically to isolate a special class of offenders, the institution appeared as a descendent of the medieval “dungeon” in the public imagination. As rehearsed in the ACA’s report, the objective exposition of the prison’s interior dispelled the “irrational” perception of the institution as a site of isolation and terror.

Similarly, the Handbook seeks to demystify the super-security prison by providing a neutral exposition of the type. While the volume withholds a model for medium and minimum-security institutions, the text features a detailed plan for a new super-security plant (Figure 2). The key to understanding the irregular disposition of the plan lies in the Handbook’s analysis of the institution in terms of “custodial control zones” and “armed supervision galleries.” The first diagram details when prisoners will occupy different parts of the prison during the morning, evening, and night (Figure 3); the institution effectively contracts to its core over the course of a day, such that by evening, the central cell block of the prison contains all prisoners. The other facilities of the prison are packed tightly around this core according to their place in institutional routine. As the Handbook writes, all essential facilities are located on the first floor, allowing for the “easier observation and better supervision of inmates”; the central corridor, moreover, allows “prisoners to reach their work without going outside the building” (USBP, 1949, p. 48). Privileging the expediency of movement over formal coherence resulted in a plan that resembled a tightly regulated mechanism, legible only after considering the movement of guards and prisoners throughout the institution.

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Figure 2.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Plan for Model Super-Security Institution, 1949, Drawing.

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Figure 3.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Custodial Control Zone Chart for Super-Security Institution, 1949, Drawing.

A common vocabulary of reinforced concrete identifies Seagoville with its super-security counterpart. The difference between these institutions—and, more significantly, the difference between modern carceral space and the technical-aesthetic system of the contemporary city—lies in the increasingly precise regulation of human flows as one moves deeper into the prison system.

Neutralizing the Plantation

The aesthetic neutralization of the super-security institution in the Handbook reflects a central concern in the ACA’s literature: the use of an objective technical language to redefine the application of violence within institutions. The irregular, irrational violence characteristic of the southern institutions horrified reformers. The modernization of correctional architecture offered, at very least, a rational way of representing violence.

Through detailed case studies, The American Journal of Correction rehearsed a common narrative of institutional decline and reform. A 1960 report on the rehabilitation of the notorious prison farm at Angola serves as a pertinent example. In the early 20th century, Angola exemplified the close historical connection between the prison system and slavery; established on the site of a former plantation in 1894, the keepers of the institution subjected a population of primarily Black prisoners to a harsh regimen of forced agricultural labor. As Matthew Mancini (1996) writes, Angola represented to White southerners “a return to the natural order after decades of floundering,” effectively translating antebellum practices into the post-Reconstruction legal order of the South (p. 151).

As the Journal reported, a group of prisoners slashed their Achilles tendons in protest of the prison’s conditions in 1952. By this time, the southern prison system had achieved international notoriety, and Louisiana’s legislature deemed nominal reforms to be a humanitarian (and political) necessity. A state investigation produced a list of recommendations that closely echoed the federal platform of penal modernization (Carleton, 1971, pp. 151–155). Needless to say, the Journal was enthusiastic in reporting the introduction of reformed methods of prison administration to Angola:

The “big stick” was out, so too were many of those who wielded it . . . [T]here is [now] no brutality, and employees, though they have civil service status, are summarily dismissed if they take violent discipline into their own hands. (Clinton, 1960, p. 7)

By adopting the bureaucratic model outlined in the ACA manuals, the Journal emphasizes, the new administrators of Angola effectively severed the institution from its sanguinary origins.

The authors offer a detailed technical exegesis of the new prison plant. As the Journal reported, the medium- and minimum-custody dormitories were “of a modular design,” allowing the installation of partitions to “transform them into honor rooms, squad rooms, or cubicles, or back to dormitories, to meet the needs of a population that will fluctuate in type” (USBP, 1960, p. 29). References to industrial building components serve as eminent signifiers of reform. As the account states, the architects of the new Angola constructed the “roofs and floors of all buildings” of “flat plate reinforced concrete slab with pipe supporting columns,” erected according to the “Youtz-Slick ‘Lift-Slab’” system; “[s]pecial detention awning windows,” the article continues, “to provide 100 per cent opening, were developed in conjunction with engineers of the Bayley Window Company” (USBP, 1960, p. 29). The text’s preoccupation with structural detail reflects the desire of the ACA to cleanse penological discourse of any reference to the body. The authors briefly reference the history of cruelty at Angola to consign it to the dark ages before reform; the description of the prisoners’ revolt and the extreme conditions which motivated it matters less to the Journal than the bland exposition of the organizational and technical advances accomplished since.

While earlier architectural texts on the prison simply refused to address physical punishment, however, the Handbook provides a detailed technical exposition of how architecture can facilitate the punishment of the incarcerated. To take a striking example, the Handbook details the position of “armed supervision galleries” in super-security cell blocks. This infrastructure entails not only continual supervision but also an ever-present potential for efficient execution. As a diagram for a typical cell block reveals, the security gallery hangs opposite the outer face of a three-story set of cells (Figure 4). Whereas, the prisoner and the guard would leave by the same door in a traditional cell block, here, they occupy completely separate paths; as the Handbook notes, the only door available for prisoners has “no keyhole, knob, handle, or other visible appurtenances or projections,” opening instead on command from “automatic operating hardware on the outside of the cell block” (USBP, 1949, p. 51). This separation forecloses the possibility of physical contact between guard and prisoner, meaning contact can occur only by means of automatic weapons; the traditional supervisory function of the catwalk is thus endowed with a lethal function. If death was unpredictable at Angola, here architecture delineates execution as one among many new standardized routines.

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Figure 4.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Cross-Section of Super-Security Cell Block, 1949, Drawing

Beyond the provisions for super-security institutions, the authors of the Handbook also described how architecture could facilitate the punishment of prisoners in institutions of all types. Upon becoming director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Bennett (1970) would officially proscribe the use of physical punishment in federal institutions (p. 92). The 1946 Manual outlines the new official recommendations for maintaining disciplinary order. While strictly forbidding the then-common practices of “beating with fists or clubs” or “stringing up by the wrists,” the text recommends various forms of isolation as an acceptable alternative for last-resort punishment within an institution. Incidentally, this is where the first Manual delves into the subject of architecture with any considerable detail. The text suggests a series of arrangements for isolation; depending on the institution, one could be subject to “restriction to one’s own cell or room,” “punitive segregation in a special punishment section or building,” or “indefinite segregation” in a separate building (APA, 1946b, pp. 7–8).

The text then outlines the general restrictions to be placed upon a prisoner in each environment. In a larger cell block, the isolation section may be demarcated “by fine wire screening to prevent the introduction of contraband” or, in the best case, by “a solid partition or door.” (APA, 1946b, p. 7). The manual goes into more graphic detail when describing the conditions of a solitary cell, “either in the punishment section or in a group of solitary confinement cells partitioned off from the rest of the punishment section”:

Ordinarily prisoners are not confined in cells with solid doors unless they have created a disturbance while confined in ordinary cells in the punishment section. Occasionally they are put in cells of this type to prevent communication with other prisoners or to increase the monotony. Some institutions have solid fronts on all punishment cells, using wire glass or glass brick to admit some natural light and providing ample mechanical ventilation . . . Monotony is the major factor in the effectiveness of solitary confinement. (APA, 1946b, p. 8)

Without ever directly touching upon the prisoner’s body, the passage evokes corporeality through the description of an architecture that hews close to the human form.

The approach to the prisoner’s body described in the manual reflects the conception of the human occupant in contemporary architectural discourse. Examining technical manuals developed by military and industrial designers at mid-century, the John Harwood argues that postwar architects increasingly delineated the needs of the hypothetical user in terms of technical specifications and measurements. As he writes, architects believed that this body of knowledge would help reduce any possible “friction” between the human user and an increasingly mechanized architectural environment; the designer would consult a body of quantitative knowledge concerning the standardized occupant’s body to address the user’s physiological and psychological needs amid a potentially hostile mechanical environment (Harwood, 2011, pp. 93–97).

While most architects sought to reduce pressure upon the human body, however, the authors of the Manual conceived of the architectural environment as a means of inflicting pain upon the recalcitrant prisoner. One can consider the progressive reductions in cell size as a means of increasing friction between the cell and the bodies of the incarcerated; solitary confinement is essentially ergonomics in reverse, the adjustment of the standardized cell to gradually constrict its human occupant. In the case of prison design, the integration of the human body into the technical discourse of architecture served the sublimation of physical punishment into the infrastructure of the prison itself.

The Handbook delves into the routines of solitary confinement with considerable technical detail. Following the example of the 1946 Manual, the Handbook provides precise measurements and structural specifications for cells at different stages of custody. After outlining a general model for the utility shaft and ventilation ducts, the Handbook delineates standards for segregation cells, outside cells, inside cells, honor rooms, and “restraint rooms.” Comparing these diagrams, the viewer is pressed to find significant architectural differences; all feature a basic disposition of the toilet, bed and table, fitted within an average cell of 10’ by 7’ with slight adjustments (USBP, 1949, pp. 202–210). The Handbook summarizes a vital development in correctional architecture undertaken by the Bureau. While extreme aesthetic and structural variations once demarcated different security levels, these differences now consist merely of minor adjustments to a series of standardized dimensions. The “segregation cell” adds a buffer space to the front of the standardized cell, reducing the prisoner’s allotment to 9’ by 7’; the restraint room, a space within the hospital section intended for those considered mentally ill, removes all furniture and adds a floor drain so that “the walls, floor and ceiling may be quickly washed” (USBP, 1949, p. 210). In the Handbook’s logic, higher levels of discipline result only in an increasingly bare environment; discipline becomes less the direct infliction of pain than the gradual deprivation of stimuli and space. Punishment becomes a quantitative method in which suffering is measured by variations on a standard.

The provision of varying grades of discipline within a single institution spoke to the logic of the postwar prison system as a whole. As described in the 1946 Manual, “[p]roper classification involves transfer of prisoners between institutions and, in its broader phases, the planning of correctional systems so that there will be a sufficient number and variety of institutions to make classification possible” (APA, 1946a, p. 2). The next step after the transfer of a prisoner to an isolation cell in a minimum- or medium-security institution is their transfer to a maximum- or super-security institution. The unique status of the federal prison system allowed Bennett and his contemporaries to conceive of a disciplinary system in which inter- and extra-institutional movement maintained the health of the system in all its parts. The gradient of discipline moved toward increasing deprivation and monotony; for directly inflicted physical pain, Bennett (1970) wrote, the reforms had substituted “the limiting of movement, the regulation of schedule, the restrictions of contact with families [and] the petty detail of organization life” (p. 137).

The techniques of the postwar prison frustrate any distinction between technologies of corporeal restraint and those of subtle behavioral modulation—they define, rather, a matrix of potential restraint that encompassed the parallel realms of the postwar city and the prison system, functioning alternately as a field of notional choice for the White office worker and as a system of variable restraints that how ever closer to the body as one ventures from the corporate high-rise to the suffocating dimensions of the standardized cell.