Jessica Bernal

ESEM- Play in The City

Penitence: The Face of Prison Reform

          In the early 19th century, America was still a fledging country in the world. Just a century from having Independence, yet it expanded and thrived quite expeditiously. The Industrial Revolution made a big impact on the country and it engaged several people to immigrate to America and start a new life full of opportunities. As a result in the increase of population and wealth, crime rates also boomed. Crime in the 19th century was at a high peak and consisted of robbery, assaults, and murders.

         America, just embarking on itself as a new country, hadn’t thought nor dealt with its most vital issue of the moment, criminals. Who would capture them? And exactly how would they be punished? Notorious criminals were walking around the dark-lit streets with no apprehension. During the 19th century, there wasn’t an effective approach to penalizing delinquents. If they were caught, those who caught them in the act would probably also be the ones penalizing them some way or another. At times, most delinquents would also either be transported to another country or hanged publicly to enforce stop to all crimes to citizens of towns.

Before I truly read the “hopelessly hardened” about the Eastern State and step into this “groundbreaking” penitentiary, I was so convinced that the prisoners lead hard lives in the cells and behave so well in order to get out of the hopeless darkness and damp. Born in a family with father as judge and mother as lawyer, I was always told how desperate lives in the cells are- prisoners can’t fall asleep on rock-like beds, have limited time to see their family and once a prisoner told my mom that he only wanted a blanket in the winter and the chilblain he got in prison prohibited him from doing anything. At that time，I thought the penitentiary is so cruel that it is not a place for helping people to confess and change，but an inferno that destroys humanity. So I was so pleased and optimistic when I get to know that Eastern State is a pioneer in reforming incarceration.

Phoenix

Mlord

Play in the City 028

Hopelessness

Eastern State Penitentiary is a crumbling heap of rock and iron. While, in its heyday, it was a marvel of prison technology, the methods are today understood to be cruel and inhumane. Cells were designed to cut off all interaction, except with the guard, who wore wool socks over their shoes so as to minimize the sound of their footfall, and with the preacher, who attempted to convert them to Protestantism. There was nothing to do except work, and if one attempted to communicate with other prisoners, he or she was punished.

ESP was a marvel of technology. It had a revolutionary heating and plumbing system not present even in the White House at that time. Thick walls prevented prisoners from speaking to one another, for ESP was not intended to be an ordinary prison. Rather than just house criminals, it would isolate them, induce self-contemplation, and lead to repentance. ESP was a pioneer in the pursuit of reforming prisoners through isolation. Its creators believed that prisoners in solitude would come to terms with their crime, repent of their sins and go on to live more wholesome lives. The design of ESP forced prisoners to spend time examining their own hearts, and, ideally, to pray for forgiveness. It provided prisoners ample time and silence to think over their wrongdoings.

Eastern state was built as a place for prisoners to come to terms with their crimes, to pray in solitude for forgiveness. Now all that remains is an eerie building, a skeleton of the failed experiment: Eastern State was more torture or prison than reform center, which effectively tried to break prisoners down mentally with silence and solitude. Imagine how much smaller, lonelier, life must be when one’s only hope for diversion comes from the guards, the preacher, or the thin hope of making contact with other prisoners; solitary confinement can quickly make a person go mad. It is understandable, then, why inmates worked so hard for the rare opportunity to communicate with the other prisoners. In the end, the goals of the prison unrealized and the rules ignored or out dated, Eastern State Penitentiary was nothing more than an experiment that failed.

Silence can be a choice but it can also be forced. It is hard to tell for which of these reasons a person is silent. I can be silent when asked a question because I don't know the answer, because someone/thing has intimidated me, or because I choose not to answer. I can't expect anyone else to know why I am silent unless I, paradoxically, tell them by breaking my silence.

I think that when dealing with silence, we can only expect to get back what we give, to a conversation, a class, or a society. If I do not talk to someone in a conversation, I cannot expect them to keep the conversation going on their own. If I do not contribute in a class, I cannot expect someone to do my learning for me. And if I do not vocalize what I think is wrong with society, I cannot expect change.

I expected Eva, as someone arrested for murder, to want to explain her situation in order to get out of some of her punishment. I have grown up with our legal system, with "innocent until proven guilty," and with "you have the right to remain silent." Eva cannot expect to get anything out of the legal system if she does not speak. The legal system expects voices, not silence.

If I am using my voice, I feel like I deserve a response; I expect it. If I talk to someone, I want and expect them to respond. The choice to be silent is not an open, easy one, because society, from individuals to the government, expects us to be vocal. Fulfilling expectations is a much easier choice than is defying them.

I could see the lonely walls, which have witnessed too much. I could see the abandoned floor, which has been victim of pacing and madness. I could see the abused door, which has been the tool of solitude and punishment since 1829. I could see the Eye of God, but didn’t feel as if that could save me. I felt the bulge of my smart phone in the back pocket of my jeans. Resisting the urge to check if I had any messages, I sighed and looked around the room for the umpteenth time. My time in the Eastern State Penitentiary was merely a fraction of what the prisoners in the past had spent; however, in this day and age, with technology and our decreasing attention spans, it felt as if I was in there for months.

Our dependency on technology makes it difficult for us to stay still for long periods of time. These days, it is almost impossible to go a day without consulting some kind of machine or device. Letters have been replaced by emails, which have been replaced by text messages. Instead of waiting seven days to receive a letter from a friend, we now only have to wait seven seconds. We have developed an intolerance of anything that takes longer than a few moments, and this is why half an hour alone in a nineteenth-century prison cell seems like such torture to my generation.

I thought it was interesting that one of the questions asked at the end of class on Thursday was whether or not Gayl Jones was intentionally trying to make the reader uncomfortable with her graphic language in Eva’s Man.  For me, the detail and word choice of the story was definitely very challenging to read in one sitting.  The graphic detail is overwhelming and part of me just did not want to recognize that, while this is fiction, the story is very real.  That being said, I don’t think that Jones had any obligation to filter the story so that is would be an easier or more accessible read.  The reason it is accessible as it stands now is because it tells the truth.  We discussed this topic earlier on in the semester, whether or not is the responsibility of the author or the reader to make decisions about accessibility.  I personally think that I would not have had such an intense reaction to the story if it had been filtered.  As difficult as it was to read, would the story have had as much of an impact if it hadn’t told to whole truth?          

We talk about talking, but never listening. (Do we ever even listen about listening? Lectures on the virtues of listening are still yet more talking, and not listening. This regretably, is yet another one of those, though it will, hopefully, make me shut up at some point and listen to y'all, instead of filling silence because I need to fill it.) The problems we have with class discussion are usually put at the doorstep of talking, not really at the lack of listening.

Likewise, much of the dialogue surrounding the silence in Eva's Man has been about Eva's refusal to speak. We talked about possible reactions to what she could have said on Tuesday. I wasn't in class on Thursday, so maybe you did talk about her audience's refusal to listen. I hope so, because hypothosizing about why someone isn't making themselves vulnerable is fine, but unpacking who is making them vulnerable and why is important, too.

Since class I've been thinking a bit more on the passage of time, and my group's conclusion that Eva's time was spent. Because of the format of the novel, we don't see Eva go anywhere, only where she came from and where she is. Because of the circumstances that led up to this point, she is stuck, her time sufficiently queered to the point that she effectively has none left. Left in prison, her life has reached standstill and is unlikely to go anywhere. Is this an overarching consequence of queering time and eliminating reproductive time? If you destroy the need for productivity and the value placed on it, is productivity actually productive (could Eva's time actually be productive in that we hear her story, thus giving her a normative timeline again), how free are we without queer time? We expressed difficulty applying queer time to a hypothetical school schedule and found it difficult to actually accomplish anything without timelines and aligned classes. Is Eva's being 'stuck' a product of her non-normative timeline?

Throughout my time reading "Eva's Man", I was constantly reminded of a documentary I watched a few years ago. The film, titled "What I Want My Words To Do To You", followed Eve Ensler (of "The Vagina Monologues" fame) as she conducted writing workshops with the women inmates of New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. What struck me about the film at the time was the immense guilt and confusion felt by the women who had been convicted for committing, mainly murderous, crimes. With the direction of journaling, many women brought to the surface their side of the story and the history leading up to their decisions (or maybe better worded, actions).