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A modern American gulag will remain standing, no matter who wins the upcoming election

A modern American gulag will remain standing, no matter who wins the upcoming election
When Eastern State Penitentiary closed in 1971, its cells fell into severe disrepair, and most remain that way today. (Photo: Glen Retief)
Glen Retief
By Glen Retief
24 Jul 2024
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Mass incarceration is now as much a part of the American landscape as Douglas firs or flowering dogwoods

All the way back in 1995, when I was, as they say, FOTB (fresh off the boat), a friend took me on a drive through the New York countryside.

I saw many new things: maple forests, riverside mansions, bright red barns.  But what made the biggest impression was the jails.

We drove through one country town after another: Green Haven, Fish Kill, Beacon. On each town’s outskirts sat a vast, rectangular, concrete prison building, surrounded by electrified, barbed wire.

“Damn, this is a gulag!” I told my friend.  I was somewhat confused.  I’d fled apartheid South Africa for New York City, which felt to me, at the time, like freedom itself. But this place was much more “Sakhalin Island.”

Nor was my gulag comparison entirely overblown. Currently, for example, the United States imprisons 531 per 100,000 adults — a similar rate to police states like Cuba, Rwanda and North Korea. 

An outdoor exhibit at the Eastern State Penitentiary shows the shocking rise in the incarceration rate since 1970, with only a slight reduction in the 2010s. (Photo: Glen Retief)



For context, this is more than double South Africa’s rate, either under democracy or apartheid. It is almost 10 times that of democracies like Germany or India. 

Black Americans’ current rate is 1,156 per 100,000 adults.  Statistically, we are a mere stone’s throw from Stalin, probably history’s most enthusiastic incarcerator, at about 1,500 out of every 100,000 Russians who were behind bars when he died in 1953.

Why so many prisoners?


Why so many prisoners?  Many Americans believe that the cause is high crime rates. Yet law-breaking in the US isn’t particularly common, and most people who go to jail do so for minor drug infractions, like being caught on the highway with cocaine in the cubbyhole. 

The most influential academic theory for mass incarceration has been offered by former Stanford professor and human rights lawyer Michelle Alexander. 

In The New Jim Crow, Alexander notes that mass imprisonment in the US dates from 1982, when then president Ronald Reagan declared war on illegal drugs. She links this to the deindustrialisation of US cities at the time, leading to unemployment and addiction, as well as a white backlash after the civil rights movement.

Read more: A South African comes dead last at traditional coal cracker boilo competition

Alexander posits that mass incarceration is a way for white America to maintain its dominance, via biased drug laws and enforcement. For example, it is illegal to racially discriminate in jobs, housing, or voting. Yet some states deny former convicts the right to vote, and it is perfectly legal to refuse someone a job or flat based on a criminal record.

Some prisons even charge inmates for accommodation. A few years ago, I visited the Northumberland County Jail, around the corner from my house in small-town Sunbury, Pennsylvania.

This was the administrative and security hub at the centre of Eastern State. The prison was designed with a hub and spokes format, to allow intense monitoring of the prisoners. (Photo: Glen Retief)



“How about a personal finance class?” asked the warden, when I expressed an interest in volunteer teaching in the jail. “These guys have to pay the county back for their accommodation, you know, and they have no idea how to budget.”

Turns out that for their forced stays on thin mattresses in cramped, freezing cells, by law inmates owed Northumberland County $50 a night after they were released, which was about the same amount of money — at the time — as a midrange motel room. 

Vast, Orwellian system


In 2023, the journal of the American Bar Association detailed a vast, Orwellian system whereby US states and counties attempt to recoup from inmates’ families the costs of their imprisonment. 

These range from prisoners’ salaries of $0.50 an hour, to $1 charges for emails, to extortionate commissary prices: $4 for a pinkie-sized tube of toothpaste; $5 for a stick deodorant.

In practice, this means that prisoners’ families simply get pushed deeper into poverty, reinforcing, in the view of civil rights activists like Alexander, the hierarchies that have defined American history.

I wanted to better understand US incarceration, so I signed up for a tour of Eastern State Penitentiary.  A vast, sprawling prison museum located on the outskirts of Philadelphia, when Eastern State opened in 1829, this penitentiary was the toast of the global prison reform movement, and its design influenced thousands of later prisons.

Among its marvels: it was also the first prison ever built aimed at inspiring repentance, hence the name penitentiary. And second, it was the first prison that was dedicated entirely to what would later become one of the most severe punishments inflicted on US prisoners: solitary confinement.

Now I happen to be a Quaker, meaning that I am a member of a religious society that worships by sitting in silence, listening to one’s inner voice — God, soul, or conscience — and then taking action based on gleaned insights.

Solitary confinement


Eighteenth and nineteenth century Quakers imagined that solitary confinement could, like prayer and meditation, heal and improve a tortured psyche. Therefore, from 1776 onwards, Quakers were one of the chief forces lobbying to make solitary confinement part of American imprisonment.

George Cruikshank’s 1818 engraving depicting the chaos at Newgate Prison, in London. The designers of Eastern State Penitentiary were trying to create a calmer environment more conducive to penitence. (Photo: Glen Retief)



Appropriately enough, then, I arrive on a Sunday morning almost exactly at the time my fellow Quakers are attending their worship meetings. My tour guide, whom I’ll call James, is a skinny, bearded hipster wearing a beanie.  He starts us off at a poster of George Cruikshank’s famous 1818 painting, “Newgate Prison Discipline”.

“This is what the prison reformers were reacting against,” James tells us.  “Chaos, fights, Lord of the Flies.” In the sketch, I do see prisoners at each other’s throats, while others dance on a table.  It looks scary and disorienting. But it also looks decidedly human – flawed, lively, and compelling.

The same cannot be said for the cellblock we visit next, a stark passage with solitary cells on either side. Admittedly, these cells are decrepit. Chunks gape in the walls, the toilets are stopped up with dust, and the narrow overhead skylights — a key innovation meant to direct inmates’ eyes to the heavens to facilitate spirituality — are coated with muck.

Still, as I step inside, the claustrophobic enclosure is overwhelming.  I ask a fellow tourist to bang the metal-grate cell door behind me, which he does.  In the 1830s, aside from a single, ten-minute meeting a day with a prison official or chaplain, after I heard that door slam, I would have been here in silence, with only my own thoughts. 

Food and water would have been pushed through an opening.  Guards would have roamed about with socks over their boots, trying to catch prisoners talking or signalling.  Even exercise was silent, in a solitary courtyard attached to each cell. 

No meetings or communal work


There were no meetings or communal work of any kind.  If a prisoner got taken anywhere, James now explains — say, when they first came inside, or later to see a doctor — they were hooded to prevent them from being identified, and therefore subject to discrimination after they were released.

Reading material was only a reward for good behaviour, and even then, consisted only of the Bible and a limited list of approved religious texts.

Charles Dickens visited Eastern State in 1842.  What he saw shocked him.  He later wrote, “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh… the more I denounce it.”

When Eastern State Penitentiary closed in 1971, its cells fell into severe disrepair, and most remain that way today. (Photo: Glen Retief)



Upon release, inmates apparently stood, shivering, on street corners, lost and confused, incoherent and afraid when someone tried to talk to them.

A less extreme version of a related phenomenon: in our neighbouring town, Lewisburg, near a large federal jail, it is common to see newly released prisoners on the street, trying to make sense of cellphones, ATMs, and automated check-out counters.

Read more: Metacom, the chief who almost kicked the English out of North America

It took decades for universal solitary confinement to be abandoned at Eastern State Penitentiary.  Since the 2010s, the US prison population has shrunk only modestly, due mostly to the rise of electronic “house arrest” bracelets — judicial penalties that still leave wearers with criminal records.

Religious organisations, including Quaker ones, have condemned solitary confinements, yet still, at any given moment, more than 80,000 US prisoners will be subjected to it.

What will it take to turn the tide? Neither the Democratic nor Republican platforms for the November 2024 elections suggest any real interest in the mass release of prisoners. 

The former proposes only modest reforms like a scaling back of cash bail, while the latter calls for the government to “stop the migrant crime epidemic”, “crush gang violence” and “lock up violent offenders”. 

As for the candidates: Trump promises to detain 15 million undocumented workers, while Harris, if nominated, is likely to run as a tough-on-crime former prosecutor.

Faced with all this, in South Africa, prisoners could at least cast votes from their cells, perhaps for a small party interested in restorative justice.

Here in the US, though, almost nobody behind bars can vote, no matter what got them there.  And mass incarceration remains as much a feature of our landscape as Douglas firs or flowering dogwoods. DM

Glen Retief’s The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood, won a Lambda Literary Award.  He teaches creative non-fiction at Susquehanna University and recently spent a year in South Africa as Fulbright Scholar.

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