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Volume 1 Issue 1 (2003)
“Killing me every
day”: Contemporary Latino/a Culture and the Growing Prison
Crisis
Amy Abugo Ongiri
Assistant Professor of English
University of California,
Riverside
Abstract
The United States now imprisons more people than any other country
in the world, possibly as much as a half million more than Communist China.
This paper focuses on the case of Luis Felipe, a New York gang leader and inmate
of the Federal Supermax prison facility in Florence, Colorado. The author argues
that with increasing amounts of people of color subjected to the direct repression
of the U.S. penal system, it becomes increasingly important to understand the
ways in which the prison industrial complex shapes and conditions dissent within
contemporary Latino/a culture.
In 1985, 108 of every 100,000 U.S. residents were incarcerated in some
form of prison facility (county, state, federal). Despite continuous national
declines in crime, by the 1997 that figured had nearly doubled to 212 of every
100,000 U.S. residents (DOC). These statistics, shocking enough in their own
right, are even more shocking when read in relation to the rest of the world.
The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world
possibly as much as half a million more than Communist China (Schlosser). In
states such as California that lead the United States and the world in the
creation and development of a prison industrial complex and implementation of an
oppressive “law and order” culture, that figure is expected to grow
astronomically into the new millennium. The case for prisons as a growth
industry in California simply cannot be overstated. A report written in
December 1998 states:
California now has the biggest prison system in the Western
industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of
Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France,
Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined. The
California Department of Corrections predicts that at the current rate of
expansion, barring a court order that forces a release of prisoners, it will
run out of room eighteen months from now. (Schlosser)
One only need reflect briefly on the shifting demographics of
California specifically and the United States in general to speculate on who
is being made to fill the beds in the ever-growing prison system. This paper
will focus on the case of Luis Felipe in order to consider the ways in which
state-enforced silences are a structuring force in the creation and articulation
of contemporary Latino/a culture. I will also consider how state-created and
enforced silences, which are constructed in the laboratory of oppression that
is the contemporary prison industrial complex, structure the ways in which we
as a wider population are silenced.
Luis Felipe, also known as King Blood, organized the New York chapter of
the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation in the eighties and quickly became
“New York City’s most powerful and deadly gang leader while behind
bars” (Kocieniewski). In 1991, the federal government completed the sixty
million dollar construction of its first Supermax facility in a sparsely
populated section of Colorado. Nicknamed “The Alcatraz of the
Rockies,” the facility is well known for housing high profile inmates such
as Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and Ramsey Youssef, who serve various levels
of nearly constant solitary confinement. One report terms the Supermax facility
at Florence “The Last Worst Place” in the US penal system because
“[a]t Florence, isolation is all there is” (Taylor). In 1997, Judge
John Martin sentenced Luis Felipe to the most repressive conditions yet
experienced by any of the inmates of the Federal Supermax Facility at Florence,
Colorado. Stating, “this defendant has forfeited any right to human
contact,” Martin deprived Felipe of the right to send or receive mail or
to receive visits from anyone other than his lawyer and court-approved members
of his immediate family of which he has none. Though under constant
surveillance, the facility’s state of the art technology has denied Felipe
even the minimal contact he might have experienced by interacting with
corrections officers or other prisoners. Under lockdown twenty-three hours a
day, Felipe receives all prison meals alone in his cell through a high tech
system that denies him even the minimal contact he might have had with the
corrections officers distributing the meals. The conditions of Felipe’s
incarceration represent the extremist possibilities for punitive isolation that
Supermax facility’s present technology allows, but all such facilities are
built around the principles of isolation and surveillance that are literally
destroying Felipe and others like him. Prisoners at the federal Supermax
facility in Florence are locked down in total isolation nearly 23 hours a day in
a space which one report notes is “barely big enough for a Ford
Expedition” (Johnson). Cells are soundproofed and prisoners are
constantly under surveillance though all furniture is made of poured concrete
and access to any non-prison items is extremely limited. Though prisoners are
only allowed outside their cell only in leg irons and handcuffs the perimeter of
the prison is guarded by dogs trained to attack without barking (Langton).
Amnesty International has investigated the prolonged solitary confinement of the
Supermax facility as a form of torture and at least one prisoner has
successfully litigated damages for confinement in a Supermax facility as
“cruel and unusual punishment” (Hallinan). Prison rights activist
Ray Luc Levasseur explains it best for those on the outside when he says
“lock yourself in your bathroom for four years and tell me how it affects
your mind. It begins to erode the five senses. It’s dehumanizing”
(Annin).
Lawrence K. Freitell, Felipe’s lawyer, has argued that the
conditions that Felipe has been subjected to have contributed to a deteriorating
mental and physical condition. Felipe has experienced a loss of sleep and
appetite so severe that has had to be medicated with antidepressants. He
reportedly weeps constantly and uncontrollably. Most importantly, Freitell
argues that existing in this state of forced isolation and surveillance has
caused Felipe to literally lose his ability to communicate verbally with others.
At his sentencing Felipe prophetically declared to Judge Martin “You
accuse me of killing people, but you’ll be killing me every day”
(Kocieneiwski). While Luis Felipe’s case presents an extreme example of
the conditions facing the Latino/a population in the nation’s correctional
facilities, it raises important questions about the nature and limitations of
“corrections” and its impact and influence on Latino/a cultural
articulation and survival.
It is not my intention here to discuss Felipe’s guilt or innocence
or to attempt to redeem him as a cultural icon. Nor do I wish to enter into the
debate as to the status of the Latin Kings as an organization. Whether they are
a bunch of drug-selling thugs, an important emerging political force or some
combination of both, it is impossible not to recognize the Latin Kings as
significant social and cultural force, shaping and being shaped by the
contemporary discourse on Latino/as and criminality. The Latin Kings are the
subject of intense news media scrutiny in the northeast, where they are
strongest. In 1997, the year Felipe was convicted and sentenced, there were
twenty-five articles on the Latin Kings in the Metro section of The New York
Times alone. They have also been the subject of several
“exposes” type stories on shows like “Nightline,” and
“ABC’s Crime & Justice Report.” They are the subject of at
least two feature length documentaries, and were even the subject of an art
exhibit in New York documenting their unique style. Consistently constructed as
a dangerous, mysterious, and ever-growing threat, the portrayal of the Latin
Kings in The New York Times parallels the news media’s
construction of the invisible threat posed by the encroachment of Latino/a
populations on wider United States culture and society.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel
Foucault writes of the “discipline-mechanism” of modern society as
having derived directly from prison technology developed in the 1800s in France.
Prison technology revolutionized the structure of the French penal system but
the technology would also seep through to other social institutions such as
schools, asylums, hospitals, and factories, institutions that required some
level of coercive discipline and control. The most important innovation in
prison technology of the time was the development of Bentham’s Panopticon,
which functioned “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and
permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”
(201). In the Panopticon “visibility is a trap” (200). This is
achieved via the architectural innovation of the Panopticon, a structure that
renders its inhabitants seen but never seeing, forever masking the workings of
power. “Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell
from which he is seen from the front by a supervisor; but the side walls prevent
him from coming into contact with his companions. He is the object of
information, never a subject in communication,” Foucault writes (200).
Foucault’s work offers strong insight into the wider cultural and societal
implications of the structures of power and coercion created through prison
technological innovations. Foucault characterizes the Panopitcon as
significantly “non-corporal” and opposes it to “ the ruined
prisons, littered with mechanisms of torture” (203, 205). In noting a
shift away from torture as a structuring mechanism of earlier prison culture, he
quotes the Panopticon creator’s claim that it “gives power of mind
over mind” (206).
In Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S.
Culture, Joy James has already begun to offer the necessary corrective to
Foucault’s obvious limitations in conceptualizing a historical account of
the Western development of punishment and the body without a recourse to a
history of Euro-American racial violence and slavery. I want to suggest that
the erasure of racial violence in Foucault’s work that James documents
presents more than simply a problematic historical blind-spot. I want to
suggest that Foucault’s conceptualization of the body and punishment is
inherently flawed by his inability to conceptualize brown bodies in pain in
“the laboratory of power” of the penal system. Foucault’s
model does not recognize the cerebral exercise of control--the forced visibility
and enforced silencing--as potentially torturous with effects that extend beyond
the mind. Consequently, since the inculcation of power is an almost automatic
affair of the mind, Foucault cannot envision a significant resistance to it.
Foucault’s prisoners cannot/do not resist or refuse the internalizing
functions of the Panopticon structure. Felipe’s case presents one such
instance of resistance to prison structures as he not only resisted prison by
becoming “New York City’s most powerful and deadly gang leader while
behind bars” but continues to resist easy integration of the forced
isolation and surveillance of the Supermax structure. In fact, the creation of
the Supermax structure can be seen as the states attempt to force rather than
“to induce,” as Foucault suggests, the prisoner into “a state
of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of
power” in such a way as to suggest that that functioning of power is not
so “automatic” after all and is already being consciously subverted
in multiple ways by prisoners. The fact that Felipe’s imprisonment has
caused physical and psychological resistance so profound the prison system has
had to medicate him so that he can eat and sleep bespeaks not only an enormous
psychic resistance to the Supermax structure but a profound bodily resistance as
well. But what are the consequences of a penal structure so repressive that the
only resistance possible involves the willing destruction of those who would
resist?
In The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X, Karl Evanzz
outlines the racial terror that was formative to the identity construction of
Nation of Islam founder Elijah Mohammad. Mohammad’s experience as a child
in Georgia at the turn of the century and as a young man in Detroit in the 1920s
run the predictable gamut from beatings and verbal harassment and to witnessing
the lynching of a young friend. These formative experiences of violence were
compounded by the repeated acts of state violence and harassment that Muhammad
and Wallace Fard faced as they struggled to configure the Nation of Islam in its
earliest forms in Detroit during the 1930s. Fard and Muhammad were repeatedly
harassed, arrested, and beaten by the police in the early years of the movement
until Fard eventually disappeared in 1934 after police “used a little
physical persuasion to entice Fard ‘to quit the city’” (139).
Despite the police violence against him and the organization, Muhammad went on
to make the NOI into the powerful political, social, and cultural force we know
it as today. The legacy of state violence that Muhammad experienced personally
and the NOI experienced organizationally, however, was never far from him or it.
In fact Evanzz contends that it was instrumental in the most significant moment
in the organization’s history, the moment in 1963 in which Elijah Muhammad
decided to formally silence and eventually expel Malcolm X, the
organization’s most powerful spokesperson, from the NOI. (These actions,
of course, lead directly to his assassination in 1965). Evanzz writes “It
is possible that Muhammad’s decision to silence Malcolm X wasn’t
based solely upon his attempt to fend off public hostility against the NOI; his
overriding motivation may have been to prevent the FBI from destroying his sect
as it had done in 1942” (165). I discuss Muhammad and the history of the
NOI at length to suggest the power of state institutions, particularly the penal
system, to police and silence minority and dissenting cultures even when they do
not actively have their boots on our necks so to speak. Muhammad’s fear
of Malcolm X’s speech rightfully arose from his knowledge of the
state’s ability to enact powerfully violent silencing through the police
and prison systems. This could potentially have destroyed the entire
organization. His inability to conceptualize a resistance to state power that
did not involve doing the state’s work of silencing dissent is valuable if
for nothing else than its instructive power to teach us the shaping force of the
state’s power to silence as well as demonstrate the limits of certain
forms of organized resistance.
In most discussions of prisons, both within the academy and outside of
it, the guiding assumption is that the major threat that mass incarcerations
presents to minority and dissenting cultures is in its ability to lock up and
essentially neutralize large groups of people for long periods of time. If a
third of our population is either incarcerated, on parole or in court, that
effectively stops them from participating in the creation of any sort of
resistance to police or state repression. This is obviously true. However, the
example of the ways in which Elijah Muhammad’s early encounters with
prison and the police structured the growth and development of the NOI suggests
that the cultural consequences of mass incarceration are much more profound than
that. The proportion of Latino/as in state and federal prisons doubled from
1980 to 1993 (DOC). In the state of California (the state that incarcerates
more of its population than any other state in the union) seventy percent of the
prison population is people of color. Thirty-four percent of that population
and growing are Latina/os (DOC). Of the youth prison population that number is
higher (DOC). California voters are currently considering, in a measure called
Proposition 21: Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act, allowing
children to not only be more easily tried as adults but also to allow for the
incarceration of kids as young as fourteen years old in adult facilities. We
need to consider what sort of cultural possibilities are allowed or disallowed
by these moves on the part of the state.
It is important to return to the case of Luis Felipe and the Latin Kings
when we consider this question. The Latin Kings, which originated in Chicago in
the Forties, were revived by Felipe and his associates in prison allegedly for
the protection of Latino/a prisoners and to promote Latino/a pride. Despite all
the limitations that inner-city poverty creates--including limited access to
education, resources, and, obviously, to media outlets such as television, film,
and advertising–Felipe and other leaders of the Latin Kings created an
organization whose styles of articulation are known nationally. The group is
famous for the manner in which it articulates its existence verbally,
stylistically through dress, gestures, and tattoos, through rituals, and through
its written charter and discourse. The Latin King stylistic articulations
became so widespread that one police detective ruminates in print:
“We’ve got kids right here in Bismark, real North Dakota kids,
taking on inner-city gang identities” (Palmer). Others note the
independent manufacture and sale of clothing sporting the black, gold, and
signature Latin Kings crown “next to a Tommy Sport tank top, floral dress
and Los Angeles Raiders hockey jersey” (McBride). The knowledge that
members wore colorful beads to denote membership in the group became so
widespread that the group was forced to end the practice. Undoubtedly, the
creativity in which the Latin Kings approach the articulation of their credo is
at least partially responsible for the media “hype” and police
hysteria that surrounds the organization. Newspaper articles focus repeatedly
on the articulateness of figures like Luis “King Blood” Felipe and
Antonio “King Tone” Fernandez as well as the “mysteries and
rituals” that surround membership in the group. Media descriptions
routinely describe members in terms such as “thoughtful and
articulate,” “resourceful,” and “charismatic”. I
raise this not to present Luis Felipe and the Latin Kings as some sort of rebel
heroes or misunderstood insurgent or organic intellectuals as many have.
Instead, I want to seriously consider the implications of the effective
silencing of members of a group who are not only constantly described, even by
their most vehement detractors, as “articulate” but also so adept at
organizing themselves and manipulating the media that they can become an
organization of national prominence in less than fourteen years with fairly
limited resources
Luis Felipe, a high school dropout, came to New York from Cuba on the
Mariel boatlift. He proceeded to author the group’s manifesto and to
create many of the rituals and much of the discourse that helped popularize the
group on the street level. What does it mean that a man of obviously limited
resources and equally unlimited talents must be “neutralized” by the
state in such a violent fashion? And what does it mean that the Latin Kings who
are so obviously adept at creating and conveying their message can be so
effectively silenced by the state? Furthermore, what are the wider cultural
consequences of being able to effectively silence such a group for the rest of
us? It is important to note that Luis Felipe’s case is not an
“isolated incident” of the use of extreme isolation to silence a
member of a powerful voice of organized resistance and dissent. Larry Hoover, a
leader of Chicago’s Gangster Disciplines, who shares a similar history of
creative criminality with Felipe, is also scheduled to be held under similar
conditions in a Supermax facility (AP). But such a fate is not reserved only
for those whose resistance is expressed through “gangsterisms”.
When inmates rose up violently in five federal prisons in Alabama, Pennsylvania,
Illinois, Oklahoma, and Tennessee against the U.S. House of Representatives
rejection of a proposal to erase raciallized sentencing disparities between
powder and crack cocaine, the so-called “ringleaders” of the
uprising were also sent to the Supermax at Florence (Miniclier). One only has
to read the enforced silence that the recently released political prisoners from
the Puerto Rican independence movement were forced to sign in order to
extrapolate the political implications of such state powers to forcefully
silence dissent. An article eerily entitled “Prison May Be the
Answer” details the Governor of Ohio’s response to the violent
uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville, one of the
most successful prison uprisings in recent US prison history
(Lore).[1] “The answer”
that the article speaks of is not just a prison but rather the creation of a
Supermax facility. “Creating a super-maximum prison at Lucasville would
send a message to the rioters that they did not win anything in their 11-day
uprising” an official from the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
bluntly states (Lore). The DRC official goes on to boast of the
facility’s ability to isolate its prisoners from even the most trivial of
human contact. “At Lucasville, the inmates walk past the officers as they
come out of cells to go eat. At a Supermax, it would be almost all indirect
contact – pushing buttons, opening doors from behind other secure
locations” (Lore).
The building of a Supermax facility in Ohio is a direct and
expensive[2] attempt to convey to
prisoners that they do not have the right to assert dissent in any sort of
substantial form. Subsequent prison protest, both violent and
nonviolent,[3] has been met with the
use of control units to physically and psychologically terrorize and isolate
prison organizers and activists. Abdul Olugbala Shakur and Ray Luc Levasseur
have been held at Pelican Bay and Florence ADX virtually since they opened.
Levasseur, a radical political activist sentenced as part of the Ohio-7+, was
previously held at Marion, Illinois, the notorious precursor to the Supermax
facilities. The potential threat of incarceration in such a facility is held
out to intimidate the system’s “bad slaves” (to borrow a
phrase from Bill Dunne in The New Plantation). Dunne, who is himself
incarcerated at Marion, also suggests that the “purpose of prisons is
first and foremost to control the outside population” (9). I would argue
that this is done not only through the use of directly coercive methods created
in prison environments and then meted out to a wider population as Dunne
suggest. Rather, I would argue that it is also achieved by allowing a
repressive “law and order” culture to coercively permeate and
consequently structure the creative and analytical possibilities for those of us
“on the outside”. It becomes increasingly hard for members of
minority and dissenting cultures “on the outside” to even begin to
imagine let alone construct themselves as “bad slaves”.
The criminalizing of minority and dissenting culture, the violence
perpetuated against those currently incarcerated, the proliferation of police
officers and subsequently of police violence leave us all vulnerable and affect
the potential development of our cultures. In making a case for the study of
Latin American literature in conjunction with the study of the anti-colonial
struggle, Roberto Fernandez Retamar makes the simple yet profoundly significant
claim: “Our culture, like every culture, requires as a primary condition
our own existence” (38). With increasing amounts of people of color
subjected to the direct repression of the US penal system and even more
suffering indirectly from that system it becomes increasingly important to
understand the ways in which the prison industrial complex shapes and conditions
dissent within contemporary culture.
Notes
[1] In “The Straw
that Broke the Camel’s Back: The 1993 Lucasville Easter Uprising,”
prison activist John Perrotti discusses the longstanding complaints of human
rights violations in the prison and attempts by prisoner activists to get
various governmental agencies and civil rights organizations to hear these
violations.
[2] Each individual unit
in the structure is estimated to cost $74,000 (Lore).
[3] Nonviolent methods of
protest employed with varying levels of success by US prisoners include work
stoppages and hunger strikes. The system itself makes no distinction between
violent and nonviolent protest classifying them all as “serious
disturbances” (Musaa, 240).
Works Cited
Annin, Peter. “Inside the New Alcatraz: The ADX
‘Supermax’ prison redefine hard time,” Newsweek 13 July
1998.
Department of Corrections. Characteristics of Population in
California State Prisons By Institutions. Data Analysis Unit: Sacramento,
1999.
Dunne, Bill. The New Plantation. Patterson, NJ: Anarchist
Black Cross Federation, 1995.
Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm
X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992.
“Feds Plan to Limit Gang Leaders Phone, Visitors”
Associate Press Wire Service, 11 April 1997.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison. New York: Vintage Press, 1995.
Hallinan, Joseph T. “Is Hard Time Too Hard in New Supermax
Prison? Juries Awarding Damages to Inmates,” Seattle Times 25 April
1999, Sunday Weekend Edition.
James, Joy. Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and
Race in U.S. Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Johnson, Mark. “Colorado Facility is Pacesetter of Newest
‘Supermax’ Prisons,” Houston Chronicle 20 June 1999,
Star Edition.
Kocieniewski, David. “Seen as Threat, Gang Chief Gets a Life
Term in Solitary,” New York Times 15 February 1997, Late
Edition.
Kriegel, Mark. “An Exhibit Screams: Long Live the
Kings,” New York Daily News 9 March 1998.
Langton, James. “Infamous Trio Make Friends at
‘Supermax’ Prison,” Ottawa Citizen 7 February
1999.
Lore, David. “’Supermax’ Prison May Be The
Answer,” Columbus Dispatch 17 May 1993.
McBride, Jessica. “True Colors Show in Gang Clothing Up
Sale,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 27 June 1997.
Miniclier, Kit. “State Gets Prison Rioters, Supermax Holds
Some Ringleaders,” Denver Post 24 October 1995.
Musaa and Ed Kinane. “Challenging the Evil that Ills This
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of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry. Daniel Burton-Rose,
editor. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1998.
Palmer, Brian. “Campaign Stops: Gang Uniforms, True
Colors,” New York Times 15 August 1999, Late Sunday Edition.
Perlstein, Michael. “On the Trail of the Latin
Kings,” Times-Picayune 8 October 1998.
Perotti, John. “The Straw that Broke the Camel’s
Back: The 1993 Lucasville Easter Rebellion,” The Celling of America:
An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry. Daniel Burton-Rose, editor.
Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1998.
Reirden, Andi. “Is It 60’s Politics or Gang
Warfare?” New York Times 2 May 1993.
Retamar, Roberto Fernandez. “Caliban: Notes Toward a
Discussion of Culture in Our America,” Caliban and Other Essays.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1989.
Schlosser, Eric. “The Prison Industrial Complex,”
The Atlantic Monthly December 1998.
Taylor, Michael. “The Last Worst Place: The Isolation at
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Francisco Chronicle 28 December 1998.
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