Government course called Prisons gets inside of its subject matter

By Franklin Crawford

Professor Mary Katzenstein's fall 2002 government class at Cornell is simply titled: Prisons. That's not an academic metaphor.

Throughout the semester, nearly 130 of Katzenstein's students explored the so-called "prison-industrial complex" and what many prominent sociologists label as America's "experiment in mass incarceration." Katzenstein's students visited two of the four adult maximum security prisons located within an hour's drive of the Cornell campus: Five Points, a newly constructed "state-of-the-art facility" on the grounds of the former Seneca Army Depot, north of Ithaca, and Elmira Prison, which sits in a suburban neighborhood 45 minutes southwest of Ithaca.

Former inmate Charles LaCourt lectures in the Prisons course, Nov. 19, in Bradfield Hall. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

"Part of what this course is about -- at many levels -- is making the prison visible," said Katzenstein. "On the morning news, in the papers, we are treated daily to crime stories, many of them almost unbearable. That is one side of the story. But these stories efface another reality. Crime is visible. Prison is not."

Some students were shocked by prison conditions in Elmira as compared to the new Five Points facility. But others, like Nyissia Charmaine Spruill, came away with different impressions.

"I expected it to be worse than it was in terms of CO (correctional officer) relations and prisoners," said Spruill, a sophomore with a double major in government and Spanish. "The COs were cordial and many were born and raised in Elmira with previous and current relatives that work for the prison as well, which I found interesting. What I got out of the visit and what I seemed to get out of the class is the utter difference in how academics see situations compared to people actually in the situations."

Becky Selling, a freshman in arts and sciences, said her visit to Five Points was unforgettable.

"Prisons are really the antithesis of life at Cornell," she said. "A university is a place budding with motivation, excitement, progress and success. ... You hear about prisons and what they are like, but it is an entirely different experience actually setting foot inside one and having big metal gates shut behind you."

In addition to prison visits, students critically examined the reasons why prison construction has become a growth industry in America and how public policy has played into that expansion. The course includes documentary films, visits to the city of Ithaca's Drug Court and guest lectures from people like Charles LaCourt, a recovering drug addict who did three stints in New York state prisons, once for armed robbery and twice for drugs; and Tom Eisenschmidt, the former superintendent at Five Points.

Given that 30 percent of African-American males between the ages of 15 and 24 are imprisoned, the question of how race and racism play into the picture also was addressed in the course, among other major themes, including treatment of women in prison and prison reform.

Rathin Yagnik, a senior in government, who visited Ithaca's Drug Court and interviewed defendants as well as police for a class project, said the course was "excellent in helping me combine the theoretical frameworks of America's prison 'experiment' with actual field observations. I was able to learn from actually visiting a prison or observing the Drug Court or listening to guest lecturers in class."

From his studies, Yagnik has concluded that "the so-called 'prison industrial complex' and the implied demographics of incarceration pose a severe threat to the legitimacy of democracy in the United States. And the worst part," he said, "is that the problem, by volume as well as its policy implications, is growing larger by the day."

Getting at the politics of imprisonment is the core intellectual objective of the course, said Katzenstein, and she pushes students to see that "the use of incarceration as the overwhelming response to crime is a political choice," she said. "To understand policies as contingent, we read about the Black Codes that after the Civil War insured that newly freed slaves would be disproportionately incarcerated (and available through convict leasing schemes as inexpensive labor); we read about crime as an electoral issue and a tool of partisan politics; we learn about the different policies pursued by the police departments in New York City and Boston; we think critically and deeply about what the concept of the 'prison-industrial complex' means and whether the dollar and political profits are all that this term implies; we think about the growing use of drug courts as an alternative to incarceration. The course, that is, tries to understand prisons not as 'destiny' but as willed."

Spruill said she spoke with various people who had passed through the prison system, some of whom reached quite different conclusions about it.

"One man said he did not see a system perpetuating penitentiaries of color, but rather that every bid [jail sentence] he did was because of his own careless behavior and that he had the same opportunities as everyone else," said Spruill. "I also spoke with a former inmate who did not see any other way to live but through crime. He did not believe he had many opportunities."

Harriet Antczak, a junior English major, visited both Elmira and Five Points prisons. While those trips were eye openers, Antczak said the facts as they stand are disturbing enough.

"I feel that we are trying to hide away all that we don't like, or that frightens us, and the consequences are both tragic and terrifying," she said. "When learning about the children and families of those in prison, and the 'collateral consequences' of mass incarceration, the laws just don't seem to make sense."

But Antczak, a volunteer with Cornell Companions at the MacCormick Center, a detention facility for youth in nearby Slaterville, said she is not a prison abolitionist, although she is opposed to the death penalty.

"There are people who need to be locked up, perhaps for life ... for the safety of society. Some people do terrible things and deserve to suffer the consequences."

Leslie Lucero, a senior government major, said after the course, she is "much more critical and hesitant to blindly accept what I see and hear about prisons. I will never again be able to view prisons, the criminal justice system, or what democracy and citizenship mean in this country in the same way."