How do you represent the prison system cinematically? A certain syntax of images springs to mind: a concrete wall, coils of barbed wire, or hands clasped behind iron bars, as seen in documentaries such as Louis Theroux’s Behind Bars (2008) or Reggie Yates’s The Insider: Inside a Texas Jail (2016). These films and others like them explore the prison and the toll on its inhabitants from the inside. The reach of the prison, however, extends far beyond its physical limits. America’s prison system is vast, and has grown exponentially since the 1970s. As of now, 2.3 million people are incarcerated. Millions more endure parole restrictions, correctional facilities and probation. Meanwhile, 113 million adults have an immediate family member who has been to prison or jail. Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes weaves together studies of different sites across America to show the ways in which the oppressive structures of the prison expand outwards across the nation as a whole. The landscapes chosen by Story are varied: a Marin County forest ravaged by fire, a post-industrial Kentucky town mired in economic depression, Baltimore under curfew, the Bronx on a busy night. Crowded inner cities are intercut with images of vast swathes of uncultivated lands. Extended shots give time and space to the viewer to coordinate themselves to specific landmarks and position these images on the American map, emphasising their indexicality – these are real places, real people – as Story pieces together the different social formations that make up America’s prison system, showing how each region is dependent on various relationships of coercion or exchange. Although Story never takes us inside the prison itself, her landscapes form a map of ‘carceral space’, what she defines in her book Prison Land as “the sites and relations of power that enable and incentivise the systematic capture, control and confinement of human beings through structures of immobility”.i This space is intricate, conditioned by and productive of interconnecting structures of legislation, racism and inequality that both constitute and are strengthened by the penal system. “What do we make of the flowering vine that uses as its trellis the walls of the prison?” asks Jackie Wang in Carceral Capitalism.ii Twelve Landscapes maps out this parasitic relationship.
I watched Twelve Landscapes last week with a heightened sense of how space is produced brought about by the Covid crisis. As Kyle Stevens argues in a recent blog post for Critical Enquiry, our “perception of space is reconditioned in life under Covid”. Reading classic films in light of this new mindset, Stevens demonstrates how social distancing measures have undermined our conceptions of emptiness, distance and proximity. When a hug poses the threat of infection and distance is enforced as a biopolitical response, “our encounters with fictional spaces, and with what and how they express, alters.” Stevens rightly asserts that space and place are political and that Covid renders the spatial dynamics of our social, economic and physical more visible than ever before, but I want to push his insights about Covid and visuality in a different direction, to think about how the appearance of the virus has exposed the everyday structures of carceral space. Twelve Landscapes was made pre-Covid, but it involves a similar kind of shock, a sudden visibility: watching it, we realise that the prison is everywhere.
Networking varied landscapes together, Story complicates traditional social discourses of the urban centre and the rural periphery, depicting an active, predatory network of capital and law enforcement and undercutting conceptions of the state as a natural, static structure. America’s prisons are designed to absorb surplus capital and people, moving populations outwards from overcrowded and potentially unruly cities into more sparsely populated space; the 40 state prisons built in New York state between 1982 and 2010 were all located in rural areas. But prisons are not marginal. Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Golden Gulag, marginality is a trick of perspective: “edges are also interfaces”, sites of flow and intersection rather than vectorless cul-de-sacs.iii The state, like the prison, is in a constant state of construction. Buildings are destroyed, airport tarmac stretches across space blasted through the East Kentucky mountains. The carceral state is not just there but is always being made. Although it constantly works to hide its nature, the crisis has shattered its aura of invisibility, revealing ever-active networks of ideological and material power. What, Twelve Landscapes asks, are its effects? The film explores the systems of power that allow for the expansion of capital and profit while all the time shrinking spheres of human possibility and freedom. While capital moves, people don’t: Twelve Landscapes’s roving camera and the geographical breadth of the film’s investigation contrast with the immobility of its subjects, pinned down by everyday cycles of incarceration, debt and police persecution.
In Twelve Landscapes, Story shows us an America which is usually obscured, constructing a map of a world structured around incarceration. The modular construction of the film, which investigates one landscape at a time, allows a comparative view. This is essential: the racial and class disparity determining who is incarcerated is overwhelming. The system is one that “punishes poverty”: being poor is both a ‘pre dictor’ and an ‘outcome’ of time inside. Above all, the system is also racist, undergirded by a penal code that is “breathtakingly cruel” in its “twists in the meaning and practice of justice”.iv Although they make up only 13% of the overall population, Black Americans represent 40% of incarcerated people. In between scenes of modern Los Angeles and Ferguson, Missouri, Story layers historic police footage from the Detroit riots of 1967. A camera inside a 1960s cop car scans the pavements, on the hunt, seeking out crime. The carceral state, Story seems to suggest, produces the criminal. In ‘An Essay on Liberation’, Herbert Marcuse argues that “the language of the prevailing Law and Order, validated by the courts and the police, is not only the voice but also the deed of suppression. This language not only defines and condemns the Enemy, it also creates him”.v As the cops drive through the city we hear their voices over the police radio. Here Marcuse’s ‘language’ of ‘law’ and ‘order’ is shown to be one of racial profiling. Yet to Marcuse’s ‘voice’ and ‘deed’ we must also add the ‘look’, criminality as defined and constructed by regimes of visuality: the exclusive right to determine what is shown and who can be seen. The eye of the police camera and the voice of the cop demeans and criminalises people of colour but it ignores white citizens. When the footage cuts to a white woman driving with her revolver clutched to her steering wheel, the police voice is silent. Story overlays this section with a clarinet solo, something which emphasises the relaxed police response. The police aren’t looking for her so she isn’t visualised with the same intensity – she holds the unquestioned right to bear arms. In the visual register of law and order the armed white woman is unseen and unremarked upon. When the scene shifts to modern day Ferguson, Story connects this way of looking directly to modern policing practices, highlighting continuities between past and present racism. One interviewee remarks that at a busy intersection the police “wait and see who is driving to stop the car”. They heavily patrol black neighbourhoods, which are often regulated under different zoning laws, inventing minor infractions. Placing her camera in cars with black citizens as they are forced to navigate everyday spaces structured and conditioned around the surveillant gaze of cops and CCTV, Story shows us the racist geography and city planning of America from the perspectives of those most affected.
For Jackie Wang, the penal geography of America can only be understood by considering the “interrelatedness of the economy, policing, and municipal finance”.vi One interviewee in Eastern Kentucky remarks that the local prison is “sustaining the economy”, providing jobs. It is a ‘recession-proof’ strategy that fills in the gaps where social security has been cut. In Detroit, big venture capital firms like Dan Gilbert’s Quicken Loans mortgage company embrace the intersections of policing and big business. Showing Story around the office high rise, an employee happily describes the links between private capital and state security. State police, border patrol and the companies’ private security personnel “all work together as a team” to police the area. City cops have second jobs working for the company. As the guide walks through central Detroit pointing happily to newly gentrified shop fronts, the camera zooms to close-ups of CCTV cameras which line the street. Are these the apparatus of the state or of private capital? Is there a difference? The guide assures Story that this is the “safest part of town”, later smiling to a police officer he knows. He does admit that a strip club burnt down recently. His firm then bought the empty lot. But who are these streets ‘safe’ for? What socio-economic relations is ‘safe’ productive of and conditioned by? Story wields empirical data to startling effect. In Saint Ann, Missouri, a city of only 12,000 people, the police levied $3,269,000 through ticketing in 2013. One woman in St Louis County was jailed for five days because her “trash can lid was not secured to the can”. She had to pay $337 to get out. This is what Wang terms, “offender-funded policing and punishment”, in which the carceral state feeds off its own populations to sustain itself, capitalism at its most vampiric.vii Hunting the poor makes rich people richer. As one activist declares, “they accumulate us in the prison systems and we die in the streets”, envisioning a ledger of economic profit and human loss. In her depiction of Detroit, Story shows the clash of two versions of the capitalist imaginary, utopia vs. dystopia. Shiny, sleek high-rises, and a fake beach in the city centre for venture capital employees are contrasted with visions of deprivation and scarcity. While the guide points out redeveloped areas the scene cuts to a street littered with refuse, luggage and mattresses, homeless and poor communities pushed out by new developments.
Landscapes of deficit are also landscapes of capital and human surplus. The prison-industrial complex is one way of dealing with crises of overproduction. By building more prisons surplus is value extracted and re-invested in the processes of accumulation around which the prison system is constructed. This surplus is materialised throughout Twelve Landscapes through long static shots that harness excessive, uncontrolled detail to the film image, suggesting an overflow of content and meaning. The forests of Eastern Kentucky spill over the frame; the roar of a New York street at night threatens to drown out the voices of interviewees. At all times there is a sense of aural and aesthetic excess. But this excess, while diagnostic of overproduction and crisis, also suggests imaginative lines of flight outside of the capitalist imaginary, advocating a shift from the material to the abstract as a means through which to re-think or out-think capitalism. Twelve Landscapes is punctuated with moments that render each landscape through abstracted images: a patch of blue sky, a leafy branch, lens flare from a sunset. In their beauty and isolation, shot centre-screen as if clipped out from their surroundings, they provide a kind of temporary escape, before Story mercilessly returns us to everyday materiality. In one scene from Marin Country the camera picks up a beautiful white cloud moving rapidly across the sky. As the cloud begins to darken, the camera tracks down its source, and we realise it is in fact smoke from a California forest fire, which prison inmates help to control. Abstraction is helpful, the film suggests, both in conceptualising totalities, and as a weapon against capitalism’s own abstractions, which are constantly invoked in the aesthetics of advertising, indeed in the very functioning of the exchange process itself. But the material is essential too. In The Rules of Abstraction, Leigh Clare La Berge argues that “if we begin with too abstract a concept” we risk obstructing our access to the “material, perceptible world”, but if we ignore the abstract entirely we may be “unable” to understand the place of the material “within a larger social totality”.viii Twelve Landscapes suggests that the battle for abolition and de-incarceration must be fought at both levels if real change is to occur.
In each of the 12 landscapes, Story layers together parables of capital accumulation to create a sense of suffocating density in which every aspect of life is encroached upon by the carceral state, pushing ever outward towards the prison. By moving from the minute – air vents loudly gushing hot air from prison walls – to the monumental – the maximum security concrete edifice of Attica Correctional Facility – Story harnesses the formal potential of film to structure and visualise complex depictions of space, giving us a vision of the intensifying forces of capital relations that produce the prison landscape. The thrum of planes overhead, the screech of diggers ripping down old buildings, the background blare of sirens – people are caught up in the sound and fury of the prison-industrial complex. The conventional image of the prison invokes visions of millions of tightly confined people, locked up in isolation or tightly pressed by overcrowding, but Story instead shows us the silence of incarceration: the isolation of the prison unit and the emptied spaces of the world outside. We see the deserted streets of Ferguson, Missouri, locked down under curfew after protests and riots following the killing of Black 18-year-old Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in 2014. The streets at night are lit eerily by yellow street lamps and police headlights; we hear the low sound of running engines and helicopters overhead – the city is a prison. By day, street cleaners cut the grass, blowing leaves off a road that has ‘RIP MIKE BROWN’ scorched into the tarmac. Twelve Landscapes depicts the literal ‘cleaning up’ of the area: marks of killing, community anger and hurt are erased and replaced by a suburban aesthetic order. What are the priorities of this civil society and who is it working for? Michael Brown’s body was left on the street for four hours after he was killed. But in the weeks that followed the state worked – using money drawn from the taxes of poor, Black citizens – to remove all traces of his death. Here aesthetics equals politics. Populations deemed unruly are kept out of sight, action and politics. Just as it does in the prison, the state controls who can be seen and, by extension, what can be done. The strength of Twelve Landscapes is that it shows these processes and visually describes the binaries that structure the carceral state: surplus/deficit, seen/unseen, concrete/abstract, black/white.
In marking these binaries, the film suggests possibilities for rupture, for breaking through the state-set limits of possibility. Must we remain in a relationship that sets economic surplus against human deficit? Story’s exposure of the structures that shape our conceptions of the social world implies that what is needed is abolition and full structural upheaval. Angela Davis argues that the prison “is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives”, and so while prison abolitionists ask whether prison reduces crime (it doesn’t) or helps rehabilitation (again, no), a key task is to undercut this sense of inevitability and necessity.ix The prison system is a choice, not an inevitability. Abolition demands a fundamental confrontation with the often unexamined ideological discourses that shape our expectation of how society can be built. This must, in part, be an aesthetic confrontation – a wrenching away from normative conceptions of what the world should look like. If Twelve Landscapes weaves together multiple images of injustice to depict a totalising structure, it also signals beyond itself, wanting not just to show what is there in the frame of the image, but to instruct the viewer in ways of seeing that show these social relations everywhere. Look at this, Twelve Landscapes demands of its audience, and then look further, there is more.
Story’s depiction of the prison-industrial complex exposes a vast web of inter-relationality, surprising us into seeing things previously hidden. So too has the Covid crisis. For Kyle Stevens the pandemic has already changed how we view cinema: images of individuals in wide open space, such as Maria in Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965), now suggest “sovereignty of expression” and “joy’. He argues that our perception of once lonely images has altered, thus the sight of C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), an insurance company clerk, working alone in an office at night in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) is now read more positively: “loneliness is less available to visual signification as it once was” – isolation is now legible as ‘solitude’, in the Arendtian sense of being in dialogue or “together with myself”.x Baxter also “seems lucky to get out of the house”. But for me the image of Baxter alone in the office is still a tragic one – he is alienated from himself and his surroundings. When seen from our late neoliberal perspective, the scene is even bleaker: the hundreds of empty seats that surround him are a testament to the millions of ‘bullshit jobs’ that are generated and reliant on the existence of equally useless and unnecessary work. In the context of the pandemic I feel this loss and waste more acutely. Now, he is risking it all for unnecessary, alienating labour. Stevens’s reading is, I think, optimistic. Under Covid, the exigencies of the wage relation should make us more sad, more angry, more scared. If not now, when? As we move deeper into the crisis, aesthetic structures sharpen and become more legible, and the question of bodies in space becomes more than just a question of representing proximity. A Covid visuality that equates distance with security is optimistic, even comforting, but falters when we consider the security state. How does the state secure distance for its citizens? Or more specifically, who does it secure this space for? For whom does it secure security?
Within the bounds of carceral capitalism distance often means occlusion, isolation and political atomisation or powerlessness. In the same way, too much proximity – in prisons or in overcrowded housing – risks infection. The function of the prison is to distance, to cover up the spectacles of punishment, racism and oppression. Out of sight, out of mind. For me, the crisis has led to a re-privileging of abstraction as a method for envisioning systematic change, one in which the political vectors of abstract and concrete space can be discussed alongside one another. Twelve Landscapes does this perfectly. This can be pushed further, to make visible what Arundhati Roy calls “the engine of capitalism”, in order so that we may better “examine its parts”. The systems which undergird social and economic life function to the detriment of us all. If we can better visualise the structures of inequality, it might be easier to push against them. This crisis is hopefully temporary, but it will be important to remember what it has shown us.
Covid’s regime of visuality makes clearer the paradox at the heart of the liberal (and neo-liberal) state: that the bourgeois states’ negative freedoms – for example, the freedom from external restraint – are ultimately guaranteed by the prison. One wrong foot in the Hobbesian quagmire and every civil liberty will be extinguished. It also opens up new questions. Who are these negative freedoms really available to? How do we build up positive freedoms – better public health, education and workers rights? As the crisis of Covid overlays the crisis of capitalism it helps us map its contours: the state is more visible than ever. Story puts it excellently: the neo-liberal state is one that “grows on the promise of shrinking”.[xi] But the crisis has undermined the power of the state to veil itself in its mythologies, laying bare the repercussions of its material incursions into everyday life. News from Rikers, FCI Oakdale, and others highlight how quickly the prison system has exposed inmates to Covid infection, and how little the carceral state has done to help them. California has released 3,100 people from prison, Rikers, 300. This is not enough. Indeed, how much can be done as long as the state remains committed to its carceral structure? Story puts marginalised places at the centre of the map to represent carcerality as a continuum, linked together by Wang’s “flowering vine that uses as its trellis the walls of the prison”. Yet as Derecka Purnell argues in The Guardian, the pandemic demonstrates that “previously unthinkable” change is possible. Twelve Landscapes shows us how we might visualise power; in doing so, Story removes its gloss of inevitability. We are shown, again and again, that the prison has never been just or necessary.
Georgie Carr is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers
