Nestled in a folder within the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections archives is a black-and-white picture of an event called “Family Day.” Held at State Correctional Institution–Camp Hill, a men’s prison just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the photo, taken during the 1950s, offers a glimpse of the joyful, if all-too-fleeting, event: it shows prisoners and their families congregating on the visiting area lawn, splayed out on picnic blankets and at picnic tables, and immersed in conversation. Prisoners’ families were not only allowed to spend time and be close with incarcerated loved ones, but to bring in home-cooked food to share with them, an undeniable luxury for prisoners otherwise forced to eat inedible prison fare. You can almost hear the probable cacophony of laughs, children’s play, and steady staccatos of conversation that likely brought a rare liveliness to an otherwise bleak site of unfathomable racialized and gendered state terror.

What makes the picture striking is its revelation of a time when the prison’s walls were more porous, both for imprisoned people and those in the free world. The present-day norm is hyper-security, surveillance, and restriction, which forcefully separates prisoners from the free world, severely limits their connection to their families, and disappears the violence of their incarceration. Yet such a contemporary nightmare, as this picture shows, is not an historical constant. Rather, as Reiko Hillyer argues in her generative new book A Wall Is Just a Wall, “the impermeability of the prison is neither natural nor inevitable but rather a recent, uneven, and contested phenomenon.”

Spanning across a diversity of states and criminal legal systems, Hillyer examines three sites of struggle over the prison’s permeability: clemency, conjugal visits, and furloughs, or temporary releases that allowed prisoners to leave prisons for hours or days at a time. In doing so, she disrupts the standard historiography of late 20th-century law and order by unearthing a more “contradictory juncture” when crises of prisoner unrest and prison overcrowding prompted experiments, to varying degrees, of prisoner release. Attending to the shifting boundaries of the prison need not suggest there was ever a “golden age” of incarceration, and Hillyer goes to great lengths to contextualize even the more “porous” eras of imprisonment, where prisoner release or visits with the outside world were more common, within reactionary regimes of racial social control.

Still, articulating this history of the prison’s permeability can help scholars and organizers communicate the broader contingency—and disruptability—of seemingly entrenched ideas about crime, public safety, rehabilitation, and indeed the prison itself. In so doing, Hillyer upends the idea that mass caging is, or ever should be, accepted common sense.

I recently chatted with Reiko about her book’s historiographical interventions, application to contemporary abolitionist movements, and the important—if analytically tricky—work of untangling history’s odd and sometimes unsavory contingences.

Charlotte Rosen (CR): In your introduction, you very powerfully write, “We now understand that mass incarceration is relatively new. What is even newer is mass disappearance.”

Can you share what you mean by “mass disappearance,” and why interrogating “mass disappearance” is important for historians of the carceral state and US historians more generally? What does that analytic offer, both historiographically and politically?

Reiko Hillyer: I’m building on a now rich historiography that tracks the policies and ideologies that have led to mass incarceration. What I’m trying to add to that is a closer look at how the punitive policies that criminalize more and more people and established harsher sentences were accompanied by changing prison conditions and particularly conditions that had to do with the relationship between incarcerated people in the free world.

What I mean by mass disappearance is that, until the 1990s or so, there was a suite of practices that connected incarcerated people to the free world, some of which emerged at the exact moment that mass incarceration developed. These are practices like furlough, conjugal visits, and the regular use of clemency. All of these practices connected prisoners to the free world and exemplified a more rehabilitative approach—a problematic term—but nonetheless, they represented practices that created more fluidity between inside and outside and also offered real concrete promise of early release.

During the lifetime of many incarcerated people in the late 20th century, all of those practices disappeared. So, the reason why this is important historiographically is that essentially, a generation of imprisoned people were suddenly disappeared, in the sense that they faced incredibly devastating consequences and radical change in their own conditions during their own lifetimes. These shifts really severed them not only from their communities but also from any hope of release. That disappearance helped to underwrite an ideology that imprisoned people are permanently incorrigible, dangerous, and disposable.

This idea of permanent exile—what now appears as unfortunately standard criminal legal practice today—has to be historicized and understood from the point of view of incarcerated people, who witnessed their conditions change before their eyes.

It’s also a useful intervention politically because it teaches us to unlearn some of the common sense about crime and punishment that suggests these structures of lengthy incarceration and permanent exile are required for public safety. On this note, knowing this history of the prison’s prior permeability provides politicians political cover, if they decide to engage in compassionate release of elderly prisoners. It demonstrates that doing so is not some radical left-wing idea; that such a practice used to be common sense for everyone from like Ross Barnett to Ronald Reagan to someone we might consider to be more progressive. That’s useful politically.

I’m also disrupting the periodization of mass incarceration a little. We often understand the periodization of mass incarceration to be something that’s on the rise in the ’70s and then really spikes in the ’90s. There’s this assumption that it was a straightforward march toward tough on crime. But I find that a lot of these efforts to open the prison up and create pathways for imprisoned people to participate in various forms of release—practices that would now seem, to the broad public, absurd or unthinkable—were actually being liberalized. Furloughs and conjugal visits were introduced at the same time that politicians were crying for more law and order, when tough-on-crime rhetoric was on the rise, and alongside efforts to implement increasingly harsher sentencing. In other words, there’s this moment of contingency and possibility, where there are all these different roads and lots of different ways the prison system could have gone.

Geographically, I had a wonderful time letting the evidence lead me from state to state to state. A lot of histories of mass incarceration focus on an individual state or they’re focused on the federal level. But once you start to look at what becomes best practices among people who run prisons—the sociologists, corrections professionals and so forth, they’re traveling from state to state, their ideas migrate. So I’m able to look at how prison practices are contingent and malleable and transform across time and space. That’s something I hope is useful.

CR: One of the most illustrative—if disturbing—histories you chart is the history of clemency. On the one hand, it’s incredibly striking that there were governors in segregationist states like Mississippi and Louisiana who were approving hundreds, sometimes thousands of pardons and commutations, whereas today some states’ numbers are barely in the dozens. There was a clear understanding that most people sentenced to life would receive some kind of discretionary release; in Louisiana, the 10/6 rule meant that people sentenced to life were routinely released after 10.5 years via clemency.

But as you detail, these were avowedly white supremacist Southern governors invested in sustaining the Jim Crow system. Even as their actions technically resulted in the release of imprisoned people, you describe the practice as the “velvet glove of racism” and an “apparent relic of Old South noblesse,” that was meant to codify a white Southern paternalism where an “architecture of Jim Crow was enough to keep former prisoners in check.” In the wake of the civil rights movement and the crumbling of the de jure Jim Crow racial order, it’s not shocking that these same Southern governors began to abandon the practice, resulting in a contemporary moment where clemency is comparatively rare.

Can you say more about the implications of this history of clemency, not only for scholars of mass imprisonment but also for scholars of the civil rights movement and modern Southern politics?

RH: In Dan Berger’s Captive Nation, he writes something about how confinement was, and is, a persistent feature of Black life. In centering the prison that way as both a site and as a theoretical framework, he’s also showing (and here he is explicitly riffing on the work of Black radical imprisoned writers and theorists) how prison is this revolving door, where the broader world is also one of racialized carcerality. If you’re in prison, that’s maximum security. Anywhere outside, in the so-called free world, is minimum security.

Black and Third World revolutionaries see this fluidity between inside and outside as an indicator of oppressiveness. But I’m trying to turn that relationship on its side a little bit or slice it in a slightly different way, which is to say that in this era of very explicit Jim Crow paternalism, governors could afford to engage in what we might consider forgiving practices because there were other mechanisms of racial control beyond the prison walls. Under Southern white supremacy, in other words, there are other repressive, deeply violent means for keeping “disorderly” people in their place in the so-called “free” world.

Clemency could then serve the political and performative need to demonstrate white Southern paternalist benevolence. Until, of course, the civil rights movement begins to challenge this white supremacist culture of deference. If the continuity of the prison is Jim Crow, then the dismantling of Jim Crow required a new site of containment and control.

What’s interesting in tracking white Southern governors’ use of clemency is that you can really see how certain kinds of behavioral expectations and a certain performance of social relations are required to get to that expression of mercy. Once those social norms are out the window as the result of the civil rights movement, it’s almost like the revenge of the former slave owner, the hardening of what had always been oppressive and racist relations to be sure, but one where previously, a certain performance of deferential personalism could actually win favor. For example, even when governors in the South became more reluctant about granting clemency as a regular feature of their administration, they still continued to free (mostly Black) prisoners who had faithfully worked at the governor’s mansion. Liberals who smell racist paternalism in such clemencies join with tough-on-crime folks to foster a greater suspicion of clemency overall. Building on Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right, the bureaucratization of these processes, and the removal of discretion—meant, of course, to remove discretion for racist judges in the South—actually helped produce a more punitive politics.

Looking at clemency is a way of looking at the changes in the ideological terms of social relations during that period, if that makes sense. The liberal need to be race-neutral converged with Southern conservative desire, in a post–civil rights moment, for a more punitive politics. It was a race to the bottom where the politics shifted so that it became a bipartisan consensus that harsher is safer.

But this isn’t an immediate or linear process. Even as the criminal legal system is becoming more and more punitive through the ’70s and ’80s, there’s still governors in the South, like Governor Winter of Mississippi, who released hundreds of people early because of an overcrowding crisis. And this was defended as pure common sense. In that same era, there was a convention of Southern governors focused on dealing with the criminal justice system. There were panels about decarceration, and corrections professionals were saying things like we have to view prison as a limited resource. This is in the 1980s.

The decline of furloughs and clemency were entwined within the same reactionary ethos of penal harm and mass disappearance that gained traction in the 1990s.

CR: Definitely. Many people would be shocked at the amount of openings for and experiments in decarceration during the law-and-order era, in large part prompted by the crisis of prison overcrowding. It doesn’t change the outcome of racialized mass imprisonment, nor does it mean we should view state actors engaged in discussions about alternatives to incarceration as at all virtuous or decarceral, but it does disrupt the sense of inevitability or linearity of the story.

Moving us onto the history of conjugal visits, can you share what conjugal visits are and how tracking the politics of the practice over time can shape our understanding of the US carceral state?

RH: Conjugal visits, or more accurately, family visits, are visits during which a spouse or other family member, including children, are allowed to visit the prison and stay with their incarcerated loved one in separate, relatively private quarters for an extended period of time, ranging from 24 to 72 hours. The development and decline of conjugal visits are a great window for seeing how penological practices are contingent and malleable and contradictory. These practices give us a glimpse into the purpose of prison at any given moment. They reveal the nature of punishment and how it’s perceived and how social relations are understood at any given moment, especially regarding sexuality.

Like with the history of clemency, conjugal visits emerge out of the white supremacist politics and ideologies of the Southern plantation prison. Conjugal visits began in Mississippi’s Parchman Farm as a way of boosting the morale of disproportionately Black incarcerated people who were imagined as nothing more than expendable laborers with primal physical needs. There’s no pretense to moral rehabilitation or uplift in that context. It’s just brutal and racist physical extraction.

Mississippi eventually constructed an arrangement where imprisoned people could have relatively private dwellings, whether it was a trailer or a cabin, where families could be alone. They had occasional checks, but they were left more or less unsupervised for 36 hours and in some cases, 72 hours. Imprisoned people could cook food with their loved ones, help children with homework, and go fishing, in the case of Parchman.

Initially conjugal visits are largely confined to the Jim Crow South. But in the 1960s, in response to prison unrest and amid new sociological thinking about the potential for so-called “situational homosexuality”—to arise in the prison context, there’s a social and political effort to shore up heterosexual nuclear family values in prison. None other than Governor Ronald Reagan becomes the first governor outside Mississippi to endorse conjugal visits to promote heteronormativity and to offer a carrot in the context of prison unrest. Conjugal visits became a common practice in California and became a part of the state’s image as, not necessarily progressive in the way you and I might understand it, but as a place for creative innovation. As a result, the practice becomes something that is debated and tested and experimented with, and adopted in over a dozen states.

Then in the 1990s, conjugal visits come under attack. Conservatives accused the practice of creating “country club conditions” that coddled prisoners and contributed to the production of, in their racially loaded words, “illegitimate children” from the wrong kinds of families.

So conjugal visits are taken away in a moment of vicious anti-welfare rhetoric and amid the ascent of a penal harm movement, whose proponents argued that the prison is meant for suffering, that no one inside should have any privilege that should give them any kind of comfort. Conjugal visits start to disappear in all but a few states.

CR: What’s so wild and gutting about this history is how, because of the punitive imposition of increasingly lengthy sentences with fewer and fewer opportunities for release, there are imprisoned people still in cages today who have seen firsthand their ability to access and be close with their families and loved ones get foreclosed by tough-on-crime politics. They have literally experienced the end of the prison’s permeability, and at great emotional and psychic cost. You talk about this in the book too; how crucial it is to attend to these stories of loss and constriction from the perspective of incarcerated people.

RH: The fact that people could experience things like conjugal visits and have them taken away is something that we don’t always consider when we’re thinking about broad historical trajectories and policy changes. I am exploring what change over time means for the life cycle of a person as opposed to thinking in terms of abstract eras. People who may have conceived a child on a conjugal visit, and changed that child’s diapers and taught them how to fish inside prison, are now forbidden to give them a hug. Prisoners a few decades ago were able to wear their own clothes, play against free-world baseball teams, leave the prison to take college classes, and most significantly, realistically hope for release. The thickening of prison walls was a devastating loss for those people; those incarcerated over the past 40 years have watched freedom slip farther and farther away over time.

CR: Your chapters on the politics of furloughs offer probably the first serious history of the infamous Willie Horton scandal. You detail not only how the event was cynically deployed by George H. W. Bush to smear Dukakis as soft on crime, but also how it empowered a reactionary, tough-on-crime victims’ right movement that helped seal “a new set of assumptions about risk and redeemability.” Why is this history important?

RH: So much of this research surprised me, not only because it was new to me but also because I was in college during the Willie Horton scandal. So I was absolutely stunned to discover, through my research, that people were once able to leave a Mississippi prison in 1971 to go play chess at a local high school, or to discover that in Washington State there was a short-lived program called Take a Lifer to Dinner. Because lifers weren’t allowed furlough in Washington, prison employees could sponsor a lifer and invite them over for dinner, just to their home. In the 1950s, a band from Angola played at a high school prom.

Once I began exploring the expansiveness of furlough as common practice, I was able to really historicize Willie Horton and understand what an exception that situation really was, and how it marked a turning point.

The turning point isn’t that he committed this crime while on furlough but rather the claim that he was typical rather than exceptional. During the Jim Crow period, if a prisoner failed to return from furlough on time, governors and corrections officials shrugged their shoulders at an acceptable rate of error, but by the 1980s, politicians sensationalized the case in order to create a sense that incarcerated people constituted a perpetual danger. Further, what Willie Horton indexes is the rise of a victims’ rights movement and victims’ rights discourse, which is sometimes co-opted in ways that don’t fully represent all constituencies of victims. Generally this discourse promotes a retributionist, all-or-nothing ethic that suggests no one in prison should have what I, the victim, cannot have.

How come the prisoner gets to have a child? My daughter didn’t get to have a child. How come he gets to leave prison for the weekend? I can’t take a break for the weekend from the prison of my grief. And so on. This zero-sum view is that any kind of comfort for prisoners becomes an insult to and evidence of continued harm for the victim. This makes it so that any gain for prisoners in terms of rights or access to the outside world become losses or offenses against decent law-abiding people.

But there are other ethics that rest on the idea that uplift and care for everyone improves the lives of everyone. To borrow from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, where life is precious, life is precious. But when you have this zero-sum ethic, then you can also turn that into a particular definition of public safety where the public is perceived as perpetual potential victims. Jonathan Simon talks about how in this moment the crime victim is perceived as the idealized political subject. If everyone is always the potential crime victim, there’s always this kind of us and them; there are monsters we have to be scared of all the time and must contain. What this does is distort the actual likelihood of danger just on a factual basis and feed into the idea that we’re all entitled to zero risk all the time. The result is that people who are incarcerated are tethered to their original crime as a predictor of future risk, which is simply not true for people who’ve served a lot of time in prison.

One moment that shows this shift exactly is the case of furlough in Arizona, where in 1988 the eligibility for furlough switched from an individual’s behavior in prison to the nature of the original crime determining eligibility for furlough. This makes it so that people who are changing over time, as humans do, are fixed in the moment of their original crime. That has tremendous material and spiritual consequences for those people. Ideologically, it underwrites the public fear and misunderstanding that there is such a thing as this entire class of perpetually dangerous people.

The demise of furlough is also importantly bound up in the demise of clemency. In Massachusetts, where the Horton case took place, furlough was an essential mechanism to demonstrate you were ready for clemency. It was a way to demonstrate your adjustment to society. It was a way to keep up with social networks, cultivate avenues of possible employment, and build healthy relationships with community that enable all of us to thrive. On the basis of successful furloughs, then, the governor could comfortably grant clemency. And so the decline of furloughs and clemency were entwined within the same reactionary ethos of penal harm and mass disappearance that gained traction in the 1990s.

CR: Something I really relate to in this book is the political complexity of trying to write about a moment in history where there were more opportunities for prisoner release or mobility comparative to today while also maintaining that these mechanisms did not make the criminal punishment system more just (especially when they were their most nimble during the apex of Jim Crow). It’s tricky to discuss these histories, and the contingencies or possibilities for imprisoned people that they offered, while still being clear that no form of imprisonment is humane, that this was not some “golden age” of imprisonment we should aim to return to, as you write.

Can you say more about how you attempt to hold these multiple truths, and why revisiting the specifics of prison permeability matters even if it does not alter the fundamental analysis of prisons as sites of inherent racialized and gendered violence, and as a form of counterinsurgent war, as Orisanmi Burton has recently articulated?

RH: It helps us all to know the history. The idea that even prison abolitionists might not know that people used to have these experiences, and that their ability to engage with the outside world, however limited, was taken for granted, is important in and of itself. Any of us, no matter where our politics are or what we imagine for the future, take a lot for granted about the nature of our present and past. Any time we peel back those layers and disrupt what we unwittingly accept as common sense, it just shakes the snow globe and gives us a little more imagination.

I also think that, if we’re going to end mass incarceration, we have to incorporate a politics of decarceration alongside one that seeks to reduce the potential for people to enter the system in the first place. We have to address those who are currently incarcerated and grapple with the epidemic of extreme sentences that is plaguing our country and recognize that a pretty swift and low-risk way of shrinking the prison population is to let entire categories of people out with some review process in place, which some states are exploring.

So the history I’m telling is meant to offer a menu of ways that people over time perceived incarcerated people’s relationship to the free world, which I hope gets people thinking about how there are millions of incarcerated people right now who do not need to be there. Many have witnessed the foreclosure of release and access to the outside world that I’m tracking in their own lifetimes. We do not have to accept what is actually a quite recent politics of mass disappearance as our norm.

I’m also arguing for more interaction between inside and outside. People who are doing this work on various levels need to consider how to organize with people on the inside, including people who are lifers who have been agitating and working and theorizing and arguing for their own transformation as well as the system’s transformation for decades. They need the collaboration and resources of the people from the outside. In doing this, you’re breaking down the walls and refusing the totalizing experience that the prison wants to inflict. Struggling together in that way across the walls is a way of refusing the prison’s impermeability in real time. That’s another takeaway. 

Featured image: Reiko Hillyer, courtesy of the author.