The PrisonCare Podcast
The PrisonCare Podcast
Way Down in the Hole Pt. 1 Solitary Confinement with Dr. Angela Hattery and Dr. Earl Smith
Sabrina gets to interview Drs. Angela Hattery and Earl Smith, professors of Sociology and authors of the new book, WAY DOWN IN THE HOLE. Learn about Solitary Confinement. Learn about its torturous impact on those held in those solitary cells, and on the Correctional Officers who work the unit. Part 1 of 2.
To purchase a copy of
Way Down in the Hole
visit https://smithandhattery.com/
Time Markers:
0:49 Welcome to Solitary Confinement
3:35 Who are these authors, anyway?
6:00 Why did you do this study?
13:28 Ethnographic…say what??
16:50 The Power of Personal Observation
20:12 The Big Take-Aways (and Strip-Searches)
26:51 The COs in Solitary
30:00 Some Brief Excerpts
We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version)
Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to the PrisonCare Podcast!
I’m Sabrina Justison, founder of PrisonCare.org, equipping compassionate people to support the often-invisible people groups who make up a prison neighborhood - the inmate residents, correctional officers, staff, administration, and the families of all of these folks.
Join me for this week’s episode, and be encouraged to think, care, and respond as we explore the challenges facing prison neighborhoods everywhere.
Let’s support positive prison culture from the outside, because EVERYone on the inside matters.
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(0:49) I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Angela Hattery, and Dr. Earl Smith, professors of Sociology at the University of Delaware, about their new book, Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy, and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement. Before you decide to skip listening to this episode because you fear it will make your brain hurt, give me a sec! While this book will hopefully be used in college classrooms all over the country, it does not read like a textbook. It is a story. It is MANY stories. It is the result of years of the authors’ lives spent in an effort to give voices to voiceless people.
We know a bit about prison, right? Maybe we have only recently begun learning (like me!), but there are ways to gain a good understanding about prisons in the U.S., what works and what doesn’t, and how the negative environment is terrible for everyone there — inmate residents and Correctional Officers alike.
But what about solitary confinement? What do you actually know about the state of solitary in the U.S. in 2022? Any idea how many folks are held in isolation? Do you know the many names for solitary, and why it’s called something different every time you turn around? Do you know WHY there are prisoners who are confined to solitary? Do you understand what they did to get there?
There are an estimated 75,000 or so people locked in solitary confinement cells every day in the U.S. That’s a really fuzzy estimate, but it’s a lot of people. For scale, that’s about 3x as many students as there are at the University of Delaware in 2022.
But we know next-to-nothing about what life is like in solitary, because it is the hidden space of a prison. Prisons are already designed to be out of view. We forget about them easily because most of us don’t even drive past one each day. But solitary is much, much easier to forget. It’s out of sight, even for the people in the prison neighborhood. And it matters to people like you, who are listening to The PrisonCare Podcast, because the way specialized housing units (one of the many names for isolation units) are run is indicative of the prison’s culture overall. The focus is on punishment, not rehabilitation.
(3:35) So stick around for this episode. I think it will be really moving, even as it teaches you a lot of stuff. Drs. Hattery and Smith — Angie and Earl — not only care about the subject matter, they care about the people they interviewed in the process of writing this book.
They spent 3 years inside the solitary confinement units of a variety of prisons, having been given unprecedented access to prisoners and staff for their ethnographic study. Their book, Way Down in the Hole, tells the stories of the people they met. It tells the story of an alternate universe, the world of a solitary unit, a unit that feels underground even though it is not. And the authors CARE deeply about the people they met there. Take a listen!
Here’s a quick bio about each of the authors you’ll be listening to in our interview:
Angela Hattery, is Professor of the Women & Gender Studies and co-Director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender Based Violence at the University of Delaware. She received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Carleton College and her masters and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of 12 books. Her most recent, Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement explores the ways in which racial antagonisms are exacerbated by the particular structures of solitary confinement. She is also the author of Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change (2022) and Gender, Power and Violence: Responding to Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence in Society Today. Prior to coming to UD she held positions at Ball State University, Wake Forest University, Colgate University, and most recently at George Mason University.
Earl Smith, PhD, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Sociology at Wake Forest University, and is currently teaching classes in Sociology, African and African American Studies, and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. Dr. Smith earned his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut. His teaching and research focus on the sociology of sport, social stratification, and the intersection of race and the criminal justice system. He is the author of 12 books, including his most recent book, Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement (2021). The book is based on three summers of ethnographic research in a large state penitentiary system. Methodologically, we conducted over 100 face-to-face interviews with inmates and correctional officers. His other books include Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change (2022) and Gender, Power and Violence: Responding to Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence in Society Today and Race, Sport and the American Dream (2014).
That’s our guests today. Let’s dive in!
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Sabrina:
(6:00) I want to hear about why you did the study that led to the book, Way Down in the Hole. Because prison and solitary is not your general field of study, right? Tell me a little bit about your background and your focus.
Earl: Well, it's a good question, because inside of the research that we've been doing for years, we have also been studying prisons. And when I think about a book we wrote on the African-American family, one of the chapters in the middle of the book was on incarceration. And when the book went out for peer review, one of the main critiques that came back was, “Why are these people including a chapter on incarceration in a family book, not a textbook, but a family book. And as we're standing around thinking, “How do we, how do we answer that?” ‘cause you’ve got to go back to the editor and answer these critics’ queries, questions. And we say, “Well, it stands to reason that you are not going to find many African-Americans, at least below a certain socioeconomic status, who don't have someone who has been incarcerated.” And immediately — we both teach family courses — immediately we went back and said, “Let's look at these books we use in our family courses.” And none of them, not one, has any conversation, any discussion of any depth, on incarceration. You say, “Well, how can that be?” Then we went to specific scholars, who are at the top of the list of studying family. They didn't have it. So we responded that, “Hey, based on our own work, and based on what we've learned in writing this book, we have to have this chapter on incarceration.”
S: It’s a factor that’s impacting them.
E: Absolutely. And at the time — this is 2006-2007 — the incarceration piece that — now people talk about mass incarceration, etc. — this is growing. I mean, it's coming up here. So, we may not have written, like, a stand-alone work on incarceration, but we were writing chapters and essays on the topic.
The way we get to solitary confinement is…nobody was going into solitary confinement. I mean, you didn't have, at least you didn't have social-behavioral scientists, going into solitary. Terry Kupers is a psychiatrist; he was going into solitary. Other people we've met over the past couple years, doctors, etc., they were going into solitary. But most of their work was being done on behalf of clients, on behalf of the state, etc. and so forth. So you just didn't pick up a book by a psychologist, or sociologist, or economist that told you something about solitary confinement.
We moved to a new university in 2010 or so, and starting to meet colleagues around campus, and Angela knew someone that knew someone, and we find out that this professor is using our book on reentry. So, wow! That's great!
(laughter)
A: No one uses that book, so it was nice!
E: And so, we get invited to have a chat. We get invited to go into the classroom, so we start to build this friendship with our colleague. And out of the blue, at one point she says, “You know, in the way these things work. I know somebody that works in the Department of Corrections,” (I think someone maybe she went to graduate school with, or what have you.) “who’s high up in the Department of Corrections, and they signed off on a study on solitary confinement.” And then she asked us if we would like to be involved.
And that's exactly how it worked. We stumbled into it.
S: That is so cool.
E: Yeah.
S: That sounds like how I stumbled into you guys!
A: Yeah! It’s a lot about network.
S: It really is about meeting people.
A: And it's about, as you know your whole doing it while having the courage to talk about what you do, or what you're living. In your case, it's what you’re living. And people go, “Oh, wait a second! I know somebody else,” you know. That's how we met, right?
E: So that's how we got into it.
S: What was the timeframe? From when that connection happened, and and then you actually started the study, and the study was over three years?
E: Three summers. In between the summers, doing various stuff with the data, etc. 5 years?
A: It's a long process. I mean, we probably met Danielle in, maybe, 2012. We went into the prisons for the first time in 2017. We had our last research trip in 2019, and then the book comes out, technically the copyright is 2023. So that gives you a sense of really how long it takes.
E: But the publisher, who we don't have a loving relationship with, the publisher sat on the book for almost a year. And the excuses were, “We can't find reviewers.” And that tells you what I was saying previously. Who is going to review this book? People, you know, they might have experiences with, like us, with incarceration, with studying mass incarceration, women in prison, or whatever. But there weren't too many people who could say they went into solitary. And we know at least one of the reviewers, excellent scholar, excellent book, but I don't think she went in to solitary. Her study was what we would call an Administrative Study. So, if you wrote to the Delaware Department of Corrections, and they could provide you with some data that tells you how many people on a given day are incarcerated, how many men, how many women, how many Hispanics, etc. and so forth. She wrote a book, a very good book, using administrative data. And she wrote, I know she wrote a review for our book, and it was a very powerful review.
(13:28) S: So, can you just explain briefly the difference, the ethnographic study approach? How does that actually, physically play out, for people who have never heard that word before?
E: Most of us especially coming up the election the last couple of days, most of us know what an interview is. You're coming out of grocery store, it's election night, somebody’s sticking a microphone in your face, and they're asking you a question…blah blah blah. You give a response…blah blah blah. And they send that back to whoever they were working for, Gallup or wherever, and that's it! That's an interview. You know, it could be one questions, it could be ten questions. With ethnograpy, you are doing interviews, but you're doing them in what we would call a holistic way. So, when we sit down with the prisoners we interviewed, and officers we interviewed, we had a schedule, depending on your experience, because on a team we had students, undergraduate and graduate students. Depending on your experience, you might start off with a question, and then, you and I, we are going to start talking, and I might say to the officer, (not to the prisoner, but to the officer) you know, “What's your schedule like?” And they'll tell you this, that, and the other. And we might hook up again at lunch, while we're eating lunch — because inside, you can't leave until the end of the day. Then, if they have a break, we might meet up again during a break and talk some more, so we're starting get to know each other. With the prisoners, one hour - hour and a half?
A: I think like an hour.
E: About an hour. And so we're trying to get to know their story, because we don't have electronics. All we're doing is taking notes. Some people who knew how to do it, could do it in shorthand…
A: But I would also here say, If you're reading the book, some of the reasons why a lot of the quotes are really short is because you’re handwriting the quotes, and so it's difficult to make sure, yeah.
E: So ethnography is a special methodological approach to carrying out discussions with individuals, with people in communities. I think you would set its beginning up with Anthropologist who would travel to Timbuktu, or wherever, and live there, and immerse themselves in communities, to live with families, etc. and so forth. To be able to learn about the total society.
S: It gives the context that is so often missing.
E: Absolutely.
(16:50) A: It also allows you to see, so you don’t have to ask everything, right? So, you know…
E: Observation.
A: So, you know, when you're following an officer, and sometimes I did this. I would say, “Hey, can I just follow you on your rounds?” And he was like, “Sure, if you want to.” And when you're following someone around on their rounds, not only are you talking to them, you're observing their interactions, but you're also, those are the times when you get to see what does cell look like? What does the shower look like? What does the food look like? Without asking, because you're able to see it with your own eyes, right? And that, I think, you know, to Earl, the point he’s emphasizing, is that we had the opportunity to literally be in solitary confinement. And we didn't spend time locked in a cell, but…to be clear, we didn't do that…but we were inside the units observing.
E: Eight hours each prison, two days, maybe two and a half days. So we would stay over in some prison town motel.
A: Which is also a place to do observation, as you know.
S: There’s some chapters in the book that touch on that whole prison town thing that a lot of people have never thought of. That first time that I went to visit my son in prison, and I was driving, and driving, and driving, I am in the middle of flipping nowhere. And then the “town” where I've been addressing my letters, it’s like, three streets! There’s nothing there. I thought, “Wow, this is a whole other world!”
E: And that town, three streets, three buildings, whatever needs that prison to stay open.
S: Desperately.
E: So, it's interesting. I worked in a maximum-security prison when I was in graduate school, and I was telling Angela. I would drive, like you did, and all of a sudden I hit this one street, and there's some type of fast food, maybe a gas station, a bar for sure, a bar.
S: And maybe a Dollar General or a Family Dollar. Someplace that is pretending to be a grocery store.
E: Exactly. And that was it! And then, rising up out of the ground, is this structure - men on one side of the street, women on the other side of the street. So yeah, we know it. And our drives were four hours, six hours into nowhere. And everybody knows who you are when you get, when you get to town. Everybody knows who you are.
S: Okay, so the biggest takeaways. And I know that is a ridiculously large question. I know that there were things when I finished the book, there were things that I had never heard before so, for me, those were like my biggest takeaways. And I don't want to throw my perspective in there…
A: No, but it’s helpful.
S: But in terms of what do you WANT people to take away from it? You want them to learn stuff they don’t know. You want them to care. But what are some of the big things that you want people have aha! moments about?
(20:12) A: I think one of the things I would like people to have an aha! moment about, is everyone who is in solitary confinement is, in part, impacted by the dehumanizing conditions. And as we write in the book, some of the dehumanizing conditions, the correctional officers, or the COs, inherit, and they can't do anything about, and others they create. And, like a lot of people in a disadvantaged situation, they're creating things that aren't good for themselves, either. So, we're not, you know, wanting to sanitize or in any way make it, you know, suggest that what they experience is anything like what the prisoners experience. But they are also experiencing extremely dehumanizing conditions. That when you lock people in solitary confinement, it is designed and implemented in ways that maximize dehumanization. There's lots of ways to do solitary confinement, which…we don't believe solitary confinement should be used at all, but if that's not a possible outcome, there are ways to create an environment for people to reflect, for people to have a time-out, for people to be taken away for a little bit, that would be not be dehumanizing by design. And currently, how we do it in the United States, that's not the case. It’s just the ultimate in dehumanization.
What would be some examples of that. Well, I mean, you know, most people maybe have a sense of this, but, you know, it's dark. It's stale air. There's no natural light. It literally feels like — we talked about this several times — we’d been at, we can't remember how many times we'd been to a solitary confinement unit before we realized it wasn't actually underground. Like, you feel like you’re underground. And people talk about going down to solitary, right? It’s down. But it's actually not. It's the same as any other unit in the prison. It's just, you know, more doors, and more wire, and more safety mechanisms in more ways you have to be buzzed in and out. But the physical structure is not underground. But it feels that way, right? You know, particularly in solitary confinement, because the COs, because of the “security,” the COs have to be there, you know, their whole 8 hour shift, or 16-hour shift is in the unit. They're locked in the unit, too, along with the inmates. They don't just wander around, right? And the only time they get to leave the unit in their shift is to go to the chow hall. They're entitled to one meal every shift, and so they would leave the unit for 30 minutes and walk to the chow hall. But otherwise they're locked in, too. And so they're not getting fresh air. They're not getting…they feel like they're there also locked in. And they do very dehumanizing work. I mean, they strip-search all day long. They — which, you know, you might not think about that, but everyone in solitary pretty much agrees that strip-searching is dehumanizing. People don't want to be strip-searched. An officer might, you know — and for folks who aren't familiar, every time you move the prisoner you have to strip search them, and so if it's a Monday, and it’s shower day, they're going to get strip-searched on the way to the shower and on the way back. If it's also yard day, they’re gonna get stripped again. If they're in a programming unit, which is for people with severe mental illness, and that's a whole other conversation, they're going to get stripped again. And so, if you're in a tier with 50 people, and you have to move each of them three times a day, that's 150 escorts, 150 strips, right? And most of that's going to happen on the 6 to 2 shift, right? So, a single officer might be participating in 150 strip searches in a day, which is dehumanizing for him. And I'm using him specifically, because most of it is in men’s prisons. That’s dehumanizing for him, too, right? And he has to, you know, hand out toilet paper. And he has to hand out, you know, soap, and little flexible pens (which are ridiculous), every single thing that the person who's incarcerated needs has to be met by the officer. That's what you get when you lock people in a cell. When you lock someone in a cell and say, “You are not allowed to leave the cell, therefore I have to bring everything to you,” right? Which means I have to observe and surveil all of the most intimate details of your life, right? So, I’m, so not only is the prisoner literally sleeping, you know, a couple of feet away from their toilet, but the officer is likely watching the person use the toilet, right? Hundreds of times a day.
E: Not likely; they are, because they have observation. They can see into every cell.
A: So I watch people shower, and I watch people defecate, I watch people eat, I watch people self harm, I watch people…whatever they're doing. It's a lot!
S: And I don’t think most of us ever think about what it's like to get up every morning and know that that's what you're going to be doing for possibly 16 hours in that day.
E: The other piece is, we generally know about general population, depending on our status, my cell is going to open at a certain time. I'm going to have things I can do. I can go to the yard. I can go to Chow. I can go to class, go to work. I can walk back into my cell at certain hours. They’re going to shut it, etc. Maybe turn out the lights, I’m not sure. In solitary, none of that takes place. The lights are on all the time. People are yelling all the time.
A: It’s so loud.
(26:51) E: You don't have the freedom to move, and when you are scheduled to eat, that same officer who's in there with you is bringing you your breakfast. They're not going to clear the deck until they've collected back all the trays. And they count them. Then they’re going to count to make sure everybody's in their cell. At lunch, which comes around 10:30 in the morning, they're going to bring lunch. There are no elevators, so this officer has to not only bring lunch to all these cells, then he, for the most part, some women, has to walk upstairs and deliver lunch to all those people, and then come back and pick up all the trays and count them.
Trash — the place is dirty — trash is…I don’t know how to get it out of the cell? Through the wicket.
A: Through the wicket. The wicket is the slot on the door where everything is passed…food… that's where people are handcuffed. They pass their hands out through.
E: So garbage is thrown out, and then the officer, for the most part — there may be a prisoner from an honors suite who comes through and might mop the floors, or pick up the garbage, maybe — but the officer now has to go around and pick up your garbage. so when you start talking about the big takeaway, the big word is RESENTMENT. So, now I'm feeding you, now I'm picking up your garbage, now I have to walk with the “medical staff,” the nurse who brings you your insulin, or aspirin, or whatever. So, for this 8 to 12 to 16 hour shift, I’m just moving.
A: It’s really hard.
E: I mean it's all day! And so, when you talk to these officers, they talk about their feet, they talk about their knees.
A: Kidney stones. All this stuff.
E: Their back. And then, the person who you’re doing all this for. Think about kids, if you have kids, and you do this for your kids cuz you love them, right? And hopefully they love you back. But these characters don't love you back.
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S: And we’re gonna pick up there next week with a lot, lot more about corrections officers, as well as prison residents who are being held in solitary confinement. I want to close out this episode just sharing a little bit from the book.
(30:00) Excerpts from pg. 2, pg. 246, pg. 175 Way Down in the Hole
At The PrisonCare Podcast, and at PrisonCare, Inc., you know that we believe that every life matters inside a prison neighborhood. I hope that you enjoyed listening in to my conversation with Angie and Earl, Dr. Hattery and Dr. Smith, and I hope that you will join us for the conclusion of that interview.
Please visit PrisonCare.org and take advantage of the resources there that help compassionate people support positive prison culture from the outside. And please remember, too, that PrisonCare, Inc. is a 100% compassionate-person-supported 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. If you share the podcast with friends who might be interested, who care and would like to support prisons, direct them to our website, we would be delighted! Spread the word!
Thanks for listening, friends, and thanks for caring.
Time Markers:
0:49 Welcome to Solitary Confinement
3:35 Who are these authors, anyway?
6:00 Why did you do this study?
13:28 Ethnographic…say what??
16:50 The Power of Personal Observation
20:12 The Big Take-Aways, and Strip-Searches
26:51 The CO’s in Solitary
30:00 Some Brief Excerpts
We've Come A Long Way (No Vocal Version)
Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/