White Lace Prison

Back in April I used Twitter to capture this idea:

“Science fiction story. Poor people voluntarily inprison themselves. Gov sponsorship, for stimulating incarceration economy. 08:13 AM March 30, 2007 from txt message”

I don’t know what struck me about this vision - but it has left me reeling for a couple of months now. Sure, the idea of a government hinging economic growth on the business of putting people in prison has the distinct taste of tinfoil. But this prison symbol seems to be cropping up a lot in our culture these days and I’ve been chewing on these images and storing them away in a notebook. Now it’s time to share and discuss just what’s going on.

In the original vision that struck me, I imagined a society in which people voluntarily had themselves imprisoned - either to pay off their credit card debts, in order to “serve their time to their country”, or perhaps even for monastic purposes - long term religious sabbaticals in order to “find god”.

In this imaginary and purely speculative scheme, the government would help support these young patriotic and honorable citizen’s by “sponsoring” them in their decision to face the slammer. What I haven’t worked out yet, is how this would actually benefit the government

First things first. Doing a simple google search on “prison grows economy” yielded these two results:

Kane Jail could help stimulate economy

Building a Prison Economy in Rural America

From the second article,

-In the United States today there are more prisoners than farmers.

-Communities suffering from declines in farming, mining, timber-work and manufacturing are now begging for prisons to be built in their backyards.

I am by no means an economist - and actually spending my time investigating the economic strategies that might be at play here is not something I am interested in pursuing. (Although, I once heard a funny anecdote about Crescent City that rumored half the population of the small Northern California town either was behind bars in Pelican Bay Prison or working at the jail itself).

Whether or not a plan will ever arise to coerce the majority of the American people to imprison themselves, let us suspend belief for a little while and imagine that the government has decided that they want this. Let’s look for historical examples that this decision has been made. Pretend, in fact, that it has been a dominant force in our human history - always taking on different form factors depending on the era.
And let’s see if we can find strong examples of this campaign being pushed down our modern media tube.

For me, I first caught on to this notion through the fabulous movie “My Dinner With Andre”:

I think that New York is a new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates ARE the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they built, they built their own internal prison, so they exist in a state of internal schizophrenia where they are the both guards and prisoners, and as a result they no longer have … the capacity to leave the prison they made or to even see it as a prison.’

See actually for 2 to 3 years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out.. that we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late 30’s… get out of here.. but the problem is, where to go, because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.

My question is still left open: “If the government really is trying everything in it’s power to put us all behind bars, what possibly could be it’s reasoning? What could they possibly want us all there for?”

More on this soon, I have a number of specific articles coming down the pipe. If you know any good examples for me to work in, let me know.

~Garrett