The Prison Boom with Shannon Heffernan

Where did all these prisons come from? WBEZ’s Shannon Heffernan is here to give us part of the answer, which involves “small government” (of course), Lennie Briscoe (as always), the pink flowers of Alcatraz, and a prison sweepstakes that produced the actual worst song of the 80s.

Two quick corrections via Shannon:

"I said Illinois has potential plans to shrink one prison and close another. That was an error. Both plans are about shrinking facilities.  I said CO's have a life expectancy of 56 years, the stat I meant to quote is 59 but since our interview, I discovered that statistic (and the stat about divorce) to be from studies/sources that are considered very weak so I've stopped using them."

Here's where to find Shannon:

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Twitter
Motive (podcast)

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Links:

https://www.wbez.org/staff/288/shannon-heffernan
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https://www.wbez.org/shows/motive/8c9f445c-4f62-46d6-a7f6-dc70a835e99b
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https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah: I think we're going to take the path of the country being taken over by badgers or something, it's going to be something we cannot predict

“If they were awarding this prison on the basis of ingenuity, creativity, determination and a total absence of shame, Laura would get it”. 

“And I saw the humorous side to all of this, through the tape. And I thought, why not? And let's carry on the tradition here. Let's keep this thing rolling. There's nothing but good that comes from it”. 

“But when you have two primary industries, agriculture and oil, which, we're on empty now in the oil field, and you start to run high and low. If you had some basic enterprise in your area that would lend stability to the economy, this just seemed like the shoe in thing. And I think that all those things are basically the reasons that we just got actively involved in because we knew it was good.”

Sarah: Hello, welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. Today on the show we are learning about prisons. And specifically a time when American towns competed to see who won a prison. And our guest today is Shannon Heffernan, who is joining us from WBEZ Chicago, home of Scruff McGruff. This will come up, unsurprisingly. She is working on an amazing podcast called, Motive, and swung by my imaginary Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood to tell me what's going on in Chicago and beyond.

This episode connects with a few themes we've been talking about on this show lately. We talked about Reagan recently with Laci Mosley, and we began the story of, “Go Ask Alice”, which if you haven't had the pleasure is, the great anti-drug war on drugs, scare tactic book of 20th Century America. It has been terrifying teenagers and parents for the last 50 years. In our part two of that story, which we're going to release on July 4th, we are going to talk about how we ended up with that book, and if it is in fact real. But for now, we're going to stick with the consequences of the war on drugs, which are in fact very real. 

So that's about it for me. Shannon is going to come and tell us where we went wrong, and why you still remember Scruff McGruff’s address after all these years.

 | Shannon: Hi, I’m Shannon Heffernan. I’m a reporter at WBEZ and I work on a podcast called, Motive. We’re in our fourth season and we’re looking at prisons. When you hear “prisons”, what do you think when you first hear about them?

Sarah: My first mental image is of a trip that I took to Alcatraz a couple years ago, which I feel like specifically the fact that from Alcatraz, you can see San Francisco. And from San Francisco, you can see Alcatraz. And also that it's fairly pretty. The cell parts aren't, but when it was operational, I believe it was largely pink because of the flowers and the plants that were planted there, to keep it from eroding.

I don't know. I've had that mental image in my head ever since I was there, because I feel like when I think of prisons, I have this sense of what's even out there, what's being hidden. What is visible and what is invisible? How much is incarceration either hidden in plain sight or actually hidden from the sight lines of people who don't experience it,

Shannon: Yes, there's almost this feeling of it being this like a far away, strange thing. A lot of people know someone who's been incarcerated. Over 40% of the U.S. population has an immediate family member in prison. I've had people I love incarcerated in prison. And that number's even higher for black Americans, like over 60%. So it's this thing that we have this strange relationship to, I feel like. Where it's very other and very outside, but also like ever present. 

And I think as I started looking into prisons and understanding them, some of what surprised me was not only how recent this history is. Like within my lifetime is when we saw the prison explosion in the eighties and nineties but also how particular the circumstances were, that prisons emerged out of and how honestly strange some of it is. Can I play you some scene setting music, maybe for the eighties and nineties where we're at?

Sarah: Yes.

Shannon: “Learn a lesson. So true. There's danger in inhalants.” Sarah: This is a jam.

Shannon: “They can break you in two. So never sniff inhalants. Breathing them is really no thrill. Don't you know inhalants really can kill?

Are you familiar with McGruff? Did you grow up in an era where this was a present thing for you?

Sarah: I am deeply familiar with Scruff McGruff and I'm trying to figure out where I would've seen all these PSAs

Shannon: Or maybe like the younger folks who don't know who he is, he was a dog, like a bloodhound. Sometimes he appeared in costume, sometimes it was a cartoon. He was a hard-boiled dog detective. And he did commercials that were anti-crime commercials.

Sarah: If you tell me a phone number, I will forget it 15 seconds after the fact. But I will remember Scruff McGruff's address until the day I die.

And it's Scruff McGruff, Chicago, Illinois, 60652. It helps that he doesn't have a street number or a house number, he just is Chicago.

Shannon: Oh, wow. I did not remember that, and I thought I was very McGruff familiar.

Sarah: I think Scruff McGruff is second only to Lennie Briscoe, in terms of effective propaganda in my life personally.

Shannon: I don't know if you remember, but in my mind, he only talked about, “Don't do drugs”, but he had a whole, “Call the police” thing too. Here, I can send you another video.

Sarah: Oh yeah, lay it on me.

Shannon: “McGruff here. See that guy, he's stealing that bike. Now see that lady, she's calling the cops. This is Mimi Marth, part of the eyes and ears patrol of Hartford,

Connecticut. There’s 126 of them, regular people like you and me, working together against crime. 

Here's another one, Albert Bell. Yesterday, it was his turn to patrol. Halfway down a block, Albert sees a strange man nosing around a Barnett basement window. So Albert calls the cops fast, and the cops pick the guy up fast.”

But it's basically just teaching kids how good it is to call the police on your neighbors.

Sarah: Right. And so, okay. The first thing is you see a guy loading a bike into a van, and you immediately call the police. And then you see a guy near a basement or opening a window to a basement, and you immediately call the police. And both of these are scenarios that are just as likely to be totally innocent, I think. That's what stands out to me the most about this, is that it's very in keeping with all the Facebook posts you see about how a mom in Georgia almost got human trafficked because she was in the same Walmart aisle as a black man two different times in the same Walmart trip. And he had a Bluetooth headset on, so he was going to traffic her. It's just anytime you feel something might be going on, it is going on.

Shannon: Well, and what a scary way to move through the world if that's your mindset. Can you imagine thinking then and walking through the world being like, everything is out to harm you or to harm others. You see a guy with a bike and you're like, that's probably stolen.

Sarah: It’s telling you that there's crime constantly happening all around you. And then I guess the two options are, you can be afraid, or you can become a police officer, just personally in your own mind.

Shannon: Yes.

Sarah: Where did this dog come from?

Shannon: The ad council. So it's easy to laugh about it because it's so strange. I laugh every time I look at one of these videos.

Sarah: His name is Scruff McGruff. You know.

Shannon: As weird as it is, it's also coming from this dark moment in some ways, this is emerging out of this moment when we’re thinking so hard about being tough on crime. And we're so deep into the war on drugs, that we literally have an ad campaign targeting kids to help fight crime. So, this is the same area you have to remember when we have Reagan, right? And he's making these speeches that are full of dog whistles, no pun intended, about young black men, essentially. So, a quote I pulled from one of his speeches, he says,

“There's the portrait of a stark face, a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time, the face of a human predator, the face of the habitual criminal, nothing in nature, more cruel and more dangerous.”

Sarah: I think nothing boils my blood faster than human beings being described as predators.

Shannon: Yes, and it wasn't just Republicans, I read a Reagan quote, but we can track that back to the Clintons, too. You have both political parties fighting to talk about how scary crime is and how much we need to fight it.

Sarah: Something I think about a lot with Reagan is that he started off as a new deal Democrat. He gradually became more conservative and helped lead the nation toward that, is my analysis and that when he was governor of California, it was much more normalized to have work release programs and people who were under some kind of probationary supervision, but who had jobs or had furloughs, that there was just much less of a concept of, “We lock you away and throw away the key.” 

And I'm fascinated by the fact that Reagan, you can find him and speeches defending this and saying look, it makes fiscal sense to not put people in prison forever. I don't know what to tell you. And that wasn't that long before he was president. And he was president, not that long before the world we live in now. So this may be the big question. How do we get tricked into thinking that it's always been the way that it is?

Shannon: Well, I think it's that ever presence, from 1980 to 1989, the prison population in the United States, more than doubled.

Sarah: Surely Americans just became much more evil, right? What other explanation could there be?

Shannon: And I don't like citing crime statistics because I think that they are not the most reliable measurement of actual crime. Because what they're measuring is people who got caught, they're matching the statistics of when we wrote it down and when we captured it, but to the degree we are able to capture it.

You don't see a correlation between the prison, boom, and a rising crime. They're not, it's not like it's this neat match between the two. And there's a lot of different explanations people give about why mass incarceration arose in this time and why there was such a fear of crime. But one question I got really interested in is, when you have something happening that big and that rapidly, it requires an infrastructure, you're incarcerating a massive number of people. Where are you going to put them?

Sarah: I feel like Americans typically have been able to engage in a lot of magical thinking about manufacturing and infrastructure and sort of how things happen because the goal, I think, of this mechanized world is to not have to think about it. And I hope that after the past couple of years, we're sort of more able to think, oh yeah, a lot of work and effort has to go into a system functioning in any way or even existing.

It's not like one day there were way more criminals. And we were, oh crap, we’ve got to put 'em somewhere because we can't do anything suddenly in America, is what I figured out. It seems as if on its own suggests the idea that there wasn't a supply of criminals and a demand for prisons, but maybe that there was a supply of prisons and a demand for inmates.

Shannon: Everything we've been talking about, like this mood around crime, that's a national phenomenon. That's a national mood that's happening, but the changes that actually started putting people behind bars at the most rapid rate were things that happened at the state level.

So, Illinois, which is where I live, passed a law called Class X. Which basically made sentences longer. And it created crimes that sent more people away. And Class X sounds very scary. Our governor, I'll read you the quote. He said, “I made up the name. I thought it had a ring to it. I thought it could signify something to people instantly, movies can be X-rated” 

Sarah: Oh my God.

Shannon: “The X symbol was a powerful symbol in American culture. You X’ed something out.”

Sarah: Oh God. Yeah, unfortunately it first made me think of X-Men First Class, but no, that's way worse.

Shannon: Yes, I don't know if Governor Thompson was familiar with the X-Men enough to purposefully reference that.

Sarah: Yeah, no, that's his first problem, is lack of X-Men literacy.

Shannon: This law, along with other laws that were passing, it led to this giant prison boom. The prison population is exploding. You have cells that were originally designed for one person, there's now two people in them.

You have gym floors where prisoners are sleeping on the floor because the prisons are just so crowded. And the governor has a problem, he needs to build prisons and he is going to have to build them fast. Because when you have prisons that are overcrowded, riots were starting to become a thing.

Before this time, nobody really wanted to be a prison town. It doesn't sound very romantic, right? It sounds scary, it does. It sounds dangerous. People were afraid of prison escapes. I actually talked to a guy who was in Thompson's administration from the time, who went to this town Geneva, Illinois, to sort of pitch this idea that they were going to open a prison there. And the whole town was up in arms. He basically feels like he got chased out of town. 

So it's this problem, how are we going to sell these prisons to these places? How are we going to get these things built? So he gets chased out of this town, right, but there's something else that's happening at this time. The economy is bad for a lot of people. You have manufacturing in big trouble, and you also have family farms in big trouble. Do you remember Farm Aid?

Sarah: Yes.

Shannon: Yes. Okay, you remember the era where we're all talking about, family farms are not doing great? but what

Sarah: But what was Farm Aid? Was it a concert for farms? I really don't know. I just know that it existed.

Shannon: It was a concert to raise money for farms. It was started by Willie Nelson and Neil Young. And it was big stars. I think the first one had Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, BB King. People were worried about the family farm and how a lot of farms were closing.

So in addition to the manufacturing crisis, you had people in these farm towns, looking for work, not having a lot of cash, jobs were short. Towns are really desperate. And this is also the era where we're cutting a lot of social service programs back, right? So people are in this jam. What are they going to do for work?

Franzen, this guy I was talking about earlier, who got chased out of that town for suggesting a prison. He has this idea of how he is going to solve two problems at once, right? If there are tax cuts, you're not going to build up welfare to support these people who are out of work, but you also need prisons. So it's almost like a jobs program, at least a jobs program for the white rural areas where prisons were getting built. And it comes up with this idea of something called, the prison sweepstakes. Small towns could compete to “win” prisons and all the jobs that came with them

Sarah: Not to get too simplistic about it. The haves in America and the politicians, whoever are, okay, we're in a crisis where there's a lack of jobs for white working-class people who we don't like, but we like people of color less. So we're going to put them in prison and then we're going to squeeze jobs out of that and give those to the white working-class people and then they'll shut up.

Shannon: On Chicago's west side, for example, all the factories were closing. So you had people who couldn't get jobs there, and you had people in these rural areas who were having trouble with family farms and people are moving away and you give them both the same solution, prisons, but of course they're on entirely different sides of the equation.

So I want to tell you about one of the towns. Can I tell you about one of the towns that competed?

Sarah: Yes.

Shannon: Mount Sterling, Illinois in Brown County, Illinois farming town known for good deer hunting, is what the area's famous for. And in 1982, 1 in 5 people in Brown County were living at or below the poverty line. People are moving away, especially young people, not enough tax money is coming in to support basic schools. I was reading newspaper articles from that time, where they're literally talking about being worried that the county's going to have to close its schools. A quote from a local editorial was, “Frankly friends, it's worse than you think. We are traveling at an alarming rate towards the black hole of non-existence.”

Sara: Wow.                                                                                                                              

Shannon: There's sort of a nickname that comes for this town in the surrounding areas, Forgottonia, because they felt so forgotten by the state.

Sarah: It's its own unique place clearly, but that seems it's standing in for so many other places then and now exactly

Shannon: Exactly. Right, a place that's forgotten and that a solution is given to. There were three guys who led it, who called themselves the “Chain Gang”. They formed a committee and they decided they're going to win this prison. Like a lot of other towns at the time, they start to get the stunts they're going to do to get attention.

 Like their whole thing was flowers. They were sending flowers to the secretary of the governor, to different politicians with poems like, “Roses are red, violets are blue, when we think of prosperity, we think of you.” They took and sprayed the entire football field in giant letters with, “Brown County Wants a Prison.”

Sarah: This is like Foxconn vibes. Foxconn is where this town, this area in Southern Wisconsin, which also was lacking industries, lacking jobs. This is a vast oversimplification of it, but basically they had to roll out the welcome wagon and sort of beg this Chinese company to come and manufacture, I think TV's, there. These are different propositions and in various ways, I'm sure. But in this case, it was like you're giving this company so much and you're screwing your own citizens so much to entice this company to come. And then they're not going to put money back in the way that they're promising. Like you are selling your town for an empty promise from someone who claims they're going to come in and fix things for you. And it was just very depressing to watch unfold. So, yeah.

Shannon: That selling of the town, it reminds me a lot of what we've seen lately with the Amazon stuff. Like all these towns pulling stunts to try to get the attention of the company. Although, in this case, what they're trying to get is the attention of a government entity bringing in jobs. Some of the stunts got really strange, to be honest. 

One town, for example, Flora, Illinois, which was also like Mount Sterling in really hard shape. More than a thousand people applied for 40 jobs at Walmart and they entered the sweepstakes, and they became like the most famous competitor in the sweepstakes. Because they made this video. That was a rap video called, “Is We Is or Is We Isn't, Gonna Get Ourselves a Prison”.

Sarah: Sounds awful.

Shannon: “Down here in Flora, Illinois. We still think that you are our boy, but is we is, or is we, isn't going to get ourselves a prison? Is w, is or is we isn’t, going get ourselves a prison?”

Sarah: Now I have to send that to somebody, or I'll die in seven days.

Shannon: It's something else. I think it's, at best, cringey at worst, it's racist to see this play out. But I think what's interesting is, it went basically viral. People loved this.

Sarah: Was it the era of, this is so cute please give this cute town what it wants. What was the tone?

Shannon: That's the impression I got of it, look at these people fighting so hard for their little cute town to save it, to be fair, the town was in bad shape, there were not a lot of jobs. They needed something, but what was offered to them was to compete for a prison. And so you have these kinds of weird antics going for them. I have to wonder what if they had been offered something else.

Sarah: I don't know. I'm at the stage where it doesn't feel subjective to say that if you look at a prison, you can see a continuation of slavery because it's based on the premise that a black person in America is free, extremely conditionally, and that like captivity and forced labor or forced, whatever happens in there is the natural state. I don't know, the people making these videos don't have to be able to articulate that, to understand that they are joyfully embracing economic security or a dream that's going to come at somebody else's expense and at the expense of a specific group of people.

Shannon: Yeah. And I think that's the gap that was there right in the sweepstakes that makes that the sweepstakes feel so strange to me, is that gap between it all felt silly and fun. It was almost like either it’s ignoring or forgetting or an unknowing, I'm guessing it's an ignoring. I don't know. I'm not inside these people's minds about what they were vying for.

Sarah: One of the things that I think about a lot is just this thing of, who's getting out there every day and harming other people. Because I think for the most part, it's people who do not conceive of themselves as doing great harm.

And in fact, people are able to do great harm by not seeing it that way. Because of course if you don't see your victims as fully human, then you're not self-aware about what you're doing. That's part of, I think what goes into the equation a lot, is to not even think about the humanity of the people whose lives you are affecting or destroying.

And I think that you can't really assign motive to an entire town. There's a lot of people whose thoughts and beliefs and desires went into this. But to me, the most dangerous people in America are probably capable of doing that silly of a public access style music video.

Shannon: In fact, they thought they were doing something really good. Helping out their town. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this abolitionist and academic, talks about how she thinks of the two places, the urban areas and the rural areas, as actually being this single space. Because they both were really hit hard by the economy at this time, they actually had a lot in common and that there was potential for solidarity and cooperation around that. But instead, what was chosen was to appeal to one group, to throw the other group under the boss. There's a different choice that could’ve been made in those moments.

Sarah: Yeah. And that feels like one of the questions, I guess, that inevitably comes up as you're watching this Baton twirling segment of a music video. Did anyone realize that there were other possibilities or were there, or did they seem to be in reach?

Shannon: You watch the video, you laugh at it and you're like, oh those folks are so out of touch down in those rural areas, but you have to keep in mind the courts, the people who are sending a lot of these people to prison, they're out in urban areas, too. And they can have this like distance to it that they're sending this away to another place to deal with.

Sarah: Yes, to the lovely town from the music video, it'll be great. Everyone will have a good time.

 Shannon: It was completely disconnected from the reality of what we were talking about, which is building prisons. And so in this video you have all these people make cameos from the town, the mayor, a reporter, there's a police officer who seems to be the best dancer of the group and he’s strolling down, twirling his baton. People loved it.

Sarah: It reminds me of just a couple short, little moments in Gone Girl, where they show kids and teenagers and just sort of a whole cross section of every demographic in this town looking for the gone girl, walking through fields, kids riding their bikes at twilight. And it always struck me as a great expression of how people just love to be brought together by something. And even if it's by something awful, I think we crave the feeling of all trying for something at once.

Shannon: Yes, I think that is exactly the mood you're capturing. When I look at rallies from these sweepstakes, it seems like everybody from town is showing up and members of the Chain Gang told me, it was the most United they ever felt like their town was.

“It's the high school band. Here is the Flora High School marching band all 120 members performing Jailhouse Rock. What else.”

“I commend you for not allowing unfortunate economic conditions to rob you and your community of a good sense of humor. All the world enjoys a good laugh. Ha ha. I know you will continue the fight to bring all types of new industry to Southern Illinois and wish the best in your efforts to capitalize on the national attentions that have been forced on Flora.”

So Flora, this town with the whole, “Is we isn't” rap video thing. That town did not win, despite being the media darlings, they lost.

Sarah: Oh no. See, and why am I like, oh no, you didn't get what you wanted. It's Ugh, boy. Yeah. Okay. Well, good try, Flora.

Shannon: But Mount Sterling, that's the Chain Gang guys. That's the guys with the roses and the flowers and the football field painting. They won and they were citizens of the year. There were all kinds of ads in the newspaper. They made a souvenir edition. Everybody got out of school and out of work for the day, the ads are to give you a mood of how happy people were, like a dentist's office took out an ad saying, “We're wide open for a prison.”

The family doctor's office had the diagnosis is, excellent economic health. The local tasty treat had chain gang specials. There were slammer burgers for $1.45. Soft drinks and sizes, minimum, medium, and max. So, the town's super, super happy. You hear those things, like the slammer burgers and, you see these parades with people walking in striped uniforms, and there's such a disconnect of the reality, but of what the prison's going to be.

But I do think there's a moment, at least in Mount Sterling where they had to confront that. So, after they won the prison and it was literally right before the first people who were going to be locked inside arrived, they had a giant prison sleepover.

Sarah: This whole thing is just so surreal.

Shannon: Yeah, it is surreal. It's very surreal. The state invited people to come stay the night. I think it had a couple of different purposes. I think they wanted to show off this fancy new facility. Also, a lot of the staff were new, they'd never worked in a prison before. So it was going to be this kind of chance for staff to practice and learn how this was all going to work and work with actual people.

I've talked to several people who were at the overnight. They all met at the county fairgrounds before they went to the prison. It seemed like it was very fun and buoyant. Somebody told me there was a husband and wife there for their wedding anniversary.

It just has this feeling of almost, like those mystery dinners that people go to, where you fake a murder mystery. It’s a little scary, but mostly in a Halloween-y fun kind of way. So I think people knew it might be a little spooky, but they're thinking it's going to be fun, it's going to be a romp.

 Sarah: I've thought about this last Halloween, what is the difference between spooky and scary? And I think spookiness is fundamentally a pleasant feeling and you're like, I have chosen to scare myself or when you eat a really spicy pepper. You're like, I have chosen to experience something that is going to make me feel more alive in some way. And then I think scariness is something else.

Shannon: Something different. Well, I think they went in expecting spookiness, but as soon as they get on the bus, the guards are like, “stop chatting with each other, don't talk, you can't talk, you have to stay silent” and they drive them to the prison and they book them, they get their fingerprints taken, they get numbers, they get patted down.

One woman was like, they didn't do cavity searches because you can't do cavity searches on the president of the PTA. So, they're not getting exactly the experience, as much as they may have felt like they were and they take them in, they're making them walk, single file. They're barking orders at them.

 They've hidden contraband on some of them. So they're pulling them out of line and taking them to segregation and yelling at them. And it's around this time that a lot of the people who I talked to, went to the overnight, said that they start to get the sense of, oh, oh, okay, this is not what I was expecting.

Sarah: And I don't know if people have articulated this, but what were they expecting or did they know what they were expecting?

Shannon: I don't think they thought about it much. You have to keep in mind that they just had gotten through with the prison sweepstakes. It's all been about saving the town and having fun and festive suddenly you're like, now we're in a prison. They take them all to this auditorium, where they do demonstrations for them. They have the prison dogs and a guy in a suit and show them how the dogs can sniff things out and can attack people. They have this group called, Orange Crush, come in, is the nickname of them, Orange Crush, they do riot control, but they also do…

Sarah: Oh God. Why the cute names?

Shannon: Well, Orange Crush is a name that I actually don't know where it came from. I guess it would be, it came from prisoners, but I'm not sure, they wear these orange uniforms, and they had these masks on, and they carry batons, like these sticks. They come in and they do a demonstration. One guy who was there, a member of the Chain Gang, said just the sound of them was scary because they're marching in unison and there's this kind of intimidation to it. And then after that, they take them all to their cells, which are tiny, and that's where the toilet is, but there's these big windows in front of them. So you have these state dignitaries, like state reps and business owners, they have to like shit and piss in front of a window.

They spent all these years in this fun festive competition for a prison and they're sitting there realizing, “Oh, this was the prize. This is what we got. This is what we won.” I talked to the Chain Gang guys after this, who like, they're thoughtful guys in a lot of ways. And they say we were thinking about the jobs, and it was fashionable at the time to be locking people up. That was the national mood.

Sarah: I don't know what to tell you, people were wearing acid washed jeans as well. Not a lot of great choices going around.

Shannon: Fair. But one thing that struck me is one of the state reps I spoke to was there, she said the next day she cried the whole way home. And some of that was just like the lack of sleep. But some of that was, what did I just go through? And I guess I expected there to be this change of heart. But she said, I also realized people wanted it this way. People wanted punishment. People were hungry for punishment.

Sarah: Because to me, like the idea that you can go and have a teeny tiny taste of this experience, right? Like the teeniest possible taste. And it's like overwhelming and really upsetting to you, in some way, that you're like, oh God that felt really bad. And then you're able to be like, well, whatever, I'm sure there's a lot of reasons for that. And one is, the sunk cost fallacy is in charge of us all. Also, you need the jobs, you need the money, you're already in. But also it feels like there's a basic feeling of, well, this feels really, really awful to me, and maybe not something that humans should have to experience, but criminals are different.

Shannon: I think that's true. I think that's why you have those terms like “predator”. And, and of course you bring in racial differences.

Sarah: Or even the term criminal, which I'm not crazy about to be honest because obviously everyone commits crimes, right? There's not a human being, maybe babies don't commit crimes, but everybody else does.

Shannon: Everybody in their life has probably committed some crime. And if not a crime, at least a wrong, it's a question of who gets punished for it. So we're talking about this idea of two groups of people who both needed jobs, Gail Fran, this guy who told me he came up with the prison sweepstakes.

I was asking him how he reflected on the fact he gave jobs to these one places that was right in rural areas and that these other people were taken out of their communities. He said and I'm going to read you a quote now, “Some people were critical of us for doing this because they felt the prison should be built closer to Chicago for the benefit of inmate families and friends, etcetera. And I was a strong opponent to that notion because I felt that the prison should be located where taxpayers were paying for it”

Sarah: Famously no taxpayers in Chicago, right?

Shannon: Yes, exactly. It's code, I think, for white people and black people. And so I think so much of this also comes to, who deserves the programs that support them as workers or social service programs.

This is the same era you have to remember when. We're talking about small government, which is a really interesting contradiction. You're talking about cutting tax dollars. You're talking about taking away welfare and it's really interesting that's happening in the same era that you're building prisons. That's a huge state project.

So at one time you have Governor Thompson, the governor of Illinois, he literally has this quote where he says,

“I had to cut cash. I had to cut all this welfare in schools,” and he says, “Does that hurt people? Absolutely, hurt school districts. School districts have to pay more local property taxes, never popular, welfare advocates will start beating you on the head, the minute you touch the welfare budget, but that's where the money is. You have no choice.”

So, he's at one time viewing these one budget cuts, as you have no choice. And then viewing this other massive undertaking from 1973 to 1996, $1.2 trillion dollars building new prisons. And you're viewing one of them as a choice in one of them as an inevitability.

Sarah: Also, prisons just seem like possibly the ultimate expression of big government, right? Because the idea is if you violate a law, the government does have the right to essentially strip you of everything that defines you, not just as a citizen, but in many ways, human. It feels like the government is the arbiter of whether you get to be human or not. I cannot think of a bigger government thing, honestly.

Shannon: Exactly. And yet it's not what we associate when we think about big government and small government. People aren't usually thinking about prisons or police. And to me, it comes down to a question of what is the job you want the government to do? What do you view as a protection of freedom? And I think this was an era where, you have politicians talking about, to be free from crime, to be free from the harms of crime, but for who to be free from the harms of crime.

We're at an interesting moment. I feel like where people are talking about policing, more people are talking about incarceration more, and in Illinois the prison population has shrunk like a bunch. And we're getting to the point where there's a prison they're talking about closing and another prison they're talking about shrinking, but at the same time, you're also having this backlash here against the.. and I think you're seeing this everywhere across the country, this sort of backlash against those movements.

And you're seeing sort of a reemergence of. It's tough on crime rhetoric, pushing back against but defending the police. And I think we're in a really interesting moment. I don't know which path we're going to take. I'm not sure which direction we're going to choose.

Sarah: I think we're going to take the path of the country being taken over by badgers or something, it's going to be something we cannot predict.

Shannon: That's true. The last few years are any indication, we're going someplace unpredictable and strange. Definitely badgers. Definitely badgers.

Sarah: It's going to be badgers. Put your money on badgers, but we have, I think this commonly accepted myth, but like the sixties, they were great. All the students just rose up and marched and flower power, etcetera.

And in reality, I think the conservative backlash against hippies and any kind of leftist movements, within the sixties, was stronger than any leftism that existed. But essentially the sixties, we refer to them now as this sort of monolithic event where America got freer, but it seems actually to have paved the way for a gigantic backlash. So, that’s fantastic.

Shannon: Well, I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of people who talk about this era of mass incarceration, which is complicated and has a lot of causes, but one of the causes being that you had movements, like the black Panthers, that then there was this desire to control. And part of that backlash being heavier surveillance, heavier policing, which then leads to heavier incarceration, like it begins to open up those doors.

I think one of the big takeaways for this for me, in true You're Wrong About fashion, I think when people think about what's wrong with prisons right now and why they got built? I think a lot of people think about private prisons and the profit of private prisons. Oh, we had a prison boom, because there were going to be these corporations that got to benefit, because prisoners would be given jobs and they'd have to do free labor. And people would profit off that free labor.

Sarah: Because someone has to make my Walmart furniture.

Shannon: It is a very small fraction of prisons in the United States that are private prisons. And a very small number of prisoners have jobs that are actually making things for-profit companies. But just because you remove for-profit prisons, Illinois doesn't have for-profit prisons by the way, you don't remove that people can see themselves as profiting off of it.

Sarah: Do you think that there is a kind of a school of thought, that we get rid of private prisons and then we can have more ethical prisons because of that. Is that something you've seen people arguing?

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 Shannon: I do. I see that and I see that argument and I see the argument that the reason prisons boomed is it was this drive to have prison labor.

Like sort of using a slave, which is an interesting metaphor. There's definitely a line one can draw from that era to through, the era of mass incarceration. But I think the idea of the for-profit company, as being the thing that's driving this, is too simple. It is just too small of a piece of what we're talking about. You have to talk about the way the government saw its job. What you saw the government feeling like it needed to do at this time.

Sarah: It’s also way too optimistic regarding manufacturing. Surely it’s cheaper to just outsource manufacturing overseas and oppress people that way. And then you can turn inmates, you can make them somehow financially useful without giving them a job even. 

Shannon: Yes, because you can make, you can give other people jobs to incarcerate them, “And that something is big. As Charlie mentioned, the basic construction of a facility of this magnitude is $41 million dollars. That's an immediate influx of that money into your community to begin to build and begin to grow. That's exciting. And then the prospect at 400 jobs, 80% of which would come from the local area as new employees. And then that was going to generate an annual $10 million dollar payroll.” 

Mount Sterling, which is this town that I focused on. Everybody there believes the prison was a huge help to their economy, but it's really hard to actually measure, in that town specifically because at the same time the prison opened, this company Dot Foods opened a big wing. So, I cannot tell you with good numbers what it did for Mount Sterling.

What I can tell you, is that a lot of Meta studies show that the financial benefits can be a wash in terms of jobs. And that they don't actually end up doing as much for these towns as promised. But one thing they do is they can bring in more tax money for people because prisoners are counted as living in the town where they're incarcerated, they're not counted as being from the town they're from. So they get that tax money. One of the quotes I found from a town that had just gotten a prison in Illinois, this town called Eena. I'm going to read you the quote from the mayor. He was bragging that they had repaved the roads and built a new community center and been able to do all these things as the prison came.

And he said, “It really figures out this way. This little town of 450 people is getting the tax money of a town of 2,700. And those people in that prison can't vote me out of office.” Jesus Christ.

Sarah: Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. Wow, that's some self-awareness right there. That's what I'll say.

Shannon: Yeah. And sort of unashamedly.

So, you're literally taking these people out of where they live, in a place like Chicago and moving them to another place, where they're providing these benefits or perceived benefits to these other places. You also think about the social cost to these towns, in prison towns, like divorce rates go up, suicides go up, addiction goes up.

 The average lifespan of a correctional officer is just 56 years. I remember talking to a CO who was about to retire, and I was, “Oh, are you happy and excited to retire?” He is, “Well, yeah I am. And people talk about one of the great benefits of our job is that we get to retire really early. But what people don't realize is also we die really early. I'm happy to retire, but I'm also, well, I probably don't have statistically that much time left.” 

When we talk about prisons, you were talking earlier about how much you have to dehumanize someone to be willing to put them in a cage.

But I also think it has an effect on how people who work there think about their own humanity. Ruth Gilmore, who I learned a lot of this stuff I'm talking about, who's done a lot of the analysis of prisons and prison economies, has this phrase where,

“Life is precious. Life is precious.”

And so if you devalue life, you devalue life.

Sarah: Something that's important to me, about prison abolition, is we're not arguing for this to be nice and because wouldn't it be nice if we were nice to all the inmates, and then wouldn't it just be nice if we held hands under a rainbow. People kind of have this jaded assumption of, sure, you want to release all the prisoners and hug all the criminals and then wouldn't that be nice if we lived in a Utopia where we love criminals and where hardworking Americans have to suffer because of it. And it's no, you shouldn't, this is a terrible job. It seems like this is good for no one. And I used to subscribe to I think it was Corrections One, the correction officer newsletter.

Shannon: I love that fact about you.

Sarah: I think I unsubscribed from it finally, because I guess every additional email in my inbox makes me scream internally, as I've discussed recently on this show. But yeah, I mean I found it fascinating. And that was where I learned, and this is I'm citing this from memory so take it with a grain of salt, but essentially the statistics that correction officers have rates of PTSD, essentially the same as people who've done active tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. It just seems like prisons destroy everyone they touch, that's how I'll put it.

Shannon: You see that from the prison overnight, just like a simulated event, not a real one for one night, having such an effect on people. Imagine going to work there every day. Now imagine being incarcerated there, not having the choice to quit.

Those things shape you. No one grows up dreaming of being a CO or maybe not no one, but probably not very many people. The same way that I don't think most towns were like, oh, if we could imagine from scratch what we would want to have to save our town, I don't think they'd come up with a prison.

I imagine that a lot of these places, if they were given a choice, would've wanted to have a way to bring back their family farms. Bring back some solid, working-class jobs that you could get without a college degree and raise a family on and have enough economic opportunity that your kids don't feel like they have to move away.

Sarah: Speaking of Chicago, I read a few years ago, Studs Terkel’s Working. Which is for people who haven't read it, this wonderful compendium of basically interviews with people across almost every kind of job that was imaginable at the time. I think he was conducting these interviews in the seventies, and there's really interesting themes that come up.

And what I remember is a really consistently recurring thing is, that people who describe themselves as having a job that they like and a good quality of life because of it. It's because they don't have to act like a machine, and it matters that they are the ones doing it. There's something about it where they feel like they are contributing something personally, to what they do.

If prisons were about rehabilitation, if the entire system were completely different, which I think it just it's, I don't think that we would ever get there, trying to sort of change what we have into a drastically different version of it. But if rehabilitation was the goal, I feel like you could have prison jobs, like a general CO job that would potentially give you a good quality of life. But it seems as if the goal really is to, like your goal ostensibly is to contain people, but it also seems like you have to be complicit in breaking them down psychologically.

Shannon: It’s so interesting that you bring that up because on this season of Motive, one of the things we talk about is mental health staff, who work inside these facilities. I spoke to these two women, who they felt like their skillset was going to be a really good match for helping out these guys who were incarcerated. Many of whom had mental illness, many of whom had never seen a therapist a day in their life. And they go in sort of excited. 

Watching how much they felt like they were then asked to be part of a security apparatus instead. They started reporting abuses that they saw. And then there was a lot of backlash from fellow staff, including fellow mental health staff, basically saying, “Well, whose side are you on?” That made me really think about what kind of work is possible inside these environments. And they both left, they both left. They both ended up feeling like all they were doing was basically going cell to cell and asking people, “Are you going to kill yourself?” So I think that people do go in hoping to make a change sometimes, but it's a very difficult environment to maintain that in. 

I think the other thing that abolitionists talk about, that whether or not you're an abolitionist you can learn from, is they talk about this idea that it's about presence. It's not just about making prisons go away, it's also about what's going to show up instead. And I think when you think about the amount of money we spend on prisons, like in Chicago between 2005 and 2009, there were 851 blocks in Chicago - city blocks - that were designated as million-dollar blocks. Which meant the state spent at least a million dollars incarcerating people from just that block. So what are other ways one could imagine using that million dollars?

Sarah: This is my beef with the movie Seven. I have no idea why I'm talking about David Fincher so much today. But Seven is this wonderful, extremely stylish, pretty scary serial killer movie, starring Kevin Spacey as a serial killer. So that's fun, spoilers. The whole tension throughout is that we have a Detective Somerset, Morgan Freeman, who's about to retire. He's doing one last job, so of course that's going to go great for everybody. And then we have Brad Pitt as the brand new detective who's from the sticks, and who wants to be a good cop and make a difference, and he is just this cute little puppy dog. Of course, over the course of the movie, we have to watch him be psychologically destroyed and basically receive the lesson of people are pure evil and they will cut off your wife's head. And stop trying, basically, just give up on humanity. Goodbye. 

The give up on humanity answer is the easy way out. I think trying to make that seem profound, the experienced person's conclusion seems very insidious to me. I think that the mature thing and the difficult thing, and the thing that takes wisdom is to be like, no, like things legitimately could be better. And if you're like, well we need all these prisons, cause there's just this many criminals and they're really bad and we just got to lock 'em away or they're going to cut off Brad Pitt's wife's head. Like that's resigning yourself actually, to saying our politicians are corrupt, we're turning human beings into passive profit generators, whether in the slim minority of people who are actually making bookcases for Walmart to sell or the people who are just sucking up money for roads they can't drive on and swimming pools they can't swim in. Saying we need this apparatus because people are awful and we need a place to stuff them into, I think is actually accepting a situation where the people running the society that you're in are given free rein to be as corrupt and as morally unchecked as they want to be.

Shannon: There's this idea, that to believe that there aren't just people who are pure evil out there is naïve. But isn't it much more complex and difficult to believe people do really bad things, and how we tackle that is maybe more complex and messy than just dividing out categories. 

People often want me to tell the story of the person who's in prison for a marijuana or a crack cocaine conviction. Or they want me to tell the story about the person who I'm so sure is innocent. Those things do happen, there are innocent people in prison. There are people in prison for very minor crimes. That is true. There are also a lot of people in prison who are there for crimes that are really serious, like crimes that make me uncomfortable. Crimes that make me angry. 

If we really want to talk about prisons, and we really want to talk about incarceration, we have to be honest about that. And we have to wrestle with that messy stuff too. What do we actually want when those bad things happen?

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel, I'm sure there are a ton of people who would confidently say yes, everything's fine, the system as it is seems fine. And I would also guess that they have not even tried to imagine themselves or someone they love getting lifted up by that system. 

Shannon: That you think of it as happening to someone else.

Sarah: It's just right. It just feels like there's this eternal sense of it's somebody else and for many Americans, particularly white ones, that can remain at least apparently true for your entire life. But what that feels like it does is just allow you to not think of this as affecting human beings.

Shannon: If we continue on trend, you'll see shrinking prison populations and at some point, that's going to mean prison closures.

Sarah: And does that mean that there will be pressure or, I assume there is pressure to keep prisons going and therefore keep people inside of them because that means continued jobs, right?

Shannon: Well, in Illinois, there's an effort to close one prison and an effort to shrink another. And you've seen the union step in and say, this is going to hurt these towns. And you saw something similar, a while ago when a few prisons were supposed to be closed, that were stopped from closing because the governor stated specifically, that the reason he kept them open was, we were in an economic recession, and he didn't want to do that to the towns at the time.

Sarah: To me, this answers the very question of, how do people do bad things? How do people, rather than being born bad, go step by step and find themselves in a situation where they are doing harm. And this feels exactly like that, where it's, you're like, well, we're in a recession. We don't want to lose jobs. We have to keep this prison going. We, people, have to work. It just makes, I don't want to lose this prison from my town, just a place, a morally repugnant place that you get to by degrees.

Shannon: Because you can say, I'm not that person and I just need to figure out who those people are and get them away from me.

Sarah: But also it means that if I'm not reading a book about how to be evil, then I know that I'm not evil. And in reality, I, myself right now am complicit in a system that takes care of me at the expense of others. And that sees me as harmless because it sees other people as intrinsically harmful and I'm complicit in that and that sucks

Shannon: When it comes down to the question of, what do we define as violence? Is violence only a physical, striking of somebody, right? Is it violence if you let someone die without proper medical care, is that violence?

Sarah: Right? Yes, I would say yes and then things get more complicated. So now that we know all this, now that we have heard the Flora prison rap anthem, and are going to try for the rest of our lives to forget it. What can we do with this information, knowing what we do? How can we take that knowledge into the world and try and make it a little better?

Shannon: So, I think the first thing, this all sounds like squishy, but I really do think this is where you start. I think the first thing that I hope people do, when they hear this information, is they start to ask what else could be possible?

It's probably not going to be a single thing, is what I hear a lot of people who work on prison issues talk about. That we're asking the prison system to do so much, deal with the fallout of mental health issues in our country, deal with the fallout of segregation and poverty.

You're not going to have one thing replace that. So, what Miriam Kaba, the activist and scholar calls the million experiments that need to be done. And I don't know if that's like an unsatisfying answer because it's not go here, write this Senator, but I really do think that's what the next step is for folks is to just, if you can realize it's inevitable, then together, we have to think about, well, what are the other possibilities?

Sarah: Yeah, and I think that makes sense to me because I think we should be wary of people who offer simple conclusions or simple answers, right? Like how do we solve society's problems? How do I fix my city? How do I make my town safe? Call the cops whenever you see someone moving a bike into a van, that'll fix it. I trust you more than I trust Scruff McGruff on this.

Shannon: So that's my messy, unsatisfying conclusion.

Sarah: Tidy wrap-ups are for presents. I think that there is nothing braver than waking up and continuing each day to imagine that things could be better. I think that's the same kind of courage that comes from waking up and continuing to love people and to love the world, which doesn't mean that you're seeing it as something it's not, it means that you're seeing it for what it could be and what miraculously it has been able to do despite everything.

“Down here in Flora, Illinois, we still think that you’re our boy, but is we is, or is we isn't, going to get ourselves a prison? Is we, is, or is we isn’t going to get ourselves a prison.

I'm Charlie, mayor of the town, people call from miles around, Is we is or is we isn't, going to get ourselves a prison.”

Sarah: Thank you so much Shannon Heffernan, for coming on our show today. If you want to hear more, listeners, you can check out Shannon's podcast, Motive, and learn more about the prison sweepstakes and so much more that goes into creating this great nation of ours.

Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, our producer, who makes this show sound great even when I record it in a McDonald's parking lot.

We have a nice new Patreon episode coming out for you later this month where I get to talk about Shakespeare in Love with Dan Schwartz, and we discuss our controversial opinion about Ben Affleck's role in the movie. So, if you feel like supporting the show, you can go on patreon.com/yourewrongabout, or you can spend your money on literally anything else, like three tacos.

And thank you, listener most of all. Thank you for being here. Thank you for learning with us. Thank you for singing songs and cracking jokes with us through our hot girl apocalypse. Thank you for being here. Take care of you. See you next time.