The Role of Public Memory in Rural Prison Towns

Sara Jacobs is a current part-time OHMA student. In this post, she discusses the Prison Public Memory Project and the complex relationship between prisons and rural communities.

As OHMA students, we frequently consider how our work in oral history can contribute to public dialogue about pressing issues faced by our communities. It is a challenge to take longform interviews, with all their depth and complexity, and integrate them into community conversation. How do we reconcile the time-intensive nature of oral history with the urgency of movements for social change? Over the course of the year, we have seen a variety of innovative projects seeking to address this question from different angles.

On Thursday, April 21st, Tracy Huling, Quintin Cross, and Brian Buckley of the Prison Public Memory Project joined us from Hudson, New York to discuss their work. The project, founded by Huling in 2011, “uses public history, art, and new media technologies to engage communities in conversation about the complex roles of prisons in society,” with the goal of working “with local individuals and organizations across the country to recover, preserve, interpret, and honor the memories of what took place in these important institutions.”

Hudson’s history as a prison town goes back to 1887.  Brian, the site coordinator for the Hudson project, walked us through the prison’s different eras, from the House of Refuge for Women (1887-1904), to the NY State Training School for Girls (1904-1975), to the Hudson Correctional Facility (1976-present). Knowing this history is an important foundation for exploring how a prison’s presence affects the community. Quintin, a 5th generation Hudson resident and coordinator of the project’s work with the African-American community, illustrated this point with an anecdote about mentioning the Training School to his family, thereby eliciting a stream of memories and recollections not found in history books.

Hudson Correctional Facility

Through engaging with local community history, the Prison Public Memory Project addresses an increasingly widespread trend that is crucial to our understanding of how mass incarceration functions in the US. Since the 1980s, the location of prisons has shifted almost exclusively to rural towns, “with a prison opening somewhere in rural America every fifteen days.” (Huling, Building a Prison Economy in Rural America page 1). Prisons have deceptively been sold as a panacea to the financial trouble brought on by the decline of industry, leading rural communities to compete fiercely to host correctional facilities as a last ditch effort to revive their failing economies. It is one of the largest growth industries in the rural US and its effects require deep investigation. Oral history can help us break down the large systemic issue of mass incarceration by exploring how it plays out on an individual and community level. The Prison Public Memory Project, by engaging with historical memory, is sparking a conversation about the role of prisons in small towns and exploring the many complicated ways correctional facilities insert themselves into people’s lives.

The Project raises many important questions – what happens to a community when a prison becomes its lifeblood? How are people, both inside and outside of the walls, shaped by the rural prison trend and in what ways does it influence their daily lives and collective memory? What are the challenges of doing oral history in small communities and how do we reconcile the sometimes-competing demands of our individual relationships and accountability to our community with broader goals of promoting social change?

This workshop made me think deeply about my own community in downstate Illinois and the opportunities and challenges of organizing in prison towns. As someone with many incarcerated or formerly incarcerated family members, prisons have always been a part of my life. They have not only made their presence felt personally, but also on a wider level. Prisons are part of the scenery. I remember driving to high school and seeing men in orange jumpsuits landscaping the Governor’s Mansion, repairing the asphalt, cutting the grass by the highway. I saw the constant chain of buses shipping people from Chicago to small towns, often 5 hours or more away from their families. Prisons also make themselves felt in personal relationships. The last time I visited home, my cousin, who was under house arrest at the time, and I went to play basketball. We shared the court with two guards from the prison he had just left. We all waved and said hello.

Illinois districts with the largest prison populations, concentrated in rural downstate (http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/illinois/importing.html)

Addressing the complex ways that prisons make themselves part of the social fabric of their host communities is an important part of organizing against mass incarceration and the rapid growth of the prison industry. The Prison Public Memory Project asks the community to contemplate the implications of having a prison in their backyard and opens the door for collective reflection on the promises that prisons make and the reality of life after they come to town. It is an inspiring fusion of historical memory, the current moment, and oral history that creates a rich and multilayered account of an ongoing systemic issue. It gives us a solid foundation that can inform our community organizing efforts and make our movements for social change stronger.

Hudson Prison Public Memory Project

Mario Alvarez is a full-time OHMA student. In this post, he writes about the Prison Public Memory Project and the ethical issues that arise between oral history and public-facing work.

On Thursday, April 21st, 2016, we OHMA students were treated to a workshop led by three leaders of the Prison Public Memory Project. These three individual had distinct responsibilities for the organization: Tracy Huling, the founder, directs and writes; Brian Buckley, the site coordinator, does digital humanities work; Quintin Cross does vital work connecting the organization with the local African-American Community. These members took the time to speak to us about their project and about the challenges that arise out of addressing the role that the local prisons play in this community. I was struck by the collaborative approach of their project – even during this two-hour workshop, Tracy, Brian, and Quintin approached the audience as equals with the potential to improve their already impressive work.

The Public Prison Memory Project, in addressing issues of incarceration and racial inequality, are handling some sensitive issues. Implementing oral histories is integral to their efforts to preserve the history of the local prisons – the personal testimonies of former prison employees (and prisoners) paint a fuller picture of what these institutions (and their surrounding areas) were like. The project deserves commendation for addressing the nuanced and oft-forgotten topic of prison towns (and ex-prison towns). I also admired our guests’ openness about the moral gray areas that arise out of this sort of work.

Aerial view of Hudson Correctional Facility, formerly New York State Training School for Girls (source)

Brian and Quintin each took time to explain their contributions to this project in detail. Brian presented a shortened history of the New York State Training School for Girls, a reformatory school for young women that closed in the mid 1970s (it is now a prison for young males). It was during this presentation that Brian complicated people’s typical understanding of prison towns, showing us that although the prison was home to an (unspoken) history of abuse, it was also a large employer for the town that helped create an African-American middle class in the community.

Quintin, whose ties to Hudson go back several generations, spoke of his personal connection to the community. He was responsible for bringing in many of the narrators featured on the project’s website, most of whom had worked for the NYS Training School for Girls decades ago. He spoke in further detail about the school’s treatment of its prisoners of color, who were subject to harsher conditions than their white counterparts. He revealed to us that there was a widespread code of silence among black employees in the prison, many of whom chose not to speak out on the various inequalities that occurred there for fear of losing their well-paying government jobs.

Then Tracy opened up the floor to us, the audience. We were split into two groups, each tasked with a different case study. Each of these scenarios were real-life ethical quandaries that the organization is currently facing in balancing the aforementioned code of silence among former prison workers and the project’s desire to bring a history of inequality to light.

When reflecting on these case studies, I couldn’t help but come back to an overarching question: where does one draw the line between one’s efforts towards social justice and one’s allegiance to his or her narrators? Can one be both a fully-committed activist and a full-time oral historian? This is something that we as students often tackled in class during this past academic year. Our conversations, though enlightening, failed to settle on a clean way of addressing this tension. This project hopes to “unlock the future” (per the home page on their website), revealing its public-facing aspirations, but I cannot help but wonder if oral history, when compared to more journalistic approaches to interviewing, can sometimes an obstacle to these hopes.

That being said, I was glad to be in the audience for this workshop. It opened up a number of challenging questions, the kinds that can only arise in difficult projects like this one. I look forward to hearing future developments from the Prison Public Memory Project.