Prisoners and Animals: An Historical Carceral Geography

This paper explores some of the key historical-geographical resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies that appear in my book, Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals . In it I propose a contribution to carceral geography from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a ‘trans-species carceral geography’ that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that I place into conversation draw from a number of institutional and industrial domains, including the prison, the farm, the research lab, and the zoo. In this paper I specifically focus on the shared carceral logics and ‘animalization’ of populations of humans and animals at these sites, as well as key entangled historical-geographies of the prison’s death row and the animal slaughterhouse that are at once structural, operational, and technological.

Introduction * My new book, Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals (2018), hinges together two distinct areas of research, carceral geography and critical animal studies, with an overall aim to make connections between mass incarceration of humans and mass exploitation of nonhuman animals in the U.S. today. These processes are connected, and thus in the book I propose an analysis of "the carceral" from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a "trans-species carceral geography" that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that I place into conversation draw from a number of institutional domains, based on their form, operation, and effect. These institutional domains include the prison death row/execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse; sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals; sites of exploited prisoner and animal labor; and the prison solitary confinement cell and the zoo cage. The ways that humans and nonhumans can be made disposable and killable in the prison and slaughterhouse; can be exploited for entertainment or as experimental research material; and whose bodies and labor can be made into property and commodity; are not the same at these sites, but they share key aspects.
Cross-pollinating carceral geography and critical animal studies offers an opportunity to reflect not only on the ways in which industrial violence against humans and nonhuman animals has been naturalized and made possible, but also the ways in which these everyday regimes of violence have been produced and are maintained together -they have been enmeshed and entangled in similar processes, co-constituted and co-articulating in their basic carceral logics. My focus is on the geographies of these sites (locations, design, and layout); the highly regulated technologies and movements within them; the emotional and psychological strain enacted via daily operations; the legal contexts within which these industries are (or are not) regulated; and the ways in which "animalization" of certain bodies works to create the conditions for their exploitation and disposability. These are not particularly new ideas, but I offer a novel synthesis and application of them. In that sense the book is more conceptual than it is theoretical, in that I engage some of the current themes, arguments, and activist scholarship of carceral geography and critical animal studies -to broker between these ideas and literatures, to bring them into conversation.
Development of the prison-, agricultural-, medical-, and entertainment-industrial complexes followed different historical-geographical trajectories towards their present iterations. My project is not in specifically comparing these developmental trajectories -governmental regulations or deregulations of industrial processes, legal maneuverings that served to protect, enrich, and incentivize certain practices, architectural or technological advances, or so on. Nonetheless a number of historical-geographical developments and processes cannot go without noticesuch as the rise of the prison industry that in many ways stepped in to fill the economic void created in many communities by deregulation of factory-scale farming. More to my project, though, are what these industries collectively produced over the past few decades: unprecedented numbers of confined bodies subjected to unprecedented levels of violence within the industrial U.S. today.

A personal and professional journey
Writing Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals was quite a personal journey. I first became interested in prison studies as an activist -as a volunteer and decade--long executive board member of a local nonprofit prisoner rights group called the Lewisburg Prison Project. The Project's focus is on protecting prisoners' civil rights while incarcerated in prisons located in my state of Pennsylvania. Where I live in Pennsylvania has unfortunately one of the highest concentrations of correctional facilities anywhere in the U.S. and prisons are the second largest industry in Pennsylvania overall. Inspired by my association with this group, my work in recent years has become more scholarly-activist in nature. I have worked on a number of projects related to the "spatial violence" of U.S. prisons, and this includes an historical-geographical study of USP-Lewisburg, the U.S. federal penitentiary located in my town that has unfortunately become the focus of much of our organization's current work due to its uniquely torturous "special management unit" for federal prisoners 1 . I also co-edited a book with Dr. Dominique Moran, Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past which readers may find of interest 2 . This is the first volume of its kind to take a comprehensive historical-geographical approach to the study of correctional institutions as a specific subset of the new, fast-moving, and fast-developing subfield of carceral geography. The book examines, analyzes, and critiques practices of incarceration, regimes of punishment, and their corresponding institutional spaces, with the overall aim of helping us to understand their legacies in the present. The breadth of the work collected spans the 18 th through 21 st centuries, and takes a correspondingly wide geographical reach across sites in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
My work on prisons continued, though it was not until a visit to New York's Bronx Zoo celebrating my daughter's birthday a few years ago that the ideas for my recent book project began to take shape. Watching the crowds of tourists, most but not all of them children, jump up and down and pound the glass wall of one particular Amur tiger's cage struck me in ways that trips to zoos had not in the past: while the beautiful creature paced anxiously around and around a big rock in its small enclosure, the notion of a trans-species carceral geography really clicked in.
Disciplinarily, although I consider myself first and foremost an historical geographer, my new book is not an historical-geography of the sites I study -the prison, the slaughterhouse, the research lab, the zoo, and the farm. Rather, the book is an attempt to uncover the epistemic violence that pervades contemporary industrial America yet is normalized and "neutralized" in countless ways in everyday life. And yet, I would also make the case that I could not have written this book without a fully developed historical geographical sensibility, imagination, and skill set. So I suppose my overall rather simple assertion about my methodology is that I could not have accomplished this work without an appreciation, an understanding, a mindset of an historical geographer. So by way of an example, in what follows I illustrate how the pivotal points of my study rely foundationally on historical geographical thinking. The first is to highlight one of the facets of the "carceral logic" that is shared across the industries I study -that is, the ideological and ontological status of "the human" and "the animal".
Carceral logic: The human and the animal Key to my thesis throughout Carceral Space, Prisoner and Animals is that the distinctions between "the human" and "the animal" themselves are made through encounters with carceral spaces. Which humans and nonhumans have the force of legal, political, cultural, or other protections due to their special "human" qualities, and which fall outside of those protections as "animal"? The process of "animalization" in particular subjugates both certain humans and certain nonhumans into hierarchies of worthiness and value. Fundamental to how and why certain humans (prisoners) and certain species of animals can be exploited, objectified, or made killable within the prison, the farm, the research lab, or the zoo is the social construction of the human/nonhuman divide itself -the social meanings that attach to various bodies and populations.
The hierarchies that these distinctions perpetuate are based on a number of social markers. Racial difference is foundational, for example, to much of the "criminal as animal" rhetoric, particularly via animalistic representations of Black men who disproportionately comprise the U.S. prison population as well as those on death row (below) 3 . Meanwhile certain animals such as pets can be anthropomorphized and "humanized" while others -vermin, pests, livestock -remain "animalized". Many processes are in play that either amplify the status of certain humans and nonhumans, or reduce the status of others. These have different and important implications -not least of which are the processes that govern how certain lives can be made disposable and killable because they lack ostensibly human qualities. "The human", though, is itself a highly contested category, from which many human lives have been and continue to be excluded. And indeed, perhaps in Western societies at least, it has only been the White, western, bourgeois man who has, across space and time, occupied or been imputed the status of "complete" human 4 .
Dozens of scholars have offered useful historical-geographical illustrations of the many human groups that have been vilified as animal or "subhuman other", marking countless numbers of dominations, exploitations, and oppressions 5 . Animalization of various human groups, vilified  Without rehearsing the vast number or extent of such examples here, a brief overview of American wars and interventions abroad in the last century reveals dominant cultural representations of Philippino "yellow monkeys" (1898), Vietnamese "termites" (1969), and Iraqi "cockroaches" (1991), to name just a few. Within the U.S., African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Chinese-Americans have been targeted as the most animal of humans by the dominant culture -base, lowly, brutish, irrational, vicious, dirty, or lustful -so as to justify their subordination, exploitation, and extermination. Claire Jean Kim 7 argues that such associations first converged in a powerful way ca. 1860 when the Black, Native, and Chinese "questions" arose in U.S. national consciousness. Within various contexts these groups came to occupy a marginalized borderland between human and animal. Their uses of and relationships to nonhuman animals -for example in San Francisco Chinatown's live animal markets -amplified accusations of cruelty and barbarism of these groups and corresponding racism, nativism, and cultural imperialist responses. Maneesah Deckha has shown that the "discourse of civilization" itself permeates animal anti-cruelty legislation, targeting practices of minoritized groups' behavior toward animals as deviant or transgressive and thereby reinforcing race, class, religious, and gender hierarchies. Such legislation targets individual animal abusers who, through gross neglect, do not maintain adequate shelter, food, or veterinary care for animals. Yet meanwhile, industrial practices that abuse animals on a whole other (massive) scale remain immune from prosecution. This has the double effect of both selecting certain animals for non-protection ("animalized animals") as well as creating a deviant class of "animalized humans" 8 . In the next section I provide one potent example of industrial practices that rely foundationally on the carceral logic of animalization just described. In this discussion I turn my attention to the spatial logic of "assembly line killing" evident in the prison's death row and the animal slaughterhouse.

Death row across species
It is hard to miss the parallels in the rise and development of the agricultural industrial complex and that of the prison industrial complex in the United States in the last half century. Both of these industries rapidly expanded during the 1970s and 1980s era of deregulated "big agriculture" on the one side, and changes in drug and sentencing laws that led to new thresholds in mass incarceration on the other -with an unprecedented 2.4 million people behind bars in the peak year of 2014. The parallel rise in mass incarceration and retention and expansion of the death penalty are indicative of an historical "hearty American appetite for punitiveness" that is exceptional among western nations. After the temporary abolition of capital punishment in 1972, the death penalty "came back with a vengeance" in the years following its reinstatement by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976. By the late 1990s, death sentencing rates and execution rates reached highs that the U.S. had not seen in 50 years, with the Supreme Court leaving the legalities of capital punishment up to individual states. Since 1976 there have been 1,442 state-sponsored executions 9 .
Today, capital punishment is legal in 32 states, while 18 have abolished it. There are 36 prisons in the U.S. with a "death row" and at the latest count these prisons held 2,905 people awaiting execution -42 percent of whom are Black, 42 percent White, 13 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent "other". Clearly these percentages indicate the uneven and racialized application of the capital sentence considering that, for example, Black people comprise 34.7 percent of those executed in the U.S. "botched" executions, drug shortages, and states seeking alternatives 10 . Prisoners sentenced to death typically spend over a decade awaiting execution, some for over 20 years or more due to lengthy appeals processes. They spend 23 or 24 hours a day alone in their cells, living with the constant anxiety of impending death. As the execution date approaches they spend up to two weeks in a separate "death watch" cell near the execution chamber itself. Not surprisingly, they suffer high rates of mental illness, what some have termed the "death row syndrome", which would of course be in addition to the mental illnesses caused by solitary confinement in and of itself. Much debate surrounds the practice of capital punishment, including those about its underlying racial disparities, controversial methods of killing, inconsistent and arbitrary patterns across state lines (with the South disproportionately represented), its (lack of ) efficacy in deterring crime, its cost, and of course its basic (im)morality. The issue of secrecy surrounding the execution chamber is another, with only a tiny number of court-approved spectators allowed to witness the killings 11 .
As Thomas and Shields observe, "state-sanctioned killings are capital punishment in one arena and »processing« in another"; they intersect with a concern for "human and animal's [sic!] lived experiences" 12 .

Entangled experiences: The slaughterhouse
Historical geographies of the animal slaughterhouse are instructive reminders of the origin of the 19 th century cattle towns that fed Chicago's Union Stock yards in the 1850s and 1860s, setting the stage for today's meatpacking industry 131 4 . Patterson describes the enormous complex of hotels, restaurants, saloons, offices, and "an interlocking system of 2,300 connected livestock pens" that took up more than a square mile in southwestern Chicago. At the time, the meat companies Amour and Swift each employed more than 5,000 workers within those yards. By 1886, more than 100 miles of railroad tracks surrounded the yards, and each day trains with new refrigeration capability unloaded hundreds of cars full of western longhorn cattle, sheep, and pigs. This first "mass production industry" introduced the conveyor belts, suspension hooks, scraping and skinning machines, and other technologies to increase speed and efficiency and by 1900, 400 million livestock were slaughtered annually. Today, U.S. slaughterhouses kill that number of animals in less than two weeks 14 .
As in the prison, the day-to-day embodied experience of captivity; of being identified with a number, a tattoo, a brand, and other forms of bodily modifications; the strain of knowing the approach of death or of the stunning apparatus or whip; all are interwoven into the day-to-day carceral space of the animal slaughterhouse. Today, approximately 10 billion land animals are held captive, mutilated, and killed in the U.S. meat-producing industry each year (nine billion of them chickens), and this figure does not include 13  the billions more sea creatures which are counted not per animal but by weight (by the ton). These billions of cows, pigs, horses, chickens, sheep, and other farm animals herded to and through the auction block, the slaughterhouse, and other processing facilities are a basic feature of today's agribusiness industry. Industrialized food production is where, by far, the most violence towards animals occurs.

Space, technology, and control
Numerous examples of the symbolic relationship between the violence of prison torture and execution and the animal slaughterhouse can be found, such as Brower illustrating via images from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where prisoners were physically handled and photographed as animals to be slaughtered. Guards used blades to cut away prisoners' jumpsuits, from their necks to their thighs, branding prisoners like cattle, drawing words and symbols on their legs and buttocks, and forcing them to crawl like dogs on their hands and knees, to bark on command, and to follow their captors on leashes or strings 15 . These symbolic referents provide powerful insights into the relationships of violence across the prison industrial complex and the agricultural industrial complex. They provide a useful springboard to the material geographies of these sites and the ways that systematic violence in them is carried out, through their shared structural designs and disciplinary technologies and practices, they terrorize animal and human bodies in similar ways. The material geographies of the prison execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse especially map uncannily well onto one another -their locations; their physical structures, spatial layout and design; as well as their technological and other control features that regulate movements within them. Most obviously, these carceral sites are "hidden in plain view" in rural or remote locations, their architectures so innocuous and ordinary that they do not attract attention. From an aerial view, the prison and the slaughterhouse look the same. Timothy Pachirat discusses the "banal insidiousness" of the slaughterhouse that hides in plain sight, its construction blending physically into the landscape of "Everyplace USA" 16 . Sites of capital punishment today also inhabit a set of insidious visual banalities, at least in comparison to the past. The last U.S. public execution occurred in 1936. Once ritual executions were moved from the public square, the public spectacle of death shifted to the sterile courtroom, where the suffering of victims and judicial process became the important ceremonial stage of punishment. In this way the infliction of punishment shifted to the imposition of the death sentence in court proceedings. Thus the loud, unruly, festive spectacles of public execution were replaced by executions carried out in the private space of the jail or prison yard 17 .
At carceral sites and institutions, the killing itself is divided into stages, highly segregated by task and out of sight of one another, including from the workers themselves. Industrialized "killing centers" have several things in common: their technologies, speed, efficiency, and "rational", scientific-management assembly line techniques. Humans have been confining and killing each other and animals for millennia, but the specialization  Politics, and Society", 20, 2000, p. 3-34. and mass-production characteristic of the modern industrial era -the "mechanization of death" -was something new and perfected by the late 19 th century. Within these spaces are routine, mechanical, predictable, repetitive, and programmed practices. As Patterson argues, "just the right mix of deception, intimidation, physical force, and speed is needed to minimize the chance of panic or resistance that will disrupt the process" 18 . Controlled containment and controlled mobility are integral to the functioning of the slaughterhouse, as they are equipped with an array of chutes, pens, ramps and mobile shackle lines, electric prods, and mechanical hoists intended to efficiently and quickly move animals for processing.
In the prison's death row and execution chamber, each movement is carefully choreographed, regulated, and surveilled. Several authors describe the "execution assembly line" of the prison's death house and execution chamber 19 . Prisoners remain in their regular death row cell until two weeks prior to execution, then are moved to a specially designed "death watch" cell close to the execution chamber. Here the minute details of the condemned's final weeks in isolation are tracked; closed circuit TV and computer tracking systems open cell doors, control lights, and maintain an activity log of every movement and location of the prisoner within the death house cell. Executions were ostensibly to become swifter, painless, and more efficient with advancements in "modern" killing 18 T. Pachirat,Every Twelve Seconds,C. Patterson,Eternal Treblinka,  technologies -historically shifting from hanging, to the firing squad, gas chamber, electric chair, to today's lethal injection. In the execution chamber itself, specific tasks are delegated to each member of the execution team, including the final enunciation -"go ahead" -of the warden. As noted by a guard assisting with a lethal injection at Huntsville, Texas, "Usually within about twenty seconds he's completely strapped down. Twenty to thirty seconds. I mean, it's down to a fine art" 20 . Many scholars have shown how the design and production methods of the slaughterhouse were the precursor to assembly line production itself, including that aimed at killing humans. Giedion's re-issued Mechanization Takes Command 21 usefully outlines the historical roots and social impacts of European and U.S. "scientific management" and mechanization of work, and illustrating the deep connections between the Cincinnati and Chicago slaughterhouse technologies with Henry Ford's mass production of automobiles, 1918-1939. Moreover, the industrialization of animal slaughter -their technologies, speed, efficiency, and assembly line techniques -inspired Henry Ford in automobile production and in turn, as many have argued, paved the way for the slaughter of humans in the Holocaust: "the road to Auschwitz begins at the slaughterhouse" (and in fact some of the soldiers who worked in the death camps first worked in slaughterhouses). As J.M. Coetzee's protagonist Elizabeth Costello declares in his acclaimed novel The Lives of Animals, "Chicago showed us the way; it was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies". The industrialized killing at the Chicago stockyards as well as Henry Ford's automobile assembly line production 20 Excerpted from Witness to an Execution (https://storycorps.org/listen/witness-to-an-execution/, access: June 10, 2018). 21 S. Giedion, Mechanization. informed Hitler's genocidal plans, and in fact Ford was a major backer of Hitler 22 .
Yet it is also important to recognize that the U.S. "correctional" (prison) industry -i.e. the United States Department of Justice -invented the gas chamber "long before Hitler". Christianson lists the 594 U.S. prisoners executed by lethal gas from 1934-1999. Ample evidence demonstrates the deep connectivity between the slaughterhouse and the execution chamber; both their materials and technologies originated from the U.S. military industrial complex of World War I, and later developing into a United States and Third Reich collaboration. U.S. scientists developed the scientific, legal, and ethical rationale for the lethal gas chamber, and U.S. firms partnered with German corporations that provided the gas. Ultimately the U.S. federal government patented two models from Eaton Metal Products of Denver and Salt Lake City, ca. 1939, which became the world's leading designer and maker of gas chambers for prison executions. Earl C. Liston's Patent Application, #2,172,168, was actually a "double-seater" gas chamber. The patent illustrates the manner by which a mechanical device drops the cyanide pellets into a chamber, a process that "provides a neat, compact mechanism which will humanely execute the criminal or criminals with the least possible delay or confusion" 23 .
While arguments in support of constructing and patenting the lethal gas chamber focused on it as a "more humane" method of killing compared with that of hanging or electrocution, as with every method of prison executions, lethal gas was eventually contested constitutionally in 1976 as cruel and inhumane. The Conference... gas chamber execution was in Arizona in 1999. This is important to keep in mind since it is the ostensible illegitimacy of the methods of killing that have led to challenges of capital punishment, rather than the killing itself. All methods of capital punishment have been challenged juridically on the grounds of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution's protections against cruel and unusual punishment. This includes recent challenges to today's lethal injection drug cocktail 24 . Perhaps the same could be said of industrial slaughter -challenges have rested on its inhumane ways of killing, not the sovereign or other right to kill itself.

Concluding comment
The aim of the above discussion and Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals more broadly is to develop a trans-species carceral geography that offers insights into how and why the sites and spaces of human carcerality, and the endemic patterns of violence within them, share key features with sites of captivity and confinement of nonhuman animals -using the example here of sites of execution and slaughter but which would also include sites of research testing and sites of exploited entertainment and commodified labor. The above focuses specifically on some of the historical-geographical bases for the relationships drawn on in the text. Within these carceral sites a number of "carceral logics" underlie their processes and profits, including historical-geographical examples of animalization, racialization, and criminalization of certain vulnerable populations, showing how these carceral logics are foundational to their continued operation. While we might recognize almost infinite differences across the various human and nonhuman groups discussed above, these differences should not prevent us from acknowledging the entangled structures, forms, operations, and embodied experiences that developed and continue to span species' boundaries at these sites.