Haunted by Prisons

In last week’s column, I wrote about the Baal Shem Tov, who miraculously freed himself from imprisonment, as well as Angela Davis and George Jackson, who battled imprisonment but did not succeed in securing Jackson’s freedom. I neglected to mention that imprisonment is a local issue for those of us in Los Angeles. In her book City of Inmates, Kelly Lyttle-Hernandez demonstrates that Los Angeles is the “carceral capital of the world,” meaning that it incarcerates more people than any other city on Earth. In fact, Mike Davis coined the term “Prison Industrial Complex” to describe the prison system in California in the 1980s in his article “Hell Factories in the Field,” and the system has expanded significantly since then.

Something I appreciate about Der Nister is our honesty about the hardships people experience around us in Downtown. Last year on Tisha B’Av, after reading Eikha, Rabbi Hollander shared that when he walks through the streets of Downtown LA, he often feels he is living in Eikha. That comment has not left me since. Walking through Downtown LA feels like Eikha, the Jewish book of lamentations, because we see visible suffering all around us. I often wonder how many of the people on Spring Street are living out the last days of their lives. The conditions that led people to live in this way were likely avoidable in each individual’s case but as a whole, the condition appears endless and interminable. And the suffering appears, literally: visible people experience pain, sometimes even approaching us, asking for help.

But there is also the hidden suffering that is obscured from our view, often purposefully. Prisons are one example. When we talk about mass incarceration, it’s easy to imagine a problem that happens elsewhere, to other people than ourselves. The cognitive and symbolic function of the prison is that it keeps suffering and violence invisible to us—out of sight, out of mind—and we all hope that we are lucky enough to never find ourselves inside. Those of us who live with whiteness are entrenched deeper into our racial identities, because it is comforting to trust that our racial identity will keep us far away from prisons.

As Lyttle-Hernandez demonstrates in City of Inmates, prisons have served exactly this function in Los Angeles since the 1910s. Keeping the suffering out of sight. Imprisoning unwanted, “problem” populations is essentially a means of erasing them: “mass incarceration is mass elimination,” as she states in the book’s opening sentence. While prisons in Los Angeles have predominantly incarcerated Black people since the 1940s, prior to that they locked up other populations that were at odds with the city’s goals of expanding and securing wealth. When Los Angeles was first founded, a prison was one of the first buildings established, and it housed predominantly indigenous people throughout the 19th century. Beginning in 1892 with the Geary Act, prisons in LA incarcerated Chinese American immigrants, in a period which the book describes as the invention of immigrant detention, something that happened right here in LA. During the Mexican Revolution and into the 1920s and 1930s, Los Angeles pioneered methods of policing the border to incarcerate Mexican immigrants. All of these groups were unwanted populations at different periods in time, and prisons served to eliminate the surplus. We imagine that prisons keep the violence away from us, hidden in a place where it can’t escape—but really, prisons are the source of violence, a key juncture in the cycle of concentrated disadvantage that prevents people from ascending out of poverty.

Since prisons serve a symbolic function of hiding suffering, violence and poverty, I have come to think of them as having a haunting property. I use the term haunting to describe a sense of pervasive suffering that is not entirely present or visible to us. When I learned that the LA Men’s County Jail is located right next to Union Station in Downtown, I felt it explained something I already knew. The train I take to UC Irvine passes directly outside the prison, which somehow I had never identified until a good friend pointed it out to me. I never knew until I was told, despite the watch tower just a few feet outside the train window, which I now painfully notice every time we reach that point in the journey. And yet, in a sense, I tell myself that I did know. There was always something I felt in that part of Downtown, something uncomfortable, something not right. 

Marx famously begins The Communist Manifesto with the sentence “a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” This notion of “spectre” was later taken up by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who wrote the book Spectres of Marx in order to elaborate the theory of haunting. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida also conducts a close reading of Macbeth, another work that represents haunting. He takes up the line that Macbeth speaks at the end of the first act: “This time is out of joint—O curséd spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” As the quote demonstrates, haunting isn’t a function of the supernatural so much as it is about our perception of time. Suffering that takes place in the past announces itself in the present. Haunting is an event you didn’t see, but whose injustice you perceive, like Macbeth who knows his father was murdered but doesn’t yet have evidence when the play begins.

Jewish tradition also offers us ways to understand haunting, which I hope to explore in future weeks of my makhshoves. One well-known example of Jewish haunting is the dybbuk. This word comes from the root ד–ב–ק that also gives us the word devekut, or “cleaving,” an essential practice and concept in Jewish mysticism. A dybbuk is typically a deceased person who cleaves to a living being they were once close to, haunting them, possessing them, leading them to act in strange or unacceptable ways. In this case too, time is out of joint; suffering from the past refuses to be complete, and brings itself into the present in new ways. Presence itself is reconfigured by this concept: those who experience a dybbuk are feeling the effects of something that’s absent, something they thought was over, something they cannot see.

I consider Downtown LA to be haunted by the presence of prisons. They are both present and absent, visible and not. Our choice to observe them, to be honest about the effects they have on the city and thereby on our lives, is a process of revelation, making the hidden cognizable. The extent of all the suffering that has happened in LA is unfathomable, plenty of it is undocumented, and to know it all would be impossible. Honesty, vigilance, and a willingness to study this troubled history all show to us just how complex and intractable the conditions of suffering here are (and, how simple and avoidable they are, in plenty of cases as well.) The paradox of invisible and yet constantly experienced suffering, the revelation and concealment at play in all haunting, is a spiritual experience we all have of the city.