Throughout the twentieth century,
even the harshest prison systems in the United States were rather
porous. Incarcerated people were regularly released from prison for
Christmas holidays; the wives of incarcerated men could visit for
seventy-two hours relatively unsupervised; and governors routinely
commuted the sentences of people convicted of murder. By the 1990s,
these practices had become rarer as politicians and the media—in
contrast to corrections officials—described the public as potential
victims who required constant protection against the threat of
violence. In A Wall Is
Just a Wall,
Reiko Hillyer focuses on gubernatorial clemency, furlough, and
conjugal visits to examine the origins and decline of practices that
allowed incarcerated people to transcend prison boundaries.
Illuminating prisoners’ lived experiences as they suffered,
critiqued, survived, and resisted changing penal practices, she shows
that the current impermeability of the prison is a recent, uneven,
and contested phenomenon. By tracking the “thickening” of prison
walls, Hillyer historicizes changing ideas of risk, the growing
bipartisan acceptance of permanent exile and fixing the convicted at
the moment of their crime as a form of punishment, and prisoners’
efforts to resist it.