WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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In an English romantic novel from 1796, the title character and hero, Marchmont, exclaims “is it possible that for a small sum, such as it is likely such people as these can owe, their creditor has a right to shut them up from the common air, and use of their limbs, by which alone there can be any chance of their payment? Can laws that suffer and enforce this senseless cruelty, be the very best that the wisdom and experience of mankind can devise for the government of civil society?”
An author of nine novels, a poet, and sometime resident of debtors’ prison, Charlotte Smith, coined the term prisonscape in Marchmont. That use was meant for the view inside the prison, but today we are helped to understand that the prison is everywhere – that through the prison the State has organized social and economic life for all of us.
Our guest today is Brett Story, a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker, and professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. We’ll focus on her 2016 documentary film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and her 2019 book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, published by the University of Minnesota Press. The book and film share the same motivation and research, but each offers a distinct and revealing treatment of the subject. They complement and deepen each other.
In the manner of last week’s show with Rasul Mowatt we’ll explore the role of the state in constructing Prison Land.
And while Story’s film offers twelve landscapes, we’ll focus on three: the so-called “Silicon Valley” of the Midwest, Detroit, as owned and “revitalized” by Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert; St. Louis, Missouri, where municipalities proliferated to support an intensely segregated racialized geography, and where taxes take the form of traffic stops and nuisance fines leading to our modern version of Charlotte Smith’s prisonscape, or debtors’ prison; and we’ll begin in New York City with the private transportation that has sprung up to connect those imprisoned in the rural geographies of upstate New York with their loved ones and relatives who mainly live in the outer boroughs of Empire City. We’ll hear clips from the movie throughout that have been edited for time constraints.
Our music today will feature Yusef Lateef, a multi-instrumentalist and composer from Detroit, and Clark Terry, a trumpet player and composer from St. Louis.
GUEST
Brett Story is a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker. Her films have screened at True/False, Oberhausen, Hot Docs, the Viennale, and Dok Leipzig, among other international festivals. Her second feature-length film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. She is the author of Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America from the University of Minnesota Press (2019). She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.
RELATED
Brett Story: The Prison in 12 Landscapes (Sabrina Alli interviews Brett Story)
On structure, collaboration, and imagining a better possible future (interview with Brett Story)
How Does It End? Story and the Property Form by Brett Story
ArchCity Defenders
The State Made Visible (Interchange with Rasul Mowatt)
Carceral Capitalism: An Interview with Jackie Wang (Interchange)
MUSIC
“Eastern Market” (Yusef Lateef’s Detroit, 1969)
“No Problem” (Clark Terry, Color Changes, 1961)
“The Philanthropist” (Yusef Lateef, The Centaur and the Phoenix, 1960)
“Russell and Elliot” (Yusef Lateef’s Detroit, 1969)
ID – “Bishop School” (Yusef Lateef’s Detroit, 1969)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
