A Wall Is Just a Wall

The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States

By: Reiko Hillyer

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Paperback | 13 February 2024

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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.

Industry Reviews

"Drawing on meticulous research and amplifying the voices of prisoners and their families and advocates, A Wall Is Just a Wall is materialist history at its best. Reiko Hillyer's beautifully narrated historical lessons and analyses of the contested sites of clemency, conjugal visitation, and furlough policies spur us to newly imagine the porosity of prison walls and, ultimately, prison abolition as justice long overdue." -- Sora Y. Han, author of * Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law *
"In this impressive study, historian Hillyer documents the relative openness of American prisons in the early 20th century and the subsequent 'thickening and hardening of prison walls.' . . . This thorough work of historical scholarship draws extensively on inmate newspapers to provide an eye-opening look at the high value prisoners placed on family visits, furlough, and the possibility of clemency, making their cancellation its own form of psychological punishment. Readers concerned by mass incarceration should take note." * Publishers Weekly *

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