Invisible shadows
The reality of incarceration, in our own backyards
Last week really tested my ability to limit the amount of national news that I consume. In particular, I kept checking my phone for the latest updates on Elon Musk—a private citizen and the world’s richest person—hijacking our treasury payment system with the help of a bunch of 20-something accomplices; including one who went by the name “Big Balls” on LinkedIn and who dropped out of Northeastern to join Musk’s wrecking crew. I’m guessing that it won’t take long for this coup to become very real for us. As soon you shut off money spigots for the infrastructure and services that 90% of the people in America rely upon, they will notice. And they will be extremely mad about it.
But when I think about what’s happened during the early weeks of Trump Part II: The Revenge, the things that really concern me are the things that won’t feel real to many of us; the stuff that’s happening out on the edges of our communities and our minds.
Whenever I head back into Boston after having dinner with my parents in the suburbs, or going on a trip to the mountains, I drive past a complex of austere buildings near the intersection of Melnea Cass Boulevard and Massachusetts Avenue. This is the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department’s South Bay House of Correction—a prison in which a daily average of 840 people are detained, as they complete sentences of two-and-a-half years or less. I’ve probably driven past the complex more than 200 times in the last decade, and while it always carried a vague sense of foreboding (“ooh, there’s the local prison again,”) the reality that several hundred people were stuck in those buildings didn’t fully permeate my consciousness. Until one night when I walked there.
On November 25th in 2014, a grand jury in Missouri decided not to indict Darren Wilson; the white Ferguson cop who shot and killed an 18-year old Black teenager named Michael Brown, who was unarmed. The Black Lives Matter movement was young and evolving, and by nightfall, solidarity protests had started in major cities across America. That evening, I joined over 1,400 Bostonians on a march through Roxbury to the House of Correction. And as we approached the police barricade stretched across Mass. Ave, each of us thinking about whether we were willing (or prepared) to get arrested, I saw something that still lingers in my mind to this day.
In the lit windows of the prison were the silhouettes of the human beings who were incarcerated there in the winter of 2014. They were watching the protests. Some of them raised their fists, but most of them stood still; static forms that could have just as easily been any of us. They seemed to cast a fragmented shadow over the street.
Today, whenever I walk or drive by the prison, I can still feel a cold sensation of being under the shadow. My nerves tense up, knowing that I’m just a few feet away from an institution built to inflict pain and degradation. While only the most sadistic sheriff’s departments would ever admit to this, cruelty and neglect are features of our prisons. Last spring, a 35 year-old mom from Dorchester was sent to the Suffolk County House of Correction after being involuntarily committed for intoxication. She died while in custody at the prison. A suit filed by her family alleged that the guards didn’t bother to check on her even as she experienced vomitting and chest convulsions. As she laid dying on the floor of her cell, the guards were apparently shooting the breeze nearby.
I’ve been thinking about American prisons and mass incarceration quite a lot over the last few months. Until 2019, the Suffolk County House of Correction sometimes held people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—the federal agency that Trump intends to use for mass roundups of undocumented immigrants. And the thing is, immigration enforcement is just one example of how Trump and his deputies plan on using incarceration as a weapon. As part of their crackdown on the existence and bodily autonomy of trans people, the Trump administration has already tried to transfer incarcerated trans women to men’s prisons. And as of this week, Trump and Co. are considering a grotesque offer from El Salvador’s strongman-in-chief, President Nayib Bukele—a deal in which the U.S. would get to transfer incarcerated immigrants and incarcerated U.S. citizens to Bukele’s notorious “mega-jail” in El Salvador that can hold 40,000 people. Given the certainty of protests against Trump’s autocratic agenda, and the certainty of arrests at many of those protests, one has to wonder who Trump would try to deport. Would “dissidents” be broadly vulnerable? Would Trump and his team just ignore the blatant illegality of deporting U.S. citizens? And if so, would that heightened exposure make the violence of mass incarceration feel real to more of us?
I’d expect that the answer to that question is, “Nope.” Most people only have so much capacity for thinking about really bad things that may or may not happen, and fixating on looming unknowns is a guaranteed way to burn yourself out. But at times when the landscape around you is changing in a way that poses some new risks, for others and for yourself, keeping an eye on those changes is important. Suppose that you’re out in Montana’s vast backcountry in August, on a multi-night backpacking trip, and you start smelling smoke. You climb one of the pine conifers and you spot a small forest fire on the distant horizon. It’s far enough away from your vantage point that you don’t need to panic just yet. But still, there’s a fire out there. It could get bigger and spread in your direction. So as you make your way to the nearest road or extraction point, you’ll have to climb another tree here and there, to keep an eye on what exactly the fire is doing.
The new and unrestrained Trump administration is the inferno that we need to keep an eye on now. But one key difference is that a forest fire is something you can see and smell. With an autocratic regime, sometimes you can’t see any flames until a terrible policy has been implemented. What you can do, as a way of reminding yourself what’s out there and what may come, is familiarize yourself with institutions that an autocrat will use to inflict suffering. Just as I did in 2014, in a different context, you might walk by a prison and absorb the reality that mass incarceration happens in close proximity to places where the rest of us play, work, eat, and sleep. And that decades of mass incarceration, under both Republicans and Democrats, have brought us to this point.
A couple of weeks ago, a teenager in Lynn, Massachusetts got into an argument with her brother and allegedly pushed him. A neighbor called the police, who arrested the young woman. But upon being initially released, she was intercepted by ICE agents, taken back into custody, and transferred to the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Maine, which ICE uses as one of their facilities. The fact that she and her family were legally in the United States, awaiting the outcome of an asylum claim, was not enough to spare her from the gaping black maw of our incarceration machine. And if you were out on Portland’s beautiful urban trail network in late January, enjoying the winter sun with a stroll on the Fore River Parkway Trail, you walked right past the prison in which this young woman was being traumatized, along with many others. She was released in early February and reunited with her family. But the Cumberland County Jail has the capacity to hold 570 people; all of whom cast their own fragmented shadow over the Fore River Parkway Trail and the deciduous trees and seasonal wildflowers that line it.
And even now, in the second Trump era, these shadows are still invisible to most of us.
One of the most audacious and disturbing films that I’ve seen is The Zone Of Interest; Jonathan Glazer’s portrait of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Höss lived with his wife, Hedwig, and their children in a villa built next to the concentration camp walls. Glazer never takes us over the wall, using sounds and implications to convey the horror of what’s happening on the other side. In the press tour for the film, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Glazer repeatedly said, “This is not about the past. It’s about now.” He elaborated on this in an interview with The Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan. “The reason I made this film is to try to restate our close proximity to this terrible event that we think of as in the past,” Glazer said. “For me, it is not ever in the past, and right now, I think something in me is aware – and fearful – that these things are on the rise again with the growth of rightwing populism everywhere. The road that so many people took is a few steps away. It is always just a few steps away.”
I don’t know if taking the first steps down the other road—of recognizing institutional cruelty and resisting it—can be a means of divergence. I don’t know if looking at our prisons out in the field and fully digesting what these prisons have been used for, is enough to make their terrible shadows visible to more of us. But I do know this. If you walk by a prison at a time when it still contains prisoners, there’s still a chance to do something about it. If you walk by a prison that no longer contains people—a prison which has been turned into a historic site with tour guides, exhibits, and an ice-cold silence—then the worst has already come to pass. And all you can do is stand there.
Since this week’s newsletter looks squarely at the chaos and horror of what’s happening under the Trump administration (something that other newsletters allude to) I want to take a moment to direct your attention to some of the most incisive reporting on these events and the journalists who are doing this work. Legacy media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post have been late to the scene on covering many of the biggest stories of the last few weeks, such as Elon Musk and the DOGE crew taking over the treasury. WIRED has been on the frontlines of covering that story, and given the synergy between Trump World and the Silicon Valley ruling class, I suspect that WIRED is going to be an essential publication over these next several years. I subscribed yesterday.
As I wrote about back in December, when announcing that Mind The Moss would transform into a newsletter about “walking into a better world,” a lot of journalists who once worked for legacy media outlets have launched their own newsletters or small-scale publications. Why? Because the journalism industry has been in a state of collapse for the past two decades, more readers are getting their news through social platforms, and ultimately, you have to go to where the readers are. A few of the independent journalists I’ve been following for coverage of recent events are Marisa Kabas (who publishes The Handbasket), Frankie de la Cretaz (who publishes Out Of Your League), and Hamilton Nolan (who publishes How Things Work.) If there are others you’ve enjoyed, I’d like to know about them too.
Mind The Moss is an independent publication too. I got my start in the traditional media landscape before pivoting to independent journalism, and I’m proud—and very grateful!—to say that Mind The Moss is 100% financed by readers like you who decide to become paid subscribers. It’s heartening to see readers stepping up and supporting independent media; because we’re going to need it over these next few years, as legacy companies owned by billionaires continue to stumble and censor. So if you would like to help Mind The Moss continue to exist, take a moment to become a paid subscriber today. Thank you, and see you out there!
Heather Cox Richardson is a professor, not a journalist, but I've been getting a lot out of her newsletter Letters From an American lately.
Can recommend Judd Legum's Popular Information and Musk Watch.