Punishment, purpose, and place: A case study of Arizona's prison siting decisions

• Published date: 09 December 2009
• Pages: 105-137
• Date: 09 December 2009
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000050007
• Author: Mona Lynch

PUNISHMENT, PURPOSE,

AND PLACE: A CASE STUDY

OF ARIZONA’S PRISON

SITING DECISIONS

Mona Lynch

ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I trace Arizona’s prison siting and construction history to

examine how cultural norms and traditions, economics, political

prerogatives, and notions about the prison’s purpose shape how such

institutions are conceived, planned, and realized over time. By looking

longitudinally at how prisons have come to be – as physical entities – in

one locale, I reveal both the continuities and changes in the underlying

meaning of the prison. In doing so, I aim to contribute to a broader

understanding of the process of late modern penal change, especially the

proliferation of prison building in the past 30 years.

INTRODUCTION

In 1876, Arizona opened the Yuma Territorial Prison, which, on the surface,

seemed to be part of the last wave of a larger penitentiary-building

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 50, 105–137

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ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000050007

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movement that had swept across the United States over the prior half-

century. Yet the Yuma prison, like many of its western peers, had an

underlying ethos that was both tougher and less concerned with the

prisoner’s capacity to reform than such institutions in the eastern region of

the country. Built in the desert near the Southern Arizona–California

border, where summer temperatures sometimes reach 1201F, the Yuma

prison has been memorialized in Western films and novels as a place so

harsh that no prisoner ever escaped alive.

1

Although it was only open for a

total of 33 years, this institution seemed to put into motion a distinct set of

norms about the prison’s function and meaning that have shaped Arizona’s

punishment practices across its history. Indeed, when the state began its

major facilities expansion 110 years after Yuma originally opened, similar

notions about what prison life should be like – austere, unpleasant, and as

economically self-sufficient as feasible – were articulated by state leaders as

they made decisions about the kinds of facilities they aimed to build.

In this chapter, I trace the prison construction history in Arizona to

examine how cultural norms and traditions, economics, political preroga-

tives, and notions about the prison’s purpose shape how such institutions

are conceived, planned, and realized over time. I am particularly interested

in how that process reflects some of the underlying ideals about prisons and

their function in the larger social sphere. Using existing press reports,

government records, and other primary and secondary sources, I construct a

history that begins in the 1870s, when the Arizona territorial government

first got into the prison business, and that culminates in the most recent

prison-building boom which was launched more than 100 years later. By

looking longitudinally at how prisons have come to be – as physical entities –

in one locale, I aim to contribute to a broader understanding of the

process of late modern penal change and expansion, about which many

scholars have written (see De Giorgi, 2006;Garland, 2001;Gottschalk, 2006;

Simon, 2007).

The chapter will proceed as follows: in the next section, I offer a broad

stroke review of penal developments in the 19th and 20th centuries at the

national level. I follow with six chronologically sequential sections that each

addresses a specific thematic period and/or moment of transition in the

state’s prison construction history. Each section will detail how state actors

articulated their (sometimes competing) vision of the institution’s purpose,

including its relationship to both those who are confined within it and the

larger community. Within that, I focus on how those articulations shaped

decisions about where to site new institutions, and what the physical

manifestations should look like.

MONA LYNCH106

PRISON BUILDING AS A REGIONALLY

SPECIFIED NATIONAL PHENOMENON

As has been well documented by many scholars and policy analysts, US

incarceration rates began to dramatically increase in the late 1970s, forcing

most state correctional systems (and the federal penal system) to come to

terms with the outer limits of their institutional capacity. Every state in the

nation experienced incarceration increases of a very similar magnitude

despite significant jurisdictional and regional differences in political cultures

and structures, criminal justice styles, and incarceration rates (Zimring &

Hawkins, 1991). States that did not have the kind of welfarist political

structure that has allegedly been supplanted by the leaner and meaner neo-

liberal form of governance (such as many places in the deep South and much

of the non-coastal West) began to amp up their use of incarceration after

decades of maintaining relatively stable rates of imprisonment in the 1970s

right alongside those states that had exemplified the rehabilitative model.

Up until then, jurisdictions had generally regulated the use of prison, even

in times of social and economic insecurity, so that a relatively stable

percentageof the general population wasincarcerated year by year (Zimring &

Hawkins, 1991). Specifically, while prison population numbers grew along

with general population growth in states across the United States, the national

average incarceration rate vacillated around 100 prisoners per 100,000 citizens

from 1929 to the 1970s (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1998). In contrast,

between 1974 and 2000, the rate of incarceration grew from 93 per 100,000 to

478 per 1,000,000. Although individual states’ incarceration rates continue to

significantly vary from each other, ranging from a low of 128 in Minnesota

and a high of 801 in Louisiana by year-end 2000, they all grew by roughly the

same multiplier in the late 20th century (Beck & Harrison, 2001;Zimring &

Hawkins, 1991). As a result of this dramatic growth in the prison population,

states began building new facilities across the nation by the end of the 1970s,

with the construction accelerating through the late 1980s and early 1990s at a

rate unprecedented in history (Lawrence & Travis, 2004;Myers & Martin,

2004). The majority of the new construction has been in rural areas, with 350

new rural facilities opening in the last 2 decades of the 20th century (King,

Mauer, & Huling, 2003).

This, however, was not the first ‘‘wave’’ of prison building in the United

States. A century before the contemporary facilities expansion began, most

states had just recently completed construction on the first round of state

level penal institutions, as they followed the lead of early 19th century New

York and Pennsylvania in building their own penitentiaries. As many

A Case Study of Arizona’s Prison Siting Decisions 107