“Visiting Day” at Rikers Island

ABSTRACT

Wacquant (2002) calls for ethnography to meet the jailhouse on its own terms, noting the dearth of first-hand writing from the carceral facility. This article describes a creative representation of qualitative research made by the author and two creative collaborators that both meets Wacquant’s call and problematizes it; meets it, as we depict the functioning of the visitation process at Rikers Island based on our first-hand experience on both sides of the bars, and problematizes it, as we chose for our medium the zine, a creative form common to prison writing, yet not sufficiently academic by Wacquant’s standards. I offer a novel definition of the zine form grounded in the academic literature, describe the visitation process at Rikers and the making of the “Visiting Day” zine, and reflect on challenges to the binary of inside/outside the carceral facility, as well as the political stakes of this theoretical formulation.

KEYWORDS:

• C-76
• DIY
• jail
• NYC Department of Correction
• punk
• qualitative inquiry
• Rikers Island
• zines

Notes

1. There is considerable debate over what to call incarcerated people: inmates, detainees, captives, justice-involved-individuals, and so forth. Formally speaking, a Rikers “inmate” is distinct from a pretrial “detainee” by virtue of being convicted of a crime and given a determinant jail sentence. To fit this structural distinction and to avoid confusion, the term inmate, applying as it does to the author, is begrudgingly used throughout this piece. Ultimately, however, as Fassin (2017) deftly argues, incarcerated people ought to just be called what they are: people.

². I have published two short pieces on my observations, “Checking Out” (Shanahan 2016a), detailing a work-stoppage organized by one of my dormmates at EMTC, and “Eating Good Enough at Rikers Island” (Shanahan & Gajraj 2016), a collection of commissary food recipes, as told to me by a trained chef and jailhouse gourmand.

³. “Visiting Day” marks my fifth collaboration with McDonough’s Grixly imprint. Additionally, I took a break from my field work at Rikers to pen “Cruelty Free in a Cruel World” (Shanahan 2016b) for Pryor’s vegan food zine Marmalade Umlaut, detailing the methods by which I ate reasonably well on a vegan diet while locked up.

⁴. “Visiting Day” can be read online and printed in booklet form at: http://www.hardcrackers.com/new-visiting-day-zine-available-free

⁵. Most commonly, the zine’s origins are traced from underground cult followers of science fiction in the 1930s, through rock ‘n’ roll devotees in the 1960s, and punk rockers in the 1970s (Buchanan 2012). But this is only one telling of the zine’s history; to this supposed “anglo-American standpoint,” Zobl (2009) cites Piepzna-Samarasinha’s and Ortiz, who argue that “one can draw history of zines that sees them as coming out of riot grrrl, punk, and other usual (and majorly white) suspects, or look through an alternative lens that sees them equally birthed ‘out of the self-publication methods utilized by Chicana, Latina, Black, Indigenous and APA [Asian Pacific American] artists, poets and writers during the ‘60s and ‘70’” (pp. 2-3). Further complicating the traditional narrative, Piepmeier (2009a) claims zines’ lineage to the 19th century women’s practice of composing scrapbooks bridging personal concerns and autobiography with social commentary, and so-called “health pamphlets” that instructed women in autoeroticism and other practices banned from mainstream publishing by the puritanical Comstock Laws in the early 20th century (pp. 30, 34). This legacy is handily observed not only in the overwhelming representation of feminism and femme-centered issues in zine culture to this day, but also in a vibrant tradition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, an queer zines that has changed its content over time but remains a central component of activism and community-building (Garrison 2014). Equally important to the zine form is its history in militant labor organizing, which Plumb (2007) emphasizes in a discussion of workplace-centered zines containing “analyses of the workplace based on the author’s personal experiences, contributing to the tradition of working-class intellectualism” (pp. 153–4). Of course, there is also the history of zines as a medium for incarcerated people, to which I will turn below. But again, this history is surely incomplete and almost guaranteed to raise the hackles of at least one zinester out there somewhere, to whom I am truly sorry.

⁶. There I go!

⁷. My own work has been informed by a broad spectrum of institutional writing, including most notable Wilde’s De Profundis (2013), Shakur’s “Women in Prison: How We Are” (1978), Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast (1991), Jackson’s collected letters in Soledad Brother (1994), and of course de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (1994).

⁸. I have written about this imperative elsewhere in “Days Spent Doing too Much of Fucking Nothing” (Shanahan 2017), an essay on Lil Wayne’s Rikers memoir Gone ‘til November.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jarrod Shanahan

Jarrod Shanahan is a PhD student in environmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center.