Prisoners of the archives: privacy, identity and the history of incarceration

ABSTRACT

The archival record of incarceration in the United States presents a substantial challenge for historical research. This becomes particularly acute in those instances where historians seek to use individual patient or prisoner records. Some of these records have been deposited in state archives, but many have not, and the use of specific inmate case files can involve restrictive rules of access. In every instance, complex interplays of power, access and privacy pose challenges for historians who wish to foreground the voices and experiences of the incarcerated, and to better understand the practices and impacts of state power. This paper uses a series of episodes from the author’s own work to highlight these issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Anonymisation
• anonymity
• archives
• case files
• prisoners

Acknowledgements

This article grew out of ‘What’s in a Name? Should We Anonymise Identities?’, a University of Oxford conference funded by the John Fell Oxford University Press (OUP) Research Fund with support from the Oxford Centre for Global History and St. Johns College, Oxford. I am grateful to Mara Keire and Zachary Schrag, for their helpful feedback. A more recent version of this paper was presented at the University of Florida Department of History Workshop series (23 October 2020), and I am grateful to workshop organizer Nancy Hunt, discussants Mara Keire and Bonnie Ernst and the workshop participants for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Twentieth-century case file practice in the United States reflects considerable social scientific influence on institutional management. For detailed considerations, see Brickell (2013); Iacovetta and Mitchinson (1998), Lemert (1969) and Trace (2002). For more on the underlying scientific propositions, see Lunbeck (1994).

2. For the ways in which stigma exercises specific material effects, see Peck and Theodore (2008).

3. I use the term, ‘right to be forgotten’ in a general sense, not necessarily in the specific contemporary usage regarding digital privacy. However, there is some overlap between the two (Maruna 2014).

4. The most extensive erasure of custodial experience in the United States is certainly that of the hundreds of thousands of patients in twentieth-century state mental hospitals. On the issues this poses for conducting historical inquiry into individual lives, as an example see Ponterotto (2015). Jill Lepore tracked the life and work of the enigmatic Joe Gould, who spent the last years of his life in New York State’s Pilgrim State Hospital, at a time when that institution was the largest mental hospital in the world. On multiple occasions, Lepore petitioned the hospital for access to Gould’s patient records from the hospital and was turned down multiple times. In each case, the hospital’s Medical Access Review Committee cited a New York State policy that, as Lepore noted, ‘effectively protects not Gould’s privacy but the hospitals’. Ironically, Lepore has almost certainly found reference to Gould in a published study, but as a patient referred to only as ‘Case No. 231’ – making definite identification impossible (Lepore 2016).

5. Here, I use ‘Lexington Narcotic Farm’ as a shorthand for the actual institution name, which evolved over the years. It opened as the United States Narcotic Farm, operated jointly by the by the Public Health Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The name was changed to United States Public Health Service Hospital soon thereafter, and then eventually the facility was renamed the Clinical Research Center in 1968, the title it kept until its closure in 1974. For more on Lexington, see Campbell (2007) and Campbell, Olsen, and Walden (2008).

6. No historian with whom I have discussed these records suspects they remain in existence, and none has ever seen them. The only reference to the records is a single, hard-to-locate NIH ‘systems listing’: https://oma.od.nih.gov/forms/Privacy%20Documents/PAfiles/0202.htm The Lexington Records which were preserved constitute only 13 boxes of material: Record Group 511, ADAMHA Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administrative Office, Clinical Research Center, Lexington KY, NARA Southeast, Morrow, GA. Written requests to NARA Southeast and NIDA Medical Records Officer have gone unanswered to date.

7. For an accountability-focused perspective, Jimerson (2009).

8. Note that all references in this paper are to the original edition. The book was published in the UK by Arthur Barker in 1963, followed by a 1964 appearance in the pulp paperback world as Monarch Books #459. The Fantastic Lodge made its first appearance the British mass paperback market in an imprint by Digit Books, notable largely for the cover tag line, ‘a story that stirs the dregs of human degradation told with fierce and unswerving honesty’. The work made one final appearance in a 1971 Fawcett edition, which dropped the word ‘girl’ from the subtitle and, for the first time, credited interviewer Howard Becker on the cover. It also added a selection of ‘Janet Clark’s’ poems.

9. It is not entirely clear who initiated the idea of the pseudonym. All IJR interview subjects were given a pseudonym at first interview, to establish some protection for both the interview subjects and IJR staff, if officers from the Chicago Police Department’s Narcotics Squad came looking around (as according to Solomon Kobrin, they did). On the other hand, in 1953, ‘Janet Clark’ gave the book publication rights to the Chicago Area Project, on the condition that her real name never be used in any subsequent publication (Bennett 1981, 221, 323 n. 26).

10. The narrator’s psychoanalyst, ‘Dr. Zimpert’ is ever-present in the book, advising her on nearly every critical decision. ‘Janet Clark’ was hardly alone in postwar America in subjecting substance abuse to a psychoanalytic reading (McClellan 2004; Rotskoff 2002).

11. Howard Becker himself, on the other hand, urged researchers to consider the ‘historical specificity of your data’ (Becker 2017, 204).

12. Ironically, it was ‘Janet Clark’s’ perceived lack of typicality as a white, female and middle-class subject that initially led the IJR to resist the publication of her life history (Bennett 1981, 219).

13. On the concept of ‘risk environments’, see Burris et al. (2004).

14. Toward the end of The Fantastic Lodge (Hughes 1961, 260), Marilyn concludes that ‘it seems the only way I will stay off [of heroin], realistically speaking, is to be locked up someplace. And it is pretty horrible to have to put yourself someplace’. The same sort of complications can be seen in the Epilogue to Miroslava Chavez-Garcia’s outstanding States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System which highlights the ‘complexity of “real life” experiences’ (Chavez-Garcia 2012, 215).

15. (New York State 1992, 3); where inmate experiences were recorded in a public way, I chose to use actual names. This included not only memoirs and other published accounts, but also newspaper articles and legal cases. I did not, however, use case files as a basis to locate outside source materials, nor did I use outside source materials to select any specific case file. Named inmates, therefore, were only those whose experiences were recorded outside of the archives.

16. For the Prison Public Memory project, see http://www.prisonpublicmemory.org/; and for the White House Boys, see http://www.officialwhitehouseboys.org/.

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Joseph F. Spillane

Joseph F. Spillane is professor of History at the University of Florida. He is author of Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920 and Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform, both published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. He is currently at work on a book manuscript examining drug war history through the lens of harm.