In American Purgatory, Benjamin Weber studies the tangled roots of U.S. empire and imprisonment. He does so with case-based precision and narrative force. Historians have needed a text to distill and reframe the now common claim about the continuum between the American prosecution of race wars on its frontiers and crime wars at home. Interdisciplinary scholars like Joy James, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Stuart Schrader have analyzed this relationship, while more traditional social and political historians such as Alfred W. McCoy and Ronald K. Edgerton have singled out the Philippine-American War as a laboratory for progressive governance. Weber broadens our historical frame with the transhistorical tools of Native, Black, and carceral studies. U.S. dominion required prisons, he argues. Its campaigns of benign conquest entailed places of legal and social experimentation, literal spaces where the rules could be suspended and revolt purged. Prisons offered “a network of historical and contemporary black sites” that developed alongside and through U.S. imperial practice (1).
Weber calls this continuum “prison imperialism,” or the way that U.S. “policy makers sought to govern the world through the codification and regulation of crime” (xi). He links historic processes, such as Native removal, counterinsurgent policing of colonial spaces, New South convict labor, and the incarceration of revolutionary figures who dared imagine sovereignty outside of the U.S. government. These are colonial practices, Weber insists, that unfolded between the American mainland and its global sphere of influence. American “prison imperialism relied on the continual production of in-between spaces of perpetual limbo,” he writes. “In a word, purgatory” (35). Though usually focused on a particular place or prison, each of Weber’s seven chapters explores the circuits and interfaces that trouble binaries like foreign/domestic or past/present. His narrative technique challenges conventional historicist attempts at stating significance for other historians while opening new pathways for future scholars.
Chapter one concerns Florida and the rival geographies of America’s oldest fortresses. While the Black Fort of Apalachicola became a space for Black and Native fugitivity in Spanish Florida, Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, later christened Fort Marion by Anglo Americans, became an infamous military prison. Built in 1695, Fort Marion held successive waves of enemies produced by American slavery and expansion. The same prison that held fugitive slaves and Seminoles during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) also held prisoners from American war-making in the trans-Mississippi West. A well-known figure like Richard Henry Pratt personally transported seventy-four Native detainees from present-day Oklahoma to St. Augustine in 1875. Between 1886 and 1913, the U.S. Army sent 502 more prisoners from the Apache Wars to Fort Marion. A key theme comes to life in this chapter: the U.S. carceral regime reused older spaces of military-based domination for more high-minded incarceration and as a staging ground for punitive social institutions. Pratt drew inspiration from Fort Marion for his Carlisle Indian Industrial School and subsequent boarding schools. He took seventeen pupils from the fort to Carlisle.
The next three chapters revolve around American rule through transportation and forced labor. Chapter two focuses on the debate over American penal colonies, a forgotten question of the founding era that resurfaced during the Gilded Age. Weber uses abandoned penal transportation schemes to link older politics of colonizing African Americans with the purchase of Alaska, which some Americans hoped would become a penal colony. Chapter three focuses on the use of far-flung prisons to wage the Philippine-American War. Weber shows that America’s counterinsurgent campaign against Filipinos, which began in early 1899, stemmed from a planned uprising by anticolonial Katipunan forces in Bilibid Prison. In the years that followed, U.S. authorities built a network of jails and prisons in the Philippines, using them to exile would-be revolutionaries and allocate forced labor to build infrastructure. Chapter four takes readers to the Panama Canal Zone. Weber describes a colonial space where the federal government, as opposed to a southern state, used the Thirteenth Amendment’s convict clause to enslave Black workers for infrastructure development, such as the highway to Empire, in Panama, which opened in 1910. When American authorities were not exploiting racialized labor, they were scheming to deport unruly laborers and depopulate areas coveted for plantations.
The last three chapters showcase Weber’s commitment to telling a history across U.S. dominion. Chapter five breathes new life into topics familiar to scholars of Progressive Era prison reform. It bounces between the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, near Tacoma, Washington, and Iwahig Penal Farm, on the Philippine island of Palawan. Together, these two prisons without walls illustrate shifting ideas about the civilizing mission, immigrant criminalization, and parole. Here, a more familiar rehabilitative prison emerged, where work was a privilege rather than punishment. Chapter six moves to Appalachia, showing one prison as a containing place for internationalist and nationalist rebels of the mid-twentieth century. At various points, authorities sentenced Black communists, Puerto Rican nationalists, and Black Panthers to West Virginia’s Alderson Federal Prison for Women. Authorities targeted Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian-American member of the Communist Party of the United States, who theorized “Prison Jim Crow” as a form of internal colonialism and supported the Black Belt strategy for southern African American sovereignty (145). They also incarcerated Lolita Lebrón for her revolutionary bid for Puerto Rican independence—the firing of “warning shots” at the ceiling of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954 to protest external colonialism (162–163). Finally, chapter seven focuses on the occupation of decommissioned Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary for nineteen months beginning in 1969. Weber reemphasizes the importance of prisons in the movement through which Indians of All Tribes reclaimed Native lands declared surplus by the federal government. Throughout American Purgatory, Weber sheds light on the intertwined histories of state violence and decolonization that haunt our contemporary landscape. A boarding school survivor, LaNada War Jack (Shoshone-Bannock), helped to lead both the Alcatraz occupation and the subsequent fight for Native Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Throughout the book, Weber foregrounds examples of historically specific thinking and organizing to end prison imperialism. He knits the various critiques of U.S. domination through the prison into “a long and powerful protest tradition” (xiii). Weber reevaluates radical politics for their bearing on the colonial prison regime. One example is the revolutionary Filipino ethic of kalayaan, or freedom from coercion. Weber imbues kalayaan with an abolitionist philosophy, as when one incarcerated freedom fighter muses to a chronicler about a world with “no labor … no jails and no taxes … and no more constabulario” (76). The book also puts Aimé Césaire’s boomerang theory from Discourse on Colonialism (1950) to excellent use, citing Césaire’s focus on the “prison guard” and “the torturers standing around the racks [who] invent, refine, discuss” (103). The political theories of inconspicuous Panamanian journalists join with well-known Black thinkers across time, including Ida B. Wells and Assata Shakur.
Weber is convincing when assembling thinkers who explicitly linked their anti-colonial or anti-racist thinking to the imperial prison regime of their moment. More work remains to parse the long anti-prison-imperial tradition for its relation to the post-Jim Crow prison as a site for social order through crime control. This reader was left wanting more on this history’s link to mass incarceration (however defined), as framed in the subtitle. Future historians face the challenge of explaining how reform traditions overcame the revolutionary answers of the colonized in politics and culture. Weber’s work should be a starting place for any historical study of America’s prison regime.
