Kim Phillips-Fein, BookForum, Sept/Oct/Nov 2009
The world’s largest jail is the Twin Towers Correctional Facility of Los Angeles, which occupies two peach-colored structures in the center of the city. Within those walls are two gymnasiums, kitchens capable of serving seventeen thousand meals a day, medical and mental-health wards, and, of course, the inmates’ quarters—which are straight out of Michel Foucault’s darker imaginings, heptagons with a single security guard in the middle surveying ninety-six cells at once through glass doors and with video cameras. Five stories high, the jail connects its floors via an enclosed yard area with a basketball hoop; a small wire cage provides a recreational area for those prisoners who need to be kept apart from the rest. Telephone banks allow for what one nurse calls an “umbilical cord to the outside world.”
Once upon a time, jails might have been rotting, decrepit pits, but the Twin Towers are gleaming and new. As one inmate put it, they are the Hilton of correctional facilities. For UC Berkeley sociologist Loïc Wacquant, this only makes them all the more sinister and powerful. They are not a world apart—on the contrary, they represent an integral piece of American society, attracting major public investment even in an antigovernment age.