Using North Carolina’s state penitentiary, Central Prison, as my principal case study, my research addresses the broad context of the political history of urban prisons and their social and spatial impact on the neighborhoods in which they were located. I chose Raleigh and Central Prison as my principal case study because, although other state penitentiaries—such as the Virginia State Penitentiary and the Eastern State Penitentiary—have been subject to such analysis, there does not yet exist a critical examination of the creation and function of Central Prison from 1860-1915. This historical analysis of Central Prison offers insight into how the monumental architecture of a prison visually impacted its neighborhood. Additionally, the social analysis allows us to understand the roots of the New Jim Crow and the history of the modern practice of the mass incarceration of black and brown bodies.
The Architecture of People, Punishment and Labor: A Spatial Analysis of Raleigh’s Central Prison and Its City
Objective
When I first began my research on the architectural and social history of Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, I found a key piece of evidence: page 74 of Raleigh’s 1914 Sanborn map. The map gave me a unique perspective into Central Prison’s physical relationship with its surrounding neighborhood and the city of Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital. Sanborn maps are detailed maps of buildings in cities in the United States produced for insurance purposes. Typically, Sanborn maps were used to assess fire risks. However, with their inclusion of details such as road names and their record of the physical arrangements of spaces, Sanborn maps can also provide valuable historical information. When translated into a database, they allow us to query a broad range of social practices and relationships. In particular, Page 74 of Raleigh’s 1914 Sanborn map serves as the beginning of a conversation on place and its relation to labor and socioeconomic development.
How does the examination of space and place help us to better understand social interaction/change as it relates to institutions of power, like the prison?
What message was the prison, and therefore, the state government, trying to communicate to the people of Raleigh?
Are racial hierarchy and punishment spatial?
Do they aid in the perpetuation of domination?
Questions
Recipient of the Visual and Media Studies Award in 2020
Presenter at the 2020 CAA Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History Conference
Awards
Background
Sanborn Maps
Central Prison and St. Mary’s Proximity (Paloma Rodney, made using Tableau)
The neighborhood that this map captures is extremely residential as almost all of the structures are labeled as dwellings. However, the intrusion of industry, including the railroad track that splits the Sanborn map into two pieces, is clear even with the northern residential piece of the map taking up most of the page. St. Mary’s, an elite all-girls school, is located north of the train tracks. The school physically dominates the Sanborn map in scale compared to the dwellings on the map. The Sanborn map shows that the school’s campus consisted of several buildings: the main building, three dormitories, a chapel, the laundry, an infirmary, and a gymnasium. The school’s campus was marked for the elite as demonstrated, for example, by its servants’ quarters. Yet, only three streets south of this elite institution is the only structure that is visible on the other side of the railroad tracks on this page, namely the North Carolina State Penitentiary. Within Central Prison’s neighborhood, there was a diversity of social experiences based on race, class and gender. This suggests a spatial and social connection that is in need of exploration. The 1914 Raleigh Sanborn map serves as a critical component of my analysis of Central Prison’s relationship with its neighborhood. The map’s visual documentation of dwellings and buildings suggests the need for an analysis of the social histories within the space.
Demographics of Residents around Central Prison (Paloma Rodney, made using Tableau)
Spatial power is intrinsic to both social and racial power. Space is used to separate socioeconomic and racial groups from each other so that spaces with power also hold privileged socioeconomic and racial groups. My research to date indicates that spatial power was influential in social and racial inequalities within Raleigh. The prison and its monumental form made a statement that contributed to the alienation of its major population, i.e. the African American population. The prison thus helps us explore questions of the black self-worth and a presence of state power. Such power was complicated with the added tension of the Union’s new presence as the supporter of the Reconstruction government, which made a bold architectural statement with the construction of Central Prison in the recently defeated southern capital.
In order to understand the significance of spatial power, I turn to theories of space and place by theorists such as Aldo Rossi, Yi-Fu Tuan, Henri Lefebvre, and Thomas Markus. With their theoretical foundations, we can begin to understand Central Prison’s relationship to power and place within the city of Raleigh. The theories that this paper will discuss also allow my research to be in conversation with broad penal theory regarding urban neighborhoods.
Raleigh’s spatial arrangement demonstrates planned and deliberate racial domination. Historically, Raleigh’s spatial development is not as clearly delineated as in northern cities. In northern cities, there were defined physical boundaries, such as a highway or train tracks, that divided the races. However, in the beginning, this boundary did not exist in Raleigh. Instead, as Raleigh developed, it abided by Tom Hanchett’s “salt and pepper theory” in which the few black and white residents lived together in certain zones of the city. Raleigh became more segregated as an influx of recently freed black people moved to the city from the plantation and countryside. This migration coincided with the rise of industry and the Reconstruction’s failed policies in the mid 1870s. I speculate that there had not been a need to spatially exert racial control over black residents in Raleigh because there had not been enough of them to pose a threat to the hierarchy of power. However, as the number of black residents increased, the city of Raleigh became more segregated as the increase in the black population started to pose a threat. Segregation was an attempt to exert control spatially in order to racially dominate the black population. At the same time as the black population’s increase in Raleigh, Central Prison was being constructed.
The visualization below shows dwellings that had residents in the city directory according to race. Any dwelling without a dot represents an address that could not be found in the directory. While there are some dwellings missing, the visualization shows an overall trend that the northern part of the train tracks was predominantly white with only one black resident. Thus, although Central Prison’s inmate population was predominantly black, it existed within a predominantly white neighborhood.
In order to understand why Central Prison had such a pivotal role in Raleigh’s industrial and racial development, we had to understand the spatial context in which Central Prison was located both in Raleigh and North Carolina. Throughout Raleigh and North Carolina’s history, two issues remained consistent. The first issue was the white residents’ fear that freed black people would gain too much power. The second issue was the State’s industrial stagnation, during which period it lacked internal projects such as roads, railroads, and bridges that would bolster the economy and facilitate commerce. For years, the institution of slavery was a solution that allowed the white population to dominate the black population as well as an economic source of income. After emancipation, Central Prison, which was predominantly black, functioned as a way to continue to subjugate black bodies and use them for labor.
Similar to slavery, Central Prison intertwined black bodies with labor to exert control on the population. The state constitution that permitted the creation of Central Prison also specifically outlined that acceptable punishments for inmates should include hard labor. With the permission to have the inmates perform labor as well as the fact that the prison we predominately black, Central Prison allowed North Carolina to continue to use black labor to further economic prosperity. The predominantly black inmates not only supplied brick to several major State buildings, but they also built thousands of miles of railroads and highways. Thus, Central Prison functioned similarly to slavery as it both controlled black bodies and provided cheap labor for the State.
The subjugation of black bodies after the end of the Civil War was not exclusive to Central Prison. In surrounding Raleigh and the rest of North Carolina, after the failure of Reconstruction, black citizens started to lose their rights and faced exclusion from white living spaces and institutions. As a result, the black population moved to the outskirts of Raleigh, on the other side of the train tracks, with Central Prison serving as a physical boundary between southern black and northern white living spaces.
In addition to the two-dimensional spatial analysis of Central Prison and its neighborhood the Sanborn map enables, I have also engaged with a three-dimensional visualization. In this visualization, Central Prison is the tallest structure in the neighborhood and is compelling in its architectural design. The French Mansard roof and the prominent tower that faces Raleigh suggests that the building was prestigious. The crenellation on top of a few towers also aligns the prison visually with historical buildings that were fortified in order to keep people out, like the Tower of London. The building’s flat walls with brick pilasters marking each bay create a repetition of form, which is only broken by the main wing of the building that symmetrically cuts Central Prison in half. The flat walls are further visually unified by the repetition of windows that would enable air flow during North Carolina’s hot summers. There is a strong vertical orientation to Central Prison as the windows have a one to two vertically spaced ratio. There is a modest cornice line across the building and several pinnacles that specifically contribute to the building’s vertical height. With all of these formal architectural details in both plan and elevation, Central Prison was, by any means, impressive. The prison, with its height and beauty, was a spectacle for the people of Raleigh. The prison’s prominence in three-dimensional space further suggests a spatial and social relationship in need of investigation.
The context of Central Prison’s construction is critical to my spatial analysis as well. Central Prison was not planned until 1868—although Raleigh had existed for almost a century— when North Carolina adopted a new state constitution which permitted the construction of the first state penitentiary. The creation of the State’s first penitentiary coincided with the end of the Civil War. Prior to the Civil War, there were different ways of managing white and black crime: slaves were punished on the plantation, and there were not enough white criminals to justify a penitentiary, so they were simply put in local jails. The prison was designed by the Ohio architect, Levi T. Scofield, and assistant architect and superintendent of construction, William J. Hicks. Every aspect of Central Prison’s creation was intentional. It was a purposeful solution to hold the bodies that were previously on a plantation or in a local jail. It was boldly built in its location, not far from downtown Raleigh, provoking the idea that Central Prison’s function was not a disgrace, but rather a source of pride for the neighborhood. Throughout my thesis, I will investigate the significance of Central Prison’s purposeful placement, both spatially and socially, within Raleigh.
Neighborhood
The Prison
Model of Central Prison (Paloma Rodney, made using SketchUp, 2018)
History
Spatial Theory and its Application
Racial Tensions & Social Analysis
1883 Central Prison Inmate Demographics (Paloma Rodney, made using Tableau)
Conclusion
My research not only found that racial hierarchy and punishment are spatial, but also that they aid in the perpetuation of domination. Central Prison’s space and the people within its walls were not only a result of practices of racial hierarchy and punishment in North Carolina, but also contributed to its perpetuation in Raleigh’s socioeconomic development.
My conclusion that Central Prison was not only a building, but a social object that had a role in reproducing the dominant hegemonies of race in the South was informed by theories from Yi Fu Tuan, Aldo Rossi, and Henri Lefebvre. Tuan’s description of place explains the phenomenon in which the function of Central Prison paralleled slavery. Similar to Tuan’s explanation that humans transform a space to a place with their habitual actions, the Raleigh community endowed Central Prison as an alternate form of slavery as it became a place for predominantly black labor. Yet, as the community continued to develop, Rossi’s theory that a building’s memory gives the building value explains how the prison’s previous value as an alternate form of slavery drove the socioeconomic development around Central Prison. Thus, the same power hierarchies and racial disparities that were present in slavery, could also be found within the prison, and in the neighborhood around Raleigh and North Carolina. Here, we can recall Lefebvre’s theory that not only is spatial organization pushed by dominant hegemonies, but it also gives it form. Thus, we can understand that the prison was a multidimensional place that was a product of society’s domination over black bodies as well as an actor that perpetuated it.
Overall, Central Prison was a site that was both an effect of racial domination and a perpetuator of this domination. It became a form that not only within its walls practiced the subjugation of black bodies in a way that was similar to slavery, but it also shaped a landscape that mirrored the plantation. I believe it is important to keep in mind that Central Prison is currently still operating in Raleigh. While Central Prison and the American prison system have had reforms, they are all built upon the cruelty of the 13th Amendment, which, similar to the North Carolina state constitution, permitted hard labor as an acceptable punishment. The American prison system still perpetuates the same racial hierarchy that mirrors slavery. Although the United States is only 12% black, 34% of US inmates are black. In general, black people are still five times more likely to be incarcerated. Thus, similar to the 1800s, the prison system is still putting more black bodies in jail at a rate that is not representative of the United States’ demographics.
Although there have been reforms, there are disparities, hierarchies and systems of domination in prisons that mirror the inequality of the 1800s. These systems of domination have simply continued in new ways. Although Jim Crow and slavery ended, black Americans are still continuously fighting for many civil and human rights. Since inmates lose many civil rights after imprisonment—including the right to vote, the right to be free of legal discrimination, etc.—and the prison system unequally effects the black population, many black Americans are left without full rights. Even today, Jim Crow and slavery have not ended, they have simply transformed and still disproportionately effect black Americans.
If given more time to complete this thesis, I would have liked to investigate the lived experience within the neighborhood near the prison with personal accounts. These insights could make my simulations of the socioeconomic development more model-like with the detail they could have offered. During my research, I came across one source, Culture Town, that contained interviews with African American residents in traditionally black neighborhoods in Raleigh. They gave their personal family histories from the 1930s and later during interviews with the authors. In order to continue my research on Central Prison’s impact on the community socially, I would like to find a similar source with personal testimonials from 1880 to 1914.