By Bill Littlefield

What Ian O’Donnell underlines so powerfully in Prison Life is the necessity of positive human interaction anywhere, including among incarcerated citizens.

Prison Life: Pain, Resistance, and Purpose by Ian O’Donnell. New York University Press, 285 page, $30 (paperback)

In this exceptionally well-documented study of four contrasting ways in which men have been incarcerated in various places, Professor Ian O’Donnell pursues two strategies. He characterizes each of the four institutions in his study according to “degree of integration,” which means the extent to which prisoners are able to associate with each other, and “degree of regulation,” meaning the extent to which the prison authority exercises control.

O’Donnell teaches criminology at University College in Dublin, so it’s perhaps no surprise that one of the institutions he examines is “H Block,” where members of the IRA were incarcerated during “the troubles” in Ireland. Determined to characterize themselves as political prisoners rather than “common criminals,” the men incarcerated at H Block refused to wear regulation prison uniforms or abide by any of the other rules the British authorities attempted to impose on them. Some of the incarcerated men died as a result of hunger strikes. For a time many of them, rather than participate in cleaning their own cells, wore only blankets and lived in squalor. But, over time, the IRA members established an extraordinary system of order and discipline within the prison. They set up classes in history and revolutionary thought. They established portions of the prison as places where only Irish could be spoken. They managed to maintain communication with their comrades who’d escaped capture. In many ways, they assumed control of the prison, replacing the rules the British tried to impose with their own code of conduct and discipline.

In O’Donnell’s terms, H Block was thoroughly “integrated.” The incarcerated men had opportunities to associate with each other, learn from each other, and discipline each other while the alleged guards were reduced to patrolling the perimeter.

The institution in the book with which most readers will be least familiar is a prison O’Donnell calls Isir Bet in Ethiopia. There incarcerated men set up shops, weave cloth, and trade food items brought to them by their family members, who have easy access to the prison during most of the day. The courtyard at the center of the prison is nearly indistinguishable from the square in the town outside except that, in the evening, everybody who’s been incarcerated has to return to the dormitory where they sleep. They are locked up there until early the next morning. Unlike any of the other three prisons O’Donnell examines, “Isir Bet mirrored the world outside.”

The conditions are so crowded in the dormitories that incarcerated men have difficulty walking from one side of the room to the other without stepping on a fellow inmate, but during the day everybody’s outside in the sun and fresh air.

Professor O’Donnell examines two institutions in the US, each of them arguably worse in most respects than H Block or Isir Bet. Until a lawsuit initiated by one of the inmates undid the routine in Eastham Unit, in Texas, the prison was characterized by an illegal system in which selected prisoners were given the authority to police and discipline their fellow inmates. Corruption, racism, and favoritism were built into the system, and the inmate/guards were often violent and sadistic. On O’Donnell’s scale, the institution rated high on regulation and low on integration, in part because prisoners were required to do back-breaking, exhausting work in sweltering fields and would have been too exhausted to associate with each other, even if they’d been given the opportunity to do so.

Finally, O’Donnell examines ADX Florence, the maximum security prison in Colorado, known throughout the US system as home to “the worst of the worst” and “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” Isolation isn’t used as punishment at ADX Florence; it’s the norm. Prisoners have almost no contact with each other or the guards. They live alone in a cell about the size of a parking space for a car. As O’Donnell points out, “the only respite was to cause sufficient self-injury to necessitate a (temporary) hospital transfer, or to fight for years, against substantial odds, through the courts.” The gruesome nature of the “self-injury” some of the men incarcerated at ADX Florence sustain is nearly beyond imagination. Some of these efforts ended in suicide.

Because, as he says, “punishment is about pain, and pain is personal,” O’Donnell provides the story of a particular individual from each of the four institutions examined in Prison Life. Three of them are so successful at transcending their hideous experiences that they cannot, I think, be considered representative. Chalew Gebino, who helped write a code of conduct and organize his fellow prisoners, earned a pardon and was released from Isir Bet “on the strength of demonstrable self-improvement and the betterment of his peers.” Laurence McKeown, “a school boy” when he was incarcerated in H Block, earned a PhD and became an author and playwright. Jack Powers, who still bears the scars of the damage he did to himself while in solitary, was inspired to write two books about his prison experience. David Ruiz, whose lawsuit ended the practice of prisoners policing prisoners in Texas, was, as O’Donnell puts it, “a recidivist offender, a product of the criminal justice state,” and he died in prison.

Lawsuits have eliminated some of the worst conditions and abuses in the Texas prisons and at ADX Florence since O’Donnell did his research. H Block was shut down years ago. But what O’Donnell has underlined so powerfully in Prison Life is the necessity of positive human interaction anywhere, including among incarcerated citizens. The stories and research here should help convince readers that isolating prisoners, no matter the rationale, is viciously inhumane as well as counterproductive. The book might also help readers understand the value of encouraging democracy and responsibility for self, especially among people who are incarcerated.

O’Donnell’s presentation of four different examples of prisons should perhaps not be taken as evidence that he has accepted that prison, in some form, is necessary and inevitable — but he does not argue otherwise. He does offer, toward the end of Prison Life, what might pass for optimism, given the terrible toll incarceration has taken on citizens around the world. “Even against mighty odds,” O’Donnell writes, “human agency is never fully extinguished.”

Bill Littlefield volunteers with the Emerson Prison Initiative, a program enabling incarcerated men to earn a college degree. His most recent novel is Mercy (Black Rose Writing).