Socio-Spatial Scripts: Evil and the Contestation of Space and

Being
Rallie Murray
Abstract
The modern American prison bears little resemblance to the institution it claims
to represent - a space of justice and morality designed to rehabilitate those
unfortunates incapable of normal life within the state. Instead, it represents a sociospatial manifestation of the desire to silence, hide, or erase that which challenges
the ideological hegemony of the status quo. In order to explore a socio-spatial
script of evil, this paper draws upon Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect as well as
current research into the prison resistance movement in California supermax
prisons. Through an understanding of the socio-spatial dialectic, subalternity, and
antisystemic movements it seeks to add to the growing critical literature on the
prison as an institution of state corruption and evil.
Keywords
Prison Industrial Complex, Socio-spatial Dialectic, Subalternity, Contestation of
Space, Excrescence, Thanatopolitics, Evil, Ecology of Cruelty.
*****
I. Introduction
Picture an 11 by 7 foot room, no windows, a concrete slab with a thin foam
mattress, with florescent lights on often 24-hours a day. The small grate on the
heavy metal door is covered by Plexiglas, distorting voices and faces passing by
outside. This is the extreme isolation of Californias Pelican Bay State Penitentiary
SHU, where prisoners who have been deemed uncorrectable, irredeemable, the
'worst-of-the-worst' are sent to serve out their punishments. Although viewed as
torture in international human rights law, there are currently upwards of 12,000
prisoners housed in solitary confinement across the state of California, and
approximately 80,000 across the United States. Some of these prisoners have been
housed in solitary confinement for upwards of three decades.
This place as I have described it is a place of evil, a socio-spatial manifestation
of Phillip Zimbardo's Lucifer Effect. 1 Intended as an institution of justice in the
'most free state', prisons have for countless generations been designed to house
evil. The American prison is no different in its conception, but I argue that in
practice it has become something entirely different: that the institution, rather than
the prisoners it houses, is the true representation of evil and human wickedness. To
house criminalized bodies within buildings called 'correctional' in order to rename
the violations of human rights carried out within it is a means of obfuscating
corruption behind within a discourse of justice. What I intend to address is how

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corruption and evil rife within the criminal (in)justice system in the United States
can be understood through the socio-spatial dialectic, and how subaltern spaces can
birth acts of socio-spatial resistance that, mutatis mutandi, force the transformation
of socio-spatial Structures.
II. The Socio-Spatial Script
A. The Socio-spatial Dialectic
In order to explore the socio-spatial scripts of evil and human wickedness in the
modern prison, it is necessary for me to briefly explain what it is that I mean by the
socio-spatial dialectic. Soja explains the socio-spatial dialectic as the
interrelationship between space and the social. 2 No space exists a priori from
human interaction and structures of signification. From a macro level, this can be
seen in the relationship between human cultures and ecologies; 3 on a micro level it
can be seen in the management of certain spaces through city planning or
architecture.4 Human geography is not merely grounded in the material world Soja writes that
the spatiality of human life must be interpreted and understood
as fundamentally, from the start, a complex social
product...human life is consequently and consequentially spatial,
temporal, and social, simultaneously and interactively real and
imagined.5
Another way of conceptualizing the socio-spatial dialectic is through the mutuallyshaping interactions between the functional design of architecture versus imagined
spaces. As Robert Butler discusses in his chapter of this book Architecture and
Evil: Imagined Landscapes, something as simple as a stairway on a college
campus can have both baseline observable function (a way to ascend a hill) as well
as 'imagined' significances.6 The particular stairway that Butler describes in the
opening of his chapter is stately, perhaps ponderous in its path up the hill. One
could imagine that the architect designed the space in accordance with the social
construct that is the university: a place of gravitas, of stately elegance (in short, the
spatial manifestation of the dignity of the Ivory Tower). Thus the place is shaped
into a space imbued with meaning, with a particular set of social expectations. But
since that set of social expectations and implications is not a priori, it is open to
interpretation and contestation by others moving within the space. The spatialized
gravitas and power of Butler's stairway can signify a much different sort of social
construct in the eyes of his boss, fascism.
Societies exist within spatial relationships; they emerge in situ. Badiou's
conceptualization of the Situation is useful here.7 The Situation is a unique sociospatial location within a specific temporality. Each Situation is structured

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according to a particular order, a particular 'law of the count' which authorizes not
only the existence of the Situation but also the Structure of the Situation (e.g.; the
State).8 And while Badiou's Situation and Structure are most often explored at a
macro-political level, it is possible to translate both to the micro-political as well.
Spaces, whether physical or purely imaginary, are innately tied to the social
scripts that are employed in their imagination, in their creation. Particularly when it
comes to housing evil, the social script of immorality and wickedness can be
excavated to some degree. The imagination and creation of evil spaces, as Butler
explores in his chapter, reflect changing attitudes to where evil dwells and how to
manage or contain it. In past epochs, evil was determined to be a force external to
humanity. Evil was the influence of Satan, perhaps, or some malignant outsider. 9 In
the imagination of Europe, evil lived apart from mankind in landscapes discernibly
inhuman. From the abyssal pits of Anglo-Saxon hell; to the inhospitable, barren
Transylvania of Stoker's imagination (a far cry from the forests of reality); to the
black lands of Tolkien's Mordor; evil places were those so clearly inimical to
human life that not even a blind man could imagine they were home to anything
but the purely wicked.
With the emergence of biopolitics, evil has moved inside the body. It is no
longer something controlled from outside, but rather it is the internal source of
deviancy, of wickedness outside the natural order.10 The space and architecture
imagined to house it transforms as well as evil resides within men, it must be
contained, not merely separated from the places where good people live.
Furthermore it must be constantly surveilled for leaking corruption and further
wickedness. Thus do we arrive at imagined spaces such as Bentham's Panopticon. 11
Designed for separation, containment, and surveillance of evil men, the Panopticon
remained merely an imagined space until well after Bentham's death. But its design
is employed now in some of the most infamous prisons, in the modern places
where evil is housed. Some of those deemed the 'worst of the worst' are sent to
prisons such as United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility
(ADX) in Florence, Colorado; which is modelled after the Panopticon and even has
cells built underground to maximize the containment of wickedness.
Imagined space and its physical reality exist in juxtaposition, not in conflict but
in mutually reinforcing and mutually transformative relationships. Spaces, as I will
demonstrate herein, are built through human imagination, construction,
deconstruction, and reimagination. They are never fixed, never simply baseline,
functional places regardless of how they might appear at casual glance. And I
propose that it is through their reshaping and redefinition from below that we can
come to understand what they really were in the first place.
B. The Lucifer Effect as a Socio-Spatial Script

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With this understanding of the socio-spatial dialectic, we can move onto an
analysis of the socio-spatial script. Perhaps one of the best examples from which to
excavate socio-spatial scripts is that of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). In
pursuit of his research goals, Professor Zimbardo created a facsimile microSituation and micro-Structure designed to mimic the socio-spatial locality of the
prison.12 Yet as his infamous research project demonstrated, from the facsimile
emerged a comingling of the real and the imaginary that reproduced the sociospatial Situation of the prison in a near totality. Zimbardo describes the emergence
of a social script of sorts within his experiment, although I think he makes an
important error - the script is not merely social, but a dialectical interface between:
1. the space he designed: an office building reconceived and redecorated
as a faux prison;
2. the social institution he intended to recreate: the modern American
prison;
3. the social activity that manifested there: dehumanization and
intensifying mortification or penal harm on the parts of the guards, and
intractability on the parts of the prisoners; and
4. the ways in which intensifying role-play reshaped the space from a
faux prison to a living prison environment in a matter of days.
These interactions and the ways in which they dictated both behaviour and the
meaning of space are what I call the socio-spatial script.
I will avoid here recounting SPE in detail, but in brief over the course of a week
students recruited to act as both guards and prisoners, as well as Zimbardo and his
research associates, were fully immersed in the imagined space of the prison. The
role-play in which they were engaged quickly lost conscious significance as roleplay and instead mirrored the kinds of activities observed in real prisons. 13
Zimbardo relates that the students posing as guards often felt disgusted by their
own behaviour, a sentiment he echoes in his personal reflections, yet felt
compelled to such actions due to their role as guards within a prison. As guards,
they policed each others' behaviour as well - none could be too 'soft' or else they
might diminish the 'authority' of their fellow guards. They reported a need to
dehumanize the prisoners in order to enact practices which they would ordinarily
find questionable at the very least. What began as a role-play activity within an
experiment devolved into dehumanizing acts of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse
in order to maintain the space of the Situation and prove themselves to be
legitimate agents within it.14
The students acting as prisoners reported a diminishing sense of their own
identities and a disconnection from reality,15 psychosocial conditions which have
been widely studied within prisons.16 Stripped of their names, their freedom, and
their lives, several internalized their roles as prisoners to such a degree that they
began to identify not with the person who they had been on the 'outside' just a few
short days before, but with the number they had been given. The gruelling

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treatment they received at the hands of the guards and the 'prison administration'
stripped them of their self-awareness so completely that many began to forget that
they were participating in an experiment altogether. The socio-spatial script
rewrote their identities, actions, and beliefs in situ. For some, this re-identification
inspired a renewed sense of their own humanity in opposition to the dehumanizing
acts of the guards that manifested through resistance. For others, the schizogenic
space of the prison proved so damaging that they had to be removed from the
experiment early.17
What Zimbardo describes as 'the Lucifer Effect' is a socio-spatial script that
emerges within total institutions - spaces in which the system they represent
defines every aspect of life for those who inhabit it. What Zimbardo refers to as
'the System',18 and I in reference to Badiou term 'the Structure', 19 is not an entity
under the conscious control of those by whom it was created or who authorized its
creation in the first place. Instead, Zimbardo writes that
Systems are the engines that run situations that create behavioral
contexts that influence the human action of those under their
control. At some point, the System may become an autonomous
entity, independent of those who initially started it or even of
those in apparent authority within its power structure. 20
This echoes Bakunin's insistence that the social contract robs humans of their
nature and 'free will', putting them instead in the service of maintaining the
existence and 'free will' of the state. 21 The prison provides an excellent example of
the Lucifer Effect as a socio-spatial script, as Zimbardo discovered. The structure
of evil which pervades such spaces has been termed an 'ecology of cruelty';22
which I argue is the direct result of a socio-spatial script that casts prisoners as
inhuman excrescences and guards as the agents of official morality charged with
appropriately punishing those who will not or cannot be 'reformed'. 23 As Csaire
beautifully illustrated, one who 'gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an
animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to
transform himself into an animal'.24 Dehumanization of the other is in reality a
dehumanization of the self. It is the birth of evil. When the socio-spatial script calls
for the total domination of prisoners by the guards, it is the guards who become
totally enmeshed within the Structure of the Situation. 25 They perform actions
which outside the Situation that is the prison would be easily accepted as 'sadistic',
'immoral'...as evil. But the prisoners are no longer recognizable as human within
the Situation; the script has written them out of humanity itself. They can no longer
be victims,26 they are not capable of being mourned.27 Acting out against what are
perceived to be their 'due' punishments only intensifies the ecology of cruelty
within which they are enveloped a process which Haney has termed the
'dynamics of desperation',28 and O'Hearn has referred to as 'looping'. And so we

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have created real spaces derived from the imagined houses of evil like the
Panopticon, prisons which bear few if any hallmarks of a genuine desire to reform.
Instead the space and the social structure pervading it becomes a place of evil, of
punishment for punishment's sake. But what is crucial to note here is that the
ecology of cruelty is not built solely from a sort of banal evil on the parts of guards
and administrators. Rather it is through the mutually reinforcing and mutually
transforming which develops between authorities and insurgents in the contestation
of space.29 This is not to suggest that prisoners deserve their treatment, but rather to
explain how evil acts become mundane through the Structure's need to reinforce
itself.
III. Subaltern Scripts
A. Flipping the Script
As I have noted, a key aspect of the socio-spatial dialectic is that no space
exists a priori, whatever the Structure of a Situation may imply. It stands to reason
then that as there are subaltern histories there must also be subaltern spaces spaces which exist right alongside the dominant spatial script of a place.
Trouillot writes that 'any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences,
the result of a unique process'. 30 I propose that a similar understanding of silence
can be applied to space through the socio-spatial dialectic. I have chosen Trouillot
here because he further refers to the 'unthinkability' of certain histories, an
unthinkability born in order to drown subalternity in silence - to fix subaltern
humanity in a realm of impossibility. This is precisely the same silencing and
obfuscation at work in the modern American prison. Prisoners become
unrecognizable as human beings, they are silenced by the torturous institution that
holds them, and acts of resistance become unthinkable as resistance and are instead
only legible as banal misbehaving.
Silencing is a deployment of power against those who cannot be heard or must
not be allowed to speak.31 The socio-spatial scripts audible past the curtain of
silence do exist - their unintelligibility through the dominant script is merely a
matter of emplacement rather than of actual silence. Approaching the socio-spatial
dialectic from a different place enables us to hear and see alternate, subaltern
scripts. In the correspondence I have carried out with men incarcerated in
supermax prisons in California and Pennsylvania, the institution of corrections and
rehabilitation is renamed an institution of torture. Like Zimbardo's prisoners, they
are still human, despite the dehumanizing forces deployed against them. 32 As far as
they are concerned their lives are still worth living, and abandonment in a
thanatopolitical socio-spatial construct is a clear violation of their 8th Amendment
right to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment. They can clearly see how
they are being victimized by a system that has been given complete control over

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their lives - through medical neglect,33 physical and psychological abuse,34 an
opaque parole bureaucracy, 35 and the everyday violence they face at the hands of
guards.36 In essence what we see at play here is the confrontation of 'spatial agency'
the ability of the subaltern to reshape and restructure the uses and meanings tied
up in their socio-spatial landscape and a 'spatiality of power' the dominant
authority's attempt to assert or reassert control over people by controlling the sociospatial landscape in which they live. 37
The subaltern script at play in the prison is one that recognizes the humanity of
prisoners - the prisoners themselves may not be the only agents within this script,
and there may be prisoners who do not participate in it. But those who do enact a
socio-spatial agency do so in a way that valorises humanity in their own terms.
They are no longer bound by the dominant script's recitation and enactment of who
or what can be human, of who can belong to the macro-Structure. Instead I would
argue that they are engaged in a project of reimagining what humanity is or can be.
Prison resistance is a revolutionary project, in which the prisoners as political
subjects engage not only as a means of protecting themselves and their community
of struggle, but also as a means of questioning the validity of a Structure that
refuses to acknowledge their humanity.
B. Socio-Spatial Resistance
Zimbardo laments that the students acting as prisoners who decided to engage
in resistance did so in a singular nature, rather than as a community effort. 38
Perhaps, had the experiment continued for weeks or months, what O'Hearn refers
to as a 'solidary culture of resistance' would have emerged - or perhaps not.39 What
is crucial to note however is that where solidary cultures of resistance emerge, they
do so as a form of socio-spatial resistance. What O'Hearn fixes upon in his analysis
of solidary cultures of resistance is 'the sustained dynamic interaction between
authorities and insurgents that invokes the necessary creativity to shape such a
transformation'.40 It is the intensification of contentious interaction over a sustained
period of time that renders the event transformative, that creates from acts of
resistance a new way of understanding the macro-Structure and the
interrelationships between authority figures and those claiming the role of
insurgents. It is through fidelity to that transformative event that the insurgents - in
this case, prisoners - may continue in their revolutionary project.41
It would be a mistake to presume that such a solidary group exists prior to the
struggle faced, or even that it marks the principle basis of the struggle. 42 Rather it is
the struggle that forms the group. The sort of solidarity that crosses racial, classed,
and gendered lines is forged in the crucible of socio-spatial agency, of living and
dreaming against the dominant script. In O'Hearn's words, 'the relationship
between collective action and identity is reciprocal'. 43 This is discernible in labour
organizing in the early 20th century,44 in O'Hearn's own research on Irish political

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protest and prisons in the 1970s, and through the past 30-odd years of prison
uprisings in the United States. Transforming the socio-spatial dialectic of the
workplace, of a territory, of a prison these are all acts of subaltern insurgence
accomplished through a shared culture of resistance.
Further, O'Hearn explains that regardless of the apparent resource differential
between those maintaining the dominant script and subaltern agents, 'they often
have an abundance of certain resources that we usually do not recognize as such'. 45
Knowledge systems born from below, organizing tactics developed unique to the
socio-spatial Structure within which they reside, and the aforementioned reciprocal
relationship between collective action and identity are all resources which can be
directed towards socio-spatial resistance, butting up against the technologies of
power employed in the maintenance of the socio-spatial status quo and the
fiduciary, juridical, and militaristic might deployed by authorities.
In 1993 in Lucasville, Ohio, a solidary culture of prison resistance was born
from a prison uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF). Prior to
the uprising itself, conditions at the maximum security SOCF were far from
adequate. The prison was overcrowded, and 75 percent of prisoners held at the
highest level of security - those considered to be the greatest risk, to themselves or
to the general population - were being held two to a cell; a practice generally
considered by prison administrators to questionable at best.46 Years of guard on
prisoner abuses, unfair labour practices, and reported attempts by guards to incite
prisoners to attack or even kill other prisoners compounded to produce a volatile
opposition between prisoners and the prison authorities. 47 Prisoners housed at
SOCF were separated by race and cultural affiliation - members of the Aryan
Brotherhood, black and New Afrikan prisoners, and Muslims were set against each
other as a part of the dominant socio-spatial script.
The direct cause of the initial disturbance was a refusal on the part of the prison
administration to honour the religious needs of Muslim prisoners. Briefly, the
Warden decided that TB testing would be carried out via injection and Muslim
prisoners, worried that the injection might contain alcohol or other proscribed
substances, requested a different method of testing. Rather than pursue the other
options available, the Warden refused to honour their demand. One of the L-Blocks
was taken over by prisoners who also took several guards hostage. What began as
one 'faction' demanding recognition quickly became a matter of addressing
prisoner complaints across racial lines. 48 Finally given the opportunity to make
their voices heard above the silencing of the dominant socio-spatial script, several
meetings were held between all factions to determine what demands they would
present to the prison administration, to determine how to rewrite the socio-spatial
landscape in which they were all subaltern. Slogans painted on the prison walls
read 'Black and White Together' and 'Convict Unity', a call to solidarity in pursuit
of a common goal. In short, a solidary culture of resistance was formed amongst
those with no previous desire for unity, to claim spatial agency towards

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reconstructing the socio-spatial script of the Lucasville prison. The uprising drew
national attention, and the National Guard was called out to help put an end to the
rioting. Before it was through, nine prisoners and one prison guard had been killed.
The solidary culture of resistance that has emerged in the supermax prisons in
California is another prime example of socio-spatial resistance through subaltern
scripts. Officially, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
(CDCR) claims that their
overarching vision is to end the causes and tragic effects of
crime, violence, and victimization in our communities through a
collaborative effort that provides intervention to at-risk
populations and quality services from the time of arrest that will
assist our clients in achieving successful reintegration into
society.49
However, a collective of prisoners confined in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) at
Pelican Bay State Penitentiary in California has since 2011 been speaking out
against the official script. Calling themselves the Short Corridor Collective, these
men, most of whom have been held in solitary confinement for more than a decade,
are engaged in a sustained dynamic interaction of socio-spatial resistance against
the structural bureaucracy which they have renamed the California Department of
Corruption.
In California and across the United States, prisoners are abandoned to solitary
confinement for a variety of reasons - of course the official script states that all
those sent to the SHU, the hole, or Administrative Segregation are the 'worst of the
worst,' but in actual practice one can be sent into solitary confinement for as little
as disseminating teaching material to other prisoners. 50 The men sent to Pelican
Bay State Penitentiary are typically sent there for gang affiliation, whether proven
or suspected; or reported misconduct, whether violent or non-violent. Once inside
the Pelican Bay SHU, it is nearly impossible for them to leave. Although the
CDCR claims to have a 'step-down' program in place to allow prisoners to prove
themselves 'deserving' of normal human contact according to the dominant sociospatial script, that program is hardly transparent - and it requires that prisoners
debrief or inform on other prisoners, an activity not only tantamount to a death
sentence in most prisons, but that also has little to do with their own rehabilitation.
Their freedom from inhumane and torturous conditions is governed by their
willingness to abandon others to the same treatment. In the SHU, every aspect of a
prisoner's life is monitored to the nth degree: how much toilet paper they are
allowed to have, how many books and letters they can keep in their cell, which
newspapers they are allowed to receive, and the food they can eat are all under the
official auspices of the guards and prison administration to decide. For women
prisoners, even menstrual sanitary supplies are a matter of bureaucratic oversight,

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while trans* prisoners are subject to administrative decisions over whether or not
they ought to be allowed to wear a bra. 51 Prisoners are allowed to file grievance
forms, but those can be easily misplaced or ignored and prisoners have no way to
track their progress or appeal denials. The direct confrontation between prisoners
and guards in this schizogenic, total institution has lead to the Short Corridor
Collective and countless others held as prisoners across the state to engage in
large-scale peaceful protesting over their Five Core Demands:
1. to end group punishment and administrative abuse;
2. to abolish the debriefing policy, and modify active/inactive gang status
criteria;
3. to comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's
Prisons 2006 Recommendations and end long-term solitary
confinement;
4. to provide adequate and nutritious food; and
5. to expand and provide constructive programming and privileges for
indefinite SHU status inmates.52
In addition to the Five Core Demands, in 2012 the Short Corridor Collective
released a commitment to Racial Unity and a call for their brothers and sisters
outside the prison to make similar commitments. Through their active resistance to
the socio-spatial script of the Pelican Bay SHU where, it bears repeating; most of
the Short Corridor Collective is held in segregation because of past or present
gang affiliations, generally based upon racial or ethnic supremacy (for example
Todd Ashker is a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood). As in Lucasville
before them, they have united across previously impermeable boundaries to
demand for themselves and others humane treatment and freedom from injustice.
The uprising in Lucasville lasted for nine days and was shut down in its
entirety, with five prisoners sentenced to death for their participation in what has
been called the longest prison riot in United States history. But the Short Corridor
Collective in California has found another means of resistance, a long term effort
that has been shaped by all participants, which has been carried out with the only
possessions of recognized value left to them: their bodies. For 45 days in 2011 and
60 consecutive days in 2013, men and women confined in prisons and jails across
the state of California engaged in hunger strikes and work stoppages in active
resistance against the Structure refusing to allow them access to essentials as basic
as a proper diet, as crucial as an end to torture and abuse. An estimated 30,000
prisoners participated in the 2013 strikes. And with each demonstration the strike
has grown larger, and the CDCR has worked harder to silence their demands for
humanity, to rewrite their socio-spatial resistance as complaints from villains who
want nothing more than to find a new way to pull one over on the good, free
citizens of the state. The prisoners who are known to have participated in the most
recent hunger strike are currently suffering from retaliatory abuses at the hands of

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guards and prison administrators for daring to make them look like bad guys, for
calling attention to the evils at work within the system.
Since this explosion of a solidary culture of resistance among California
prisoners connected by the imagined space they inhabit together, a reflection of
the physical spaces in which they are separately bound prisoners incarcerated in
other states have also began to demand better treatment, emboldened by the actions
of the California hunger strikers. And similar networks of solidarity have grown
outside the prisons themselves. State Assembly Member Tom Ammiano has
championed AB-1652 'An Act to Amend Section 2933.6 of the Penal Code,
Relating to Inmates'. The initially proposed legislation would have for the first time
clearly defined exactly which offenses could send a prisoner to the SHU, remove
provisions to limit those prisoners who have been sent to the SHU or other special
watch and segregation facilities from receiving credit reductions from their term of
confinement, and increase the amount of credit reductions for which prisoners are
eligible from 6 weeks of credit over a 12-month period to 6 months of credit for
every 6 months of continuous confinement.53 Unfortunately as it has entered the
long process of amendments, official readings, and voting, the clause limiting and
clearly defining which offenses could send a prisoner to the SHU was removed
from the bill. At the same time, a federal lawsuit filed in 2012 by members of the
Short Corridor Collective at Pelican Bay State Penitentiary has, as of 2 June, 2014
been granted Class Certification by Judge Claudia Wilken. 54 The lawsuit, Ashker
v. Brown, contends that long-term solitary confinement is a violation of Eighth
Amendment prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, and further that
the bureaucratic rather than judiciary nature of confinement in the SHU violates
rights to due process. The prisoners who have signed their names to this lawsuit
have put themselves at risk for reprisals by prison guards and the prison
administration in service of the solidary culture of resistance that they have
worked to build into their subaltern socio-spatial script, these men have been
moved in and out of Administrative Segregation, faced cell extractions intended to
provoke them to retaliate violently and thus undermine their legal progress, had
their cells raided to ostensibly search for contraband but later found their personal
belongings (and sometimes legal documents) missing upon their return, and a
number of other abuses designed to silence them and punish them for their
malcontent. Yet with federal Class Certification, the CDCR will on a national stage
have to defend a practice as constitutional which has already been declared to be
torture in the international court of law. As other states have passed resolutions to
investigate the constitutionality of long-term solitary confinement, and with others
introducing bills to limit the duration of any stay in solitary confinement or abolish
the practice altogether, the socio-spatial script that defines the modern American
prison as necessary for the well-being of the state is beginning to be deconstructed
by the subaltern script that redefines the prison as an injustice perpetuated in the
name of the state.

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IV. Conclusion
The act of socio-spatial resistance calls into the fore what Badiou remarks upon
in his discussion on evil. Evil goes above an individual person's actions - instead it
resides within the corruption of the state, with the Structure as an immoveable
force for the status quo. What is evil is that which seeks to erase those inhabitants
of the Situation who are not represented within it, and what is evil is that which
holds faith in false notions of 'justice' in order to continue authorizing itself. 55 The
Lucifer Effect makes it possible to ignore the abuses being carried out against
human beings because the socio-spatial script in which they are embedded renders
them no longer human. Yet through acts of socio-spatial resistance we are able to
apprehend the evils perpetrated in our names, to redefine what it is that humanity
entails, and reassess to which event we owe fidelity - to the event that created the
prison, or to the event that will end it.

Notes
1

Phillip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn
Evil (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2008).
2
Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010).
3
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies, The Subsistence Perspective:
Beyond the Globalised Economy (New York: Zed Books, 1999); and Annette
Desmarais, La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants (Ann
Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007).
4
Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice; Hans Toch, Living in Prison: The Ecology of
Survival (Lawrenceville: Princeton University Press, 1992).
5
Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 17-18.
6
Robert Butler, 'Architecture and Evil: Imagined Landscapes', in this volume.
7
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2007).
8
Ibid; and Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New
York: Verso Press, 2012).
9
Butler, 'Architecture and Evil', in this volume; Michel Foucault, Abnormal:
Lectures at the Collge de France 1974-1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Picador Press, 1999); and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
10
Foucault, Abnormal; and Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
11
Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
12
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect.

Rallie Murray
__________________________________________________________________
13

Craig Haney, 'A Culture of Harm: Taming the Dynamics of Cruelty in

Supermax Prisons', Criminal Justice and Behavior 35, no. 8 (2008): 956-984;
Victoria Law, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
(Oakland: PM Press, 2009); Denis O'Hearn, 'Repression and Solidary Cultures of
Resistance: Irish Political Prisoners on Protest', American Journal of Sociology
115, no. 2 (2009): 491-526; Leonard Orland, Prisons: Houses of Darkness (New
York: The Free Press, 1975). Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect.
14
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect.
15
Ibid.
16
Bruce Arrigo and Jennifer Bullock, 'The Psychological Effects of Solitary
Confinement in Supermax Units: Reviewing What We Know and Recommending
What Should Change', International Journal of Offender Therapy and
Comparative Criminology 52, no. 6 (2008): 622-640; Terry Kupers, 'What to Do
with the Survivors? Coping with the Long Term Effects of Isolated Confinement',
Criminal Justice and Behavior 35, no. 8 (2008): 1005-1016; Haney, 'A Culture of
Harm'; Law, Resistance Behind Bars; and O'Hearn 'Repression and Solidary
Cultures of Resistance'.
17
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect.
18
Ibid.
19
Badiou, Being and Event.
20
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 179-180.
21
Mikhail Bakunin, 'The Immorality of the State by Mikhail Bakunin [18141876]',
Anarchy
Archives,
accessed
10
March
2014,
<http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/bakuninimmorality.html
>.
22
Haney, 'A Culture of Harm', 958.
23
Foucault, Abnormal; and Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
24
Aim Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2000), 43.
25
Haney, 'A Culture of Harm'; and Zimbardo The Lucifer Effect.
26
Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the
Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press,
2012).
27
Judith Butler, 'Violence, Mourning, Politics', Studies in Gender and Sexuality
4, no.1 (2003): 9-37.
28
Haney, 'A Culture of Harm', 958.
29
O'Hearn, 'Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance', 501.
30
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 27.

Socio-Spatial Scripts
__________________________________________________________________
31

Gayatri C. Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988): 271-313.
32
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect.
33
Arrigo and Bullock, 'Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement'; Amy
Khan et al., 'Ongoing Transmission of Hepatitis B Virus Infection Among Inmates
at a State Correctional Facility', American Journal of Public Health 95, no. 10
(October 2005): 1793-1799; Kupers, 'What to Do with Survivors?'; ' Law,
Resistance Behind Bars; Alfred Sandoval, 'Without the Federal Overseer, Deaths
Caused by Inadequate Medical Care will Soar', San Francisco Bay View, 9 June
2012, accessed 7 October 2012, <http://sfbayview.com/2012/without-the-federaloverseer-deaths-caused-by-inadequate-medical-care-will-soar/>;
and
Jason
Schnittker and Andrea John, 'Enduring Stigma: The Long-Term Effects of
Incarceration on Health', Journal of Health and Social Behavior 48, no. 2 (June
2007): 115-130.
34
Kupers, 'What to Do with Survivors?'; Law, Resistance Behind Bars; and
O'Hearn, 'Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance'.
35
Orland, Prisons.
36
Haney, 'A Culture of Harm'; and O'Hearn, 'Repression and Solidary Cultures
of Resistance'.
37
O'Hearn, 'Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance'.
38
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect.
39
O'Hearn, 'Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance'.
40
Ibid, 494, emphasis in original.
41
Badiou, Being and Event; and Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
42
O'Hearn, 'Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance'.
43
Ibid, 493.
44
Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic, Wobblies & Zapatistas: Conversations
on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History (Oakland: PM Press, 2008);
Matewan, dir. John Sayles, Santa Monica: Artisan Entertainment, 1987, DVD.
45
O'Hearn, 'Repression and Solidary Cultures of Resistance', 495.
46
Staughton Lynd, Lucasvile: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising (Oakland:
PM Press, 2011).
47
Ibid, 17-18.
48
Ibid.
49
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 'About CDCR:
Vision, Mission, Values, and Goals', Last Modified 2013, accessed 28 August
2013,
<http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/About_CDCR/vision-mission-values.html>,
emphasis in original.
50
Law, Resistance Behind Bars.

Rallie Murray
__________________________________________________________________
51

Ibid.
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, 'Prisoners' Demands', Last
Modified
3
April
2011,
accessed
10
October
2012,
<http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/the-prisoners-demands-2/>.
53
Tom Ammiano, 'An Act to Amend Section 2933.6 of the Penal Code,
Relating to Inmates' (Assembly Bill, California State Assembly, 2014), accessed
12 June 2014, <http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml>.
54
'Ashker v. Brown', Center for Constitutional Rights, last modified 2 June
2014, accessed 12 June 2014, <http://ccrjustice.org/pelican-bay>.
55
Badiou, Philosophy for Militants; and Hallward, Badiou.
52

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