2025/09/01 by Melanie D. Newport · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaaf109
openalex publication_date 2025/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
One of the most significant shifts in the historiography of incarceration in the past ten years has been the reconceptualization of carceral space by focusing attention on the nuances of “inside/outside” struggles through which new prisoners either brought radical ideas into the prison or became radicalized there and carried those ideas beyond the walls. Reiko Hillyer makes a distinctive contribution to this field through A Wall Is Just a Wall, which tracks the development, implementation, and decline of policies that allowed prisoners to leave prison or allowed families to enter. Hillyer argues convincingly that “rhetorically and physically separating the world of the free and that of the captive” were central to the creation of a “zero-risk” orientation of carceral governance over the course of the twentieth century (p. 18). The book's three parts address the rise and fall of clemency petitions before and after World War II, the brief heyday of conjugal visits from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the collapse of prison furlough programs by the 1990s that had allowed incarcerated people time outside prison for work, funerals, musical performances, and holidays. Through deft use of prison newspapers, letters from incarcerated people and their families, of accounts from incarcerated people in a range in sources ranging from small-town newspapers to state prison files to federal reports, Hillyer recovers how these major policy shifts were received by incarcerated people. Valuably, this study of California, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Mississippi unsettles conventional assumptions about a punitive, conservative South and a more compassionate North.