In the Dayroom

When my colleagues and I arrive at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center (OBCC), a facility on Rikers Island, every other week, our book club takes shape slowly, a little awkwardly. We are students and staff from Columbia University’s Justice-in-Education Initiative, and this book club is one of the group’s inside-outside initiatives. The book club has never taken the shape of a circle. In fact, I don’t think it has ever taken on the same shape twice in a row.

Its shape, by which I mean the literal configuration and placement of our bodies, is decided entirely by the furniture within the space. Thanks to the furniture that fills the OBCC dayroom, the organization of our bodies is always asymmetrical, with forced outliers and awkward overlaps. The ways that we interact with each other, look at each other, even experience the diffusion of each other’s voices is dictated by the furniture. And when a book club—a meeting of minds that relies so much on interpersonal connection and bodily cues—can’t quite take shape, it struggles to flourish.

Yesterday, sitting in the dayroom, I took note of the six tables and six chairs in the room. Each table is bolted to the ground, hard and rigid. The chairs, though moveable, are blocky and heavy (it took two of us to slide one into place between two tables). The tables are rectangular, reminiscent of those that might fill a school cafeteria, with immovable stools sprouting from the table’s legs. Each table seats four to six people, and all its surfaces are stainless steel. When we arrive for book club, the tables have often been put to use in any number of ways: they act as a drying rack for laundry, a surface for a chess game, a snacking space. Sometimes, too, we arrive and they’re entirely bare.

As the men in the unit arrive to join us, the group always fills the space hesitantly. If one sits there, the sight of the other will be blocked. If another sits in that chair, he’ll be quite far removed from the group—we won’t be able to hear him when he reads. Perhaps these issues seem minor, but somehow, the physical positioning of our group greatly alters the chemistry of our discussions, sometimes working to create a physical, even emotional dissonance.

When our time is so limited, it is frustrating that we’re not even able to always see or hear each other. How simple, almost silly: we can’t sit in a circle! And yet, this fact seems to gesture at a more permeating constriction. Of course, the interior of the prison is inherently constrictive. Spatial configurations are designed to allow surveillance and control. But what I am thinking of here is something even more rudimentary and private: I’m interested in the ways that the senses, when faced with this sort of furnishing, are gradually stifled.

As I write this, I am sitting in a recently opened coffee shop near Columbia. Online, customers have praised the comfort of the coffee shop’s interior—its homey feeling. The stools that litter the space are mismatched, made primarily of amber-toned wood and decorated with various cushions. There is a pleasant variation throughout the space, and the people around me have really settled into the space. Their notebooks, bags, and books sprawl across the wooden tabletops. There’s a flexibility too; a group of students has gathered stools in a cluster around a table, while I’ve shamelessly taken up a large round table that could easily fit four people. The space invites its inhabitants to alter it, to mold it to their needs, and it hugs them as they do so.

On my dining table at home, there is always a pleasant mess of papers and CDs. My parents, perhaps to a fault, make their space their own. I suspect that, were the flock of papers to go missing, the table’s surfaces would feel a little bereft.

I think back to the stainless steel of the tables in OBCC. I don’t think I’ve ever seen their stiff and imposing silvery surfaces littered with extensions of those who live in the unit. Likewise, the stools do not yield to those sitting in them. Uniform, circular, and flat, they resist the body. Imposing and fixed in place, their authority is unquestionable. We shuffle around them in an attempt to coexist. I recall an older participant urging me to sit in a moveable chair, pointing out how uncomfortable the stools are. The dissonance between the space and the people within it is loud.

Though I’m not an expert in furniture design, I’ve grown interested in the particulars of the OBCC dayroom. We’ve spent so much time in it, but with each visit, we seem to remain at odds with it. When I attempt to find its rigid tables and chairs online, I discover that there are marketplaces specifically for so-called “justice furniture.” Take Norix, for example, a company that designs “high-quality, durable commercial furniture . . . for challenging environments.” Norix primarily designs for four markets: health care, “justice”, transitional housing, and GSA (a government agency that furnishes military barracks and handles governmental real estate affairs). And sure enough, within Norix’s lineup, I find the Vesta™ Seating Series and the Max-Master Tables, which are dead ringers for the stools and tables in the OBCC day room.

A blog post on the company’s website, “The Role Furniture Plays in Successful Inmate Rehabilitation,” reads:

Prison detention centers and justice-focused institutions such as police stations must seek furniture solutions that humanize all settings in which detainees are housed. These solutions must not only be high in quality and durability, but designed to reshape the inmate experience and physical environment altogether.

I am struck by the presence of the words “humanize” and “experience” in this text. Contrast this with seemingly more honest language that appears in the brochure for Norix’s Vesta™ line. Under the heading “Features That Matter,” the following characteristics are listed, among others: “Anti-Ligature Design,” “Concealed Hardware,” “Contraband Resistance,” and “Ballastable.” Similarly, the Max-Master Tables promise “Extreme Durability” and “Bolt-Down Capability.” These features seem designed with Hollywood caricatures of prison in mind: someone shoving a baggie of an illicit substance into a hollowed-out chair leg; a loose screw being used as a weapon, or as a tool for escape. That these features can exist harmoniously with Norix’s aim to “humanize” seems questionable.

The Norix brochures cite these features as necessary in the “challenging environment” of the correctional institution. The threats of this “challenging environment” must silently win out against the ideal of humanization. This furniture appears designed not with comfort in mind, but longevity. It is furniture designed to take a beating. Furniture designed in anticipation of wrongdoing.

And yet, the same Norix blog post states the following in a section titled “Successful Inmate Rehabilitation Requires Humanized Environments”:

Without progressive trends such as normalized environments, successful inmate reintegration becomes decidedly more difficult. Residential-looking furnishing solutions with bright colors may be part of the solution for our country’s correctional system.

Even Norix—or at least the copywriter responsible for this post and the brochures—recognizes the allure of environments that allow humans to be humans. To feel human.

And still, our book club has never taken the shape of a circle.

That the furnishings and interior of carceral space are forcibly impersonal and rigid as a form of punishment is no recent phenomenon—nor are efforts by incarcerated people to personalize these impersonal spaces.

One of the earliest modern examples is the diary of Sir John Gibson, a British royalist who was imprisoned at Durham Castle in the 1650s. Gibson approached his diary’s pages as though they were the blank walls of a cell, filling them with cuttings from books and almanacks, pictures from other texts, and lines of poetry he copied down. While we can’t be entirely sure of the origins of the materials found in Gibson’s diary, it’s fascinating to consider the currents of circulation that, with Gibson’s labors, culminated in this personal project. Though it was compiled in the impersonal confines of the prison, Gibson’s manuscript weaves together personal reflections and worldly materials. While confined in a “common space,” the prison, Gibson constructed a strikingly personal artifact.

People incarcerated in the United States today find ways to personalize their cells to the degree that they’re allowed—over and against the anonymity of communal spaces such as dayrooms. Admittedly, this is something that I will never be able to see firsthand but only hear about. What I can experience firsthand is the way that the poetry and prose being written by them likewise reflects a constant negotiation between the “common space” of the prison and their attempts to have the space of incarceration in some way reflect their personhood. Consider how poet Mesro Dhu Rafa’a uses his poetry to lean forward into imagined places. The first stanza of his poem, “Only Judith Tannenbaum,” paints an abstract space of comfort with a lush openness. The poem is an ode to Tannenbaum, who taught poetry in San Quentin State Prison, where Rafa’a is incarcerated.

Only Judith Tannenbaum
teaches that
love rhymes with roses
and can take me
from a train station
through light that poses
as love and
transport me
to a kitchen
with light like a sea
around wooden chairs,
paisley cloth,
two mugs of hot tea.

I find much comfort in the abstractness of Dhu Rafa’a’s words, in his envisioning of a cozy kitchen, somewhere outside of space and time. This room, well lit and furnished to his liking with its paisley cloth, wooden chairs, and two mugs, is vivid and rich. Perhaps most importantly, it is a testament to the individual ability to plait a breadth of ideas and memories together, even when immediate circumstances would have it otherwise.

It reminds me of an interaction that took place in our book group. Following a group reading of Anna Washburn’s play adaptation of The Twilight Zone, one participant remembered himself as a young boy, sitting in his kitchen and watching Rod Serling’s original show on his family’s television, which was precariously placed atop his fridge. For a moment it was like we were all in a more lived-in space than the dayroom.

There is warmth and beauty to be found in remembering other spaces, both past and present. These elusive daydreams of alternate spaces can become as concrete and real as anything. As we work to amend and reckon with the lasting harms of imprisonment, these personal realities deserve attention and consideration. On blank pages. In song. Through art. More simply, through conversation.

_{Image: Forlll De Rad / Unsplash}

Contributors

Sara Medwin Sara Medwin is a Senior at Columbia University studying Literature and Anthropology. Outside of her studies, she volunteers with the Columbia Justice-in-Education Initiative and is the Program Assistant for the Columbia Justice Lab’s Probation and Parole Project.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• American Prison Writing Archive
• Carceral Geographies
• conditions of confinement
• education
• prison writing