{"id":39877,"date":"2012-10-11T15:42:18","date_gmt":"2012-10-11T19:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=39877"},"modified":"2012-10-11T17:46:37","modified_gmt":"2012-10-11T21:46:37","slug":"the-modern-monastery-pussy-riot-in-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/11\/the-modern-monastery-pussy-riot-in-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"The Modern Monastery: Pussy Riot in Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Philadelphia's Walnut Street Penitentiary<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cPrison,\u201d Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said in her interview with GQ<\/em>, \u201cis like a monastery\u2014it\u2019s a place for ascetic practices.\u201d Member of the celebrated but incarcerated band Pussy Riot, Tolokonnikova gave voice to the belief that prison can be a soul-changing institution: an idea that inspired the American penal system.<\/p>\n

The same year that America declared its independence from Great Britain, Philadelphia\u2019s Walnut Street Jail opened. Its first major addition came in 1790 at the instigation of Quaker reformers who proposed \u201ca penitentiary house\u201d of sixteen individual cells for solitary confinement.<\/p>\n

The penitentiary, unlike jails or prisons, set itself to the task of rehabilitating prisoners. Religious penance became the paradigm for criminal punishment; the monastic chamber served as the model for the prison cell. Walnut Street exemplified the philosophy of what became known as the Pennsylvania System, which separated prisoners from one another while enforcing silence and manual labor as mechanisms for transformation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The prison reform movement in Philadelphia culminated in the opening of the Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829. Here the Pennsylvania System took shape as prisoners learned trades like shoemaking and weaving in their solitary cells lit only by skylights that let in heaven\u2019s glow through vaulted ceilings.<\/p>\n

Charles Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville both visited Eastern State, with Dickens condemning the cruelty of the institution\u2019s isolation, but de Tocqueville observing enthusiastically in 1831: \u201cCan there be a combination more powerful for reformation than that of a prison which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope\u201d?<\/p>\n

Pussy Riot\u2019s Tolokonnikova echoed de Tocqueville last week when she said: \u201cPrison is a good place to learn to really listen to your own mind and your own body.\u201d<\/p>\n

By embracing the monastic aspects of their sentence, Tolokonnikova attempts to situate Pussy Riot\u2019s experience in a canon of carceral literature that goes all the way back to the Apostle Paul, whom the band cited in their closing statements at the Khamovnichesky Court in August.<\/p>\n

Paul too was arrested for defiling a holy place: the Temple in Jerusalem, not Moscow\u2019s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, though he was attempting to make an offering, not staging a punk prayer or engaging in a public orgy. It was during his second imprisonment at Rome that he wrote his famous epistles to the Colossians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, and Philemon.<\/p>\n

An earlier imprisonment at Philippi described in the Book of Acts features Paul \u201cpraying and singing hymns to God\u201d from inside his cell. One imagines that the Apostle\u2019s optimism was shared by Henry David Thoreau, who wrote of his one night in jail: \u201cI did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jailed for tax evasion in 1846, Thoreau explains what Pussy Riot intimates in their interview: prison, like the monastery, can be the site of profound reflection. “I could not but smile,\u201d Thoreau wrote in his treatise, \u201cto see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meditations in a penitentiary, \u201cCivil Disobedience\u201d took shape during Thoreau\u2019s imprisonment. His taxes had gone unpaid for six years, but it was not until Thoreau went into the modern monastery that he began crafting the narrative of conscience that explained his own refusal to support a government that allowed slavery and waged imperialist wars like the one against Mexico.<\/p>\n

Another such explanation for civil disobedience came in 1963, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested for the thirteenth time. \u201cSeldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas,\u201d King lamented in his \u201cLetter from Birmingham Jail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taking time to respond to \u201cA Call for Unity\u201d by seven Christian clergymen and one rabbi who had asked civil rights activists to stop protesting in Alabama, King concluded his letter with an apology for its length: \u201cwhat else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?\u201d<\/p>\n

King\u2019s experience fulfills the hope of the reformers who designed Philadelphia\u2019s Eastern State Penitentiary, though surely they intended their design for criminals and not civil-rights activists.<\/p>\n

Pussy Riot has attempted to find solidarity with these earlier carceral authors, but the band\u2019s obscenity and anarchy are quite distinct from King\u2019s nonviolent marches and Thoreau\u2019s civil disobedience. Even their patron, Saint Paul, was arrested after a crowd of fanatics started a riot around him, not because he was rioting.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the transformation of prison into monastery that Pussy Riot asserts belies the reality of the modern prison system, which truly deserves protest. Numerous international human rights organizations have documented abuse, disease, and torture in the Russian penal system. And for the more than six million Americans in the correctional system, the Quaker dream of rehabilitative contemplation is nowhere to be found in the nightmare of dangerous and retributive facilities.<\/p>\n

That is why the genre of carceral literature found today is so unlike Boethius\u2019s Consolation of Philosophy<\/em> or John Bunyan\u2019s The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em>. Bunyan and Boethius were able to imagine a world outside of prison, inventing adventures and allegories that took place beyond their jail cells.<\/p>\n

Contemporary carceral works are more likely to expose the conditions of life inside prison walls, to denounce the criminal activity that led to the author\u2019s imprisonment, and to lament the justice system that so often fails its citizens. Son of Sam laws complicate a prisoner\u2019s efforts to profit from describing his or her crimes, but much of the prison literature that is anthologized today includes letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and diaries of life during and before imprisonment.<\/p>\n

Prison writing workshops, like prison ministries, promote rehabilitation through confession and reflection. While the ministries are usually focused on inmates, the workshops attempt to reform society as well as the offenders by giving voice to the conditions that create and frustrate incarceration. In this way, prisons really can become monasteries: communities for learning and reform, within and without.<\/p>\n

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

[tweetbutton]<\/p>\n

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\u201cPrison,\u201d Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said in her interview with GQ, \u201cis like a monastery\u2014it\u2019s a place for ascetic practices.\u201d Member of the celebrated but incarcerated band Pussy Riot, Tolokonnikova gave voice to the belief that prison can be a soul-changing institution: an idea that inspired the American penal system. The same year that America declared its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":383,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[8906,1203,8641,8903,8900,8904,8902,8901,447,8905],"class_list":["post-39877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alexis-de-tocqueville","tag-charles-dickens","tag-henry-david-thoreau","tag-monasteries","tag-nadezhda-tolokonnikova","tag-penitentiaries","tag-prison","tag-pussy-riot","tag-russia","tag-walnut-street-jail"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Modern Monastery: Pussy Riot in Prison by Casey N. 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