by Kenneth Madsen and Alia Dietsch
We have been reading Reiko Hillyer’s (2024) book, A Wall Is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States, this autumn. The book questions the assumption that prison walls are impermeable, and we’re currently exploring Part II: Strange Bedfellows, which highlights the personal, social, and political justifications for allowing, then later denying, intimacy within prison walls. Hillyer invites us to see prison walls as semi-porous membranes—structures that both enforce separation from one’s home community while also allowing carefully regulated breaches, such as family time and conjugal visits on the inside.
As a community, we agreed with the power of human connection, and examined the philosophical underpinnings of sanctioned intimacies: what does it mean to be with your loved ones when relationships are state-sanctioned, monitored, and either allowed or denied? Learning community members experiencing incarceration reflected from personal experience that such visits are foundational to their wellbeing not just because of the potential for "carnal knowledge" of a partner, but for the ability to laugh, love, hug, and spend time with a loved one, including time spent engaging with children on homework, games, etc.
Within P4H, we read this book not as a distant critique but as an ethical challenge. If walls can be permeable, what responsibilities emerge for those of us outside them? How do we reconcile the human need for touch and recognition with architectures designed to deny both? Our conversations about the book confront the fragility of belonging and the violence of its conditionality, as such visits also reinforce hierarchy and control within prisons, as well as normative beliefs about who is supposedly deserving of love and its many expressive forms.
Through ongoing collaboration in our sub-groups (writing, oral history, zine) and regular check-ins with each other, our P4H LC continues to be a valuable space for growth. The community we have created serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration for insiders and outsiders alike. For many of us, it is a time we look forward to re-connecting not just academically but also socially and emotionally, something we reflected on wholeheartedly during our last meeting together.