The Family Way
In January of 1900, Ms. Ida Barnickol was the new wife of St. Clair County, Illinois, Sheriff Hermann Barnickol when “the prisoners of St. Clair’s jail mutinied.,” according to a newspaper article of the time. Like sheriffs and their families, the Barnickols lived in a house attached to the country jail, with a secret door that the sheriff used to go from his house to the jail in a hurry as well as a dumbwaiter the Barnickols used to deliver food from the house to the jail. During dinner one evening, the Barnickols heard “a commotion and then the scurrying of feet.” The sheriff and his brother went to see what was going on. The turnkey — or jailor — had been handcuffed by those being held in the jail and thrown into a cell. He was shouting for help.
Ms. Ida then heard gunshots.
“She did not scream and she did not faint,” the paper tells us. Instead, Ida Barnickol went to block the dumbwaiter to prevent anyone from escaping through that route, threatening to shoot anyone who emerged. She had no gun, but her ploy worked. Eventually, backup police arrived and rescued the men, breaking down the jail door with a sledgehammer.
The jail system we know today was imported from England, which long held adults, children, and animals in makeshift jails altogether. They also included witnesses, debtors, etc, with no separation by gender, age, etc. But around 1900, England started to consolidate their jails. Sheriffs in America wanted to retain their high degree of discretion, so they resisted consolidation and continued to operate as small fiefdoms.
In America, while most counties had elected sheriffs who ran jails, the jail itself as a construct was not yet the hyper-modern, alien, metal structures we see today. Instead, most sheriffs held people in a basement or a small building attached to the house. Escapes were common, and people would drill holes through wood and reeds to deliver messages or just walk outside. In one case, a man opened the cell door with an iron bar and then used a rope to climb out.
Daily was a third man who was too large to fit through the escape hole. Cincinnati, 1899.
Sheriffs did not hire staff to clean and maintain the jails — those jobs fell to the sheriff’s wife (sometimes with the help of her paid house staff). Sheriff’s wives cooked, cleaned, and did the laundry for those staying in the jail. The wives also managed budgets, took emergency calls, and often cared for children who were abandoned or orphaned. They worked for cheap — actually, they worked for nothing — and as technology advanced, women took on more responsibilities, especially on the administrative end.
In 1899, an Ohio newspaper described the meals “on order that is clockwork in its punctuality.” They were allowed coffee and cream “on Sundays,” and at Thanksgiving and Christmas, they were served at one long table, rather than in their cells. The piece goes on to describe the person behind the food:
And, of course, all that labor was unpaid. Sheriffs were, in fact, incentivized to keep costs low because they were paid (and still are) on a fee system — they received a fee for holding people that included their costs. Anything leftover was profit. So it made financial sense to maximize profit by minimizing expenses like labor, food, and other amenities.
Beyond basic care, sheriff’s wives were also makeshift guards and police officers. In 1899, a man broke out of the jail in DeKalb County, Georgia, and grabbed the sheriff’s two-year-old as a hostage. “Wielding a broom,” the sheriff’s wife helped her husband force the man to drop the baby.
Of course, the first thing to note in all of these stories is the unpaid labor of women. This isn’t new nor is it different from the unpaid labor of the wives of CEOs, who manage households of staff. One study did find that in counties where “mom and pop” jails were more common, there are now more female employees working for the sheriff. (I don’t know if the numbers still hold, but interesting nonetheless.) A lot of the newspaper accounts and profiles are, to be frank, very sexist, suggesting that wanting to be compensated for your labor is tantamount to not loving your husband.
Honestly, same Gladys
Today, the idea of the county jail as a family business feels impossible (although it’s still around in some rural counties — there’s much to say on rural jails and how little we know about them). It also has an odd humanity; it serves as a reminder that jails have not always been the steel-and-barbed wire structures they are now. There was not much difference between the people inside the jail and those outside; they ate the same food, wore the same clothes, even bathed in the same facilities. Sensational stories of jail escapes made the front page, but at the heart of all of these incidents was a sense that for everyone, life was precarious. And, as a result, the attitude towards those being held in jails was judgmental, but also one of bemusement. They were sinners, no doubt, but aren’t we all?
With the invention and widespread production of things like electronic gates, military-grade weaponry, and security cameras alongside training jailers in SWAT-style and more aggressive tactics to subdue and restrain those being housed in jails, the sheriff’s wife with a baseball bat is less necessary as a tactical strategy. But, the same technology and tactics sheriffs use to seal jails off from society also has the effect of allowing society to act as though people within the jail are somehow not of society, that they are being removed, experiencing “civil death,” even though most of them haven’t been convicted of a crime. Foucault’s “panopticon” only works in a sealed environment where total control is possible. The people inside, hidden from view, become less human, more like phantom monsters. We might be sinners, but they are something else.
The pandemic has highlighted what has always been true – jails are not sealed off from the rest of the world. They are, in fact, extremely porous institutions. COVID-19 easily moved from jails to the community because people move from jails to the community. Jails, as they say, generate “churn,” which means that people move in and out, intentionally so as jails are designed for short stays. But our acceptance of mass incarceration as a regrettable tragedy – it’s inhumane, most would agree, but also sadly necessary – requires jails to become the initial site of dehumanization. We must begin to see the transformation from human to not-human happen as soon as the apparatus becomes involved. Because, otherwise, why would we accept so many people torn away from so many families and condemned to life in a cage?