ABSTRACT
I travel hours across Illinois to monitor prisons and to visit people incarcerated. Generally located in rural environments, often inaccessible to public transportation, and occasionally foreshadowed by signs admonishing drivers to “not stop for hitchhikers,” prisons in Illinois have sprouted up in former family farmland: medium-security Lawrence, opened in 2001, where the average age of men inside is 33, and the average annual cost per person incarcerated is $28,326; medium-security Decatur, which opened in 2000, and in 2006 is just over its capacity of 500 women, average age 36, at a cost per person of $36,164; supermax control unit, Tamms, which opened in June 1995 and houses approximately 500 men, average age 36, at a cost per person of $58,994 a year (Illinois Department of Corrections, 2006). Eerily prescient, the “strange fruit” of the Midwest (also other regions) is now soy plants and the increasingly more valuable black or brown urban bodies imported to fill these new fortresses.
