ABSTRACT
Joseph Glidden, a farmer from De Kalb, Illinois, is usually credited with inventing barbed wire in 1874. Soon he had a factory producing miles and miles of fencing. The fencing of the American West with barbed wire and the enclosure movement in Europe starting in the late Middle Ages may seem to bear little resemblance to each other. Attacks by private security guards and the police have included the use of dogs, pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and razor wire fencing to keep protestors away from construction areas and machinery. Penitentiaries, Gulags, concentration camps, and reservations are obviously institutions for corralling large groups of people, fencing them off from the general population. The Greenville lockup is surrounded by barbed wire, topped by its perfection, spirals of concertina or razor wire. Greenville prison and the jail cells in Mad Art point to the great contradiction between America "land of the free" and the stark fact of mass incarceration.
