Montana State University
Kirke Elsass is a historian of technology, environment, and culture who is currently a PhD Candidate at Montana State University. While majoring in geology at Carleton College, he was drawn toward topics that involved humans interacting with mineral and hydrological processes. After several post-college years in farm to school programs, garden-based education, and classroom teaching, Kirke moved with his wife to Bozeman, Montana so that he could continue learning about the intersection of people, rocks, and Earth's surface. The two of them, along with their two children, recently moved to New Haven, where she is working toward an MDiv while he concludes his dissertation, which examines the standardization of cement as a material of dense barriers in built environments throughout the United States. The dissertation chronicles how cement became a co-creator of American cultures via its application in prisons, sidewalks, and home basements.
In the 1820s, a group of social reformers, an up-and-coming architect, the Pennsylvania legislature, and scores of Philadelphia workers collaborated with tons upon tons of rock and mortar to create a building that many thought would save men’s souls. They called it the State Penitentiary of the Eastern District. Inside, walls of smooth plaster upon lime-coated, foot-wide stones separated single-occupancy chambers. The dense masonry dividers were designed to prevent the convicted from seeing or even hearing one another. Indeed, the innovative architecture was to disconnect prisoners from everything save their own thoughts and an abstract, heavenly God. If paired with regular moral instruction from visiting clergy and laity, reformers believed the structure itself promised to both preserve convicts from further corruption and effect a penitence that, in turn, would re-create them as productive citizens. During the nineteenth century, however, the intent of solitary confinement in US prisons shifted from a putatively rehabilitating treatment supplemented by fresh air and gardening to a nakedly punitive, absolute separation. Over that same period, production of cement proliferated across the country and concrete replaced stone and lime in prison construction. Austere, dense dividers became standard in prisons. This paper interweaves the history of separation in prisons with a history of building materials. It raises and attempts to answer questions about mineral technologies as an active participant in developing carceral cultures, as a non-human co-creator of both what prison reformers and officials thought possible and what people experienced while incarcerated. Cement history, always linked to the diffuse inhumanity of industrial carbon emissions, can also help define the acute inhumanity of solitary confinement. Today’s interfaith advocates of carceral reform roundly oppose this careless and abusive disconnection from nearly all Creation, in stark contrast to the historical people of faith who helped advance structural separation in modern prisons.