The Prison in 12 Landscapes is a documentary that came out in 2016. It’s a beautiful film. Intimate interviews, lush landscapes, and deep attention to the complexity of people’s lives, from cities to small rural towns. If it wasn’t in the title, it could take a while to realize that its central topic is prisons, and how they shape life far beyond their walls. The prison itself – the sprawling complex of buildings surrounded by fences, razor wire, guards – is just part of the prison system. There are also police and courts. County jails. That’s still just what we can see. Like an iceberg, the system of incarceration has a whole lot more going on under the surface. But that’s what keeps it afloat.
Micol Seigel is an activist, scholar, and teacher who’s been studying this carceral system for a long time. Her most recent book, Violence Work, looks at how police and policing are a primary vector of violence enforced and enacted by the state – which is to say, governments. But lately she’s been focused on another part of this carceral iceberg. One that is maybe less obviously part of the same system. That’s the foster care system. That might come as a bit of a surprise. We think of foster parents as maybe the holiest of parents, doing that hard work of taking in kids they’ve never met before, who desperately need a place to go. A home.
But there’s a larger system at play. On this week’s Inner States, Micol describes how the foster system, and the Department of Child Services that helps run it, is also totally intertwined with the broader system of policing in this country. That doesn’t mean Micol is saying all foster parents are bad people. Just that they – and really, all of us – are part of a bigger carceral system that separates people from their communities, their families, and, sometimes, children from their parents. As a foster and adoptive parent herself, Micol has become deeply familiar with this system.
Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Violet Baron, Eoban Binder, Jillian Blackburn, Mark Chilla, Avi Forrest, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Jay Upshaw, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.
Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music and Ramón Monrás-Sender.
