Chiefly, the gist of this current archival tryst is a rather unkempt attempt to look comparatively at two precedent-setting U.S. prison institutions through their common application of a single term – “self-abuse.” And, at the risk of invoking the dread obelisk of stilt-speech or a precipitous pour into the torpors of formal abstract amidst this most urgently personal letter, the backdrop runs something like this: Throughout the 1800s, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia used “self-abuse” in its annual reports and other prison documentations as a frequent stand-in phrase for “masturbation,” a practice which the institution openly condemned and to which it (rather dubiously and quite manipulatively) attributed a huge number of facility inefficiencies, prisoner illnesses and even individual mortalities. At the time, the prison officials were quite apprehensive about the potential effects of public concerns that the extreme isolation and sensory deprivation which prisoners were being subjected to at ESP was leading to the degradation of these individuals’ physical and mental health. Accordingly, the facility worked to conveniently obfuscate the accusation of inhumane prison conditions and to exonerate itself from any charges of influence or responsibility in the matter by doggedly redirecting attentions toward “self-abuse,” a practice they ingeniously sculpted as the abased and shameful culprit to all such maladies.

            [**The distances to which this tactic was taken, Nat, are quite startling,
            even remarkable. For instance, in 1889, a prisoner at the institution took his
            own life by setting fire to his mattress and cell and purposively inhaling the
            smoke as a means of self-asphyxiation. Such is an act which, I suppose,
            could arguably qualify as leaving open a range of death certificate
            opportunities in the category of causation - i.e. suffocation, suicide, fire,
            misery. The final official paperwork, however, settled resolutely, and one
            can only presume by consensus (or at least by ladder of approval),
            on “excessive masturbation” as the most direct contributing agent of
            demise. The given prescription flies at one’s reading eyes - riding,
            as it does, nearly wholly unencumbered by the rumbles of the
            material world.**]

            This purposive cloaking or modification of the numbers for the benefit of the institution’s public image and reception was recognizably not a new phenomenon then and continues (this will come as no news to you, Dew) to be recycled in the U.S. penal system today in order to obscure its intrinsic brutality. In fact, in 2002, this term ‘self-abuse’ or ‘self-harm’ returned to the records of prison physicians as a means of downplaying the startling high number of suicide attempts taking place amongst “detainees” at Guantanamo Bay. [Even here, in the space of our epistolary intimacies, those parentheticals seem an ethical necessity - a minimum insistence that grammar convene to remind us of the bald inadequacy of our terminologies to the task of describing the circumstances. Pertaining as they do currently to the unprecedented and uniquely precarious situation of those individuals being held (some for more than six years now) without charges and without any access whatsoever to even the rudest judicial proceedings or fickle seagulls of legal representation.]