MacCormick Prison

One of the most interesting experiences in my time at Cornell was making repeat visits to the MacCormick Secure Center. For five years, Sam Nelson has been visiting the prison on a weekly basis to take a debating class and he helped arrange to take us along to his classes.

The experience highlighted the twin extremes of American society. Cornell, whose endowment dwarfs the GDP of some nations, is an institution embodying the wealth and excellence of America’s higher education system. MacCormick stands apart as a small but resonant emblem of America’s enormous prison industry.

In a small rural hamlet north of Ithaca, MacCormick is a high-security juvenile detention facility housing youth who have committed serious violent crimes. The facility is about half an hour from Ithaca and is relatively isolated, situated in a clearing at the end of a scenic long, winding road littered with scrap metal. The children it houses mostly come from New York City and other distant population centres such as Buffalo. The remote location can make it difficult for the offenders to receive visitors. I noticed signing into the prison when I returned on Monday that relatively few visitors had visited since my own visit on the Friday before. I think it is safe to assume that if people are not visiting on the weekend then they are not really visiting the residents.

The inmates are almost exclusively African-American and Latino. Although the facility houses inmates up to the age of 21 (they can transfer to adult prisons at age 18 if they wish), they are mostly 15 or 16 year old boys. Approximately one third of the inmates are fathers. There are around 40-50 inmates, housed in three separate units of around 15. There is very little interaction between the units, who eat, sleep and go to school together.

MacCormick is undoubtedly at the less repressive end of the American carceral spectrum. Yet there are some constant physical reminders that you are in a prison. Movement within the prison relies on hand-held radio requests to a central facility to open any doors. The sound of the heavy metal doors being remotely unlocked was somewhat haunting. Whatever vista the windows in the classrooms looked out onto featured the enormous metal fence in the background. Plainly the New York juvenile corrections department has adopted “matte Spartan” as its interior design aesthetic: the walls were unadorned by posters or pictures, the colour scheme was uniformly dull.
On each occasion at McCormick, our work took on a similar form. For about an hour, we sat and talked to three or four of the students and then, split up into teams comprising one student and one adult each, we undertook a debate. The first session involved a debate on the motion “that we should close all zoos”. Few of the students had been to a zoo but, as a few awkward moments revealed, they could all understand the experience of lacking certain liberties. The second session featured a debate on the topic “that all athletes who cheat through drugs or break the law should be banned from sport and removed from the record books”. Like many other students around the world, their initial reticence to speak disappeared once the debates were under way.

In some small way, the promotion of debating at McCormick visibly alleviates the boredom and inertia of juvenile prison. It cannot redeem the mistakes and disadvantages that have led these young men to McCormick but it can give them some sense of the importance of argument and the value of public speaking as a means of self-expression.

-cc