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Spencer J. Weinreich is a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: You have a variety of interests, like history of Christianity, history of science, and the history of the prison. How does this broad range of interests come together and intersect?
SJW: The two strands that always seem to be there: one, a deep interest in violence.
How is it that somebody can commit an act of violence and think that they’re doing an act of kindness or an expression of faith or a way of making knowledge? And what kind of knowledge comes out of violence?
The other strand is, what are the ways that human beings experience the divine in the world? What are the practices, what are the objects, what are the places that we use to — depending on your theology — either channel God or convince ourselves that we’re channeling God?
FM: I want to return for a moment to the first question you asked about “How can someone commit an act of violence and believe they’re doing something good?” Have you found an answer to that, or even a partial answer to that, question in your research?
SJW: It’s kind of all how you set up the problem, right? If you say, what are the stakes on the other side?
To take the example of the Medieval Inquisition: if I believe that someone is going to go to hell and be tortured for all time if I do not save their soul, and if I then believe the only way to save their soul is to force them to confess to their sins so they can then repent — well, then, whatever temporary pain I inflict now is as nothing compared to what they will suffer. And so it is actually an act of mercy to inflict this temporary pain on them.
If you think about the fact that in a lot of states, in the United States, for example, the prison system — if you were to say, “Okay, what bit of the government is in charge of that?” It won’t be the such and such Department of Prisons or Department of Punishment, it will be the Department of Corrections, right? And so you get this idea that you can make somebody change, whether they want to or not, and then it will be good for them to change, and it will be good for society to change.
FM: How did you become specifically interested in the history of the prison and solitary confinement?
SJW: When I was doing my masters at Oxford, I discovered some letters belonging to one of Henry VIII’s bishops, and I liked the way he thought, and I liked the way he wrote, and I wanted to write my dissertation and my masters about him. And it turned out that the aspect of his life that no one had really studied was that he had been in prison. And so I worked with the notebooks that he kept while he was in prison, and wrote about that, and came to read prison history scholarship, and found it just extraordinarily fascinating and exciting.
Solitary confinement sort of emerged out of a question, which was, is a history of solitary confinement possible?
I was interested in the idea of this, this practice where you sort of shut out the entire world from a person, you cut them off from everything and everyone. Does history still happen in that cell?
And as that question evolved, two more questions emerged, which have become the guiding questions of my project. One is, the earliest evidence for solitary confinement is 2,000 years old. It has been done for thousands of years. It has been done on every continent. It has been done by every culture that has had a prison, and most cultures have had a prison. Why?
And the other question was, when you talk to former prisoners, and when you read what former prisoners 200 or 400 years ago wrote about the experience of solitude, the thing you hear most often is, “I can’t describe it. It’s beyond comprehension if you haven’t been in it. And if you have been in it, you don’t need me to describe it because you’ve been in it.” And so for me as a historian, there was a real challenge.
How do you do the history of something that on some level you will never actually — God willing — never actually know?
FM: Can I pose that question back to you? How do you begin to study something that you feel you can never fundamentally understand?
SJW: For me, it comes back to two things. One is the survivors and the people who didn’t survive. Recognizing that if I don’t understand, they do. In some sense, they may not be academic historians — in most cases, they are not — but they’ve spent more time thinking about solitary confinement than I ever will. Thinking about them as experts in their own right, and letting their knowledge and their authority and their understanding of the prison guide my own. So I conduct oral history interviews with former prisoners. I read as many diaries and memoirs and other prison writings as I can.
The other aspect is, in the history of science, there’s an idea of the black box. If you’re mapping out a kind of circuit of different mechanisms and so on, and you have a mechanism and it does something, it’s not really important for you when you’re mapping it to know what it does or how it does it. What’s important is to know what goes in and what comes out.
I don’t need to be able to say, here is exactly how solitary confinement disturbs a human being, in the deepest sense of the word “disturb.” Because I don’t understand that. But I know that it does disturb, and I can see what goes in, and I can see what comes out, and I can respect the reality of that and put that at the center of the history I’m writing without claiming to anatomize it in all its details.
FM: How should looking into the history of prison inform our understanding of them in the present day?
SJW: I do think we need to take seriously just how old the prison is. This is not something we invented 50 years ago or 200 years ago. This is something that’s 2,000 years old, if not older, and probably, this is something that is as old as settled human society itself.
That is a deeply uncomfortable fact to try and reckon with, because it means that if we’re going to move past this way of dealing with problems, we’re not just trying to undo a wrong turn that we made 50 years ago or 250 years ago. We’re trying to live in a way that human beings have never lived before. We’re trying to do a thing that has never been done.
That’s all the more reason to try and do it, in my view. I often feel, as I read the stories and the words of people who suffered in prison 500 years ago — 5,000 years ago — that in a way, we owe it to them as much as to ourselves to build a world where that doesn't happen.
FM: In your article “Why Early Modern Incarceration Matters,” you state “If the history of witchcraft is the history of fear or fantasy, so, in a sense, is the history of crime of all kinds.” And I find that very fascinating — this reframing of crime as a socially constructed thing. How should that impact the conception of crime and how it should be handled?
SJW: So here, I’m really indebted to a lot of the great scholars of carceral studies, who make the very good point that it’s not as though crime is just a thing that is there. It’s not a given that this human action is a crime, right? There are acts that we define, and you can define them in multiple ways.
This is why I say in the article that punishment produces crime, rather than the other way around. Crime is that which is punished, or at least that which society attempts to punish.
What makes it a crime is that there’s a social process of saying, “That’s a crime.” And it’s very easy to grasp this when you talk about something like witchcraft, because we don't really believe in witchcraft. We tend to think that that’s always socially constructed.
I think that should make us think very differently about how much trust we give that label. This came up pretty recently in a Supreme Court case about rough sleeping. The question was, if you're in a park someplace or in your car and you have a blanket over you, are you camping? And can the city restrict you from camping?
We all fall asleep. Sometimes you fall asleep on a bench, or in your car, or whatever it might be. When does it become a crime? Well, it becomes a crime when the state says it’s a crime. There’s nothing inherent in the act of sleeping, even the act of sleeping on a park bench, that would make you say, “that is a crime.”
FM: You also, in your article, seem to have some strong thoughts about the practice of plea bargaining — even likening it to medieval torture. Would you care to express any of those thoughts?
SJW: There, I am learning and inspired by one of the truly great legal historians, John Langbein, who, back in the ’70s, wrote this incredible article called “Torture and Plea Bargaining.”
In this article, he says, “I’ve studied medieval torture. Structurally, functionally, how does it work within a legal system? The closest analog I have to it is plea bargaining.”
In that system of law, in order for there to be a conviction, you basically needed perfect proof. Either you needed a certain number of eyewitnesses — which tends to be very hard to find for certain things — or you needed a confession. Torture emerged as a way of getting the confessions without which the legal system couldn’t function. You coerce someone against whom there is a certain amount of evidence to provide the rest of the evidence themselves.
As John Langbein argues in that piece — and I agree with him — that’s what plea bargaining is now, right? There is some amount of evidence, one hopes — certainly enough that a prosecutor is bringing a case. And in order to get the conviction, rather than take the risk of a trial, we coerce cooperation. You say, “If you don’t give me the information that I want, viz. a confession, I will coerce you into it. The alternative is a much higher sentence. “
So Langbein argues that it’s the same way of short circuiting an actual judicial process — an actual trial on the merits, on the evidence.
FM: As someone who’s published research and is working on a book currently, what is your writing process like?
SJW: I write a lot, and I write badly first. I wish I could remember who said this to me, because I love it, and I quote it all the time, and I want to give them credit, but I don't remember who it was — “The point of the first draft is not to get it right, it’s to get it written.”
I draft constantly and revise constantly, and I read a lot. That’s my biggest thing about writing: you have to read.
My other big part of my writing process is I go for a lot of walks, and I do my thinking on my walks. Sometimes I read and walk. I suppose the other bit is talking. I think out loud a lot, and I will say to one of my colleagues or to my partner or to a friend, “Will you let me just talk at you for five minutes?”
So it’s a kind of full body sport in terms of reading and walking and talking, and sometimes all of them at once, provided traffic allows.
FM: Is reading walking ever a tripping hazard?
SJW: No, mostly because I’ve been doing it ever since I could do both of those things. A dear friend once didn’t believe I was actually reading, and so we walked from one end of campus to another, and I read out loud, and he actually tripped, but I didn't.
It's one of my few skills, and not a very marketable one, but it is a skill.
FM: Do you have a favorite work of fiction? Or even just a current top of the list?
SJW: The top of the list — because he’s my favorite writer — is Samuel Beckett.
But I mean, I read everything. I pride myself on being a textual omnivore. On that shelf right there, there’s really everything from the memoirs of an obscure 1950s opera singer to phenomenology and a play by William Butler Yeats.
FM: Were you always a textual omnivore, or is it something you worked at and avidly made an effort to be?
SJW: I was always a voracious reader, certainly, and always liked exploring. I think there was a period where I became very snobbish, and I became very much, like, “I will read the classics. I will read Good Books,” you know. Capital G, capital B.
And gradually you find you become disconnected from the things that got you excited about reading in the first place. You know, fantasy novels, comic books, whatever it might be, and letting go of that was intensely freeing.
I used to say, “I want people to read good books,” and then it became, “I want people to read books.” Then it became, “I want people to read.” Now I’m past even that. I want people to engage. I want people to have story in their lives. Granted, I happen to love reading myself. I happen to think reading is really, really important for the health of one’s mind, the health of one’s soul, the health of our university and our world. I think it is fundamental. But more fundamental is the curiosity.
That’s what I’ve come to at this point. I want people to have stories.
FM: You competed in the Quiz Bowl in college. What was your preparation strategy, both academically and mentally?
SJW: I did it at Yale, and then I did it at Oxford for two years, and I drove the captains that I played under bananas because I wouldn’t study. One of the things you have to do if you want to get really good at Quiz Bowl — and I was mostly a literature player — is you have to memorize the characters and the plot points of any book you can think of.
And I deeply admire the people who had the discipline and the drive to do that, but I never could.
I’m not a model for how to get good at Quiz. I might have some hope that I can be a model for how to do Quiz and enjoy it, if you don’t want to spend all your time memorizing things.
FM: So there’s this thread on the Quiz Bowl Resource Center website titled “Quiz Bowl men get a haircut.” Are you familiar with this thread?
SJW: I am, mostly because a friend sent it.
FM: What are your thoughts on the state of Quiz Bowl men's grooming when you were competing?
SJW: Oh, God, I really don’t know. I have dated a few quizzers in my time, but they were very well groomed. So I really have no complaints on that score.
I was flattered that I was brought up on that forum as some sort of positive thing, which is really astonishing to me, because I’d certainly never set out to do that. I set out to wear clothes that I like to wear and that are comfortable to sit for long periods of time listening to questions with.
FM: I also wanted to ask: You have tattoos; do they have any specific meaning to them?
SJW: They do. The first one I got is Cleo, the muse of history, which I got when I graduated from college.
And then the second one — which I got after I finished my master’s — is in Hebrew, and it says “And none shall make them afraid,” The verse from the prophet Micah. It’s that verse that goes, “And they shall sit beneath their fig tree, they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and none shall make them afraid.” It’s a kind of vision of the world we’re trying to build, of a world where no one will make anyone else afraid.
Then — you can’t see because I’m wearing a shirt — but I have two feathers just there, which I got midway through my Ph.D., and which were inspired by the play Angels in America. There’s a revelatory scene in the play where one of the protagonists is in his room, and he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to be called on this divine mission. And a steel gray feather falls from the top of the stage, and there’s a voice that says, “Look up.” And eventually he looks.
So I have these two steel gray feathers on my shoulders, in homage to that and all that play has meant to me, and all the things it brings up about my life and my history.
— Associate Magazine Editor Jem K. Williams can be reached at jem.williams@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @jemkwilliams.
