Prison's Awful Acoustics

The prison soundscape was far worse in decades past. Between the slamming gates and the jangling keys, the rappers and the howlers, the aggressive disputes and the lustful whoops, there was no escape from the penitentiary's auditory assault. Most cells had at least one wall made up of bars, making the whole housing unit a sonic space shared by upwards of 100 men. Modern prisons tend to offer residents the luxury of a solid steel door, but their inhabitants are still awash in a great deal of noise.

Before coming to prison, I'd never experienced high-volume culture. I didn't know that playing cards could be popped. I took for granted that people didn't incessantly beat on random surfaces for fun. I had no concept of a casual shout. I might've seen a lot in my pre-imprisonment world travels, but it seems that my life prior to this life-without sentence was still somehow sheltered.

Back in the nineteenth century, prisons were places of maximum quiet. No one spoke, except in official communication with guards (called "keepers") or with the prison's religious advisors. You'd labor without making a sound. You could practically hear a flea jump in a neighboring cell at midday prayer. Oppressive stillness was believed to spur the prisoner to search his soul and, ultimately, repent. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

Neither did abandoning those tyrannical silences, though. Once the carceral system ditched that deeply flawed model of imprisonment, chaos reigned. Guards' radios beeped and squelched. Intercoms blared. Communication across the yard or between locked-down cells became a simple matter of verbalization. "Kites," the written notes that prisoners "fly" to one another, remained in use, as did sign language—but why scrawl or signal messages when you could shout to their recipients directly?

Memories of life at Missouri State Penitentiary still abound for prisoners who did time there before it closed down. They recall a maddening, twenty-four-hour-a-day cacophony, running the gamut from TV laugh tracks to the sounds of real-life forcible rape. There was no getting away from it, they say. All you could do was fight fire with fire: crank up your own radio, start reading aloud, or sing at the top of your lungs.

The aural unease inflicted by my own imprisonment has been mild by comparison. Yes, I was once earwitness to a neighbor being stabbed. I also endured countless deafening dining rooms, and in the last of my years at Crossroads, blogged about the torture of what I termed "aggressive whistling." Worst was my time in administrative segregation—a cumulative three months of my wingmates' all-night shouting and incessant metal banging—which gave me an acoustic experience close to the hell that people survived at MSP.

Nightly lockdowns today usually bring hours of quiet. This is disrupted only by guards' occasional radio traffic during walkthroughs, and by cooks and bakers leaving for their 3 AM kitchen jobs. Unbroken sleep is possible, at least theoretically. In the daytime, however, all bets are off.

One man in my wing does daily aerobic laps past cell doors with his ear buds in, subjecting everyone to his caterwauling. "I can't help it," he insists. "I got the music inside me." We roll our eyes and abide his off-key singing because, despite being regarded as a pest by nearly everyone here, he's recognized for being quite stupid and therefore not able to comprehend the concept of impulse control.

A quartet of comparatively compos mentis card players bellows obscenities amongst themselves, punctuated by verbal gunshot noises—for hours. When that no longer amuses them, their ringleader adds honks and abrasive car alarm effects to the mix. Sometimes one of them starts to scream, then modulates his larynx to create uniquely maximalist laughter, the likes of which I've (thankfully) never previously known.

Beyond these auditory offenders, the wing's volume reliably crescendos after recreation periods. Ballers continue their on-the-court disputes in the shower, shouting across the wing, from one stall to another, about who had better layups or three-pointers. Anyone trying to have a phone conversation in the midst of this often gives up and retreats to their cell.

Frustratingly, no one with sufficient clout to mute these uproars ever does so. Prisoners don't need or want absolute silence, but volume caps would be nice. Conversations I've had and overheard over the years imply that a majority of us would welcome occasional interruptions over the intercom, telling the noisemakers to turn it down a notch.

While awaiting the realization of this pipe dream, I plug my ears and remind myself: circumstances could be worse. They certainly have been before.