Breakout

By creating the town of Wolf Creek and illustrating its socioeconomic relationship to the Wolf Creek Correctional Facility, the author addresses contemporary societal discussions about the institutional racism of the US prison-industrial complex—a term coined to describe the overlapping interests between the prison system, government policies, and those that profit from them economically or socially. When Nora and Lizzie research the demographics of the prison and find that the majority of inmates are people of color while the majority of corrections officers and other prison employees are white, this mirrors real-world statistics for the state of New York, according to recent data collected by the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services and the Prison Policy Initiative. An investigation by The New York Times reported that the workforce in Upstate New York prisons is largely white, with the facilities often referred to “as ‘family prisons,’ where members of the same family have worked for generations. In these communities, prisons are often seen as political spoils, fiercely protected by upstate politicians for the jobs they provide” (Schwirtz, Michael, et al. “The Scourge of Racial Bias in New York State’s Prisons.” The New York Times, 3 Dec. 2016). Through Nora’s father, Bill Tucker, the prison superintendent; Lizzie’s grandmother, who has worked in the prison cafeteria all her life; and references to many other town residents who work there, Messner depicts Wolf Creek, “a small town with a big prison” (48), as economically dependent on this relationship. However, the characters who rely on the prison for their income rarely consider the lives of the people who occupy it.

Beyond statistics, Messner uses Elidee and her brother, Troy, to represent the human toll of such discrimination and privilege. Though she doesn’t address the details of Troy’s crime, Elidee imagines Troy in prison with “a bunch of other guys who hung out with the wrong people” (29), suggesting Troy is being disproportionately punished for a small mistake that has labeled him a “criminal” for life. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, policies that favor punitive incarceration over rehabilitation “have served to isolate and remove a massive number of people, a disproportionately large percentage of whom are people of color, from their communities and from participation in civil society” (“Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” NAACP Legal Defense Fund). The novel depicts this separation when Elidee describes the wall around the prison and the lockdown that prevents her from visiting her brother after the breakout. She further emphasizes it when the inmates are barred from participation in the Wolf Creek Community Time Capsule, suggesting their perspectives are considered unimportant to history. The novel also touches on the ways privilege and bias in schools can contribute to this, helping to create what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline—a documented trend of public school practices, including zero-tolerance policies or police presence leading to arrests that tend to push a disproportionate number of students of color toward the criminal justice system. To escape her brother’s fate, Elidee feels she must be perfect and remain calm even when a teacher threatens to call her mother to discuss her “attitude,” an injustice Messner highlights with irony by describing the unchecked harassment Elidee endures at the hands of her white peers.