Mugged by the State

On April 28, 2004, the CBS weeknight program 60 Minutes II reported the story of prisoner abuse by US soldiers in Iraq. The broadcast included leaked snapshots from Abu Ghraib, in which American military police gleefully photographed one another in the commission of brutal, sexual torture of their detainees. Critic David Levi Strauss took up the task of  reading the images, and in The Brooklyn Rail, he contended that “the looks on the faces of those reservists, and their easy, hamming body postures were intended to show that they, unlike the Iraqis, were not subject to the depredations of Abu Ghraib; that they were actually not there at all, but back home, mugging for the camera.”

At the time, digital point-and-shoot cameras were understood to be for private consumption, and their grainy JPEGs rarely traveled farther than a family email or a personal blog. Abu Ghraib put the lie to these presumptions. “How are we going to wage war anymore, with everyone watching?” chameleon commentator (then hawk) David Brooks asked. “Could this be the apotheosis of Total Surveillance,” Levi Strauss glossed in response, “the saving grace of the Pandaemonium?”

It turns out the state is perfectly capable of waging war, and terror, with everyone watching. Images don’t reveal; they circulate. The first decade of the twentieth-first century is on the record less as history, more as meme. The photo of George W. Bush’s stricken, beady-eyed countenance being told the news that a second hijacked plane had struck the World Trade Center is an affective glyph transferable to meme accounts of all political or aesthetic persuasions.

Every shock—be it the ungovernable dispersion of images of carnage from Gaza or the highly governed image of El Salvador’s cruelest penitentiary—can be absorbed. In 2022, Nayib Bukele unveiled his Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) project, touting it as the solution to the country’s very real gang violence. CECOT represents a new institutional form: a prison that collapses the individual cells of modern incarceration into mass containment, structured not for rehabilitation but for spectacle. Its design—part museum, part warehouse, part reality TV set—is engineered for circulation. Total visibility is the point. There is no secret left to expose, and in this regime of full disclosure, critique becomes catechism.

Construction was executed in large part by two Salvadoran firms whose shared portfolios assemble a cartoon of biopolitical state management: a mega–vaccination center, a veterinary clinic shuttered for animal cruelty, a prosecutor’s office block. CECOT opened in January 2023; Bukele’s administration publicized this fact by broadcasting vertical video of alleged Salvadoran gangsters, mostly naked with shaven heads, being herded into confinement like cattle. Bukele himself took to X to brag about how much engagement he was getting, describing CECOT as the “habitan la cárcel más criticada del mundo.” The criticism is the icing on the cake.

Prisons, Nikolaus Pevsner brusquely explained in A History of Building Types (1976), are, architectonically speaking, hardly different from other institutional structures of industrial modernity. In prisons as in hospitals “a number of people are confined in one particular place, although they would prefer not to be, and in both cases constant supervision is necessary.” From the eighteenth century through the twenty-first, prisons have been built according to a rigorously segmented plan, in which tens, even hundreds, of inmate cells are nested within blocks that branch off from a nucleus. The arrangement enables both social isolation and controlled interaction, corresponding to the bankrupt notion that rehabilitation can be brought about by inducing personal guilt through deprivation. CECOT retains the cell blocks typical of prison architecture, but it eliminates entirely the cellular individuation of inmates. Each of the facility’s eight buildings contains thirty-two blocks capable of holding as many as 156 men, with a mesh ceiling allowing observation from above. The premises are artificially lit 24/7. Prisoners are not allowed eating utensils and are let out into the central corridor only for religious services and minimal recreation. They are dressed in white basketball shorts, Crocs, and shirts, producing an effect of total anonymity.

In government-sanctioned press images, the CECOT complex is clinically pristine. Whitewashed walls, polished cement floors, totally grayscale if not for the inconvenient presence of human flesh. This fully illuminated calibrated-monochrome could be the setting of a new Gagosian outpost. The vaulted corridor even evokes the top-lit spine of Renzo Piano’s Art Institute of Chicago (2009). (The museum was indeed coeval in the nineteenth century with the prison, but the exhibitionary layout of CECOT has more in common with twentieth-century white cubes.) On the exterior, nothing. The façade of CECOT is the digital image of its interior, circulated on social media by Salvadoran and now US government surrogates. CECOT the prison and CECOT the image are one and the same. It operates as total revelation. At Abu Ghraib detainees were dehumanized by hoods covering their faces. Not only does CECOT reveal every prisoner’s face and render it irrelevant, but the faces of the guards are now concealed. Where Abu Ghraib was grubby, lugubrious, and libidinal, CECOT, we are led to believe, is perfectly ordered. Base individual drives become regulated state functions.

The warden’s authority over inmates is secondary to absolute authority of the image. It’s the reason why CECOT invites YouTubers like Nick Shirley to tour the facility. “When an inmate walks in this door, he never leaves,” Shirley narrates into his fluffy lavalier mic. “Are you still proud to be a gangster?” he asks a caged man in wooden, Mormon-missionary Spanish. Throughout, he maintains a brisk cadence that resembles reportage, but he can’t help but slip some admiration for the mega-prison. West Virginia Representative Riley Moore and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem both traveled to El Salvador and released smiling snapshots from the prison, in front of the caged men. Like the MPs at Abu Ghraib, they mug for the camera before their captives. But they mean to be seen. Even the oppositional image of CECOT affirms it. At Paris Fashion Week in June, the Mexican designer Willy Chavarria staged models, shaved and kneeling, in CECOT-style whites in what some hailed as a “powerful statement” about the plight of deportees. But spectacle is spectacle, and putting CECOT on the runway is actually better proof of compliance than resistance. (Bukele countered that his policies were the inevitable result of “glorifying criminality [like] in Paris.”)

The image of CECOT tempts critique only to anesthetize it. Its novelty obscures the reality of even the recent past. The capture and imprisonment of so many legal American residents in a foreign prison is gruesome—but no more so than GITMO, where foreign nationals from around the world continue to be held at a US military base in occupied Cuba. Abu Ghraib became fodder for literati who knew better than to loose their disgust into hysterical complaint—who found, in those marginal images, the otherwise inarticulable state of the center. The photos were installed as an art show on which Levi Strauss mused. Susan Sontag lilted in The New York Times that “words alter, words add, words subtract.”

Staring down the maw of CECOT, one immediately sees that it is steel, concrete, and the special bodies of armed men—not words—that alter, add, and subtract. The state, which once found it necessary to deny and dissemble under criticism, doubles down and openly parades its transgressions, which include outright deception. And lacking any power or influence to change this story, critics are drawn into a position of quasi-collaboration with the state. Image critique reduces barbarism to images and words. It shares in the abdication of politics to its image.

Weeks after his second CECOT vlog went live, Shirley uploaded a video of his trip to Alcatraz, with the thumbnail chyron “REOPENING ALCATRAZ.” “Right now, they’re thinking about reopening this and making this the future mega-prison here in the United States,” he said. A revival of that historic littoral prison has yet to come to pass. Instead, Trump greenlit “Alligator Alcatraz”—a meme made material with vinyl and tent poles in Florida. Here, prisoners will be at the whims of the cascading incompetence of state actors who may be too inept to pull off CECOT’s choreographed cruelty. However, on the level of image, the Trump administration has advanced—or is it regressed?—to horror so adolescent it fails to shock. On Twitter, the Department of Homeland Security, that 2002 Bush creation, promoted the new jail with an AI-generated image of alligators wearing ICE hats, standing in line outside a barbed wire fence. DHS gleefully captioned the image, “Coming soon!”