Tonight radio station WXPN played a 50 year old live recording of the song Jungleland in advance of the Springsteen concert, and it started my mind spinning about this week’s tragic events in New Jersey.
I was 15 years old in 1975 trying to woo my first girlfriend when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played a benefit show for a struggling music club near my teen hangout neighborhood called the Main Point in Bryn Mawr. Philadelphia’s WMMR radio station broadcast the performance the same night, running reel-to-reel tapes by car from the venue to the station in center city at 19th and Walnut, playing them over the air in hour-long segments. DJ Ed Sciaky introduced the band that night with a prophecy: Bruce was about to go off “to conquer America and the world.”
What the radio audience heard that night were songs still being written. Born to Run. Thunder Road. The song Jungleland ran for nine and a half minutes of emotional shake up on the first record album that I would own six months later. The songs I heard that night on the radio were unfinished, the edges still raw.
I was a teenager listening to that radio broadcast and I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing. Not yet.
The Song
Jungleland operates on two simultaneous planes that never reconcile.
On one side is the romantic: the open highway, the promise of escape, the girl, the music itself swelling with violin, piano and the long, devastating saxophone solo that made Clarence Clemons a household name. It is genuinely beautiful. It makes you fall in love.
On the other side is the brutal arithmetic of street life: gangs, police, violence set in the industrial shadow of northeastern New Jersey, that corridor of rail yards and highway overpasses and refineries and estuaries where working-class dreams go to die. The story ends not with triumph but with quiet, anonymous death. Springsteen doesn’t resolve the tension between these two planes. He lets both exist simultaneously, which is what makes the song devastating rather than merely sad. The power of the music is doing something cruel. It makes you care about people right before it destroys them.
For me as a teenager, the romantic plane was the whole song. The saxophone, the sweep, the lovers. Then at some point, years later as an adult, you hear the other song underneath it. The one about what actually happens to people without power, without money, without protection, when the state and the street both have their boots on your neck. That is how I crossed from adolescent thinking in my sheltered suburban world into something harder and more honest. Music was moral education. Springsteen wrote about the geography of northeastern New Jersey, the Passaic River, the Newark waterfront, the industrial flatlands between the refineries and the bay.
Fifty Years Later, the Same Neighborhood
That neighborhood now holds Delaney Hall in Newark, wedged between warehouses and the Essex County jail, a few hundred yards from where the Passaic River flows into Newark Bay. Delaney Hall is the largest immigration detention facility on the East Coast. It holds nearly a thousand people under a $1 billion, 15-year contract between the federal government and a private prison company called the GEO Group.
Most of the people inside are not criminals. They are civil immigration detainees, mostly people who overstayed a visa, whose paperwork lapsed, who exist in the administrative gray zone of immigration law. The violations that put them there are civil, not criminal. The equivalent, legally speaking, of a regulatory infraction.
Yet what has been done to them is horrific and a moral stain on our nation. They were arrested without judicial warrants. They were held without criminal charges. They received no bail hearing. They have been detained indefinitely, pending civil proceedings, in conditions that members of Congress who toured the facility described as filthy bathrooms with backed-up toilets, food served spoiled or with live worms in it, inadequate medical care for detainees with HIV, cancer, diabetes, and heart conditions, and punitive use of pepper spray against those who organized a hunger strike to protest their treatment.
New Jersey Governor Sherrill was denied entry to the facility when she tried to conduct an oversight visit. New Jersey Health Department inspectors were not allowed to complete a full inspection. Senator Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed in the street outside while attempting to de-escalate a confrontation between protesters and federal agents.
This is happening now, in Newark, in the same industrial waterfront geography that Bruce Springsteen mythologized half a century ago.
The Disturbing Political Talking Point
My well respected State Senator Mike Testa, who represents the First Legislative District in Cumberland, Cape May, and Atlantic counties, the same South Jersey communities I serve, suggested recently that with all of New Jersey’s problems, Delaney Hall should not be our top priority. Within a day, another leading Republican in my neighborhood repeated the same framing.
I recognize a coordinated talking point when I hear one. The message tracks directly to national Republican messaging: Democrats are focused on illegal immigrants instead of real New Jerseyans. The framing is designed to change the subject from what is actually happening inside that building.
But the framing fails on its own terms.
When government arrests and imprisons people off the street without a judicial warrant, without criminal charges, for a civil administrative violation, without a bail hearing, without meaningful access to counsel, indefinitely. This is not an immigration issue. It is a liberty issue that demands our top priority attention. The precedent being established at Delaney Hall is about the limits of state power over human bodies. Those limits protect everyone, or they protect no one.
The “other priorities” argument assumes that human rights violations can be triaged like a budget line item, addressed when more convenient matters are resolved. But history is unambiguous on this point. The moments when a society decides that detention conditions are someone else’s problem to worry about later are precisely the moments that define that society’s moral character, permanently. There is no revisiting them cleanly afterward.
The conditions being described at Delaney Hall: spoiled food, denied medical care, overcrowding, punitive force against hunger strikers; all meet the international legal definition of cruel and degrading treatment. That is not a secondary priority. That is the first question any civilized society must answer about itself.
What the Song Was Always About
Jungleland became one of the most celebrated rock compositions ever recorded not because it celebrated the city it depicted, but because it refused to look away from what that city did to the people living in it. Then the end came quietly, without ceremony, without justice.
The people inside Delaney Hall are living that second song right now, the one underneath the romantic plane, the one about what actually happens when the institutions meant to protect human beings instead become instruments of their suffering.
Senator Testa and his colleagues are still hearing the first song. The saxophone solo, the sweep, the idea that these are somebody else’s people in somebody else’s problem.
They are not. The Passaic River flows past Delaney Hall on its way to Newark Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean, the same coastal waters that the Delaware Bay feeds from the south, the same water that runs along the Cumberland County shoreline I have lived beside for decades.
This is our geography. These are our institutions. These are our obligations.
What really matters? After fifty years of listening to that song, I think I finally understand what Springsteen was saying.