If one wishes to analyze prisons from a communication perspective, they will inevitably grapple with Foucault. His 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison has become a canonical assessment of power relations in houses of punishment and myriad other neoliberal institutions in modern society. While this original assessment continues to be highly generative, it is worth stopping and assessing its strengths and highlighting its limitations. Need we be tethered to the Foucauldian framework for analyzing prisons? The question goes beyond direct engagement, for countless other works have extended his framework into the realms of public discourse, race relations, interpersonal interactions, and beyond. In the following pages I trace the work of Foucault through various authors to offer a survey of his impact on contemporary prison scholarship. I hope to lend the reader a sense of how his analytic frame has been productively adapted to various contexts and continues to prove valuable despite its blind spots. In the second section, I seek to demonstrate the compatibility of phenomenological accounts with the discursive ones inspired by Foucault. At very least, the juxtaposition of these analytical foci should provoke questions about what our privileged methodologies convey to the reader. To that end, I find we are faced with an imperative to toggle between the abstract and concrete, embrace methodological fluidity, and attempt to show how sociological structures shape visceral experience.
Discourse and Power in Prison Analysis
In Discipline, Foucault offers a genealogy of the modern penal system by tracing the functions of torture and public spectacle up to the contemporary practices of isolation and thorough, yet largely latent disciplinary strategy. Although, it should be noted that much of the disciplinary logic he elucidates is not necessarily intended or used to rationalize the concrete practices of the penal system. Much of the micro-disciplinary shaping of incarcerated subjects is a by-product demonstrated through an ex post facto assessment of these technologies and practices elaborated by the institutions. “Incarcerated subjects” is used here in a technical sense – Foucault is concerned with illuminating the totality of repressive and productive forces that shape the prisoner’s experience and the creation of knowledge that legitimates the use of such practices. To be clear, he is not interested in a phenomenological account of what it is like to be incarcerated under such conditions. Rather, as he states in a published interview discussing the aims of his scholarship, “One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework” (“Truth and Power” 117). His analysis is focused on the concrete organization and procedures by which subjectivity is formed – the means rather than the result. Discipline’s aim, and the ongoing work he believes his conclusions entail, can be summarized as such:
“’We punish, but this is a way of saying that we wish to obtain a cure.’ Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing re-inscription of non-juridical systems. It’s fate is to be redefined by knowledge” (Discipline 22).
The “we” in his unattributed quote forecasts the thoroughness, the apparent naturalness of our penal practices – its institution-level implementation and the public acceptance of it as a legitimate institution of punishment. There is a sense in which we collectively punish, not just in the tacit acceptance of juridical practice as it plays out, but also in our continued treatment of criminals as criminals, during and beyond release. The modern prison, he argues, has fashioned itself into an apparatus premised on the goal of transforming its subjects, to socially reform and “cure” them. To be sure, his use of apparatus is distinct from the Repressive State Apparatus conceived by Althusser. Foucault argues that a proper analysis of power and discipline should start by examining the practices of the institutions rather than viewing them top-down strategic efforts of the state. While Althusser’s concept of power is predicated on the negative, repressive function of the institutional apparatus operating at an ideological level, Foucault’s notion of power is positive and productive. “The State is superstructural in relation to a whole network of power relations” that already exist because of the concrete practices of such institutions which have effects that exceed the rationale for the practices as such (“Truth and Power” 122).
For Foucault, there is a technical relation between punishment and “saying” when he cites that “We punish, but this is a way of saying that we wish to obtain a cure.” The micro-disciplinary features of the prison arise out of a shift from a centralized punishing figure, such as a king, to a bureaucratic network of actors with distinct power relations and spatial logics that maximize the efficiency of surveilling the incarcerated. Furthermore, it sets up power relations between the prisoners themselves that incorporates them into the network of disciplinary influence. This reimagined system of punishment employs procedures of
“distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them, extracting from them the maximum in time and forces, training their bodies, coding their continuous behavior, maintaining them in perfect visibility, forming around them an apparatus of obstruction, registration and recording, constituting on them a body of knowledge that is accumulated and centralized” (Dicipline 231).
Foucault leads us to believe that carceral practice and logic are recursive. While power networks and spatial curation are intended to be efficient and effective in enacting punishment, he demonstrates how a discourse of punishment arises from these practices, which legitimizes and extends the disciplinary potential of the institution. Modern punishment is constituted on this body of knowledge creating a “carceral regime” which produces data that justifies its operations, normalizes its practices as effective punishment, and grants it nearly complete putative sovereignty. Highlighting punishment as a “way of saying” points to this discursive rationale as the central feature of the modern prison. In simpler terms, the penal system, through its myriad practices, is granted incredible power over defining delinquency and enacting the “correct” means of punishment based of such definitions, and furthermore, shaping social perceptions of what counts as the appropriate means of punishment. Since the institutions have autonomy over the production of technical discourse around criminality and rehabilitation, it has purview over diagnosing and prescribing corresponding “cures” for its subjects, renders these procedures legitimate to the point they may even appear intuitive, and resists outside influence that could undermine the status quo of power relations, economics, and efficiency of the institutions. How is this so?
He goes on to say that, “Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself by this unceasing re-inscription of non-juridical systems” (Discipline 22). By in large, it references the seemingly essential features of criminal subjects, or at least the social/scientifically accepted propositions about them. As Sloop succinctly puts it, the “carceral society” imagined by Foucault
“places each of us in the role of the judge. We need only to add the title judge to our occupational and cultural roles to understand the implications of this claim: we are a society of teacher-judges, doctor-judges, social worker-judges, psychoanalyst-judges, friend-judges, spouse-judges, and so forth” (Cultural Prison 9).
A grammar and nomenclature for discussing criminality and punishment is negotiated and sedimented in a network of both technical and non-technical social relations pertaining to it. In Discipline, Foucault is primarily concerned with how the penal institution serves as the centralized producer of such knowledge about punishment, which informs the broader public discourse around it and incorporates these judgmental relationships into its network of power. However, he stops short of elucidating the broader cultural discourse around it, privileging the role of concrete institutional practices in the constitution of carceral knowledge over the peripheral influences of cultural productions on this knowledge regime.
Foucault offers a rather dismal, deterministic view of the incarcerated subject that appears to be fixed within the thorough system of power relations. The agency of the inmate appears to be deeply constrained and almost completely ignored. This is the cost of his analytic framework, but does not preclude transformative potential. While I think Foucault might accept the claim that the multiplicity of forces involved in his assessment set incredible constraints on incarcerated subjects to resist the regime of knowledge that structures their experience, I do not think he would go as far as arguing it precludes action on their behalf and especially not on the behalf of others with the will to intervene. As he writes in the initial quote cited above, the fate of criminal justice “is to be redefined by knowledge” (Discipline 22). While he offers what reads as an overbearing description of those “concrete systems of punishment,” he ultimately is advocating for a challenge to and redefinition of this system. In his terms, he is merely providing his readers with a descriptive archeology that is taken up to rationalize a tactical, genealogical subversion of the multiplicity of knowledge claims that make up the status quo carceral discourse.
Building on the work of Foucault, John M. Sloop offers an analysis of how popular rhetorical discourse reinscribes knowledge about criminality and discipline. He is centrally concerned with how “we, as a culture, have constructed a reality that allows this particular configuration of discipline” to exist and be reproduced (Cultural Prison 3). That is, how we as a culture talk about rather than treat the incarcerated, keeping in mind that the former affects the latter. Rather than focusing on the concrete reality of prison operations, he turns his attention to the dominant cultural discourse about prisons and prisoners. Despite the admittedly powerful affect of discourse on subjectivity, Sloop explicitly states that he does “not mean to suggest that displaced subjects have no agency within their constructed boundaries” (Cultural Prison 10). He instead adopts a Gramscian framework that acknowledges how resistant reading of cultural texts can, to various degrees, refuse consent to the hegemonic system they exist in. Ultimately, Sloop is interested in elucidating the discursive boundaries of the “cultural prison” by demonstrating the degree to which mass mediated messages about punishment may shape our view towards prisoners and the way prisoners experience punishment for their crimes. To do so, he investigates media coverage around prisoners to understand how “Articulations of the term prisoner, as it emerges in mass media outlets, are reflections of contemporary dominant power relations” and, as such, function as an organ in the larger disciplinary apparatus as laid out by Foucault (Cultural Prison 13).
Cultural Prison guides the reader through a selection of newspaper articles spanning from 1950 to 1993 that discus prison and prisoners. His rhetorical analysis carves the latter half of the 20th century into four distinct eras of discourse in dominant culture that each distinctly shape and reflect the treatment of prisoners, as well as the rationale and operations of American prison institutions. During this era, the concept of a malleable, reformable prisoner emerged. However, public discourse about prisoners demonstrates this possibility of rehabilitation and societal redemption was distributed unevenly across lines of race and gender. The starkest contrast as well as the most consequential in terms of unequal and unjust punishment, lies in the differentiated constructions of white and black prisoners. In the middle of the century, whites still significantly outnumbered African Americans in prisons. “While African American and [other minorities were] certainly imprisoned throughout the period,” he argues, “their virtual symbolic annihilation suggests that their representational presence would have been incompatible with the depiction of the prisoner as a redeemable agent” (Cultural Prison 60). During the civil rights era, African Americans were increasingly deemed revolutionary, dangerous, immoral, irrational, and, therefore, irredeemable compared to white criminals. The divergence in morality along racial lines became increasingly sedimented in dominant cultural discourse, which not only perpetuated suspicion and unease around blacks in general, but shaped a sense of naturalness and inhumanity around them. The construction of African American criminality thus served (and continues to serve) as rationale for differential punishment between races of inmates. The most tangible effects of this modulated treatment is the staggering shift in proportions of black and white inmates, with far more African American’s now incarcerated than whites, as well as the “eligibility” for reform programs that Sloop points out is more associated with discourse about white prisoners.
While Sloop’s assessment of racialized prison discourse is insightful in its ability to pinpoint specific moments of discursive transformations in the latter half of the 20th century, it remains largely de-historicized. Even though race, and specifically the discourse and treatment of African-Americans, becomes central to his analysis, notable precursors to these evolving discursive practices are almost completely ignored. This is not so much a point of critique about the accuracy, force and implications of his findings, but an observation of how their historical context helps us realize just how insidious the substance of his discoveries really are.
In Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, she argues that the mass incarceration of African-Americans should be understood as the newest, and most thoroughly mystified, system of black subjugation in America. Without reference to Foucault, she offers a distinctly racial take on his notion of the carceral society that can be traced through nominal breaks in historical periods: “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race” (Alexander 13). Her historical account of this well-established network points out that, despite the absence of overtly racialized policy that characterized eras passed, there remains a racial caste system in America which continues to reproduce the nefarious effects these policies engendered. Following the Civil Rights Movement and the dissolution of Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the southern states, America entered a period of transition to a largely invisible system of racial subjugation. The cornerstone of this new system was the symbolic construction of black men as criminals who, as the dominant discourse would lead you to believe, have indeed chosen to be criminals. Building on centuries-worth of symbolic degradation by deeming blacks physically and politically threatening for the sake of rationalizing their subjugation, the new era locates them as the primary antagonist in the war on drugs. Narcotics operations are continuously carried out in poor communities of color, disproportionately incriminating black men and reifying their criminal status.
Alexander suggests that the formal punishment of black men is only the first step in a much more elaborate process of racial subjugation that persists for individuals and their communities even after release. By nature of their newly confirmed status as felons, they become subjected to similar forms of racial discrimination that existed during the Jim Crow era. Employment, housing, public benefits, and political participation are all affordances that are hobbled by social sigma if not precluded by loss of legal rights. (break up into legal and extra legal). This stigma holds the potential to endlessly protract and rationalize the discrimination of African-American males. The consequences of this are so extensive that Alexander argues; “The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time” (77). All of this exacerbates the detrimental effects on the communities they are stripped from. The 2018 United States Census Bureau statistics show that there are approximately 2 million more adult women than men in black communities, which proportionately comes out to roughly 14% more. This difference can be partially explained by the disproportionate number of African-Americans in prison. 2020 Federal Bureau of Prison statistics show that 37% of those presently incarcerated are black while 58% of the prison population is white. Given that only 13% of the general U.S. population is black and 75% white (U.S. Census Bureau), it becomes clear that blacks are still disproportionately incarcerated, even though this gap is starting to close (Gramlich). This disadvantages the black community in general by removing a significant percentage of their male population and continuing to marginalize them, both legally and symbolically, upon release. This is why Alexander likens mass incarceration to a system of racial caste – it confines a large segment of the community, symbolically cleanses policy of explicit racial reasons for doing so, socially constructs black men as criminals, and hobbles the entire community’s ability for upward mobility. If we accept Alexander’s account, Sloop’s concept of the ‘cultural prison’ becomes a much more distressing issue than initially imagined.
While each of these authors so far have offered historically oriented and structurally focused accounts of how the prison system concentrates and exerts power over incarcerated subjects, they remain lacking in their ability to demonstrate what effects these institutions have on the individuals within them. Officer-inmate relationships, prisoner-prisoner relationships, and individual experiences are almost completely excluded from these analyses. Foucault comes the closest to investigating the power relationships in these former two dyads, but remains methodologically uninterested in detailing the structure of experience they engender. We are left with two big questions: How does discourse function in the context of prison and what is it like to be a prisoner? These two questions are bound up, to be sure. Attending to them means attending to the concrete interactions that unfold in day-to-day prison life and analyzing how power is negotiated through them. I believe that bringing the phenomenological subject back into the equation of these analyses offers a more complete understanding of how power actually functions in prion by observing how it affects experience.
In Prison Discourse: Language as a Means of Control and Resistance, Andrea Mayr gets closer to accomplishing this by analyzing how institutional ideology is reproduced and contested one Scottish prison’s “Cognitive Skills” classroom. By combing a more formal linguistic approach with the functional approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA hereafter) and participant observation, she is able to analyze negotiations of power as they play out in conversation. While her own analysis is directly influenced by Foucault, and indirectly by his influence on literature in the tradition of CDA, she acknowledges several critiques that have been leveled against his approach to power. The first simply points out that he lacks analyses of texts and location of the specific agents and agencies that power is enacted through, thus putting limits on the thrust of his claims (Mayr 21). I would also add that Foucault’s original treatment of prisons in Discipline focuses primarily on the Benthamite-inspired prisons and was first published in 1975. While many of the concepts he develops in this book are applicable or adaptable to a variety of contemporary prisons, some of his conclusions have evolved and other take on a historically significant character. For instance, he argues that labor in prison claims to function as way to moralize, socialize, and transform the prisoner. In actuality, they primarily function to further constitute a network of power relations between the prison and institution, as well as incorporate them into the production apparatus (Discipline 243). While this may be applicable in the American context, it does not account for the history of slave labor, labor-leasing programs that effectively transformed slavery into a state apparatus, and the continued exploitation of prisoners in some states who are required to work monotonous jobs for little to no pay. Secondly, Foucault’s analysis of power frames it as a tool for political domination that is strategically, if sometimes unwittingly, deployed (Mayr 21). While I believe the first part of this critique holds up, it is not always so clear if Foucault believes there is an awareness of those effects on subjectivity specific to the concrete operations that prisons put into practice. Rather, much of his literature is focused on the mystification of power which becomes such a productive force by nature of its ability to elide awareness of the actors that reproduce it. Its de-centralized and loosely attributed nature makes it appear as if power is ethereal – as an agent in itself – which is a characterization that Foucault would be surely be unsatisfied with. Lastly, the ubiquity of power and its seemingly endless deferral to different actors, both vertically and horizontally, makes it appear to have almost exclusively negative effects that can hardly be avoided (Mayr 21). While Foucault ultimately is concerned with offering intellectual tools to resurrect, amplify, and deploy subjugated knowledges to upset the power relations that be, he leaves little room for human agency to creatively counteract the dominance exerted over individuals. While it is clear that Foucault has hope for transformation implied in his corpus, he remains seemingly uninterested in bringing the human agency that it would take to realize into account.
Mayr, however, is interested in parsing out utterances between officers and prisoners to observe how, in even the most subtle linguistic conventions, institutional ideology is reproduced and resisted. The interactions she observed took place in a very specific setting of officers teaching prisoners in a “Cognitive Skills” class. Despite the narrowness of its scope, this research setting is unique for the fact that the educational offerings appear to be exclusively for the betterment of the prisoners, yet still, with a closer look, reifies problematic institutional rationale for treatment of its population. She argues that the material used for the course is predicated on the assumption that prisoners have faulty or handicapped cognitive development. Down to the lexical level, the course materials simultaneously mystifies its own agency through quasi-objective vocabulary choices and displaces the agency of the prisoners by stylistically rendering them as behavioral-mechanistic objects to be fixed through the program. In a distinctly Foucauldian vein, she points out how naturalized scientific explanations about prisoners covertly rationalize the institution’s treatment of prisoners: “Expressions such as ‘under-socialized’, ‘psychopathology’, ‘at risk’, ‘egocentric thinking’, ‘anti-social individuals’, deficits in interpersonal problem-solving’, etc. become authoritative explanations which call for intervention” (Mayr 80). These interventions entail political values that, while they are genuinely deployed to help transform prisoners in a positive direction, are simultaneously (and almost expectantly) constructed to guide them towards success on institutionalized measures of progress.
At a more general level – and this is where Sloop picks up after Foucault – this same institutional ability to define prisoners’ ‘real’ issues and apply corresponding interventions informs public discourse about them and their deserved treatment. As Mayr states, “the lay public by and large adopts the professional perspective, for it wants to believe that others are able to handle these problems, which are potentially threatening to them” (81). The reproduction of such perspectives is largely dependent on depictions of prisoners by journalists and other pop cultural production outlets. It is worth noting, however, that Sloop nor Mayr observe the public reactions to this type of professionally inspired discourse that spills over into the public. The latter of the two notes that it is the audience reaction which is politically crucial. The public response holds the ability to confer or resist the legitimacy (and therefore power) of the professionals behind its creation and integration into penal logic. The point of this critique is therefore to denaturalize commonplace terms and prejudices they reflect, especially when the actions they prescribe are harmful to prisoner well-being beyond what is necessary to obtain justice. From within the prison, Mayr observes this happens at minute levels in prisoner-officer interactions by interrupting them, telling their own stories, and arguing with the course material.
Even though Mayr gets closer to acknowledging the experience of prisoners in relation to the network of power relations that are established in a given prison (system), she still only incorporates their subjectivity insofar as it plays out in a very specific and, in the American context, rare context. The limitation of each of these analyses is that the prisoners’ experiences are argued to be thoroughly affected by the systems they are subjected to, but are almost completely dispensed of for the sake of analytic scope. While the discursive and material dimensions of prison critique are invaluable to theorizing about how prison systems operate, as well as understand how such a dire socio-political failure could persist, they simultaneously abstract the concrete subjectivities they claim their objects of analysis shape. I believe these dimensions of analysis would benefit greatly by dialoguing with phenomenological accounts of prisoners’ experiences. Ultimately, it is these accounts that offer the greatest opportunities for identifying with our imprisoned community members and giving punctum to the structural and discursive analyses surveyed here. In the following section, I hope to offer such a dialogue and, at points, provoke considerations of how the objects of these previous analyses may shape the embodied experience of prisoners.
A Critical Phenomenology of Communion and Redemption
In the early pages of her book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives, Lisa Guenther explicitly states that Foucault is “indispensable in understanding the disciplinary logic of the penitentiary system,” yet fails to capture the experience of prisoners within such a system (Guenther xvii). This text offers a compelling account of how human beings experience the concrete conditions of prison based off of contemporary penal logic. While her analysis is primarily focused on the most harmful of such conditions, solitary confinement, her conclusions offer powerful insights for understanding prison life under various degrees of control.
Reading Guenther’s account of the contemporary prison system in America, one could argue that the covert disciplinary logic in Foucault’s original account has been rendered more explicit and commonplace. “Gone is the rhetoric of rehabilitation or spiritual redemption,” she proclaims, “It has been replaced by a neo-liberal rhetoric of risk management, security, efficiency, accountability, and public-private partnerships” (Guenther 161). We have entered the era of the control prison in which few opportunities for self-betterment are offered to inmates and the common conditions of prison life constrain the individual’s ability for self-improvement. This institutional era falls within the scope of what Gilles Deleuze has announced to be the era of control societies. He argues that we have surpassed the era of the disciplinary society, as Foucault anticipated, and have entered into a new system where modulation (of punishment, in this instance) becomes more acute and adaptable, training replaces school, and control replaces examination. Guenther’s account of solitary confinement is but one indicator the American prison system has transitioned to this control driven impulse. Even though this type of punishment is rationalized to do more than manage “high risk” individuals, it fails to offer any other benefit to the individual or the institution. She compellingly demonstrates that solitary, as well as more generalized methods of control in contemporary prisons, are harmful to the social and psychological health of prisoners. To borrow Foucault’s words, she offers a cutting critique of the contemporary prison system by pointing out where it is “dangerous when it is not useless” (Discipline 232).
Situating her analysis as a critical phenomenology, Guenther recognizes the fundamental structure of experience as relational. Against the Husserlian notion that “the foundation of all possible experience is the transcendental ego, the pure stream of consciousness that unfolds in the first person in a singular, unsharable way for any given consciousness,” she argues that subjectivity is primarily constituted in relation to embodied others (Guenther 27). As human beings, the character of our experience arises from the fact that we are always already living in a web of social relations. In this formulation, transcendental intersubjectivity, rather than monadic subjectivity is the primary condition of consciousness: “to feel our body as our own, to have coherent perceptions of an objective world, to tell the difference between reality and hallucination, and even to exist as concrete persons, presupposes embodied social relations with others” (Guenther 37). Such a view of human experience allows for a consideration of how power relations and control over prisoners’ possible relationships with others can thoroughly shape their subjectivity. While her main argument is that solitary confinement has the ability to undermine one’s capacity for apprehending a meaningful, coherent world, her peripheral arguments allude to the effects of disciplinary logic at all levels of incarceration and offer potential directions for exploring what challenges they may experience after release.
If we accept Guenther’s conclusions about embodied intersubjectivity as our fundamental condition, we can begin to flesh out the consequences of prison operations as theorized by the formerly surveyed authors. In the following pages, I attempt to tease out the implications of her conclusions by exploring what it means for prisoners to find redemption – a goal that appears to be increasingly written out of penal logic in contemporary prisons. Ultimately, I will argue that by removing prisoner’s opportunities for communion, our current prison system thoroughly constrains prisoners’ abilities to find social and societal redemption. By communion I mean “common participation in a mental or emotional experience” (Lexico). That is, by removing prisoners from their communities and restricting them to a limited set of highly surveilled and socially constrained relationships, prisons deprive them of opportunities for meaningful socialization and thus work against their ability for redemption. As Guenther argues:
“If we truly want to address the harm of crime and to challenge criminal offenders to transform their lives, then we must put them in a situation where they have a chance to explain themselves to others, to repair damaged networks of mutual support, and lend their own singular perspective to the meaning of the world” (Guenther 251).
Etymologically, the word “redeem” means to “buy back,” which assumes a transaction, an exchange of value for what one used to have. Operating under this sense of the term, we might ask what it is that one previously had that was lost or taken away and how one gets this lost status back. If for a moment we decontextualize redemption from its concrete, institutional context, and only look at it on the basis of guilt, we can say that it reflects the loss of innocence and the return to this status, or rather, a return to a the status of existing as if one was innocent. Here we are not talking about an undoing or erasing of the fact that the unlawful act occurred, but to approach a personal and social status one had before the act was committed – two statuses that the previous section has demonstrated, and that this section will continue to demonstrate are deeply intertwined.
A prisoner seeking redemption is attempting to “buy back”, through his actions, a condition in which he is not burdened with guilt, or at best, to mitigate those consequences. However, the status of innocence is more complicated than assuaging guilt. One can, of course, feel no guilt but nonetheless be guilty of something. Personal freedom from guilt does not purchase one’s social status as harmless, capable, bearing potential, trustworthy, or whatever social statuses may be undermined by the stigma of being convicted. Although it might mark a greater capacity for this (re)claiming this status if one can express genuine remorse for the guilty act, it does not in itself have the capacity to fully evaporate the cloud of suspicion that follows felons inside and outside of prison walls. To bring this discussion back into the context of its political reality, and to call back to each of the authors in the previous section, redemption is constrained by discursive networks around prison and prisoners that are sedimented in culture from federal legislation down to our everyday language choices. As Sloop and Alexander both conclude, the act of being labeled a “criminal”, “felon”, “convict”, or “prisoner” is what constrains one’s ability to distance themselves from his guilty status. As Roger W. Smith puts it, “To describe man as a thief… is not, in modern society, to say what he has done, but rather to describe what he is” (225). These labels do more than point to an unsavory action or set of actions. Rather, they have the tendency to normatively brand the (formerly) incarcerated with their deviance as a trait, something inextricable from their fundamental condition.
Awareness of someone as a criminal, either presently or previously incarcerated, is often a recognition of who, even what, that person is rather than what he has done. In other words, we privilege a view of criminals as agents of crime (“he chose to do it”) or as predisposed to criminal behavior (“he’s a bad person by nature”) rather than consider the socio-environmental factors that complicate the personal and proximal conditions for the criminal act. Despite the degree of egregiousness of the crime committed, there is a tendency to associate suspicion, fear, ill-will, and general disfavor towards the individual. Incarceration leaves a stain on the individual, one that he may begin to identify with. One is tacitly taught to identify with it via their social treatment. “[The convict’s] public identity is that of a criminal,” Smith observes, and “because he lacks respect for the law, will probably commit other offences as well” (225). There remains an essentializing quality to modern criminality that brand criminals with the expectation of bad behavior, societal risk, or immanent threat. Even the most basic level of trust invested in common strangers is undermined by the knowledge of criminal guilt.
Smith goes on to argue that, theoretically, guilt should be separable from the individual – a circumstance that has arisen from myriad factors leading up to that criminal act rather than an inherent personality feature. In practice, however, the tendency is to compartmentalize and fix the individual in the condition of guilt:
“By turning men into stone – that is by freezing them into solid and permanent categories – we force the offender to become regular, calculable and predictable. This certainty and economy of thought, however, comes with a price; it denies the offender the possibility of change and, consequently, the possibility of redemption through reconciliation” (225).
Guilt is thus formalized: one commits a crime, gets caught by law enforcement, is processed through the penal system with a specific charge or set of changes, and insofar as this last step is made accessible to those associating with the convict, guilt or suspicion is tethered to their person for the fact they were caught. The legal process is a sort of liminal state between innocence and guilt, a negotiation of character and conviction, a conferral of a new status of social being that one must continuously demonstrate they do not deserve. Judicial action brings weight to the facticity of criminal activity as a sort of mass judgement via proxy of a legal official. The carceral act in itself, while it may be observed by some and spread through rumor by others, is not enough to confer the same quality of guilt. The state renders the guilt legitimate, and worth of particular, institutionalized forms of punishment. Imprisonment becomes the threshold for the conferral of societal guilt. It removes all speculation of whether or not someone acted criminally. Even in cases where someone is wrongfully convicted he is stamped with a mark of suspicion.
Passage through the liminal space of prison or jail is a difficult conferral of status redress. “Punishment,” Smith argues, “does not fulfill the rhythm (separation, transition, incorporation) implicit in the rites of passage; the transitional stage of the outsider becomes permanent” (226). Guenther alludes to this same conclusion when she recalls Orlando Patterson’s application of “social death” to the experience of slavery as “a permanent condition of liminality and must forever mourn his social death” (qtd in Guenther). Although, as Michelle Alexander noted, social death in the age of mass incarceration lingers beyond confinement. The gap in employment, the disclosure of one’s past to new relationship partners, the contents of some tattoos, the time restricted from personal and economic growth – all of these factors beg for explanation and constant demonstration that these features have little bearing on one’s current character and potential. More so than anyone who has never been convicted, the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated must constantly establish and reestablish their character. There lies an inherent distrust in our penal system to help do this work preceding their release. There is a lack of social confidence that United States prison system provides a restorative of cultivating experience in any way, regardless of the fact the many are labeled “rehabilitation” centers. This impulse is largely correct, too. The U.S. prison system offers little by way of a framework to redeem themselves. As Guenther points out, the prison environment can often cultivate the very criminal mentality it allegedly aims to rectify. The primary social milieu is that of other criminals, many who, despite their conviction still take pride in their affiliations and are prone to violent behavior. Even if they wish to distance themselves from gang life and informal racial codes in prison, this choice alone can invite the possibility of violence towards them. The dismal, impersonal machinery of the penal institution is adverse to both personal and societal redemption because of its inability to individualize and formalize progress. The state can strip away character status with ease, but fails to offer any effective ways to restore it, that is to fulfill the incorporation stage of the justice ritual in an ethical way.
What about those prisoners who take it upon themselves to reflect on their past, better themselves in the present, and plan towards a fruitful future? While the prison conditions do not completely preclude this – even in the extreme cases of years-long solitary confinement some continue to strive for redemption – it sets up many formal and informal constraints. Even the basic activity of reflection, prompted by large segments of the day spent in (semi)isolation, is made difficult because of the environmental constraints on is subject to. Formerly incarcerated poet Ethridge Knight compares prison time to attending collage to make this point. Both college and prison have the ability to prompt introspection, but as Knight states, “the only difference is that college is set up deliberately for reflection and introspection, examination; in prison it’s just a by-product” (2). Simply being sat aside to “think about what you’ve done,” in the context of a new social world of officers and other offenders is far from an ideal circumstance to prompt productive reflection. These dismal conditions to reflect are further degraded in solitary confinement. The complete absence of a social world (aside from terse commands by officers and their application or removal of handcuffs) is exacerbated by the extreme deprivation of stimulus. It is not uncommon that hallucinations may arise and one’s grasp of reality begins to slip, such that “Even the effort to reflect on their experience becomes a form of pathology” (Guenther 145).
There is also a sense in which introspection is a creative endeavor. The method in which one reflects (i.e. writing, art, meditation) is constrained by available physical and mental resources available to prisoners. Knight admits there is plenty of creative activity takes place in prison. However, he finds the creative capacity of the incarcerated is “somewhat narrow” because of the awareness presumed by the capacity for creativity and the lack of positive aspects to become aware of: “you are aware that your environment is painful; you are aware of the guards in the tower; you are aware of the insanity and the pain and suffering all around you and inside you” (2). The prison is a dense ecology of alliance, manipulation, politics, failed expectations, and behavioral norms that constrain emotions and self-expression. These provide rather dismal conditions for creative, positive reflection. Furthermore, it is a space that simultaneous resists to be reflected on. The bleakness, as Knight points out, is a condition to escape: “anything to escape awareness” (3).
Outside of reflection in solitude, there exists a whole host of social restraints that make it difficult to communicate with their community outside of prison and limit the relationships they can form inside. The incarcerated are largely excommunicated from the social world outside of prison and separated by informal boundaries from their peers within prison walls. Communication with folks on the outside is restricted to strictly regulated forms of visitation and remote correspondence. In almost all circumstances, one’s communication is surveilled to some degree, either by the physical presence of the officer during visits or expectantly by the screening of incoming and outgoing letters which are monitored for suspicious activity. As for the prospect of forming meaningful relationships inside prison, informal norms of differentiation along the lines of gender, race, sexual orientation, and affiliation create boundaries of who it is possible to associate with. Knight notes that, because they are thrown into such a community, they are technically not exiled but “iniled, isolated, and that in itself is alienation” (3). He argues this functions the same as excommunication because inmates are rendered anonymous insofar as it is practical for the institution to handle them. “They strip you of your ‘negative behavior,’ of your personality, and are supposed to rehabilitate you,” Knight suggests (3), but ultimately end up forcefully and continuously demonstrating the power the state holds over the individual. Foucault echoes this sentiment in his discussion of isolation as the first principle of prisons as “complete and austere institutions” when he states that “Isolation provides an intimate exchange between the convict and the power that is exercised over him” (Discipline 237). Excommunication thus takes on a distinctly modern, bureaucratic character that thoroughly constrains the physical and mental activity of the incarcerated, separates them form society, restricts and regiments the communities they are allowed to build, and subjects them to informal identity conventions that further preclude the freedom to foster community.
Guenther echoes Foucault’s argument when she points out that the primary relationships that inmates have are those that are forced on them by the institution. The classification of prisoner determines what segment of the population they will have to interact with (i.e. what yard they are placed on). On top of that they are assigned cellmates who they have to negotiate the use of a small, shared space with (although in some cases they are able to choose who they live with). Beyond the administrative level of sorting, prisoners are primarily held in forced relationships with the correctional officers who manage their time and location, as well as monitor or break up any congregations they might try to form. This further impinges on the quality and character of the possible relationships prisoners are able to build between one another. Citing Jack Henry Abbott, a formerly incarcerated author, Guenther argues “prisoners cannot obligate or be obligated to each other, except in the specific ways sanctioned by prison wardens and correctional officers” (xxvi). Such total control over the inmates time, activity, and relationships creates a dependence on the institution that makes it difficult for the prisoner to build a sense of responsibility towards himself and others. To this end, Guenther concludes:
In short, supermax prisoners are set up to fail. They are told to conduct themselves as autonomous subjects while under near-total control. They are told to reflect on the consequences of their actions in a situation that typically produces cognitive impairment and mental illness. They are told to accomplish a social and ethical transformation in a situation that blocks social and ethical relationships to others. They are told this in a way that both uses language and abuses it: by demanding accountability while excluding in advanced the possibility of an interlocutor to whom one may give an account of oneself. (emphasis in original 229).
Outside of the relationships that prisoners are able to keep with members of the community they came from, their responsibilities are largely prescribed and measured by institutional rules and norms.
There tends to be agreement among some of the formerly incarcerated, prison critics, and private-sector organizations that seek to make prison a more valuable, empowering experience: offering opportunities for communion is what is needed for self-improvement and socialization. As Renford Reese, founder of the Prison Education Project states, “words are the most powerful way in which we can transform the internal human condition, which is the way we feel about ourselves – e.g. our self-esteem and confidence” (92). However, he goes on to highlight a complication in many prisoners’ ability to communicate even before they are convicted. For the incarcerated, language has been, for much of the population, experienced as a tool of dominance, a wedge of difference, a cue of authority. Being spoken to in an idiom distinct from your primary social community that uses higher vocabulary and more standard conventions of English can be alienating in itself. A lack of education, whether it be from the low quality of public schooling available, a cultural devaluing of education, or a personal decision to not take it seriously (three possibilities that are often bound up with one another), can alienate one from economic and social opportunities before community is even stripped away from them by the penal system. Lack of verbal competence, in relation to dominant standards, can be experienced as subordination and out-casting at the most mundane level of everyday life.
Gloria Anzaldua, in her “Letter to Third World Women Writers,” highlights the impact of experiencing a language gap. She evokes a poem by Cherrie Moraga to perform this point:
I lack imagination you say
No I lack language.
The language to clarify
My resistance to the literate.
Words are war to me.
They threaten my family.
The vast majority of incarcerated individuals come from unhealthy home lives, disenfranchised environments, ecologies where crime may not only pay off in the proximal sense of committing the act, but also in cultural currency, such as gang activity. Linguistic competence in these communities may differ qualitatively from communities that do not endure that same social disadvantages. Difficulty with language or literacy, then, in the context of education, employment, and other civic affairs, can alienate, other, subordinate. If there is no apprehension of how linguistic competence could translate into some significance in the environment that the individual goes home to, it can be seen as pointless at best, and isolating and subordinating at worst. The moralistic and measured language use of a teacher disciplining a student, the state-authoritative language of an officer, the legalistic language of the penal system exert dominance over nearly any person, to be sure. But language of everyday life, for communities more privileged than those mentioned above, already carry with them a logic of dominance that reproduces lines of difference, shame, incompetence, and guilt before the individual of a lower-level of linguistic competence, even before he gets incarcerated. The language that dominant culture expects people to speak at to be considered a good-an-able citizen is not a quality that is equally granted to all by nature of birth and healthy development, but a structural privilege that is heavily shaped (though not determined) by the environment on is thrown into. Reese, with a focus on education in general, summarizes this point clearly:
“The common denominator with the system-involved population is their lack of education, which has led to serious societal consequences. The person who drops out of school in the sixth grade has few options in American society – so he eventually winds up in prison. The person who cannot read is perpetually embarrassed and frustrated, which eventually leads him to prison. Our jails, prisons, and juvenile halls are filled with and uneducated and angry population. Part of this anger stems from their lack of education and options in life” (93).
In order for the discursive analyses in the previous section to show their true implications, this is the level of analysis that they must be in dialogue with. That is, we must have an idea how all the concrete realties of prison life effect individuals at the level of experience. Once we realize the complications that prisoners face in redeeming themselves, we can start to get a better sense of what aspects of the prison system are in most urgent need of reform. Ultimately, if we are concerned with improving the lives of millions of incarcerated individuals and formerly incarcerated individuals in America, it takes understanding how the current system effects them at even the most mundane levels.
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