Prison Stories II: Poems from a Worker in the Prison-Industrial Complex (Justice Policy Journal) (original) (raw)

The curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of mass incarceration

County Jail, the largest detention facility in the 'Free World', to give a ground-level sense of how the entry portal of the US detention system operates by way of prelude to this special issue on the ethnography of the prison. A survey of the recent sociology and anthropology of carceral institutions shows that field studies depicting the everyday world of inmates in America have gone into eclipse just when they were most needed on both scientific and political grounds following the turn toward the penal management of poverty and the correlative return of the prison to the forefront of the societal scene. Accordingly, this issue seeks to reinvigorate and to internationalize the ethnography of the carceral universe understood both as a microcosm endowed with its own material and symbolic tropism and as vector of social forces, political nexi, and cultural processes that traverse its walls. Field researchers need to worry less about 'interrupting the terms of the debate' about the prison and more about getting inside and around penal facilities to carry out intensive, close-up observation of the myriad relations they contain and support. This article discusses the obstacles to such research, including questions of access and funding, the professional organization of academe, the lowly social and therefore scientific status of the object of investigation, and the (mis)use of the military metaphor of 'collateral damage'. It concludes by suggesting that getting 'in and out of the belly of the beast' offers a unique vantage point from which to contribute to the comparative ethnography of the state in the age of triumphant neoliberalism.

“Nobody gets out alive. This place just a big coffin”: On Death and Dying in American Prisons

This article explores the manner in which the narratives in the Prison Noir volume (2014) edited by Joyce Carol Oates bring into view the limits and abusive practices of the American criminal justice system within the confines of one of its most secretive sites, the prison. Taking an insider’s perspective - all stories are written by award-winning former or current prisoners - the volume creates room for the usually silent voices of those incarcerated in correctional facilities throughout the United States. The article engages the effects of “prisonization” and the subsequent mortification of inmates by focusing on images of death and dying in American prisons, whether understood as a ‘social death,’ the isolation from any meaningful intercourse with society, as a ‘civil death,’ the stripping away of citizenship rights and legal protections, or as the physical termination of life as a result of illness, murder, suicide or state-sponsored execution.

The Ethnography of Prisons and Penal Confinement

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2014

Centered on the ethnography of prisons and field research on penal confinement, this review maps out current developments and characterizes them in relation to key themes that shaped earlier approaches. Further internationalizing the ethnographic discussion on prisons by broadening the predominant focus on the United States and the English-speaking world, the review is organized around a main line of discussion: the prison–society relation and the articulation between intramural and extramural worlds. More or less apparent in field research, this articulation is addressed from different perspectives—within and across different scales and analytic frames—whether centered more on the workings of the institution or on prisoners and their social worlds, both within and outside walls. The porosity of prison boundaries, increasingly acknowledged, has also been problematized and ethnographically documented in different ways: from prison-in-context to interface approaches, both more reflexi...

“Prison Ecopoetics: Concrete, Imagined, and Textual Spaces in American Inmate Poetry.”

Green Letters, 2014

Bell Gale Chevigny writes, in prison '[n]ature is the more valued for its scarcity', yet very little work has been done on the ways inmates engage with environments. Continually confronted by a lack of multidimensional environmental experiences, the prisoner is more aware and more conscious of the complex and often invisible ways in which environments manifest themselves. As such, I contend that there is an ecopoetics of prison poetry that results from the inmate's hyper-awareness of environmental encounter and the various forms in which that can arrive. By acknowledging and embracing this new forum for ecopoetic studies, we not only become more conscious of the ways in which American inmates respond and express their confinement but also uncover the disconnections between traditional ideas of nature and ecopoetics. This article will consider a variety of anthologised prison poets and the ways in which they engage with ecopoetics.

An immanent critique of the prison nation

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2017

More women are currently incarcerated than at any other time in US history. Though the United States has begun to acknowledge mass incarceration as an international embarrassment, the discourse has centered on men of color, and the experiences and consequences of US mass incarceration for women of color have been largely ignored. This is the case in spite of a now strong mainstream, institutionalized movement to end violence against women, and a growing prison reform movement ostensibly meant to help vulnerable women. This paper uses the method of immanent critique to explain why women of color have been left behind by reform strategies, and to make a normative argument for abolitionist strategies. I use Beth E. Richie's analysis of the failure of the feminist anti-violence movement to protect poor women of color, to expose the contradictory circumstance that turns "public safety" and "anti-violence" against the women they claim to protect, and to argue that reform is not enough.

Security Here is Not Safe': Violence, Punishment, & Space in the Contemporary U.S. Penitentiary

Environment and Planning D Society and Space, 2013

The US penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was retrofitted in 2008 to offer the country's first federal Special Management Unit (SMU) program of its kind. This model SMU is designed for federal inmates from around the country identified as the most intractably troublesome, and features double-celling of inmates in tiny spaces, in 23-hour or 24-hour a day lockdown, requiring them to pass through a two-year program of readjustment. These spatial tactics, and the philosophy of punishment underlying them, contrast with the modern reform ideals upon which the prison was designed and built in 1932. The SMU represents the latest punitive phase in American penology, one that neither simply eliminates men as in the premodern spectacle, nor creates the docile, rehabilitated bodies of the modern panopticon; rather, it is a late-modern structure that produces only fear, terror, violence, and death. This SMU represents the latest of the latemodern prisons, similar to other supermax facilities in the US but offering its own unique system of punishment as well. While the prison exists within the system of American law and jurisprudence, it also manifests features of Agamben's lawless, camp-like space that emerges during a state of exception, exempt from outside scrutiny with inmate treatment typically beyond the scope of the law.