CHAPTER 1:
(From: J. Thomas and B. Zaitzow (eds). 2003. Gender and Social Control
in Women's Prisons. Denver: Lynne Reinner.
The Absurdity of Gendered Technologigies of Control
Jim Thomas / Northern Illinois University
20 June, 2002
Oh, sir, you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities,
which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since
they are true" (Pirandello, 1922: 7-8).
Surely it cannot be plausible that prison heterosexual norms and gender can
be a technology of oppressive control. It may seem implausible also that
gender-neutral attempts to treat female prisoners the same as male prisoners by
ignoring sex and gender differences add more layers of punishment to the female
carceral experience. It's equally implausible that many prison researchers,
while challenging the prison conditions that lead to physical violence,
nonetheless promote an equally harmfulful form of symbolic violence. This
violence distorts how we view gender and control in women's prisons in a game of
resistance and accomodation that reproduces gendered control on both sides of
the wall. Yet, as the contributors to this volume illustrate, it's all true.
In the form of digressions, this introduction lays out a framework to illustrate
how the subsequent empirical chapters, both individually and in the aggregate,
provide an alternative discourse that displays the implausibilities, or what
some might call the absurd ironies, of (hetero)gendered experiences in women's
prisons.
At first blush, Pirandello has little to do with prisons, with technology,
with surveillance, with domination, or with gendering, hetero or otherwise. So,
of course, this volume isn't really about Pirandello. It's about reality. Our
reality. Gender reality. The prisoner reality. And mostly, it's about the
absurdity of prison culture, the reality of social control in women's prisons,
and the gendered technologies of controlling.
Prison Life as Absurd
Prison life, much like life outside the walls, is absurd. An examination
of this absurdity highlights the tensions between freedom and constraint in a
social world comprised of ambiguous rules, mysterious forces, and no immediately
observable remedies to redress power imbalances. Absurdity, a core
existentialist theme, suggests that social life is inherently permeated with
conditions for which there often seem no rationale solution. One absurd aspect
of the human condition lies in willing accomodation to cultural constraints that
promote unnecessary forms of social domination in ways that make us unwittingly
complicit in our own subjugation. Borrowing from Esslin (1961: xix), absurdity
refers to a condition of existence out of harmony with reason, a set of
circumstances devoid of ostensible purpose that makes behavioral choices futile.
An absurd existence is one in which we are unable to discover the obscurely
oppressive meanings and significance of our social world.
If social existence outside prison walls is absurd, then meaning and
purpose in the social world of prisons are even more so: Inmates are faced with
high-stakes dilemmas in their relation with those in positions of authority over
them. They continue to exist in an atmosphere of subjugation at best
institutionally paternalistic, at worst systematically repressive and arbitrary.
Females are expected to develop autonomy and individual responsibility even as
gender games promote passivity and dependence within the prison culture.
Prison conditions symbolize oppressive authority, intensify powerlessness,
and constantly remind prisoners that, even if they are able to manage the
physical deprivations, there is no escape from daily confrontations with absurd
conditions. The stripping away of the prisoner's identity through a series of
degradations, abasement rituals, humiliations and profanations (Goffman, 1961:
14-21) also dissolves conventional frameworks of normalcy that guide and give
meaning to mundane behavior. This contributes to "learned helplessness"
(Goodstein et. al., 1984), in which prisoners suffer reduced motivation,
"cognitive deficits," and a restriction of choices proportional to the loss of
control over their environment and existence. As a consequence, what outsiders
often interpret as abnormal behavior in prisons instead may reflect attempts of
prisoners to adjust to the absurdity of their environment (Milovanovic and
Thomas, 1989). Absurdity rises out of this dilemma of restricted freedom of
action and choice on one hand, and the need to successfully confront
debilitating conditions in a regulated environment on the other.
What is Prison Culture?
Culture is the socially established set of public codes, the syntax and
lexicon, that guide the conventions of "reality construction" by which we order
and legitimize everday roles, priorities and operating procedures (Berger and
Luckmann, 1967: 99). As the totality of all learned social behavior of a given
group, culture provides not only "systems of standards for perceiving,
believing, evaluating, and acting" (Goodenough, 1981: 110), but includes the
rules and symbols of interpretation and discourse as well. The meaning of
culture includes social behavior and the guiding framework by which cultural
members understand their, and others', behavior. To speak of culture as a
monolithic and invariant "thing" glosses over the cultural work required to
produce the repetitive meanings, invoke interpretive tools, and recreate a
semblance of ordered social existence. Cultures are produced both by the
experiences of everyday interaction and by specialized culture-producing
organizations (Becker, 1986, 16; Collins, 1979: 60). Culture is a "collective
fiction" (Clifford, 1988: 106) to the extent that it is a shared social
fabrication with meanings that, while seemingly constant, are in fact ambiguous,
tentative, changing, and may vary dramatically between groups and institutions.
Like the broader culture, the prison culture reflects meanings that are
manufactured, imposed, negotiated, altered, highly structured yet permeable and
amorphous, and provide the codes for the controllers and those they control for
"doing time." This leads to two broad questions underlying the study of prison
culture. First, what is the relationship between prison culture and prisoner
culture? Hayner and Ash (1939: 362) distinguished between prison culture, which
encompasses staff, civilians, correctional officers, and others, and prisoner
culture, which reflects norms, language, coping mechanisms, behaviors,
artifacts, and other characteristics shared primarily by prisoners themselves.
Prisoner culture, by contrast, arises from the combination of the outside
culture modified by prisoners' challenges of adjusting to and surviving in a
world of deprivation and control. But, the two cultures intertwine, as
prisoners and staff reciprocally create the meaning of each in a dance of power
and control, each providing patterns of mutual expectations, meanings, and
interactional strategies for the other. In prisons, the cultural work of staff
and prisoners, and the formal and informal structure imposed by state and
administrative personnel combine to create rules and resources that form prison
culture. The rules and social resources are patterned by gender, and as Owen
(1998, 1988) describes, the gendered culture of prisons is reproduced in a
complex interplay staff and between staff, between prisoners, and between staff
and prisoners.
The second question centers on whether prisoners import their culture into
the prison with them (the importation model), or whether prisoner culture arises
from attempts to adjust to and resist deprivation and control (the deprivation
model). Advocates of the importation model see prison culture as a product of
behaviors intended to reduce the pains of imprisonment. Advocates of the
importation model argue that prisons reflect a microcosm of the broader street
subculture, and prisoners build a social world around the norms, values, and
behavior habits that guided them on the streets.
In prisons, where discipline and control are enforced by the overt
asymmetrical power imbalances between and among the keepers and kept, more
subtle but equally powerful forms of domination remain invisible. Sexual power
is one of the most effective of these hidden mechanisms. One way this occurs is
through the reinforcement of what Ingraham (1994) has called "heterogendering."
This refers to the socially institutionalized ways in which the processes and
images of heterosexuality become carried out in ways that, in prisons, reinforce
prisoners' identities such that they become their own control agents. More
simply, heterogendered cultural formations are a technology of sexual control
that in turn leads to self-surveillance, domination, and control. Yet, few
prison studies have focused on the difference gender makes in the prison
experiences for men and women. The contributors in this volume redress this by
raising a third question, one that doesn't so much answer as reconceptualize the
first two questions: How does imported gender-based cultural baggage shape how
women prisoners create and respond to their prison experience and reproduce
mechanisms of control, domination, and even resistance?
In varying ways, each chapter here argues that both sex and gender combine
in ways that help accomodate to prison deprivations while also providing
mechanisms of control and resistance. The contributors draw from their research
of female prisons and prisoners to explore how gendered characteristics such as
roles, scripted behaviors, norms, and identity are recreated behind the walls in
ways that reinforce conventional patriarchal images and policies. Each author
illustrates how gender performances are reinforced in prison in ways that add
other layers of control to the technology of punishment.
Gender Games as Technology
We do not want to deceive ourselves into thinking that the technologies of
surveillance and control are only electronic or mechanical. As Foucault (1979)
suggested, technology is more than bells and whistles of the electronic age; it
includes the "technology of culture" in which ideology, cultural icons, and
other symbolic artifacts become implements of self-serveillance and other forms
of control/domination.
Technology, the systematic application of knowledge and skills to
accomplish a specific task, has changed. But, the prison tasks of imposing
control, deprivation, and discipline, have not. Jeremy Bentham's 19th century
panopticon prison, a circular, multi-tiered open structure with a guard tower in
the center, was a technology designed to provide a single person with visual
access into every cell and prisoner. Survielling prisoners presumably made
prison control more effective and efficient by increasing discipline while
reducing staff resources required to maintain it. Other than a single cellhouse
in Illinois' Stateville Correctional Center, the panopticon model has gone the
way of the great auk, as more efficient technological advances continue to
penetrate prison design and operation to control prisoners.
Less visible technologies, some so basic that we rarely recognize them,
contribute to the control and punitive processes, especially in women's prisons.
One example is gender. The thesis of this volume is that gender constitutes a
technology of control. The panopticon model provides a metaphor to describe how
gender functions to promote staff interests and subvert the interests of female
prisoners. Like behavior in the old panopticon, gender displays are always
visible, monitored both formally and informally, and subject to both peer and
administrative rewards and sanctions. Doing gender becomes a type of game in
which the players simultaneously win when they successfully play it to their
advantage. But, it is also a game where players' wins can become losses when
their successes reaffirm both social and institutional forms of domination by
reinforcng a control apparatus that promotes passivity and dependency both in
prison and after release.
Gender as Game
As in most social interaction, games constitute a significant part of
social control. A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior
transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome (Berne, 1964:
44). For Goffman and others, games refer not to play, but to a type of
interaction with winners, losers, successes, failures, rules, "cheating," and
often in prisons high stakes. In Goffman's (1969a, 1969b) development, a game
is a metaphor for one type of interaction with "players," "position," "moves,"
and wins and losses (or successes and failures).
As a game, gender performances contain the codes and rules that, when
applied to the ends of punishment and control, become a powerful technology that
generally remains preconscious and invisible, yet, like gravity or magnetism,
forcing us to accomodate to its logic. Gender games and identity intertwine,
and these games become part of control contests. In prisons, the control game,
in which one side manipulates the situation to attain compliance and the other
side moves to counter it, is the most obvious. Doing gender constitutes a type
of game in that displays of gender identity become a chit in status, rewards, or
punishment.
Doing gender becomes a performance, and the rules become scripts to be
followed, ad-libbed, or revised as needed. These scripts, in turn, become part
of the expressive equipment (Goffman, 1959: 22) for creating a front-stage
persona, or public identity, for an audience. In prisons, with multiple
audiences and where stakes are high, gender games become a fundamental part of
coping and survival. Whether the stakes are for information, scarce resources,
as in ingratiating flirtation, for status, as in linguistic putdowns such as
"playing the dozens," or for other goals, such as social distancing, success in
gender gaming depends on an ability to comprehend cultural nuances in order to
enhance psychological and physical survival.
How well prisoners develop gaming skills effects how they experience their
time. Not all prisoners master gender games equally, Schmid and Jones (2000)
demonstrate how poor gaming skills among male prisoners mark one as weak, with
consequences that range from minor humiliation to predatory victimization. When
and at whom to smile, the limits of self-revelation, or sharing histories of
abuse or vicitimization with staff or peers, the subtexts of verbal jousting
matches, or learning with whom one can safely associate are a few examples of
the types of gender-based cultural rules that must be learned quickly. The
prison gender game is thus an extension of a larger gender survival game played
on the streets. The player, whether inside or outside the walls of the prison,
recognizing that her gaming skills might be out of the ordinary, is constantly
aware of the consequences should she fail to make the right moves.
In a culture fraught with tensions and contradictions, such as prisons,
gaming is complicated by a number of antinomies that penetrate and mediate
meanings and add multiple layers to the most messages. Girshick (this volume)
suggests that appearing too feminine may put women at risk of staff harassment
or worse. But, just as appearing too feminine in a men's institution can lead
to predatory assaults or intimidation by other prisoners, in women's prisons,
failing to appear sufficiently feminine or "ladylike" risks sexually-related
ridicule by staff or other inmates, and can lead to a staff-imposed label of
"not with the program," or "an aggressive trouble maker."
As Zaitzow, Girshick, Sharpe, and Bosworth (this volume) describe, women
bring their gendered forms of behavior with them into the institution. However,
the unique demands of prison control may make many of these behaviors
inappropriate, especially when they reflect dysfunctional backgrounds, such as
victimization by intimates or substance abuse. The gender game then becomes
complicated by the need to learn new rules, including how to develop a rhetoric
of self-expression, construct a new identity and self-concept of independence
and self-reliance even while submitting to passivity and control, and learning
where the boundaries of appropriate gender expression lie between staff and
other prisoners (McCorkel, 1998). Playing the prison gender game can thus
become a manipulative exercise in coping, rather than a viable means of
developing ways of doing gender on release. The game of doing gender thus
becomes an integral part of control in which the complex relationship between
identity, expression, and manipulation become intensified.
The papers in this volume explore aspects of the gender-based technology of
creating and refinorcing the existential barriers that serve to dominate and
control women in prison. Although the contributions here are not embedded in
Foucault, Goffman, or existentialist writings, they nonetheless illustrate how
the basic themes from these works sharpen the theoretical and conceptual
mechanisms for examining how gender issues shape women's prison expierences.
The Difference Diffence Makes
It's old news that the conditions and policies of women's prisons are
different than those of men. Considerable evidence also confirms that
incarcerated women experience their incarceration differently than men.
However, less evident is how gender differences shape policies and experiences
of control, and how gender identity and roles shape women's adapatation and
resistance to prison culture and control. Historically, gender-based policies
shaped many of the differences between men's and women's prisons, as men's
behaviors and needs provided the model for all prisons. This often led to fewer
resources, gender-stereotyped programming, and inattention to gender-specific
needs such as health care, child care, post-release preparation, and other
issues that affect women more than men. Most significantly, control mechanisms
in prisons and the corresponding polices, staff training procedures, and
resources tend to be designed to control men, who are more aggressive, violent,
and cope with and experience time differently, and resolve conflicts more
competitively.
One challenge facing both policy makers and researchers is whether gender
and biological differences between men and women should be recognized more fully
and translated into corresponding prison practices. As Barbara Zaitzow and
Esther Heffernan argue in their chapters in this volume, the belief that women
are innately different than men shaped the patriarchal systems of carceral
control in which female offenders were viewed as incorrigible "fallen women" who
could be "fixed" by restoring their adherence to and dependence on traditional
images of feminity. Yet, women's biological differences undeniably create issues
that men do not face, such as pregnancies, hysterectomies, masectomies, and
geriatric health and psychological needs.
Biological differences extend beyond medical issues. They also add a level
of punishment by increasing powerlessness and uncertainty. For example, in the
early 1980s and early 1990s, women prisoners in Illinois believed that prison
doctors were over-prescribing hysterectomies, allegedly to generate revenue for
local medical personnel. No evidence supported the belief, but the helplessness
and fears women experienced not only when faced with surgery, but also with the
possibility that "it could happen to me" contributed to distrust of medical
personnel, increased health-related stress, and reinforced feelings of
helplessness and dependency. When women enter the prison system pregnant, they
normally give birth in local hospitals. The pre-natal anxieties of labor and
delivery add to the stress of the prison experience. In Illinois until the late
1990s, women were shackled to the delivery table while giving birth. Although
no longer practiced, the security procedures required for transporting women to
and from the local hospital, combined with the close monitoring while in labor
and delivery, increase feelings of powerlessness and anxiety. Mothers with
normal delivery are allowed to stay with their infants for 24 hours, with
C-sections for 48 hours. The subsequent separation can be traumatic, adding
additional layers of loneliness and depression on return to the prison
populatation.
In addition to biological differences, incarcerated women also bring their
gender-based baggage with them into the institution. As the contributors to
this volume illustrate, unlike men, women are more likely to have medical
problems exacerbated by substance abuse, be HIV positive, and face child care
and other domestic problems needing attention while incarcerated. Coupled with
the likelihood that women are likely to come out of abusive relationships with
family or male partners, to be less educated than male counterparts, and have
fewer vocational skills, they begin their prison experience with less social
capital to adjust to, and cope with, incarceration. Greer (2002) found that how
women prisoners' emotions and ways of expressing them influence and are
influenced by the environment of prison, which differ dramatically from men's
emotional coping strategies. For women, previous life experiences shaped by
poverty, abuse, drug addiction, and disregard by significant others hindered
their emotional management in prison (Greer, 2002: 123). These emotional coping
techniques, constructed on the outside, perpetuate gender stereotypes inside the
walls in ways that sustain traditional roles of passivity and acquiescence to
power and domination.
As Bem (1992: 80) observed, gender polarization superimposes a male-female
dichotomy on biological characteristics and on sexuality. Eliminating
essentialism and androcentrism, she contends, is of itself insufficient to level
the gender-game playing field, because it would leave us with gender
polarization. Therefore, in dealing with "the conundrum of difference" (Bem,
1992: 177)--balancing the risks of falling into an essentialist trap of gendered
social construction while also acknowledging fundamental differences--scholars
face a methodological and theoretical another challenge. How do we recognize
gender differences without recreating the asymmetrical power relationships that
have characterized the treatment of incarcerated women and that reinforce
patterns of gender domination both during and after release? One way is by
recognizing that treating male and female prisoners identically does not
necessarily lead to equal treatment. The creation and implementation of
policies intended to reduce gender inequality can have the ironic outcome of
exaccerbating the differences, thus creating a two-tiered, gender-based system
of punishment in which gender becomes a means of controlling and punishing women
to a greater degree than men. By distinguishing between parity (identical
treatment) and equality ("equivalence"), we can see how this occurs.
Equality or Parity?
Especially since the 1970s, scholars and policy makers recognized that,
because they comprised barely five percent of the nation's prison population,
women were the "forgotten offenders." Influenced by feminist scholars, a
combination of civil rights activists and prison reformers advocated
establishing parity between male and female prisoners by eliminating
gender-based prison policies and treating both men and women identically. To
some extent, this has occured in the past two decades, and gender differences
have been levelled such that policies are generally created and applied
identically across the board. However, this may not be sufficient, because
policy parity does not necesarily translate into equality of treatment,
especially when policies continue to be driven by the control imperatives of
males.
Parity denotes gender-neutral quantitative sameness or parallel standards
of equivalence without consideration for mediating factors. The underlying
assumption, quite reasonable on its surface, was grounded in the belief that, by
eliminating gender differences and applying policies identically across the
board, women would begin receiving resources on a par with men, and their prison
experiences would be less restrictive.
Equality, by contrast, is a qualitative concept suggesting non-parallel
equivalence. Attempts over the past three decades to improve the conditions of
women's prisons and provide resources and amenities on a par with men has either
stressed parity as a way of subverting gender-based assymetry and establishing
identical standards, or de-emphasized the distinction between parity and
equality. In the outside world, the "lens of gender" creates a male-centered
set of images in which men's experiences are taken as axiomatic and superimposed
on women as an organizing principle that forges a cultural connection between
sex and other aspects of human existence (Bem, 1992: 2). As in the outside
world, this translates into prison policies in which special needs of men are
considered axiomatic, and women's special needs are either treated as special
cases of left unmet (Bem, 1992: 183). As a consequence, treating male and
female prisoners identically has not resolved gender disparity, and in some ways
has increased it. This requires a closer look at how women's unique pre-prison,
prison, and post-prison experiences should become part of policy formation.
An single example from Illinois prisons illustrates the difference between
gender parity and equality. In 1999, the Department of Corrections implemented a
policy in which prisoners were prohibited from wearing street clothes; they
could wear only apparel issued by the prison or purchased from the prison
commisary. At the same time, a second policy specified that all prisoners'
property must fit in two small boxes. The first, a "property box" slightly
bigger than a military footlocker, holds clothes, commissary items, and other
personal belongings. The second, a "correspondence box" about the size of a
small personal computer, is restricted to papers, letters, and pictures. Books
may be kept in either box. The only property exempt from property box storage
includes authorized electronic items, such as radios, televisions, typewriters,
or fans. The policy was initially imposed on male prisoners, but concerns about
complaints from men and potential equal protection litigation contributed to
identical application of the policy to women. However, women's additional
sex-based property, such as undergarments, cosmetics, and feminine hygiene needs
exceed those of men, leaving them with more items to store in identical space.
Therefore, policy parity trumps equality, because the policy places greater
hardship on women, one seemingly minor but nonetheless substantial.
The contributors here illustrate how women's experiences of prison, and how
they cope with confinement, reflects their gender-based experiences in the
outside world. Past victimization and abuse, culturally defined ways of coping
with problems and interacting with others, cultural ways of encouraging
traditional "gender-appropriate" behaviors, and women's strategies for adapting
to social control are a few aspects of their previous existence that women bring
into the prison with them. As Wheeler et. al. (1989) have shown, women's legal
needs reflect these pre-prison experiences and differ from the legal needs of
men. Women's litigation centers more on such issues as child custody, programs,
health care, prison discipline and control, and visitation than men's,
suggesting that establishing parity is of itself an insufficient criterion for
guiding prison policies. Failure to recognize this both in policy and in
research only adds to the symbolic violence resulting from distorted images of
the relationship between gender and control.
Symbolic Violence and Prison Research
Heffernan (this volume) describes how adminstrative processes of
classifying women prisoners constitute a form of symbolic violence in which
gender domination is perpetuated by official discourse. This discourse
reinforces stereotypes and imposes behavioral expectations through corresponding
policies based on uncritical images of heterosexuality and gender roles. Just
as the rhetorical images connoted by official documents create a
culture-defining reality that reflects a form of symbolic violence, so too do
research discourses shape images in ways that reproduce subtle forms of
domination in how we examine prisons and prisoners. By failing to recognize the
subtle, yet powerful ways that gender becomes a technology of control, our
research reaffirms and recreates an invisible source of oppression and
domination by misconceptualizing and ignoring the crucial element of especially
hetersexually-based gendered culture.
Symbolic violence refers to the power of symbols to impose, devastate,
attack, suppress, and distort ways of seeing, thinking, talking, and acting.
Symbolic violence often can be more destructive than physical assault in that it
imposes and reinforces social harms caused by class, gender, and class
differences in what Collins (1990) calls the "matrix of domination. It
strengthens social barriers and reinforces culturally embedded domination games.
In describing one way that dominant groups can exert their will over others,
Bourdieu (1991: 209-210) observes that symbolic power presupposes a
misrecognition of the violence exercised through it and therefore requires some
unrecognized complicity by those on whom the effect is exercised. Our images
and understandings of prison culture derive from the productions of outsiders,
and researchers are a significant source in creating cultural understandings.
Smith (1987) observed that most people do not directly participate in the
making of their culture, and our ideas about it may not arise directly from
everyday lived relationships:
Rather, they are the product of the work of specialists
occupying influential positions in the ideological apparatus
(the educational system, communications, etc). Our culture
does not arise spontaneously; it is "manufactured" (Smith,
1987: 19).
Yet, most of us do not perceive this manufacturing process, especially that
of the prison research process itself, as an act of violence. In subtle ways,
uncritical conventional scholarship imposes, distorts, and twists our cognition,
and subsequently our actions, forcefully and with often injurious consequences.
Too often, conventional prison scholars commit the violence of rupturing the
researcher from the people being studied in what Van Maanen (1988: 46) calls
"realist tales." In realist tales, the author vanishes from the finished text,
making the reader dependent on the author's experiential authority with no
opportunity to reflect on the researcher-researched process. The result imposes
the meanings of outsiders, including researchers and the audience of the
research, on the messages we hear from our data.
Lefebvre (1971: 145) refers to the consequences of the conflict between
repression of alternatives and evasion of control as the "terrorism of everyday
life," by which he means the hidden and abstract forms of subtle intimidation
and domination on which social existence is built. Bourdieu (1991) adds that
institutions of power lie behind behavior and cultural meanings that construct
and limit choices, confer legitimacy, and guide our daily routine. This power is
symbolic in that it relies on shared beliefs and ways of expressing those
beliefs. Symbolic power is violent because it appropriates preferred meanings
and represses alternatives (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977: 4). The contributors
to this volume resist symbolic violence by displaying alternative gendered
meanings that conceal the deeper levels of prison reality in ways that distort
understanding and thwart possibilities for change.
The power to exert symbolic violence exists in the power to impose meanings
as legitimate, thus concealing the underlying power relations on which they are
based (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977: 4). In prisoner culture research of both
men and women, images of deviance, marginalization, and stigma can constitute a
form of symbolic violence. One way this occurs is through oppressive discourses
that reinforce and fail to challenge existing social relatiions, including those
of research. Discourses are sets of symbols that we use to communicate who we
are, or who we think we are, the context in which our existence is located, and
how we intend ourselves to be understood as well as how we understand our
topics. Discourses impose sets of formal or informal rules about what can be
said, how it can be said, and who shall say what to whom (Schwalbe, et. al.,
2000: 435).
As a cultural artifact, conventional discourses often impose metaphors that
wrench prisoners out of their shared humanity and create conditions that
exacerbate qualities such as animosity, distrust, and predation. In research,
the images from these discourses are violent because they arbitrarily impose
symbols in ways that may grotesquely distort the "reality" of what is seen and
what is signified by what is seen. The distortions reflect oppressive power
relations that promote the interests of the more powerful. The conventional
discourses of prison research impose images that obscure and distort the deeper
structures of the culture and limit the possibility of seeing alternative
meanings and connections. Each of the contributors to this volume provides an
antidote to the symbolic violence of research by critically examining how the
gendered foundations of social life are recreated in prison culture and serve as
an ironic mechanism in games of control and resistance. All follow the
prescription that critical social research should contribute to emancipation by
encouraging us to both emotionally and cognitively rethink repressive emotional
ideas and identities.
The question remains, however, as to why outsider researchers, even those
with a critical eye, should be credible in assessing and reinterpreting the
meanings of prison life as experienced by insiders. This question, rarely
addressed by prison scholars, poses a challenge that becomes part of our
methodological problem, lest we, too, simply impose an alternative, but no less
destructive, discourse on those we study.
OUTSIDERS LOOKING IN
How can well-meaning, white, middle-class, educated, nearly middle-aged,
non-incarcerated academics "really know" the experiences of generally
economically disadvantaged, uneducated, incarcerated, usually ethnically
different and much younger, subjects? This question especially challenges males
writing about the female prison experience, and raises credibility issues when
translating the standpoint of others into our own narratives intended for a
wider audience. In writing about the experiences of female prisoners, we should
reflect on the insider/outsider question for several reasons. First, all
contributors here write as outsiders looking in. How can we transform our
subjects into what Smith (1987: 112) calls "my puppets who speak, see, and think
the words, sights and thoughts" that we attribute to them? Second, the prison
people with whom we interact are demographically quite dissimilar to us. How do
we respond to the extreme essentialist view that only "identity groups" can
understand their own culture? Third, most of us teach or work with racially,
ethnically, and economically diverse groups of students. What obstacles subvert
our credibility when attempting to speak about and to their culture and their
experiences from our own biographical and experiential standpoint?
Sociological texts characteristically relate us to others and even to
ourselves as objects. Criminologists, perhaps more than other social scientists,
find themselves on the outside looking in, making objects of our subjects in
courts, criminals, gangs, deviant groups, or prisons, among our topics. In
reflecting on whether scholars could really fully understand the experiences of
their research subjects, sociologist Georg Simmel reputedly asked nearly a
century ago: "Must one be Caesar to know Caesar?" Max Weber (1965: 90) provided
the answer: One need not be Caesar to understand Caesar, he suggested, but it
helps.
Standpoint research, or the "privileged knowledge thesis," holds that the
views and claims of insiders are more credible than those of outsiders. White
scholars received heated criticism in the late-1960s and 1970s from those who
argued that white experiences and assumptions narrowed and distorted their
research lens when focused on people of color. This, the critics argued,
obscured the experiences of the subordinate group by producing partial, even
erroneous, understandings. Feminist scholars further refined standpoint
methodology. Smith (1987: 112) nicely illustrates the insider-outsider problem
when describing her experience of watching a "family of indians" on a rail
platform in Canada. The passing of the train, she realizes, provides an
image-creating metaphor that distances the observer and observed in ways that
silence both.
In conceptualizing this "family" of "indians" and in describing their
activity, Smith replaced others' identities and interpretative frameworks with
her own, thus making "the other" less visible. Excluding, distorting, or
discrediting the experiences of people we study provides, at best, only partial
understandings. At worst, we recreate and maintain systems of privilege and
domination through a process of "othering," in which we impute identity and
experiential meanings to others that they might prefer not to have done by
labeling them, attributing motives, virtues, and defects, and, implicitly, by
saying how we are different from them (Schwalbe, et. al., 2000). Othering
creates imputed selves that stand in a relationship of superiority and
inferiority to each other, thus making researchers complicit in preserving the
asymmetrical power hierarchies they intend to reduce.
Participatory researchers attempted to resolve the insider/outsider problem
by "celebrating the subject" and fully integrating members of the culture being
studied as full participants in the research design, data collection, analysis,
and writing. Conventional scholars tend to ignore the issue, although some
(e.g., Van Maanen, 1988) have suggested reflectively critiqueing how the types
of narratives we employ can set us apart and often above our subjects. In
penology, the "celebration of the subject" emerged in part with conflict
theorists and symbolic interactionists who began to give voice to the targets of
social control to express their motivations and view of the world. This
provided one antidote to the dominant voices of the controllers. More recently,
the emergence of "convict criminology" (Stephens, 2002) has mobilized a cadre of
ex-offenders and others who have experienced the "dark side of the law" to
present what is perceived as an alternative to conventional corrections
scholarship.
The belief that a culture is best-studied by insiders, or that the claims
and interpretations of insiders about their culture should be given more
credence than the observations of outsiders, however, raises the problem of
relativism, in which all standpoints risk being judged equally valid. Mannheim
(1937) provides a way out of this potential problem. For Mannheim, "standpoint"
was not a form of relativism, in which all perspectives are of equal value with
no transcedent rules to sift out meritorious claims from those less so. He put
forth what he called "relationism," or knowledge seen in the full context of the
historically and socially shaped ideologies that shaped it:
Relationism signifies merely that all of the elements of
meaning in a given situation have reference to one another and
derive their significance from this reciprocal
interrelationship in a given frame of thought (Mannheim, 1937:
86).
Multiple audiences (or stakeholders) present the challenge of multiple
standpoints on both ends of the researcher/audience continuum. The trick is to
recognize the dialectical process that privileges not the claims of one audience
over another, and to activate the process of dialog. Although not specifically
drawing from Mannheim, Smith, or others who address the outsider/insider
problem, the contributors here each follow their spirit:
Locating the standpoint of women in the everyday world
outside the text (in which the text is written and read)
creates a whole new set of problems to be solved, problems
of the relationship between text and reader, problems of
how to write texts that wil not transcribe the subject's
actualities into the relations of ruling, texts that will
provide for their readers a way of seeing further into the
relations of organizing their lives (Smith, 1987: 47).
While it may help to "be Caeser" to present his standpoint, individual
lenses are no less subject to distortion than other prisms, and a constant
iterative dialog between insider and outside cognition and interpretation, as
the contributors here demonstrate, provides an antidote both to relativism and
to the dogma of "privileged knowledge." In this volume, we recognize the
difference between "speaking as," "speaking for," and "speaking about" women
prisoners. In the aggregate, we allow women to speak as themselves in order
that we may speak on their behalf. By integrating their views with our own
theoretical insights, we allow our readers to examine the invisible ways in
which gender shapes the prison experience in a dialectical game of resistance
and control. Our intent is to expand the dialog by which we understand how
gender contributes to the punitive context of prisons for all prisoners.
Existential Display: Chapter Summary
The works in this volume build on the conceptual ideas presented here in
varous ways. But, in the aggregate, they display the absurdity of prison life,
its existential dilemmas, and how gender games are played out in prison.
BARBARA ZAITZOW provides a framework for examining gendered experiences of
women in prison by illustrating how their struggle to accommodate prison life
with problems of their outside lives. She argues that relationships (with
outside family members, inside friends/family, and staff), programs, rules, the
culture itself, combine to reinforce a definition of "womanhood" that may not
have relevance or practicality for women, either in prison or on release.
Further, the deceptive nature of women's prisons, often seen as "soft,"
"campus-like," or "easy time," masks repression that, while subtle, is stronger
than in men's institutions. Introducing a theme that other contributors build
on, she concludes that identical treatment of male and female prisons would not
be beneficial to women, and that we cannot eradicate gender differences within
prison while they persist in the outside world.
Prisons, of course, have not emerged de novo, separate from the broader
culture. ESTHER HEFFERNAN illustrates how they are embedded in an historical
process reflecting gendered ideologies of punishment. Drawing from Bourdieu, she
applies the concept of "symbolic violence" to illustrate how the traditional
classification of women prisoners arose out of and reinforced gender domination
by imposing images of "proper feminitity" on female prisoners. This symbolic
imposition is violent because it ruptures women from part of their humanity.
This forcibly deprives women of their social capital, and only by challenging
this outside the walls can we transform prisons as well.
Too often, we overlook jails when studying prisoners. Yet, women in jails,
who--like men--often serve up to several years--tend to be excluded from studies
of incarcerated women. KATHLEEN FERRARO and ANGELA MOE correct this by
illustrating how women are controlled through routinization that subjectifies
women and reinforces institutionalized power asymmetries of race, class, and
gender. Yet, they remind us, women are not simply passive agents or totally
powerless victims. They possess means, albeit limited, to resist the imposition
of control and in ways that partially mediate domination. In challenging the
use of incarceration for most women offenders, they argue that activivists on
the outside, especially feminists, should take a more active role in recognizing
the relationship between gender oppression and incarceration.
In coping with imprisonment, prisoners engage in a dialectical dance in
which their past experiences combine with the control and deprivations of prison
culture to add to the punishment. LORI GIRSHICK details how an overwhelming
proportion of women in prisons and jails were physically, sexually, and
emotionally abused prior to entry. The sexualized environment of custodial
institutions, which includes physical constraint, surveillance, and instrusive
searches, retraumatizes women with a history of prior abuse. Existing carceral
policies fail to take this into consideration in policies of control. As a
consequence, the sexualized nature of control in prison must be reconceptualized
as a social problem in order to prevent the revictimization of women when
incarcerated.
The androcentrism of the criminal justice system and corresponding
research, SUSAN SHARP and ELAINE ERIKSEN argue, would leave the impression that
all prisoners are alike. One significant difference between male and female
prisoners is that women, far more than men, tend to have dependent children on
whom incarceration has devastating consequences. Lacking social capital, these
women and children become society's "throw-aways." As a consequence, we cannot
fully understand women's prison experiences without also understanding the the
relationship between children and mothers, and how maternal incerceration
contributes to punishment. The class and racial underpinnings, which affect
both prison and post-release adjustment, reinforce the need to re-assess the
so-called "impartiality" of the criminal justice system. This requires, they
contend, not only the need to develop creative programs to address the needs of
imprisoned mothers, but for researchers and others to examine the broader
implications of this gendered layer of punishment and its impact of the families
left behind.
Our social identity tells us who we think we are and announces us to
others. An identity is not only a status, but a cue-card that prompts others
with short-hand summaries of what they can expect and how they might respond.
The message of an identity conveys strength, weakness, honorability,
accessibility, and other valuable attributes. But, identities also can be
constructed in ways that challenge or reinforce assymetrical control. Using data
from her study of three women's studies in England, MARY BOSWORTH illustrates
how the intersection of gender, race and sexuality shape prisoners' identity.
She argues that these identities can be shifted, manipulated, and transcended to
challenge the power mechanisms in prisons in an ironic game that uses the
gendered and racial forces of domination to renegotiate and restructure their
stigmatized status. In developing their identity as women or as members of an
ethnic group, they shift from being passive recipients of power to agents
resisting it.
Most studies of prisoner culture focus either on male or on females. Few
do both. RICHARD JONES and THOMAS SCHMID correct this by illustrating parallel
adaptation strategies of females and male prisoners in two Midwest institutions.
They introduce the metaphor of "cultural soujourner" to describe the
border-crossings from the outside world into prison terrain, a crossing that
requires identity work. Like Bosworth, they describe how control in women's
prisons is partly a dialectical identity struggle in which women can resist some
of the dominating forces that constrain them. Focusing on identity assaults, in
which prisoners' former identities are replaced with new, more degrading ones,
the analysis illustrates how building on identities as mother and other
non-institutional statuses help women from seeing themselves as captives.
Reversing the traditional approach of applying concepts used to study males on
female prisoners, Jones and Schmid suggest ways to use our understandings of
women in prison to the male experience.
We cannot fully understand gendered power in women's prisons without also
understanding how conceptions and practices of masculinity shape a hierarchical
power structure. FAITH LUTZE moves us beyond the prison arena by arguing that
even women's prisons reflect an ultramasculine environment based on traditional
sex role stereotypes and male models of domination. Male power, she explains,
defines individual interaction (private and public), the law, and the formation
of policy and institutions. This inhibits especially women with histories of
prior abuse for whom the institutionalization of ultramasculine sex role
stereotypes reaffirms their powerlessness. The irony is that even
"women-centered" approaches to programs intended to empower women are likely to
fail, because the current structure of prisons magnifies the structural
inequalities of society that women will confront upon release.
Although the explicit theoretical perspectives underlying individual pieces
vary, the central organizing theme that unites these pieces combines critical
gender theory with an exploration of the absurdity of gendered experiences that
extends beyond the walls. The strength of this eclectic integration lies in
pulling together seemingly conventional empirical studies within a broader
framework that, following Pirandello, allows gender domination to be displayed
as part of our existential prison on both sides of the walls.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker, Howard. 1986. Doing Things Together. Evanston (Ill.): Northwestern
University Press.
Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. 1992. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on
Sexual Inequality.
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of
Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City (N.Y.):
Doubleday-Anchor.
Berne, Eric. 1975. Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.
New York: Grove Press.
Bosworth, Mary. 1999. Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women's
Prisons. London: Ashgate Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of
Culture. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge (Mass.):
Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1979. The Inheritors: French
Students and their Relation to Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Collins, Patrica Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Collins, Randall. 1979. The Credential Society: An Hitorical Sociology of
Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press.
Esslin, Martin. 1961. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Anchor Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
Vintage Books.
Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental
Patients and other Inmates. New York: Anchor.
_________. 1969a. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
__________. 1969b. Expression Games: An Analysis of Doubts at Play." Pp 1-81
in Strategic Interaction, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goodenough, Ward H. 1981. Culture, Language, and Society. Menlo Park, CA:
Benjamin/Cummings.
Goodstein, Lynne, Doris Layton MacKenzie, and R. Lance Shotland. 1984.
"Personal Control and Inmate Adjustment to Prison." Criminology, 22(August):
343-369.
Greer, Kimberly. 2002. "Walking an Emotional Tightrope: Managing Emotions in a
Woman's Prison." Symbolic Interaction, 25(1):117-139).
Hayner, Norman S. and Ellis Ash. 1940. "The Prison as Community," American
Sociological Review, 5(August): 577-583.
Heidensohn, Frances. 1986. "Models of Justice: Portia or Persephone? Some
Thoughts on Equality, Fairness, and Gender in the Field of Criminal Justice."
Internatinal Journal of the Sociology of Law. 14:287-98.
Ingraham, Chrys. 1994. "The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and
Theories of Gender." Sociological Theory, 12(July): 203-219.
Jones, Richard A. and Tom Schmid. 2000. Doing Time: Prison Experience and
Identity among First-Time Inmates. Greenwich (Conn.): JAI Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. New York: Harper
Torchbooks.
Lutze, Faith E. and David W. Murphy. 1999. "Ultramasculine Prison Environments
and Inmates' Adjustment: It's Time to Move beyond the 'Boys will be Boys'
Paradigm." Justice Quarterly, 16(December): 709-733.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
McCorkel, Jill A. 1998. "Going to the Crackhouse: Critical Space as a Form of
Resistance in Total Institutions and Everyday Life." Symbolic Interaction,
21(3):227-252.
Miller, Jody. 2001. One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Milovanovic, Dragan, and Jim Thomas. 1989. "Overcoming the Absurd: Prisoner
Litigation as Primitive Rebellion." Social Problems, 36(February): 48-60.
Owen, Barbara A. 1998. In the Mix: Struggle and Survival in a Women's Prison.
New York: SUNY Press.
_____. 1988. The Reproduction of Social Control: A Study of Prison Workers at
San Quentin. New York: Praeger.
Pirandello, Luigi. 1922. Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author -
"Henry IV." - Right You Are! (If You Think So). New York: E.P. Dutton &
Company.
Sabo, Don, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London. 2001. Prison Masculinities.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Smith, Dorothy E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology.
Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Stephens, Richard. 2002. Convict Criminology. Belmont (Calif): Wadsworth.
Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales from the Field. University of Chicago Press:
Chicago.
Weber, Max. 1965. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York:
The Free Press.
Wheeler, Patricia A., Rebecca Trammell, Jim thomas, and Jennifer Findlay. 1989.
"Persephone Chained: Parity or Equality in Women's Prisons?" The Prison
Journal, 69(Spring-Summer): 88-102.
Return to JT's homepage
Page maintained by: Jim Thomas - jthomas@sun.soci.niu.edu