-
7. Prison Otherwise: Cultural Meanings beyond Punishment
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
190 7 Prison Otherwise Cultural Meanings beyond Punishment Many years ago Durkheim claimed that society could not only understand but also reconstitute itself through its collective representations . If he is correct, as I have been arguing, then coming to terms with the symbolic logics of culture should be the first and not the last step in any analysis and reform of criminal justice. —Philip Smith, Punishment and Culture, 2008 In the late modern world, then, the fundamental subject matter of criminology—crime and its causes, crime control, fear of crime, policing, punishment—is recast. Now, fear of crime may well emerge from mediated representation, punitive attitudes from social and personal precariousness. . . . A new sort of criminology will be needed. —Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, and Jock Young, Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, 2008 I began this volume with a discussion of my own introduction to incarceration in the United States. It was during those first trips to prison in graduate school as an instructor and a tourist when a tension in my own relationship to punishment materialized. Caught between passivity and engagement, lacking the cultural vocabularies and political will to interrogate that tension, penal spectators often miss the ways in which their struggles with how to look and act meaningfully in proximity to pain are submerged. Punishment, I have argued, is a crucial testing ground and resource for understanding our relationship to that pain. Across this Prison Otherwise: Beyond Punishment 191 volume, I point to some of the ways in which that test and the tensions of cultural response materialize. They are, more often than not, moments that we rarely think through as settings where our own relationships to the practice of punishment emerge. And yet, they are sites in which the meanings of punishment proliferate and run up against one another, inflecting the tone and nature of our relationships to exclusion, pain, and suffering. As penal spectators, we watch across vast mediascapes where penality flourishes explicitly and implicitly in narratives and commentaries structured through penal correlates of prison, surveillance, judgment, and accusation. We visit death camps, assassination sites, crime scenes, battle grounds, war zones, third world poverty, and defunct prisons. We look to prisons in distant locations in the context of wars against terror and vicariously explore the meanings and limits of acts rendered both visible and invisible within them. We hear about and produce criminological and sociolegal studies which attempt to intervene and speak back to torture , war prisons, and mass incarceration but rarely speak self-reflexively of our own places in that dialogue and in proximity to pain. In this way, we live our everyday lives amid complex, but often fleeting, anecdotal appearances of the penal, even as punishment emerges as a structuring force in globalizing frameworks. In these contexts, we could benefit profoundly from a structure of critique, a framework from which to challenge our distanced selves in relation to our own place in punishment. In this concluding chapter, I explore this possibility while revisiting the key cases, concerns, and emergent themes in this volume. This effort begins with an assessment of the conditions under which the cultural work of punishment so often fails. Second, in an effort to carve out space for alternative discourse and practices, I discuss some preliminary starting points where a new kind of work and subject position in relationship to punishment might begin. In this pursuit, I identify what I consider to be some key exemplars and forces for change. In all of this, I argue that cultural analysis has a special role in the transformation of the passivity of penal spectatorship to an informed and engaged mode of citizenship, which requires a critical engagement with the work of punishment. The chronology of chapters in this volume has reflected something of the shape and aims of this final chapter. Beginning with cultural meanings and images of punishment we are most likely to share, those that circulate and are visualized daily in mass media, we then moved into settings that are more selective and challenging in their relationship to spectatorship . Prison tours represent important ways in which to bring citizens [54.221.159.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:55 GMT) 192 Prison Otherwise: Beyond Punishment into contact with their penal history and the challenges of punishment in late modernity. However, cultural imaginaries run rampant in the newly opened spaces of the prison, where visitors play a powerful consumer role, shaping tours around the thrills and spectacle of punishment as opposed to its...