-
1. Introduction: Notes on Becoming a Penal Spectator
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 1 Introduction Notes on Becoming a Penal Spectator Tipping Points When I began graduate school, the first course I took was a proseminar on the administration of justice. The curriculum was an unprecedented experience and challenge for me, a former humanities student, in its deep survey of organizational theory through the central institutions of the criminal justice system. The last few weeks of the course were spent on classic and contemporary works in correctional research—leading me to work by pioneers in the sociology of imprisonment. I studied the first wave of social scientists who entered prisons and observed their daily life, including the work of sociologists Donald Clemmer, Gresham Sykes, and Erving Goffman.1 Encounters with historical documents such as The President ’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, the American Friends Service Committee’s Struggle for Justice, as well as revisionist social control histories authored by David Rothman and Nicole Rafter, led me to reconsider the entire purpose of punishment and how visions of social control have such unforeseeable consequences and often go so badly awry.2 Contemporary work of the period, ranging from John DiIulio’s high-profile prediction of a wave of youthful super-predators , Norval Morris and Michael Tonry’s argument for the necessity of an interchangeability of punishment, to Nils Christie’s indictment of crime control gulags, opened up issues with little resolution against the backdrop of a deepening sense of futility.3 My final project in the proseminar examined a key debate about the role of rehabilitation in U.S. punishment , relying heavily upon the controversial work of Robert Martinson, widely recognized as having come to the infamous conclusion that “nothing works” in the field of corrections. During that time, Marc Mauer’s groundbreaking Sentencing Project report was issued, which found that 2 Introduction one out of three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 were in prison, jail, or on probation or parole.4 I left the course and my first semester of graduate school feeling as if these researchers were discordant voices in a strange wilderness as the United States continued to build the most massive penal system on the planet. All of this culminated in a deepening commitment to the study of punishment. It seemed clear that the U.S. penal system remained the most invisible and overlooked of justice institutions and that the reasons for this strange inattention were remarkably thin and undertheorized. It also seemed clear that a generation of criminologists and sociologists were taking on a deep sense of urgency in mapping these penal transformations and arguing their meanings. I remember thinking that, as a citizen and potential criminologist, I bore some responsibility and accountability in this new understanding, as it was developing against the relatively quiet backdrop of unprecedented prison expansion and mass, racialized incarceration in the United States. I launched energetically into the project of visiting prisons at every security level and across the United States as part of my plan to study them. I eventually obtained a teaching position at the largest women’s correctional facility in my home state of Indiana, all in order to lay the groundwork for gaining access and conducting doctoral research in the statewide correctional system. In these pursuits, I found myself immersed for the first time in the physical world I proposed to study and hoped to change. It was a claustrophobic space whose structural tensions, ironies, inertia, and contradictions were immediately apparent. All of my visions of reform and transformation quickly dissipated into a chronic kind of worry and exhaustion, alongside of an overwhelming sense of being up against something impossible to transform. The anxious awareness of the impossibility of change, after all, is in many ways the story of the prison and reform—and certainly marks its history and its sociology. The physical world of incarceration was also, in a mundane, horrific way, a space, in the late 1990s, overflowing with people—prisoners, correctional officers, case workers, mental health staff, attorneys, administrators, and brief but routine appearances by families and community members. During those long drives home from class and facility tours, through beautiful, desolate rural counties, where the roads were largely empty and the economy long gone, I continuously pondered what it meant to be a prison culture—a society committed to the construction of prisons and the warehousing of mass numbers of people with little regard for the complexities of their lives, the [34.204.181.19] Project...