Out There/In Here: Masculinity, Violence and Prisoning (review)

Out There/In Here uses 19 life-history interviews to examine the way criminalized men "do" masculinity inside and outside prison. Comack argues that essentialist claims concerning men's violence are problematic because they eschew or ignore the way prison and poverty facilitate violent cultures of masculinity. Interviewing men to "learn about the violence in their lives—their own use of violence and that which has been directed against them" ( p. 25), Comack argues that local cultures of masculinity in prison and outside (with gangs, for instance) facilitate gendered violence. Many of Comack's research participants are Aboriginal men, and she tries to demonstrate how colonization has contributed to higher levels of conflict with the law for Aboriginal men in Canada. Her underlying concern is with how men become socialized into violent ways of relating to women and to one another.

Out There/In Here begins with the participants' childhoods. Comack is interested in "examining the gendered resources and strategies that the men had to draw upon as children and youth" (p. 30). What she calls the "care/custody mangle"—the removal of Aboriginal children from their communities in the 1960s—is a "gendered and gendering experience, both in the forms of control exerted over young people and in the resources [young people] draw upon in responding or reacting to that control" (p. 70). From stories about school, sports, and gang involvement, Comack illustrates how gendered strategies for achieving honoured masculinity often involve violence, bringing boys into conflict with criminal law. Early experiences, she suggests, stay with youth as they grow into men. Drawing more links between colonization and contemporary violence would have strengthened Comack's point about how colonization contributes to Aboriginal men's conflicts with the law.

Comack draws on James Messerschmidt's theoretical work on gendered-structured action.¹ For Messerschmidt, masculinity is context dependant; social actors frame their identities in relation to structural patterns. Hegemonic masculinity is honoured in each context, while crime is viewed as a "resource" for doing masculinity. Comack critiques Messerschmidt for not adequately deconstructing the notion of "crime," since his crime/not-crime dualism works to "obscure the similarities between so-called law-abiding and criminal behaviors" (p. 22). Building on Messerschmidt, Comack treats violence and other unlawful activity as a "resource" for doing masculinity. Yet, as Jody Miller has pointed out, this relationship can also be reversed: masculinity can be a "resource" for doing unlawful activity.² Comack's participant narratives lend themselves to this reversed theoretical framework, so a more elaborate discussion of the connections between masculinity and violence would have benefited the conceptual framework.

Imprisonment, Comack contends, puts men into situations where they must fend for a sense of self in cultures of masculinity that condone violence. Men learn particular ways of doing masculinity from other prisoners. Given that these men were incarcerated for issues related to violence, and that prison aggravates this violence, prison does not "rehabilitate" people but "makes worse" (p. 145) the relationship between masculinity and violence. In effect, Comack argues, imprisonment is a form of violence backed by the state.

Out There/In Here offers an important political message about the failure of prisons. But Comack's participants were held in one of Manitoba's provincial jails. Comack uses the terms "penitentiary," "provincial prison," "provincial jail," "prison," and "jail" to refer to the same facility. This is not only a semantic issue. There are major differences between jails and prisons in North America, having to do with service provision, overcrowding, sentence length, and so on. Comack acknowledges that her study does not look at the issue of masculinity in relation to the federal prison system (p. 135) and that there may be important differences in cultures of masculinity between jail and prison (p. 144). A comparative study concerning masculinities in jail versus prison would be needed to explore this issue.

Overall, Out There/In Here is a well-written contribution that will be appreciated by sociologists, criminologists, and socio-legal scholars interested in masculinities...