The Impenetrable Boundary

I find this case really interesting, as it touches on a subject that is not often spoken about in an analytical way. Rather, society as a whole views this group of people with disdain, and instead of trying to understand what makes prison inmates so fearful and strange to us, we tend to discriminate and place them in a sort of impenetrable box that removes "them" from "us." I also am fascinated with this case because one of my brothers spent some time working as a detention officer, and I find a lot of the things mentioned in this case match up with my brother's feelings and experiences.

One thing that is most interesting to me is this divide that Sharon Daniel mentions between "us" and "them." She says in her provocative invitation, "Walk with me across this boundary between inside and outside, bare-life and human-life, and listen to Public Secrets." (Daniel) This statement alone reaffirms the idea that there is a distinction or "boundary" between inmates and people who have never committed a crime. There is a line drawn, and if you are on the inmate side you are "bad" and "other," and if you have not committed a crime (or have never been caught, rather), you are part of the "us" group, and you are good. Judging by the statements made by several of the inmates, I think it is fair to say that they are not only aware of this "othering," but they are also marred by it. The fear that the general public feels toward prisoners is sometimes unwarranted. And this causes the prisoners hardship when they are released as well as hardship while they are on the inside looking out.

This is a complex thing for Daniel to take on, and the way that she handles it makes me wonder, can this hypertext critique be called a "speech genre" as defined by Bakhtin? To answer this, I will offer my opinion. I think that this critique could be categorized as a speech genre. There are certainly aspects that are easy to identify and compare to different genres. But I think that to put this critique into a box would do nothing more than to perpetuate the box that the prisoners discussed in this critique have already been placed in. Really, we would be looking at boxes within boxes. And I think that detracts from this case. Instead, I would propose that we employ the concept that Derrida applies to his term "differance," and apply it to this case. Derrida argues for a liberation of thinking, and a freedom from categorization. I think that this is exactly what we owe not only this case and its author, but also prisoners. If we could free this critique from all speech genres and simply examine it as an art form in its own rite, perhaps we could really get it without trying to apply constraints to it. In the same way, if we could examine prisoners as people rather than concepts (of bad and wrongdoing), perhaps we could really get them on a human level. Which seems to be what Daniel wants.