I have to say, I was pretty excited when I found out we would be examining prison life for this case study, since it has always been a fascinating subject for me. I simply thought about it in terms of sociology and psychology and didn't realize just how important the role of language is in perpetuating the American prison system.
I was jarred when listening to one the inmates express that, "if society wasn't taught to be so afraid of us, I would probably right now be home with my children, going on with my life... but they want to keep dehumanizing us and putting us down" (Misty Rojo). There's a lot of interesting comments that could be made about this quote, but I think the most important notion to examine is that of society being taught to fear inmates. It's not like crime and punishment is a mandatory class for all American students, so how exactly are we being taught to fear prison inmates?
I think the answer lies within the concepts of parole (i.e. utterances) and langue (i.e. the larger linguistic system). Another inmate in her audio clip uses the phrase "tough on crime", which to our ear, sounds like a positive phrase. Who doesn't want to elect a government representative who's tough on crime? Crime is a bad thing, it should be punished. But looking to see how this phrase works in the larger linguistic system has to give us pause. It is a dangerous phrase because people don't stop to realize its implications.
First off, it dehumanizes the person committing the crime by removing any references that he or she really is a person. It also removes the complications that come with knowing the specific circumstances of each criminal act. Does "tough on crime" mean being equally tough on all criminal activities, regardless of its context? Would we give less prison time to a man who sold drugs because one of his children had cancer? Obviously, in a just world, this context would be important. But using catch phrases like "tough on crime" discourages looking into the situational context of each individual criminal act by lumping all of different types under one category-- "crime".
In this sense, we are taught (implicitly) that crime is bad, punishing it is good, and we shouldn't care to look into the details. Granted, this is not a one-sided relationship. This goes back to Bahktin's "The Problem of Speech Genres", where he says, "any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree" and "any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances" (69). It's not just that we're being taught to view prisoners in this manner, but we're allowing this perception to persist by not questioning or working against the assumptions that seemingly innocent phrases like "tough on crime" make. Communication is not simply about the speaker but about the active role of the listener as well.
So what does it say about our thoughts on the people incarcerated in prisons if this kind of phrase has been popularized and repeated over a long period of time? Well, it says overall that society would prefer to forget or cast aside those who have been deemed "criminals". Why though? Are we simply lazy? Too worried about our own lives to care? Too scared to find the very real horrors these prisoners go through? It's not an easy question to answer but one that needs to be addressed.
6 comments:
"Tough on crime."
Interesting. I wanna change that phrase to "tough on people." Because crime is a forever changing moral philosophy imposed upon society. Where's the line? An 18 year old can get shot and killed in the army, but ti's illegal for him to purchase alcohol? I wonder what would happen if we changed the phrase.
Did you listen to the story (I don't remember whose it was, maybe also Misty Rojo's) about how she had brought the law in to intervene with her domestic violence situation, but once she was charged with something involving drugs the charges against her husband were dropped? I feel like this has to do with being "tough on crime", however, the government is apparently only tough on certain kinds of crime.
The woman made a comment along the lines of "I guess I wasn't worth being protected" in response to the situation, and one wonders why she was worth protection before her drug charges and not after. Is the government being tougher on drug-related crimes than violence crimes, or is it tougher on women's crimes than men's?
I feel like that is part of the point of "Public Secrets". Women's prisons seem to be functioning as a means of punishing improper womanhood as opposed to crime. People are always more disappointed in a woman with children who commits a crime than a man with children, because the man isn't expected to be responsible. In this woman's case, she was only "worth protecting" as long as she was behaving as a proper woman. Once she gave up the privilege her femaleness lent her under misguided chivalry of the patriarchy, she was no longer the angel, but the monster. Thus, the man who abused her was no longer a criminal, and could be set free.
I thought about this a bit too. It reminded me of Ellen Barton's "Textual Practices of Erasure" which we looked at back at the beginning of February. In the prison system, the inmates are criminals and that is it. They are not mothers, patients, students, or even women. One inmate named same quoted a guard as saying "just because you're disabled out of prison doesn't make you disabled in prison" because now she's a criminal just like every other criminal. Sam's complicated medical history has been erased. Many of the women in this essay talk about how the prison ignores their medical records and conducts their own tests. Anyway this is just one way that calling them criminals erases on very important aspect of their lives.
I think you are completely correct in utilizing langue and parole to make sense of society's perceptions about the prison system. And I agree with why society believes we should be "tough on crime."
Daniel responds to this situation by saying, "The public perception of justice - the figure of its appearance - relies on the public not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive sociological phenomena such as racism, poverty, addiction, abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical."
Thus, Daniel seems to believe that people attempt to assure themselves that the prison system is not problematic because it is serving justice, and they purposefully overlook any injustices in the process.
When someone has committed what is determined to be a crime, we want to punish them. It is a black and white system. However, Daniel is trying to make it known that "systemic injustice, social inequality, and the crippling effects of poverty" are directly related to crime. Thus many "criminals" are victims of their environment, but instead of looking at the whole picture, we put up a three million dollar razor wire fence.
I want to comment on something you said about mid-post about dehumanization. I wonder if the heteroglossic nature of the hypertext might show that this idea/relationship is false. Or perhaps, highlights it. When you think about prisoners there are two modes of thought that come to mind. First, that of "s/he was convicted, ergo he is bad" and second, "s/he is person who made a bad/immoral/ illegal decision.
When you say being "[tough of crime] is a dangerous phrase because people don't stop to realize its implications," I think you are highlighting this relationship. There is the most common, for which "tough on crime" is thought to stand for. This is "s/he is a criminal." However, what you and Daniels are both pointing out is that another perspective exists that says "s/he is also a person." Thus, being "tough on crime" is a metonymy (Killingsworth) that reduces the state of person-hood to the state of being a criminal.
I really like this post, and I would like to oomment on the question you posed about how we as a society have come to fear these inmates. I think that this fear we have developed can largely be because we as humans tend to have a fear of the unknown. When faced with something we do not understand, we react, usually emotionally, to it. We shy away, or we look at it critically. It seems that Daniel wants us to look at these inmates, but remove the bias and preconceived notions we have. She wants us to see them as humans, rather than the strange others we typically see them as. I think this fear we have towards them is limiting. And I guess I do not know why we have developed it. But I do think that it is in part because humans are fallible. We make mistakes, we misjudge. But why can't inmates be fallible too? Why can't they be humans,even? It's interesting to think about.
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