Inmates' Narratives and Discursive Discipline in Prison by Jennifer A Schlosser

Author:Jennifer A Schlosser [Schlosser, Jennifer A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781317601937
Google: NbJhCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-05-15T05:02:43+00:00

7 The divide

“[I] used crack as another form of currency.”

Chad, 24

Beyond content: structural problems in program design

The next two issues, detachment from reality and the imposition of expert knowledge, illustrate more broad-based issues with the ‘Pathway to Change’ program in general. These problems span across the program but occur most prominently in several specific lessons. Here, the gap between the program content and the inmates’ narratives widens and creates a deeper divide that more broadly characterizes the meta-narrative of the state in general. The disconnection between the proponents of expert knowledge and the lived realities of the inmates is most evident along these two themes.

Beyond the program, however, we’ll also see in this chapter that the two issues found in the empirical example also embody an affirmative postmodernist conception of the legal structure in general. This position leads with the idea that the power relations evident in our legal and criminal justice systems are not separate from those governing society at large, nor do they merely influence one another passively. The relationships of power and the decisions made in both state law and social law are mutually interrelated; one affects the other to the point that neither can be considered autonomously (Henry & Milovanovic, 1996). Expert knowledge and the enmeshing of individual realities with contradictory common meta-narratives did not originate in the criminal justice and legal systems, nor do they operate separately from them. These processes of social control circulate in and out of many governing institutions and moral landscapes relevant to our modern world (Reiman, 2009). The affirmative postmodern position is most applicable here when we see that the socio-legal processes that carve and distinguish our criminal justice institutions are the same ones that define the whole of our social lives. Extending that critique, it is necessary then to question who among us is really free if the processes we use to govern and discipline our convicted criminals are the very ones by which we govern and discipline ourselves. There is, in fact, no distinction between how these processes are enacted upon our inmates and how we use them in our daily lives through any of our educational, political, religious or social institutions (Foucault, 1979). Two of these processes, the imposition of expert knowledge and the detachment of meta-narratives from individual realities in particular, will be analyzed here in direct relation to their empirical expression in prison. It is important to understand, however, that the affirmative postmodern position indicating that the processes of power and control present in the legal system are also wholly evident as overarching power strategies in our other social systems is what will allow us to see these two processes operating simultaneously and in cooperation beyond their situated expression here.

Detached from reality

Detachment from reality is a general characteristic of many in-prison programs and, indeed, an issue most of the inmates mentioned in their narratives. Detachment from reality represents a larger problem than the disconnection between the stated objectives of a particular lesson with the methods used to attempt to achieve those objectives.

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