The Politics of Recognition and Social Justice by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli Bob Pease

Author:Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, Bob Pease [Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, Bob Pease]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138957596
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

9

Indigenous Subjectivities

How Young Women Prisoners Subvert Domination Representations to Maintain Their Sense of Intrinsic Worth

Sophie Goldingay and Tania Mataki

Introduction

It is only since the industrial era (between 1700 and 1750) that prisons have been used as a primary means of punishment in Western society. Indigenous populations worldwide have used other systems of redress in response to offending against accepted laws and customs prior to their being colonised by European settlers. For New Zealand Maori prior to colonisation, justice revolved around the concept of Utu—which is closely related to reciprocity and mutual obligation and requires a process of compensation to a wronged party by an offender (Mead 2003). In New Zealand and around the world, the colonisation process has led to the dominance of an imposed settler process for justice, and hence, today few people of Euro-Western extraction would imagine any other response to crime than imprisonment, despite much evidence as to its ineffectiveness at reducing it (Foucault 1979).

Recent global renewal of retributive philosophy, sparked by media coverage of horrific crimes and subsequent lobbying by victims-rights groups, has further incited fear, disgust and hatred towards those who offend (Pratt and Clark 2005) and further entrenched the use of long prison sentences as a sanction for crime in New Zealand and overseas. Foucault has observed that discourses regarding prisoners in the public domain form an “anchor point to what actually happens in the institution” (1979, 222). Thus, the impact of these discursive formations outside the prison walls affects both the ways prisoners construct themselves and the way staff and other prisoners construct them. As will be seen in this chapter, prisoners are constructed as not worthy of respect or dignity. Women prisoners are even further vilified, as not only have they broken the law; in failing to uphold society’s moral codes, they have transgressed what is considered acceptable female behaviour.

Drawing from data from a study conducted in New Zealand women’s prisons between 2005 and 2008 with young women prisoners aged seventeen to nineteen years, and Maori tribal representatives who support them in prison, this chapter will consider the impact of imprisonment on the type of self-hood and identity possible for young women prisoners serving time in New Zealand prisons. It will do this by considering seminal and recent literature around prison processes, and then the discursive formations used by both prisoners and staff within the women’s prison and those circulated by politicians, policymakers and the media. It will then explore the ways these young women resisted these limiting subjectivities through discourse, by drawing on Indigenous notions of what constitutes worth in a person. Thus the chapter is underpinned by post-structural assumptions of the fluidity and contingency of identity (Burr 2003) and the link between identity and material and subjective effects (Allan 2008).

Dynamics of Prison Culture and Type of Self Possible Within the Prison

Prisons have been described as ‘total institutions’, where there is limited opportunity for those outside to see what is happening within and for inmates to have contact with the outside. As

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