Visibility and Obscurity Within the Surveillance Regime of the U.S. Prison
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2019.i14.260Abstract
Prisons are physical and imagined objects of fascination. Dramatic images of prison life are highly available in the public imaginary, yet the lives of typical prisoners remain obscure from public view. Through media portrayals—both fictional and ‘real’—the public is led to visualize the prison primarily in terms of dramatic physical violence. At a different level of public visibility, the external physical features of the prison facilities themselves project a message of violence (e.g. through razor-wire fences and gun towers) and thus an implicit message about the publicly-unseen population secluded within its walls. This essay examines issues of visibility and obscurity in regard to the present-day “control prison” (Rhodes 2004)—a regime that functions primarily as a means of punitive social exclusion. Kleinman’s (1997) anthropological concepts of social violence and social suffering will be used to discuss the diffuse, less-readily-visible, forms of violence which are the product of the social separation created by the prison regime, and help us to more critically engage with representations of the prison.References
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Wadsworth, 2018.
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Manfred B. Steger and Nancy S. Lind. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
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Evans, Jeff, ed. Undoing Time: American Prisoners in Their Own Words. New York: Civita Press, 2001.
Farmer, Paul. “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below.” Violence in War and Peace: An
Anthology. Eds. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
281-289.
Galtung, Johan. “Cultural Violence.” Violence and Its Alternatives: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Eds. Manfred
B. Steger and Nancy S. Lind. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Haney, Craig. “Afterword.” Undoing Time: American Prisoners in Their Own Words. Ed. Jeff Evans. New
York: Civita Press, 2001.
Hartman, Kenneth E. “The Trouble with Prison.” Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America. Ed. Doran
Larson. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.
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Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das and Margaret Lock, eds. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997.
Kleinman, Arthur. “The Violences of Everyday Life: The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence.”
Violence and Subjectivity. Eds. Veena Das et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Larson, Doran, ed. Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America. East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 2013.
Leder, Drew. The Soul Knows No Bars. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
Mauer, Marc and Sabrina Jones. Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press, 2013.
Morris, Norval and David J. Rothman, eds. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in
Western Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995Rhodes, Lorna A. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Philippe Bourgois, eds. Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Shelton, Richard. Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2007.
Skarbek, David. The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal
System. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Steger, Manfred B. and Nancy S. Lind, eds. Violence and Its Alternatives: An Interdisciplinary Reader. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Wacquant, Loïc. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment and Society 3.1
(2001): 95-134.
---. “The New ‘Peculiar Institution:’ On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto.” Violence in War and Peace: An
Anthology. Eds. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
318-323.
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2019-12-01
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