Carceral Nation

In an essay published in the 1990s, I observed that America’s unprecedented prison expansion was taking place at a time when the once-strong traditions of American prison sociology and American prison literary writing had large fallen silent. The golden age of both prison sociology and prison literature (roughly, the 1940s to 1960s) took shape at a very different moment, one when a relatively modest and stable long-term population of prisoners was declining and was expected by some to practically disappear. In contrast, our current era is characterized by unprecedented prison growth, undertaken with little direct observation by social scientists, and far fewer books and articles by prisoners. The explosive expansion of prisons includes three distinct dimensions. First, our imprisonment rates are on average from 3 to 5 times what they were in the 1970s (depending on the state), so we’ve built a lot more prisons. Second, the prisons we‘ve built are, for the most part, a lot bigger than even the “Big House” prisons of the 1920s. For example, recent California prisons have been built within penal complexes, holding as many as 5,000 prisoners in one location. Third, the prison experience, both the direct one of custody and the indirect one of collateral consequences after prison, now claim a far more totalizing hold on the lives of people who pass through them than in the past. Today, a fifth of California’s giant prison population is serving a life sentence and, unless present parole policies change, most of those inmates will die in prison. In recent years this unprecedented social transformation has finally received sustained attention by social scientists. Yet while enormously welcome and vital to generating serious public discussion, the new sociology of mass incarceration is better thought of as a political sociology of prison population growth than a true sociology of the prison experience. It is this major gap that makes The Prisoner’s World and Prison Profiteers such welcome contributions for readers interested in what is actually going on in and around our distended penal estate. William Tregea and Marjorie Larmour, authors of The Prisoner’s World, have been teaching college level courses in Michigan prisons for more than twenty-five years, so they’re in an outstanding position to observe the boom from inside and hear about its meaning from both prisoners and other correctional workers. The prison-college classroom is a remarkably interesting vantage point. Once the crown jewel of rehabilitative penology, prison-college classrooms, where they survive at all, are now marginal enterprises. These programs are ignored rather than resisted by prison staff who no longer feel education’s presence as a challenge to the guiding moral principles of security and custody. The first part of Prisoner’s World provides a first rate summary of contemporary sociological thinking about the prison boom and its causes. The second part draws on prisoner/student narratives to discuss life before prison and the pathways that take people there. One of the best features of Tregea and Larmour’s approach is that they draw on three decades of collecting narratives to point out changes over time. Even for minority youth of disadvantaged economic status ending up in prison was a kind of anomaly in the 1970s and 1980s and required special explanation. It’s become far more “normal” since the late 1980s. The latter sections of the book focus on the daily life of imprisonment, the experience of African Americans in the expanding prison world, and what the authors term “the prison self”: the forms of subjectivity that are available for self-fashioning in prison, including prisoner free time, the “homosexual prisoner,” and the role of drugs and contraband. One of the most noteworthy features brought out in Prisoner’s World is carceral nation