By Lalo Piangco Rivera
Sitting on the table beside me are three objects: a razor blade, a rose, and a blue rubber wristband. The singe-edge razor blade was surrendered to me by a former therapy client who used it to regularly cut himself. He carried at least one blade at all times inside the case of his cell phone and needed to be creative about hiding them because he was living at a community correctional facility at the time and was subjected to regular pat downs from the staff. Next, the rose is made out of toilet paper dyed with red toothpaste for the flower and green toothpaste for the stem. This flower represented a former client’s particular brand of hustling for money in prison. He crafted them to sell to other inmates to give to girlfriends or family members who came to visit. I remember being struck by this massive tattooed man classified as a violent offender holding out one of his delicate toilet paper roses as a parting gift while sitting in jail for a parole violation and awaiting transport back to prison. Lastly, the blue rubber wristband was handed out at a funeral of a former client who hung himself unexpectedly six months after his release from a five-year prison sentence. His full name is etched on one side of the band and on the other side the words, Never Forgotten. The blade I have held for safekeeping in a small box made from dried orange peels. The wristband resides in my jewelry box, and, every so often, I take it out, put it on my wrist momentarily, and run my fingers across his name. And the flower normally lies on the dashboard of my car.
Each of these objects serve as venerated mementos of the seven years I spent working as a psychotherapist at a treatment center for court-mandated clients. They are a symbol of the pain of incarceration and the time spent in the criminal justice system. Furthermore, they exemplify the challenges of mental health issues and addictions, for some, and the beauty that can sometimes bud and flourish there in unexpected ways. Through my time working in the criminal justice system, I have been particularly interested in the body’s experience of confinement and freedom, incarceration and emancipation, the reciprocal relationship between both, and the migratory process that occurs in achieving the transcarceral body. If we are to understand that the meaning of transpersonal is that which lies beyond the person or beyond the self, let us then consider the transcarceral body to mean that which lies beyond and transcends what has been transcribed on the body, both visible and unseen, through the experience of incarceration.
To fully comprehend the transcarceral body, we must first identify and explore the numerous ways in which the incarcerated body is constructed and customized through the experience of captivity in jails and prisons. To further our understanding, it is crucial to examine how the “criminal’s” body becomes both subject and object of the system, or, rather, both subjectified and objectified, and the subsequent reification of the body as property and product.
In my desire to further explore the evolvement of the transcarceral body, I elected to invite former clients to discuss their lived perspectives and insights and to use their native understanding of the incarcerated experience to inform this project. Semi-structured, open-ended interviews were conducted with seven individuals (both male and female) who come from a variety of ethno-racial backgrounds with differing ages, types of criminalization, types of criminalized activities, correction experiences, and length of release.1 Of the seven interviewed, one participant remains in the process of completing her sentence. All participants were court-mandated to attend therapy at a local treatment agency and were former clients of mine. All participants worked with me either in group or individual therapy and sometimes a combination of both. Most participants I had seen on a weekly basis for at least one year. With the exception of one participant, all interviews were conducted either in person or via video chat and were at least ninety minutes long. The decision to use video chat was purposeful because it provided me an opportunity to make nonverbal observations of participants as well as track my own responses to former clients with whom I had intensive therapeutic relationships and with whom I had neither spoken nor seen in at least a year or longer. All participants chose their own pseudonyms for this project.
Table 7-1: Participant Demographics
| Participant | Age | Ethnic Background | Offense | Years in the System |
| Brittany | 36 | White | Second-degree murder | Currently in system |
| Bubba | 28 | Mexican American | Felony menacing | 14 |
| Camilla | 46 | Mexican American | Assault with a deadly weapon | 10 (4 years in prison) |
| Danny Darko | 26 | Mixed race | Menacing and child abuse/neglect | 15 (1.5 years in corrections) |
| Dark Star | 44 | White | Intent to distribute | 10 |
| Muff Dog | 32 | Mixed race | Assault with a deadly weapon | 15 (9 years in prison) |
| Velika | 30 | White | Attempted aggravated robbery | 11 (3 years in prison) |
Anyone entering the criminal justice system is classified and categorized according to type of conviction (e.g., assault—a.k.a. violent offense; theft—a.k.a. economic crime; drug possession—a.k.a. drug offense) and level of offense (misdemeanor or felony). The type of crime typically predicts the type of treatment an offender will receive from fellow offenders as well as correctional facility staff, probation officers, parole officers, and even potential employers. For example, sex offenders are typically treated like pariahs; violent offenders are typically treated with caution or unease; and those convicted of drug-related crimes are treated with some combination of distrust, condemnation, or pity. Of course, exceptions certainly occurred, and, in the county I worked in, I observed the full spectrum of treatment, ranging from subtle or searing contempt to genuine care and compassion. It was not unusual to hear clients describe a pecking order as it related to the type of crimes committed, with certain crimes earning high-status peer approval and other crimes granted more bottom-dwelling, catfish-of-the-pond status. In constructing the narrative of the offender body, beginning with a discussion about labels is useful because they were often pointed to, by research participants as well as other former clients, as the prologue to the creation story of the criminal body.
In addition to type-of-crime signifiers, countless colloquial labels abound and are thrust upon a person navigating the legal system, including such monikers as “convicts,” “felons,” “criminals,” “tweakers,” “junkies,” “offenders,” “violent offenders,” “cho-mos” (a derogatory abbreviation for child molesters generally used to describe all sex offenders), and “fuck-ups.” Some of these labels arise from within the criminal collective and become internalized or, conversely, projected outward to peers. Other labels are unwittingly offered up by a thoughtless or cruel remark from an external source such as a prison guard or parole officer, for example, and then become internalized. Interview participant Dark Star described the eroding impact that a label can engender, “When somebody calls you out and says, ‘You’re just a junkie,’ it can definitely make you feel stuck. Oh, yeah, I am a junkie. Shit. I definitely felt at times throughout my life of using [drugs] that I am a junkie and I’m stuck and this is it and stuck in that label.”
For others, the dismissive and reductive designation served a different outcome. In lieu of feeling marooned, Danny Darko, another interview participant, described feeling ultimately catalyzed by it:
At some point, you don’t look at it as a label and you think maybe they’re just right. Maybe that’s just who I am. And so, I started to put those labels on myself. At the time, I liked it. In there [jail], that’s like clout, something that I was not proud of, but I made it a point to make it that way for a reason. But right now, I feel bad about it. I feel ashamed, honestly. I feel ashamed that I liked it. I liked leading that lifestyle. I hated it, but I liked it. I enjoyed it. It felt like I was at least at the top of the bottom. If I was stuck there and had to be there, I was going to make something for myself.
Danny Darko’s internal dilemma arose from being labeled both a criminal and a violent offender, which, at some cost to him, he resolved by embracing it.
For Camilla, the prison setting had an added strain when she was forced to wear an orange jumpsuit reserved for violent offenders at her prison facility, and, as a result, she was ostracized by many of the other female (nonviolent-offending) inmates. Although she says her first felony was committed as an act of self-defense, over time she found herself adopting the persona, in both body and attitude, of a violent offender. From here, we recognize how these labels cast their insidious spell on both the wearer and the user and act as the terra firma from which identity formation takes seed. The labels themselves contribute to crafting the architecture of the criminal body and can be seen in the post-carceral world, for example, in the swaggering bravado of the male violent offenders or the downcast demeanors of the sex offenders sitting on the edges of group therapy settings.
Prisons are “spaces in which race is performed, understood, and made meaningful at the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels.”2 In carceral settings, the racialized body is unavoidable because it is a dermal reality that immediately marks an inmate entering the penal environment and affects both the viewer and the viewed. New inmates, particularly in prison, are immediately targeted by representatives of various racial groups and expected to form mandatory alliances with a conscripted group. Segregation is an unquestioned norm with swift social and physical consequences bestowed on anyone willing to test it. Interview participant Brittany spoke about the white inmates in her facility who obtained the “good” jobs in prison and consequently were given access to higher-level correctional staff, such as the captains and lieutenants, which brought a certain level of prestige. Furthermore, leadership positions such as, for example, running the cosmetology school, were offered exclusively to white inmates, with the one exception of an African American woman whose rare opportunity was attributed to her being “whiter” (i.e., more light skinned) than “the rest of us.” For others, such as Muff Dog, who generally identifies as mixed race but who “looks white,” found it less problematic to fall in with the white racial group. In prison, though, racial politics are a tricky thing, and privilege is not always so clear cut, as Muff Dog attested:
In prison, if you even affiliate yourself with any white people, you’re automatically a white supremacist . . . and that was kind of a lot for me to take in, especially reading it on paper when I’d see reports on me—that I was a white supremacist and I’m not even full white. I’ve got a Japanese mom. Especially having never been convicted of a hate crime or never being in trouble for a hate crime and simply the color of my skin being labeled a white supremacist.
Danny Darko, who is also mixed race with European ancestry but whose features clearly favor his Native American heritage, opted to “sign up” with an Aryan racial group due to perceived economic and social rewards:
It was beneficial for me to do so. I’m not really a racist person. I dislike certain people, but I don’t dislike people based on what they’re born looking like. Really, it’s a group of people that are proud to be who they are. It was obvious that I wasn’t 100 percent white, but it was never really an issue. It’s not Hitler’s army running around. For a while there, I thought I was going to prison.* That’s when I hopped aboard. It was set up if I had gone to prison. I had a group of people who had my back. In there, if there’s anything good to be had, the more people you know the more connected you are, the more things come your way.
Complications proliferate, though, when an inmate is not willing to fall in line or when an inmate belongs to a perceived marginalized category. Velika, who is white, refused to participate in prison politics and opted to commit a norm transgression by befriending a black inmate. For this offense, he was accused of being a “nigger” and was rewarded with a broken nose by a prison gang leader. Camilla, who is Mexican American and spent time locked up with primarily white inmates and white correctional officers (COs), found her racial status a liability that marked her body, by virtue of its skin color, as less than. She described ongoing negative treatment of both herself and other Latina inmates at the hands of COs and in the form of being made to eat last, not being permitted to participate in outdoor recreation, and being consistently harangued to speak English even though many of her Latina peers did not speak a word of English. Regardless of which side of the racial line inmates fell behind, the racialized body was thus inscribed into the multilayered incarcerated body.
Throughout my years working with clients in the criminal justice system, I repeatedly heard clients who had been to prison declaring themselves “DOC [Department of Corrections] property,” which meant that they were subjected to certain prescribed rules and expectations. These rules and expectations encompassed a number of areas, including being required to ask permission to sign any contracts or leases, to marry a significant other, and—more relevantly—to make alterations or changes to the body. Brittany discussed the distress she felt regarding her self-harming behavior during incarceration and explained why she went to such great lengths to conceal cuts to her body: “My God, because that’s huge. You go to segregation for self-destruction. They see you as their property.” She went on to identify another way she was made to feel that her body was a mere commodity of the state:
They are so extreme about you being their property that if you willingly went outside to play a sport and spend time in the yard and don’t take accountability and wear sunscreen and you get a sunburn so bad it takes you to medical, you get a write-up for destruction of state property.
Other areas of carceral and post-carceral life in which former inmates were made to collectively feel that their bodies were inconsequential objects of the penal system were their shared experiences surrounding strip searches, handcuffs, shackles, ankle monitors, and health care.
Routine strip searches were a common occurrence in the carceral environment of the interview participants and were used as a means to discover potential contraband items. The general consensus among the participants was that strip searches were an assault and an intrusion on the body. Both Velika and Muff Dog described the sense of powerlessness that accompanied strip searches. Velika stated, “You feel like you’re doing a song and dance for somebody who owns you. If there was ever a time I felt like a slave, it was then.” Similarly, Muff Dog shared, “If they want to look up your butthole, they can and you can’t do anything about it unless you want to get beat up and have your butthole looked at also. They can make you get naked whenever they want. It’s humiliating as shit, but you get used to it.” Muff Dog went on to describe how certain guards abused the power they wielded over inmate’s bodies by the methods they employed to lead the strip search:
Some of them are real dicks about it. If a cop doesn’t like you, after a visit, they’ll start by telling you to lift up your balls and penis. Then they’ll have you bend over, spread your cheeks open for them, and now run your fingers through your mouth to make sure you don’t have anything in your mouth. And you’re like, goddammit, dude. Really? Why didn’t you make me do that first? And that sucks. That’s gross. But you have to do what they tell you to do. And if you don’t do it, they’re going to make you do it.
The experience of being handcuffed or shackled is another rite of passage that inmates must succumb to for the practical purpose of restraint, which is to ensure safety to other staff, other inmates, and potentially the inmates themselves. Although the restraints are used as a protective measure, many participants shared stories of cruelty and inhumane treatment, at the hands of COs, that left behind enduring scars. Velika spoke about a particularly charged incident that, in the retelling, made him aware that the charge had not dissipated over time:
There were several different times where I ended up in shackles and I still have scars on my ankles from them. In one instance, by the time I arrived to the visiting room, my socks were not like soaked but there was a lot of blood on my socks from the shackles. Then I had to put the damn things back on over these wounds to make the same return walk back to my cell. That particular time was the worst. That one is a bad memory. That was really like they’re treating you like shit on purpose.
Muff Dog described a terrifying experience in which he was made to wear shackles for eight or nine hours continuously and ultimately resulted in him urinating on himself while guards stood by and laughed:
They tied a chain around my short rib, and they tied it so tight I can’t take a full breath. You can’t inhale enough to take a full breath and it was kind of freaky. I tried to sit down and it tightened around my Achilles tendon and I have scars from that. I’m bleeding. My feet are numb. I thought I was going to lose my feet. I was freaked out. That particular warden, that was his thing. He did that to a whole bunch of people. He did it for absolutely no reason. For laughing. They did that to me twice. That kind of stuck in my head. That made me really bitter towards all of them. When I think about it, I get mad all over again. I’m fine now. I didn’t lose my feet. I saw a guy shit on himself. He was right around the corner from me going through the exact same thing. That was pretty gross. I’m glad I didn’t have to do that. It was just pee.
For others, like Danny Darko, being handcuffed was a distressing experience for other reasons:
I’ve never liked handcuffs. I remember being four or five and going to the hospital because my dad was there. He was being arrested, but he was in the hospital first and they had him shackled to the bed. He was drinking, so he was just out of control. Bleeding at the wrists where the handcuffs were. So, I just really don’t like handcuffs. I remember seeing my mom get arrested when I was little and her having handcuff marks on her because she fights and acts ridiculous. Bloody handcuff marks. Anytime I’ve ever been arrested, I kind of shut down. I completely go away. I don’t really remember a lot. I don’t really think I let myself have any feelings.
In fact, during Danny Darko’s retelling of this event, he began to dissociate and became dysregulated enough that it became necessary to lead him in an emotional regulation exercise and veer away from the topic at hand.
Electronic monitoring devices, or ankle bracelets as they are commonly called, are used in the community to track the wearer’s location and can indicate, for example, if the wearer is complying with curfew rules. Other types of electronic monitoring devices are used to test the wearer’s perspiration for the presence of alcohol. In some cases, clients were ordered to wear both devices. Many clients pointed to them as a source of embarrassment and shame and saw them as affecting potential future employment opportunities and the ability to have normal interactions with people in general. Velika describes his experience:
For one, it being this bulky piece of plastic that everybody knows what it is when they see it on your ankle. I knew people were looking at it. I’d catch people looking at it. Sometimes they’d say something, but more than anything in my head every time I was out in public wearing shorts—and you can’t just wear pants year around—I would hate this. Talk about being labeled because I’m a felon. You have to look at my criminal history to know that about me. This right here, I’m wearing my criminal history on my ankle. That’s immediate judgment from anybody who sees it.
In public or group therapy settings, clients regularly referred to their ankle bracelets as “jewelry” (as in, “nice piece of ‘jewelry’ you got there”), which they would flippantly flaunt and brandish for each other with levity and good humor. However, behind closed doors, clients would often refer to these ornaments of disgrace as the scarlet letter of the system making it that much harder to successfully integrate into the outside world.
Health care in the prison system was viewed by many as a last resort to be avoided at all costs due to the lack of concern or regard received during treatment and the potential risks associated with being treated. Velika described a “savage” experience of getting his teeth cleaned and of “really getting the sense that you are less than regular human to them.” He spoke of another incident in which he had a tooth knocked loose in a fight and how he was plagued with anxiety that his tooth would fall out. When asked about his refusal to obtain dental care, he said, “There were a ton of guys walking around missing teeth because they’re happy to pull your teeth, but they’re not going to pay to put any prosthetic on you so I was terrified this tooth was going to fall out. It was terrifying.” Muff Dog spoke about an incident in which the prison doctor inexplicably took him off his medication, which he had been taking for many years for a chronic digestive condition: “I guess this kind of comes from the privileged side of me how I took care of that. My dad being a doctor. This guy takes me off of it, and I’m miserable as fuck, and my dad called up and introduced himself as Dr. X and that he would report this guy to the review board, and he put me back on my meds immediately.”
For the participants, to have a criminal body meant involuntary enlistment into a one-sided battle where the criminal body was besieged on all sides through the countless ways the participants were objectified by the system. With the loss of self-sovereignty and with limited options to shield their bodies from harm, participants employed numerous strategies for survival. Some normalized the treatment while others detached from it. And others, such as Brittany, chose to temporarily surrender dominion of their body for their greater good, “Your mind is the only thing you have. It’s the only thing they can’t touch.”
In an environment where inmates encountered “diverse vulnerabilities”3 as it pertained to their bodies, which were regulated, managed, and controlled by the penal system, opportunities for cultivating bodies of reclamation, resistance, and survival were regularly found and sought out. Making marks on the body in the form of tattoos, cuts, burns, and scars; attending to personal appearance; and developing and “choreographing”4 the performative body were viewed as worthwhile and necessary “body projects.”5
At some incalculable point, the gloom of captivity and the accompanying ubiquitous stasis descends. The fact that everyone has the same general allotment of identical clothing to wear causes attention to appearance and dress to decline for some whereas others make it a priority to be fastidious as a point of principle. Attention to dress and appearance can be an opportunity to assert identity, creativity, and, in the carceral setting, a form of combatting the “convict” status and “resisting the embodiment of ‘the prisoner.’”6 Brittany identified her current everyday post-prison clothing style as casual and relaxed (sweats, yoga pants, and jeans) but described her clothing in prison as, “perfect. They were meticulous. My clothes were creased all the time. I ironed every day. In there, I took so much pride in my clothes. I think that everything is so controlled that you maybe take everything and put a little twist of your own on it.” For others, such as Danny Darko, fresh clothes were a source of pride and status, and he went to some lengths to procure well-appointed uniforms:
I made sure I knew someone in laundry. I tried to dress as nice as you could when everyone is wearing the same thing. Darker newer clothes. I would have them ironed by the guys in laundry sometimes. Brand new white t-shirts not worn by anybody. Everybody’s running around wearing the same thing. I don’t want to run around wearing the same thing too. I don’t want to look like I’m wearing somebody else’s drawers. It didn’t seem fitting if I didn’t have to. It felt a little better like I’m not in the same boat as everyone else. Or in a little better boat [laughs].
In some women’s facilities, makeup and other beauty products could be ordered, and Brittany declared that she took full advantage of the opportunity. However, she acknowledged that efforts to prettify herself were accompanied with a double-edged sword:
Well, we’re also show monkeys. They want us to be presentable. They spend all day walking big groups of people through to pride themselves on what they were doing. They want us to look the best that we can be, you know, because it makes them look good. Denver’s [Denver Women’s Correctional Facility’s] big on presentation. You could get in trouble if you’re not showering once every two days. A lot of people would come in battling demons and drugs, and looking presentable was the least of their worries.
Here, the lines between body as subject and body as object become blurred, and the experience of a subject-defining activity becomes somewhat tarnished.
One of the specific instances in which clients would regularly mention that they considered themselves “DOC property” involved the issue of tattoos. Clients would emphatically state that their bodies were considered property of the state, and, thus, any change to state property necessitated discussion and approval by their parole officers. Tattoos are not permitted in the carceral setting either and garnered serious consequences if discovered. (During his interview, Muff Dog proudly stated that he suspected he accumulated nearly a year in “the hole” for getting caught with tattoos each time he got them.) In my experience as a clinician, I never once came across a client who requested permission from a parole officer to obtain a tattoo, but what I generally observed instead were clients arriving to individual or group therapy sessions gleefully and brazenly displaying their new tattoos for other clients and their therapist to admire. Here was a way to quietly and flagrantly subvert the rules regarding property and body ownership.
Tattoos were considered an “appropriate embodiment” of “prison identities”7 and were both a standard initiation into prison culture as well as a “statement of contempt and defiance . . . of solidarity and communality.”8 Muff Dog spoke to this communality: “Everyone in prison has tattoos and when you’re around it all the time, it looks cool.” Velika’s tattoos represented a form of resistance—not resistance against the prison institution itself but resistance against prison culture. When invited to join a white prison gang upon his arrival, Velika said that he pointed to a tattoo inscribed on his arm as his response to their invitation, “I told them nope, not interested, I roll solo. That’s what it means right here, ‘One Deep.’ That means I roll solo. People in prison know what that means.” To further drive his stance home, Velika opted to obtain a new tattoo from an inmate friend who happened to be black. As discussed earlier, he suffered a broken nose for this racial indiscretion. Of this tattoo, Velika shared:
It represented my refusal, my retaliation toward telling me I had to abide by these politics that I don’t feel apply to me. I don’t care whose black or white, whose gang or whatever. If you’re not racist, then I’m probably alright with you. For me the tattoo signified standing my ground. I’m proud I took the path of most resistance to get this tattoo.
Tattooing the body in the face of potential penal or social consequences took on new meaning because it signified a means of commandeering ownership of the body. Kevin McCarron poetically drives this point home in stating that “the tattoo has no economic value—it cannot be sold, or bartered—yet still it is perceived as the ‘property’ of the tattooed criminal. This property, significantly, cannot be stolen, even in a world of thieves.”9 Moreover, in a world where a criminal can feel that so much has been taken away, a tattoo can be the body’s talisman of protection or a trophy to be held aloft in triumph.
For others, mark making on the body emerged in the form of cuts and burns. Unlike tattoos, cuts and burns are “concealable stigmas”10 in the eyes of both jail/prison officials and other inmates, yet it was widely reported to help participants feel a sense of control, self-empowerment, and relief. Danny Darko described a time in jail when he carved into his leg the word hate, which he claimed was directed at himself, at others, and at “everything.” On other occasions, he has burned himself with a lighter as a reminder of mistakes made and lessons learned. Each burn scar represents a significant event and a resulting map of lessons that he did not want to forget. In both examples, the body is used as a secure locale to record and convey hurt and pain that could not be safely entrusted to others. In these instances, self-harm can be construed as a way of “highlighting the body’s communicative and social nature.”11 With regards to physical scars, Velika appropriately named his own the “scar album,” and he, along with other participants, identified many of their scars as symbols of self-protection, protection of others, and standing up for steadfast principles.
An aspect of carceral life that is essential for survival is the necessity to establish and build a “public edifice”12 that includes “front management tactics” as a way to “fit into the prison community and avoid exploitation” or, correspondingly, as “one-upmanship or assertion of legitimacy, status, and superiority.”13 Managing one’s front or public persona generally involved attention to how inmates carried themselves in their bodies, nonverbal gestures, quality of eye contact, and facial expressions. Even though he is six feet five inches tall and weighs two hundred pounds, Velika admitted that he did not “feel like a tall person” and normally describes himself as a “shy and timid” person who typically held his pre-prison body in a slouched position to maximize an air of “invisibility.” In prison, though, he quickly learned, as did all the participants who were interviewed for this study, the necessity of developing an embodiment of confidence and strength. Typically, this practice entailed observing and noticing other inmates’ confidence displays and, to some extent, mimicking them. Velika described an inmate who was striking in that one “didn’t ever catch him out of his persona. He was like a strong stoic machine.” Facial expressions were expected to be constrained, and eye contact had to express a quality of fearlessness. Danny Darko acknowledged, “I smiled a lot less. I was a lot quieter of a person. I kind of developed that thousand-yard stare to just look through people. Show nothing and look for everything.”
“Chow-hall face” was nomenclature that Muff Dog and his friends ascribed to a particular facial expression that one donned both in the cafeteria (a venue fraught with potential volatility and violence) and in other parts of the prison. During her interview, Brittany pointed to a permanent crease on her forehead left from her time wearing a self-protective “shitty face” in the dining area. “Prison is like an extrovert’s world,” Velika explained, and, therefore, an extrovert’s body was vital: “It looked like having a straight back, shoulders back, chin up, chest out a little bit, speaking louder—more firmly, poker face.” Hand gestures were generally discouraged because they could be taken as a sign of aggression. According to Velika:
It’s all about not appearing froggy. You don’t want people to think that you’re about to jump up and start fighting. I remember the first time it was made clear to me that my hand gestures needed to calm down. I was afraid of them, but I couldn’t show my fear. They were like, put your hands by your side when you’re talking to me.
Muff Dog, who spent nine years in a maximum-security prison, had a different take on the prison persona:
It doesn’t mean you walk around acting like a tough guy all the time. Some people do and I personally think that’s stupid. You don’t let anybody bully you. You don’t let anybody take your stuff. You don’t let anybody push you around. You handle your own. You’re a man. So that’s what being a convict is. You put on the persona that you think you need to have. Then you get a little bit more relaxed with it. But anything outside of that, you can totally be yourself. You can joke around or be serious, whatever’s you.
Whatever “masks of impression management”14 inmates attired themselves with, it was important not to lose a sense of one’s true self. “I didn’t take on a persona of a bunch of opposite principles. My persona was mostly just trying to stay true to who I was prior to prison but trying to up the ante on how I display myself,” Velika stated. Muff Dog concurred in saying, “You basically make your own morals and you stick to them no matter what. My own set of morals are more important than anything, more important than life.” Despite the system’s attempts to assert full control over the criminal body, participants found ways to soar above the objectified experience and recoup losses by seizing authority by whatever creative means necessary.
When doing prison or jail time—no matter the length of time someone has been held in captivity—something tangible and indelible is left behind from the experience. The newly released individual must grapple with countless challenges, including the likely difficulties of reentry and reintegration. For many, what sits on the other side of time spent locked up is mandatory probation, parole, halfway-house time, or some combination in between with its concomitant requirements and expectations, all with the grand hope of reformation and rehabilitation as the end goal. No longer ensnared at least in body, if not in mind, individuals are now free to reshape and redesign themselves. “Being corporeally aware of the marks of their criminal past and of the effects of prison on their bodies,”15 the ex-inmate can now attempt to “‘erase’ or overwrite these inscriptions” of incarcerated time and initiate the “corporeal process of becoming”16 someone new, reborn, and remade. For some, the tone of reentry can be set just before technically stepping a foot into the free world because, ahead of departing the facility, a visit to retrieve personal property and effects, which have been stored for safekeeping, is a final stop before egress. Danny Darko:
I usually get brought in in gym shorts and an undershirt. There’s a big rip on your shirt, blood all over it. Because you haven’t seen those clothes since the day you got arrested, those memories come back really hard. I got out and still had a 30 mg Oxycontin still in my wallet. Razor blade still in my wallet. They put you in a little room and you open up your property. It’s been vacuum sealed so smell—everything’s been time capsuled waiting for you. It brought back a lot of bad feelings and memories. You put those clothes on knowing that you don’t have anything else to put on. You get so excited that you’re going to finally get out of jail scrubs and that’s what’s waiting for you. It’s kind of shitty.
The process of acclimation and acculturation requires simultaneously attending to a number of weighty details. Most former inmates are painfully aware of the fact that they carry the “just got out look,” as described by Danny Darko, not only on their faces but also in their bodies, their interactions, and their overall demeanor. “I’ve got this DOC haircut, wearing mostly a uniform, and I’ve got this way about me, a little cocky, a little angry, and—I wouldn’t say prone to violence—but maybe that’s where my mind went,” Velika stated. Likewise, Muff Dog shared that “getting out and not knowing how to act, it’s like super awkward. You feel like you talk different than everybody else. You feel like you’re carrying yourself different than everybody else. And you are.” Having to contend with an anachronistic version of themselves, it becomes vital in the creation of an updated and modernized embodied version to surveil the environment for guidance and instruction. Muff Dog:
For me, I would watch people. I would see people who had their shit together. I’d just watch their mannerisms, the way they talk to other people. The way they stand. Everything about them. And I would try and imitate that, basically fake it till you make it. That’s how I would get by at work. I would see people who were kind of doing good and I would just imitate them. Even now it kind of feels like I’m acting. I don’t feel as fake as I first did. It’s feeling more natural.
The “corporeal process of becoming”17 is a burdensome one, and the specter of the incarcerated body can often be counted on to materialize again and again throughout the course of re-encoding and reconstruction. Brittany put it like this:
Like right now, my arms are always crossed. If I go to an interview or something important, I literally have to make a mental note or write on my hand and tell me not to cross my arms. I have to remind myself to smile. I have to say you’re not in prison. You can smile. Try smiling at someone. You might get a smile back.
Engaging in simple everyday-life things such as driving, grocery shopping, or interacting with loved ones can often leave the former inmate in a suspended state of being locked up all over again. Velika admitted that he has had a tendency to treat live-in girlfriends like “cell mates,” while Muff Dog described the long-term impact of having spent two years in solitary confinement:
I’m probably going to be on medication for the rest of my life because of what supermax did to my brain. I can’t shake it off. I thought I was just fine until they let me out and the world and everything around me seemed so loud and so stressful. I can’t focus my thoughts on anything. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of that. Just that weird feeling.
Issues of boundaries and space are another area that required re-examination and renegotiation. Brittany, who spent thirteen years in prison, discussed the challenges of standing in a grocery line:
When I’m in line and I can feel your breath on me and I take two steps forward, that doesn’t mean you take two steps forward. People have no sense of space out here. It’s so overwhelming. Gives me anxiety. My armpits are sweating and I will be physically sick to my stomach. I’ll have to go to the bathroom afterwards because this person couldn’t give me some fucking space. There’s a lot of things I don’t know if I’ll ever get over.
Despite the rigors of release and readjustment, eventually a path emerged of what could be plucked and plundered from the spoils of incarceration. Through the mix and mingle of the incarcerated body with the emancipated body, an amalgam is made and a new alloy is formed: the transcarceral body.
The transcarceral body commences with two basic ingredients: “I think you have to be able to step out of that box in order to live out here,” said Muff Dog, and, added Velika, relearn how to be “in normal person mode.” According to Azrini Wahidin and Shirley Tate, “through the idea of body and flesh, one has to integrate identities as a set of embodied potentialities.”18 These embodied potentialities are developed through a process of trial and error, the support of the community at large, and the healing power of time. As discussed previously, with the exception of one participant, all participants interviewed for this project were at least one-year post-completion of parole and probation requirements or, as it is colloquially called, “off paper.” Unencumbered by the emotional and physical constraints of the criminal justice system, participants described more body coherence and consonance: “Now I don’t feel like I’m looking over my shoulder,” Velika said. “Today’s the first time I’ve thought of that in a long time, so I think I’m well past that. I’m not there anymore.”
Participants discussed the importance of forging a new relationship to self and other and, more specifically, to the singular body of self and the plural body of other (e.g., loved ones, work, and the public domain) as crucial to the development of the transcarceral body. Velika attributed a friendship to supporting the development of a new template for being: “He made me see humor in a lot more things including myself. I kind of took that on. He really did help me see life not like an inmate would. Trying not to look tough or trying not to be vulnerable. Or being the dominant one.” Bubba, another interview participant, spoke about making a conscious effort to alter his physical appearance, which he acknowledged had unquestionably marked him as a typical gang member:
People know about that. How other people dress. How criminals dress. Just my style and my skin. My goatee and my mustache. You can identify me from far away. And a bald head. If you were looking at me now, you’d see I grew out my hair [laughs]. I got hair now. I’m trying to change my clothing, but I can’t really find any other clothes that I like. The thing that changed in me is to stop acting like I’m the shit. Like I’m real hard. Because I know I’m not the hardest. It’s just all macho bullshit.
Learning to trust the environment and allowing one’s body to reflect that trust is an ongoing practice for Brittany:
In restaurants, I don’t sit with my back to people. C [her boyfriend] gives me any seat I want. But sometimes now I’m like, go ahead and have the seat. Sometimes I try to catch myself and say it’s not a big deal. I’m trying to trust him. And that I can sit with my back anywhere and I’ll be alright. I mean, who’s ever really popped off at Chili’s, right?
For others, their children helped them to find a new way of relating to their bodies. Danny Darko admitted that, with most people in his life, he “keeps his distance,” but, with his children, he is able to relax his guard: “When we lay down to watch a movie, he’ll come and lay on top of me. It’s nice. With the kids, they’re both generally sitting next to me, or on me, or trying to climb up me.” Brittany, whose child’s name means “salvation,” described the embodying effect of her child: “Remember the punching bags that had weights at the bottom? He’s the love bug that grounds me,” she said with a smile.
A conversation about the transcarceral body would be incomplete without acknowledging that all participants unanimously shared that incarcerated time did not come without merit or reward. Several participants identified a sense of body safety and inner peace from their time locked up. Others identified unexpected value in other aspects. Velika appreciated the “forced camaraderie” that accompanied the prison experience and acknowledged that his prison friendships far outnumber his current social circle. Furthermore, he stated, “I actually feel like I was more at peace internally. My body and my nervous system felt more at peace in prison than it does nowadays most of the time. Sad to say, but it’s true.” Both Bubba and Dark Star reflected that jail time helped keep them safe from themselves. Bubba:
I’m more restrained from making dumb decisions like that gang shit. Robbing or hurting other people. When you’re in jail, personally I feel safe I guess. That’s fucked up to say. I know that I’m limited from doing stupid things.
For Dark Star, who has struggled chronically with drug addiction, jail was a place to restore her relationship with her body, “Because I wasn’t doing the illicit drugs, that gave my body a chance to start healing itself. For me, detoxing in jail, that’s the beginning of you becoming reconnected with your body.” Brittany, who began her thirteen-year prison sentence at the age of fifteen, credited a parental relationship that had been previously lacking in her life: “I grew up in prison. Prison was my mom and my dad. It’s where I learned right from wrong. If I’d never went there, I would still be a bad person. I would have been just like my mom.”
From the kiln fire of incarceration, the transcarceral body emerges. With neither an aim to vilify nor valorize the criminal justice system, this research endeavored to consider the possibility of a “body-friendly criminology.”19 At the epicenter of the challenges of incarceration, let us imagine a person whose body is treated with dignity, decency, and respect. In so doing, the incarcerated individual may find an opportunity to have a truly corrective experience and a genuine chance for recovery and emancipation that will propagate citizens who may hope to one day thrive and prosper.
It is nearly impossible to work therapeutically with clients in the criminal justice system and be unaffected by the deep impact of this work. Just as I observed the evolvement of the transcarceral body, so too did I witness my own transformative body emerge. I can recall the week leading up to the first day I started working at the treatment center that served court-mandated clients. I was beset by various emotions, most predominantly fear and excitement. There were many shades and hues that colored that fear, including my arrival to the center as a graduate-level intern and as my first professional opportunity to practice as a psychotherapist. Questions and concerns about my readiness and competency were naturally at the forefront of my mind. Another aspect of my fear had to do with the population itself. I found myself worrying about potential safety issues, and so I began mentally preparing beforehand. I went over some scenarios in my mind, such as how I would keep my personal belongings secure, and made a plan for asking a colleague to walk with me to my car late at night after group therapy was let out. During that beginning time, I was engaged in what Martin Buber (a renowned German philosopher and existentialist) called I-it thinking. In the I-it paradigm, the “I” is the subject and the “it” is the object. The “it” is a detached “thing” separate from “I.”
By the end of my internship year, I remember expressing profound sadness to my clinical supervisor (who was also the owner of the agency) that my time there was coming to a close and that I did not feel ready to leave my clients or this work. To my immense surprise, she told me that I did not have to leave and offered me an opportunity to continue my work there. So, I chose to stay in what turned out to be six more years because, in that first year, I had thankfully progressed from that initial I-it way of relating to clients to the more meaningful I-thou. In the I-thou relationship, both the “I” and the “thou” relate to each other as subject to subject in a unity of being in which both are ultimately transformed by the relationship between them.
Before working with court-mandated clients, I had spent a large portion of my professional career focusing on what are traditionally defined as “women’s issues.” These issues included work in the areas of sexual assault, interpersonal violence, teen pregnancy, and sexual health. Even though my work had at times included serving men, my focus was primarily on the women. I felt most comfortable in women-oriented spaces, and, in my previous line of work, men for me were in some ways either perpetrators or some form of “other.” In other words, men were an “it.” At the treatment center, where approximately 80 percent of the clients were men, I was not only forced to face my limited thinking, but my body was also called on to confront this matter as well. As a therapist, working with court-mandated clients meant one sure thing: most clients saw you as another arm of the law and therefore came to therapy and the therapeutic relationship with very little trust. Given that it was my responsibility to cultivate a safe and trusting relationship, I realized quite early on that my Batman-car body of self-protection, with which I had automatically suited myself up, was not going to serve my clients or their healing.
Thus, I found myself shedding my armored layers and finding my way to the “thou” both in body and in mind. I sat with gang members, thieves, drug dealers, sex offenders, child abusers, wife batterers, and murderers both in groups and individually. I stood beside them through the storms of relapses, suicide attempts, self-destructive behaviors, court dates, and more incarceration time, and, underneath the labels and the gendered bodies, I learned to find the human connection between my tender heart and theirs. A colleague once described to me how she saw probation/parole and therapy as holding complementary parental roles. Parole/probation held the masculine rule-enforcing/disciplinarian father role, and treatment held the feminine nurturing mother role. Prior to my work at the treatment center, I would never have particularly described myself as a maternal person. And yet again and again, throughout the years of working at the center, I found myself (on many occasions) wanting to take those big hulking brokenhearted men in my lap and rock the hurt of their incredible suffering away. Through this work, I discovered a softness in my own body and a depth of affection that I did not realize I was even capable of. I remember one former client, in particular, who used to come into session and would regularly and inexplicably initiate extended eye contact that I would liken to that of the innocent yet oddly enthralling gaze of a baby. Never fully comfortable with these unique and wordless moments, I realized eventually that he was calling for me to see him, truly see him, and in so doing I allowed myself to be seen by him, subject to subject.
For this project, I had the unusual opportunity to reconnect with clients whom I never really expected to see again. All of the reunions were rich and meaningful to me for a number of reasons, and being afforded the chance to learn how they were faring after all this time was a profound privilege and bittersweet experience. Some participants were still caught up in the quagmire of their addictions and criminal behaviors while others had found meaningful work and loving relationships. To close, I will share two parting moments from the interviews that held some poignancy for me.
First, at the end of one of the interviews, a participant pulled out a whiskey bottle and, with great mischief, toasted me and all of the other system officials by whom he felt squelched due to the rules and regulations of parole—including not being permitted to drink alcohol. And as he took his swig from the bottle, together we laughed in celebration; with some gravity, I said to him, “You earned this. You really earned it. Congratulations.”
A final moment that stood out to me was this. After preliminary hellos with another participant on our first video chat call, we found ourselves suddenly dropping into that wordless eye contact that I had forgotten was a part of our knowing each other. Although a year had passed since we last saw each other, my body remembered, and, with a smile on my face, I held his gaze, and held his gaze, and held his gaze, and through my eyes I saw him, I truly saw him, and through my gaze I let him know that I loved him. I loved all of them.
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