Eastern State Penitentiary

(photo by author)

Research

My scholarship is situated at the intersections of the sociology of punishment, cultural criminology, and sociolegal studies.  The majority of my projects investigate how radical transformations in the practice and experience of punishment, law, and media have given rise to new and dangerous possibilities in the practice of social control and exclusion.  In order to understand these shifts, I give attention to the historically devalued, but increasingly prominent place of culture in contemporary debates and understandings of these institutions.  My research methods are thus defined by cultural interpretation, including ethnographic, institutional, discursive, and feminist approaches to the study of punishment, law and media.  The following is a summary of my main research areas and projects.

 

THE WORK OF PUNISHMENT

In my work, I map the cultural conditions, processes, and meanings of punishment, social control, and exclusion.  This commitment takes a variety of forms.  The first is a book manuscript, The Work of Punishment: Culture and Imprisonment (forthcoming, NYU Press), that explores the ways in which those citizens who have no necessity to address the problem of mass incarceration develop cultural meanings and understandings about punishment.  This body of research examines a variety of popular sites for cultural engagement, including media, tourism, science, and war.  The main argument of the volume insists that because the axis of incarceration extends along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who do not know its experience.  In this way, the U.S. penal system is defined specifically by a classed, racialized minority presence from which white middle class citizens remain to some degree comfortably distanced – distanced enough to support and sustain the largest punitive political turn in U.S. history.  These citizens are precisely those who need not encounter the overpowering tangibility of imprisonment and its troubling social effects and yet are more powerfully positioned to facilitate this practice through democratic processes resulting in policies that exacerbate social divisions and inequalities. Such distant social relationships, I argue, imply potentially dangerous shifts in meanings and subjectivities surrounding punishment.  In developing the concept of a “penal spectator” - a citizen who sanctions, in her approval and witnessing, the infliction of pain from a distance - I explore how the fate of punishment is further distanced from direct democratic engagement and public oversight and more significantly, reflects a loss of social thinking.  Centered in a growing contemporary body of social theory, cultural studies, and law, the volume examines the pervasiveness of penal judgment in media representations, the rise of a commercial prison tourism, the emergence of new war prisons post-9/11, and the role of social scientists in elaborating alternative frameworks to our current penal trajectory.

 

TRANSNATIONAL PUNISHMENT

In studying the cultural meanings of punishment, I often look for key moments of crisis where the frames surrounding our understandings of punishment are disrupted.  The worldwide circulation of disturbing photos of American soldiers engaging in torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad constitutes such a site with the scandal becoming a key focal point in my research.  I have since examined the role of U.S. war prisons in opening up new spaces of punishment and violence in relation to law transnationally.  In my first peer-reviewed article, “‘Setting the Conditions’ for Abu Ghraib: The Prison Nation Abroad,” I map how the harsh practices and retributive discourses at the Abu Ghraib prison reflected domestic practices and understandings of punishment employed at home in the United States, including super-maximum confinement.  In more contemporary work, I examine how post-9/11 war prisons open up new spaces of exception in US governance, tending toward unusual and dystopian possibilities in human exclusion.

 

MEDIA AND CULTURE

Themes of exclusion and social control are also reflected in my research with images of crime and punishment in media representations.  I situate most of my media projects in the area of cultural criminology, an emergent body of work that seeks to examine crime, deviance and control as cultural processes that generate perpetual contests in meaning.  Cultural criminology is particularly well known for its privileging of the analysis of texts, images, and discourse alongside of detailed ethnographic reflections on criminality in everyday life.  Its key works, importantly, are grounded within an interventionist framework, challenging conventional approaches to the study of crime and punishment and encouraging criminologists to rethink the role and primacy of culture in understanding crime and transgression.  I see my contribution here as one which applies these perspectives to punishment and also encourages criminologists to rethink the expansiveness and immediacy of media in everyday experience, as it increasingly becomes impossible to separate the image from social life.  Because crime constitutes such a large proportion of media representations, I have actively attempted to contextualize the power of media not simply to exaggerate or distort how we view crime but as a cultural force in and of itself, complex in its platforms, technologies, functions, and meanings.  My work, in this respect, has been far-ranging, and includes analyses of print, internet, and television news, Hollywood film, and documentary representations on topics as diverse as 9/11, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the war on drugs, prisons, youth violence, and serial killers, all in an effort to explore why these representations captivate us culturally and how they recursively feed back into the practice and experience of crime and punishment. 

 

PRISON WORK IN A CULTURE OF CONTROL

Another body of work in contemporary research on punishment examines the “collateral consequences” of mass incarceration upon prisoner’s families and communities.  I pursue a similar project from a slightly different angle, observing the social effects of work in prison settings upon correctional staff while also collecting their interpretations of what it means to do prison work.  Participants in the study included frontline custody and correctional officers, mental health and medical staff, case workers, administrative staff, wardens, and execution team members.  Data collection included multiple onsite visits and observations at prisons at a variety of security levels as well as over forty in-depth interviews with staff about how work in prison changes their social relationships, perceptions of self, worldviews, and the communities that surround them. 

 

PUNISHMENT, PAIN, AND EXCLUSION IN LATE MODERNITY

The main project that I will be developing across the next few years will trace the effects of punishment broadly into and across other social institutions.  As Erving Goffman and later Michel Foucault famously observed, factories, schools, hospitals, and other total institutions are striking in their similarity in structure and organization to prisons.  Across a wide range of disciplinary frameworks, contemporary theorists argue emphatically that we are witness to a continuum of pain that spans in its logical relations from hospitals to prisons, from intensive care units to internment and detention facilities.  Such relations include a capacity and ordinary willingness to engage in a routinized, indifferent violence that risks increasingly positioning specific kinds of groups as disposable waste or less than fully human.  These populations are defined by their vulnerability, invisibility, and exclusion: the very old, the very sick, the mentally ill, the poor, the imprisoned, victims of extreme violence, as well as other historically marginalized groups on the basis of race, religion, and ethnicity.  Within such tendencies lay the foundations for a vast and unprecedented social system of exclusion. I plan to interrogate the nature of these emergent relationships through research that follows punishment well beyond its formal institutions.  In hospital, assisted living, hospice, and prisons for the aging and ill, I plan to map empirically the ways in which care and pain converge and how compassion or indifference is constructed and prohibited within different institutional frameworks.  This study will question how larger structures of governance that are penal in foundation inform or guide institutional designs, services, and discourse.