hypervisibility/invisibility of minority groups

Essay readings

· when citing, refer to the article titles highlighted in yellow below.

Carlen P article

A prison is a prison

· prison is primarily and essentially organized for punitive exclusion by secure containment for a period of time determined by a court.

· Yet although prison is the most compelling symbol of the state’s power both to punish, and maintain existing patterns of domination and exclusion, it is also a politically dangerous and unstable symbol.

· it is an unstable symbol because the prison business is still (as it was during the early days of psychiatry) an opulent shareholder in, and consumer of, the modernistic fashioning and retailing of new therapies and ‘psy’ sciences;

· , because it so nearly violates so many human rights and is so painful that democratic governments need continually to re-legitimate its systematic and almost exclusive use against certain classes and categories of lawbreakers for quite minor crimes;

· the prison is nowadays ‘a social agency of first resort’ for the already socially excluded (

· that women in intimate relationships involving domestic violence, poverty and addictions can find that the imprisonment of their men gives them a temporary relief from ‘the serious problems jeopardizing . . . safety, health and marriage

· insist that psychologically based programmes actually cause harm because they suggest to women that they should be able to control their responses to adverse material circumstances over which, in fact, they have no control; and that, therefore, when the women are released, they suffer confusion and guilt when confronted with even worse problems than they had prior to their imprisonment and its reprogramming programmes- see women as unfit for society

· first, because women have always been more vulnerable to pychologistic interventions than men; second, because the causes of their lawbreaking are more likely to be seen as stemming from an economic need which, with the demise of welfarist models of crime, is nowadays likely to be translated into the so-called criminogenic needs which behavioural models of crime have traditionally addressed and which they are now claiming to address again (Hudson, 2002; Kendall, 2002); and third because, even though unproven, those claims still provide a rationale for sending to prison minor female offenders whose psycho-social needs would previously have been seen to merit a non-custodial sentence

· Typically, however, sentencers also frequently observed that they sent women with addiction problems to prison because there were no suitable resources in the community. Prison was quite simply the only place that law-breaking women could get treatment.-warehouse prisoners

· But, even more surprising, and as was shown earlier in this article, sentencing studies in some jurisdictions suggest that women are often quite explicitly sent to prison because they are already socially excluded (e.g. homeless, unemployed, drug-users); and that sentencers think that because they are already socially excluded they are more at risk of committing a crime in the future

· ; health is impaired; and there may also be further loss of self-esteem via humiliation by prison staff and the inevitable stigmatization of a prison sentence

· Interestingly enough, in light of Megan Comfort’s research discussed previously, the only good thing that the women usually say about prison is that there is an absence of men.

· prison provides a protection against abusive men, and, in so doing, it helps buttress relationships that are damaging to the women and, in some cases, their children.

· it excludes the already socially excluded still further.

· attributed the high recidivism rates of female prisoners to the fact that women’s

· sentences are relatively short

KRUTTSCHNITT ARTICLE

· They found that women reacted to prison very differently from men. By and large, the women studied by Ward and Kassebaum shunned identification with a convict identity and notions of prisoner solidarity, and relied on primary relationships-especially intimate, often sexual, relationships with other womento buffer the pains of imprisonment.-difference btw men and women

· They see a shift from what they call the old penology, which emphasized individual responsibility, diagnosis, and treatment, to a new penology concerned with the identification, classification, and management of dangerous groups, i.e. “the actuarial consideration of aggregates”

· The growing number of women’s prisons, combined with the move toward gender equity in corrections, mean that more women are now incarcerated in physical surroundings and subjected to disciplinary regimes unlike women’s prisons of the past and more similar to men’s prisons

· Female offenders once viewed as misguided, and in need of treatment, are now viewed as dangerous and irredeemable

· Neither were there racial differences in adaptation styles: for example, women of color were no more or less likely than white women to be politically active, socially isolated, defiant toward the prison, ‘in the mix,’ religious, and so forth

· A woman’s economic background – social class, seemed to have a much stronger effect on how she reacted to prison than did her race. Most of the women we talked to, not surprisingly, came from impoverished backgrounds

· Most of the relatively privileged women adjusted

· ” Many of these women adjusted by immersing themselves in their jobs; and because most of them came into prison with many job-related skills they often held relatively good prison jobs

Still, the economically disadvantaged women did not, in general,-hierarcy in prison

For the race aspect pease use the readings/points below

In 2007, Jerome Almon, a Detroit-based rapper and the CEO of Murdercap Records, launched a 900-million-dollar lawsuit against 95 Canadian border officers and two former Ministers of Immigration for racially profiling him as 'black rapper from Detroit'. Almon claims that between 1998 and 2004, he was stopped, turned back or detained 117 times when travelling between Detroit and Toronto and that this could not be reasonably explained by his criminal background, which included arrests but no convictions. The CBSA responded: '... our officers are provided with cultural awareness and diversity training with anti-racism components and do not discriminate according to race, nationality or religion'

· denials such as this are actually made possible by the pervasive ambiguity that surrounds the very meaning of racial profiling

· These ambiguities are effectively enabling, that is, they work to actually protect from scrutiny and facilitate the play of racialized risk knowledges at the

· You know there are situations, like you know, you'll be working a midnight shift and I'll come in off the line and the whole lineup at Immigration is all African American people, the whole line up. And none of them are traveling together, you know and stuff like that. And you wonder who's sending all of those cars down [for inspection], why are they all—now when I say it happens here every day, I don't mean to that magni tude that it happens here every day. But somebody is sent over for a reason, solely because of what they are and who they look like, one a day I am sure of it.. .it happens, I'm sure it definitely happens- ancedtoal example from an officer

· While there is some empirical research that Canadian scholars can point to when asked to provide expert testimony on racial profiling and the criminal justice system, there is very little that they can draw from on the specific question of racial profiling and border control- lack of empricial data

· ), another important difference for our present purposes is that border authorities at land ports of entry receive very litde advance information on travelers seeking to cross the border with which they might build formal, information based risk profiles. In the absence of a wealth of advance information about travellers, profiling here relies upon signifiers that are imagined to be part of a configuration that constitute a traveller's identity as either trustwort

Protectionist logic

· Racialized risk knowledges at the border are given practical effect through the technology of administrative discretion (Pratt 1999). Operating in the 'dark' shadow of the crime security nexus (Pratt 2005) and the trend toward governing through crime (Rose 1998; Simon 2007), this wide discretion is enabled by protectionist and quasi-chivalrous narratives that represent frondine border officers as benign guardians of public safety, whose preemptive and morally charged work protects the endangered nation, local communities and innocents from harm. Decision making at the border reflects those elements of police science that enable fatherly and wise decision making and the taking of regulatory, proactive and preventive measures for the common good unfettered by 'strict law-like definiti

· Protecting potential victims, at the levels of nation and of community, from those who would prey upon them is central to the constitution of the border as a thin blue line, of border crossers as potential predators and of nation/community as damsel in distress.

· criminality and security concerns contributes to the slippage between and resultant ambiguity surrounding race and nationality at the border

· he border. While considerations of 'race' are officially rejected and denied, nationality is constituted as a separate and distinct attribute that is considered to be an entirely legitimate frame for the classification of security intelligence on organized crime, criminal gangs and terrorism and, hence, for the individualized risk assessments carried out by frontline border office

· here. (280801) While race is an unacceptable basis of discretionary risk assessment at the border, nationality is continually reproduced as a legitimate consideration in this target-hardening effort to get a bigger 'return on the investment

· Indian gangs, the Sri Lankans, the Tamils .... (140402) The formal distinction between criminal gang profiles that are explicitly organized according to nationality and racial profiles is significant. Nationality-based criminal profiles are acceptable. Racial profiles are not- another way to target minorities

· Border officers rarely deployed racial categories in isolation. When asked about racial profiling, officers commonly responded by talking about nationality. While references to the targeting of 'black' Americans for drugs were common, their nationality as Americans also figured prominently (as sometimes did their city of origin) .Jamaica was commonly mentioned as a high-risk nationality and country of origin, as were a few specific countries in A

· high-risk nationality and country of origin, as were a few specific countries in Africa. Vietnamese and East Indian people were frequently mentioned in relation to currency violations (often referred to as 'Asians' or 'Orientals') and Middle Eastern and East Indian people were identified in relation to terrorism (sometimes referred to as 'Arabs', 'Muslims, or broken down into a collection of specific nationalities). As explained by another officer: Oh, it happens, it does happen. There are officers [who believe that] if you're an oriental, you have money [to launder] and they'll send you over [for secondary inspection]. And it's not always the case, so, you know. And there are also officers that say: 'you're a black person? Well, you're a drug dealer, over you go' .... It's natural, it is natural. And I've even found myself on the line thinking, 'Boy', you know, 'you're an oriental, I'm going to send you over f

· Our findings thus reveal two significant points of ambiguity: between 'actual' racial profiles and other kinds of racially inflected decision making and between race and nationality. This clearly fraught situation inevitably produces local resistances. One of the officers with whom we spoke expressed frustration that black kids were more likely to be sent for further inspection for reasons of suspected criminality, even though their crimes tended to be less serious- hypervisiblity

Another officer described how they would request that 'a carload of white people' be sent down in order to deflect such accusations

Browne article

· With the banopticon, certain groups and individuals are labeled as potentially dangerous. This labeling as dangerous is then massively applied to certain nations and their citizens and to those outside the bounds of citizenship, where anxieties and the anticipation of risk stemming from those deemed “dangerous minorities” then shape security measures at borders, on city streets, and other spaces that come to be associated with risk, or with being at risk of becoming risky

· According to Bigo, the banopticon is “characterized by the exceptionalism of power (rules of emergency and their tendency to become permanent), by way it excludes certain groups in the name of their future potential behaviour (profiling) and by the way it normalizes the non- excluded through its production of normative imperatives, the most important of which is free movement.”

· The branding of enslaved people as a means of accounting for a particular ship’s cargo, for example, was not only individualizing but also a “massifying” practice that constituted a new category of subject, blackness as saleable commodity in the Western Hemisphere.

· Runaway slave advertisements were not only about ascribing physical details to the runaway, but also offered the slave owner’s assessment of the fugitive’s character.- hypervisibility

· Collins situates the bodies and lives of black women who labored as domestic workers and the white- controlled private homes in which they were employed as the “testing ground for surveillance as a form of control” that was enacted by way of “techniques of surveillance,” including close scrutiny, sexual harassment, assault, violence, or the threat thereof

· . For the white women who employed them, Collins argues, this arrangement was predicated on the illusion that “the Black women workers whom they invited into their private homes felt like ‘one of the family,’ even though they actually had second- class citizenship in the family.”113 Yet within these labor conditions of hypervisibility, black domestic workers needed to assume a certain invisibility where, as bell hooks observes, “reduced to the machinery of bodily physical labor, black people learned to appear before whites as though they were zombies, cultivating the habit of casting the gaze downward so as not to appear uppity

· Seemingly “invisible to most white people, except as a pair of hands offering a drink on a silver tray,” this signifying act was performed by many domestic laborers so that they would be assumed to be readily manageable and nonthreating.1

Coupled with this system of scrutinizing black women’s domestic labor in private white homes was the controlling image of “the mammy,” one of “several interrelated, socially constructed controlling images of Black women, each reflecting the dominant group’s interest in maintaining Black women’s subordination the mammy as a representational practice relies on the circulation of stereotyped images and ideologies of black womanhood that seek to position black women as “the faithful, obedient domestic servant. The mammy is depicted as caring for the family in which she is employed, often to the sacrifice of her own. This social control mechanism was “created to justify the economic exploitation of house slaves

Sex aspect (registered sex offenders)

Prison rape reading

· In today's world the judge who sentences a young person to reform school or prison passes male rape on him as surely as the sentence. Every inmate has a very short time, once inside, to pick a 'wolf (a tough protector) or face gang rape, becoming the 'girl'. Penal institutions are shown as crucibles of masculinity; places where distorted—and destructive—forms of male identity are forg

· the threat of sexual violence actually dominates the prison environment and structures much of the everyday interaction that goes on among inmates. In fact, the threat of sexual victimization becomes the dominant metaphor in terms of which almost every other aspect of prison reality is interpreted

· In an environment without women, some men must adopt the feminine role if these structures are to be perpetuated. This adoption is often coerced. Prison rape is an acting out of power roles within an all-male, authoritarian environment where strength and dominance are emphasized. This is why men who anally penetrate young and vulnerable men against their will are first, not considered rapists and second, do not incur the stigma that such an offence would attract if perpetrated outside the prison walls. The practice of rape reinforces heterosexual norms

· the typical sexual aggressor does not consider himself to be a homosexual or even to have engaged in homosexual acts. This seems to be based upon his stardingly primitive view of sexual relationships, one that defines as male whichever partner is aggressive and as homosexual whichever partner is passive

· In the twisted sexual politics of the prison, a male prisoner who has sex with his cellmate without consent is considered 'straight' (and worthy of respect) but if he instead holds hands with him, he is considered 'gay' (and a legitimate target for disdain). Rampant homophobia coexists with high levels of male rape

· . (There may be some parallels with male rape in the community, which according to Turner (2000), mostly involves hetero sexual perpetrators and homosexual victims

· Interestingly, the proportion of aggressors roughly corresponded to the racial breakdown of the population studied, 80 per cent of whom were black. The striking difference was in the victim group, where whites were greatly over-represented

· ors. Clearly, however their targets are not randomly selected and questions of racial identity may become relevant at this stage of the analysis. Part of the answer may lie in the fact that whites were seen as more isolated and less likely to belong to a network within the prison (whether based on gang membership, area of residence, or kinship bonds). Their perceived lack of solidarity may make them vulnerable

· As far as can be ascertained the UK literature is silent on the question of prevention. This is another indication that the problem is not considered a sufficient priority at an official level. Nor has it exercised prisoners enough for them to attempt direct action. This reinforces the point that sexual violation is not as endemic a part of prison life in the UK-aiding to the invisibility

· Gilligan believes that prison staff allow sexual exploitation to persist because it gives them another method of controlling prisoners: 'it deflects the violence of the inmates away from the officers and onto each other'

Prisoner reintergration article

· overcoming the stigma attached to imprisonment is one of the key, interconnected, issues (Travis, 2005). Despite the attention paid to prisoner reintegration, very little research has followed the embodied experience of prison time and the way in which this impacts on life after release.

· However, although she provides a grounded and nuanced overview of the particular challenges facing women on release from prison, including the stigma attached to incarceration, which, as she says, translates into an embodied notion, with women saying that ‘they believe they have a tattoo on their forehead that proclaims them as ‘‘ex-con’’’

· the concept of stigma generally conveys a sense of disgrace, based on an attribute viewed as discrediting, which reduces the bearer from ‘a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’

. In their conceptualization of stigma, Link and Phelan (2001: 367) understand it as existing when a series of interrelated components converge. First, people distinguish and label human differences; second, dominant cultural beliefs link such labelled differences to undesirable characteristics, or negative stereotypes; third, on the basis of these stereotypes, labelled persons are categorized as ‘them’, separate from ‘us’; with the result that fourth, ‘they’ lose status and experience discrimination and unequal outcomes.

· As earlier testimony showed, missing teeth are just one of a range of physical characteristics and habits which ‘mark out’ ex-inmates, including tattoos, smoking and swearing. However, they seem to be the most problematic, in terms of the problems women face in concealing these bodily inscriptions of incarceration.

· However, any social interaction which involves conversing with others, and any public-facing employment, reveals missing teeth. For this reason, these women were willing to go to considerable trouble and expense to repair or replace their teeth, and devoted scarce resources to getting their teeth fixed as a high priority on release- could lead to recidivism

Coping with stigma article

· A felony conviction results in sanctions that last long after incarceration and community supervision. A criminal record makes it difficult to find and maintain housing, employment, and social relationships

· Registered sex offenders (RSOs) face some of the most enduring punishments following their conviction and release from prison. They are required to register with law enforcement, which then releases their personal information and offense details to the public. Housing is problematic for RSOs because registration and notification policies can alert landlords to an individual’s sex offense conviction and make them unappealing as tenants (Zevitz & Farkas, 2000). RSOs are further limited in their housing options because of residency restrictions and because they are excluded from government-subsidized housing

· . Employment prospects for sex offenders are equally limited because many employers are unwilling to hire a convicted sex offender (Tewksbury, 2005). Even before the point of hire, RSOs on parole or probation face restrictions on their movement that make it difficult to even seek out and apply for jobs (Burchfield & Mingus, 2008). With limited housing options and difficulty attaining a legitimate source of income, RSOs who are able to find a place to live usually end up living in low income and socially disorganized neighborhoods

· A sex offense conviction also makes it difficult for RSOs to form relationships, including friendships and romantic relationships, and many suffer disintegration of their current relationships, especially with extended family members

· two additional methods of stigma management, referred to as “grouping” and “denial.” Stigmatized individuals who engage in grouping seek out other individuals who are similarly stigmatized as a source of social support and understanding. Denial is a process whereby stigmatized individuals disavow the label that society has ascribed upon them. RSOs, by denying the label, are subjectively reforming their identities as separate from their sex offense conviction.

· The registration and notification processes have reduced the anonymity of those who are convicted of a sex offense and blurred the line between discredited and discreditable stigma by making RSOs more detectable to the public.

· Because the sex offender label is not visible to others during social encounters, RSOs carry what Goffman (1963) coined a discreditable stigma. This form of stigma is not innate but arises from deviations in normal and acceptable social behavior, in contrast to discredited stigmas, which are visibly noticeable (e.g., deformity

This study defines stigma as the ascription of deviance upon an individual that leads others to judge that individual as illegitimate for social participation

· Regardless of their offense conviction, RSOs experience harsh stigmatization because society classifies all RSOs as violent, dangerous, child molesters, even if they committed non-violent offenses and have a low designated risk level

· . In addition, the majority of the public believes that once an individual has committed a sexual offense they will continue to offend unless incapacitated (Sample & Bray, 2003). Many RSOs therefore must grapple with new public identities that are not linked to their past actions or self-concepts, but rather only to their legal identities.-moral panic pushes for harsher sentences

· Stigma is an informal mechanism of oppression that strips an individual of his or her identity while giving that person a new social identity

· Stigmatization is an unavoidable consequence of a criminal conviction in American society. RSOs experience some of the most extreme stigmatization because they are required to register and have their personal information released to the public. The problem with registration is that it leads society to view all convicted sex offenders in the same way, regardless of the severity of their offense or their risk of reoffending.

· RSOs who do not believe that they are deserving of the sex offender label attempt to deny the label and its effect on their identities. Their denial suggests an act of resistance that reflects the perceived unfairness of the law or a belief that the legally designated label is not conducive to effective treatment. It also could suggest that many RSOs feel they have served their punishment, demonstrated their rehabilitation, and are deserving of forgiveness but are frustrated with a legal system and society that are incapable of showing clemency

·

· There are consequences to the coping strategies that stigmatized individuals use to manage their stigmatization. They may limit RSOs’ opportunities to pursue employment and social relationships