On Wednesday 29 April, The Differential Association will be discussing Edwards, Ashmore and Potter's 'Death and Furniture'. The article is a reflection on realism versus relativism and the arguments for and against social constructionism.
As well as discussing the questions of epistemology that this article throws up, we will also be applying these questions to our own research and experience, so that we can consider the theoretical preoccupations in light of tangible questions emerging in relation to understandings of crime and punishment.
When: 6pm Wed 29 April
Where: Mulligan's Back Room
Edwards, D., Ashmore, M. and Potter, J. (1995) 'Death and Furniture: The Rhetoric, Politics and Theology of Bottom Line Arguments Against Relativism', History of the Human Sciences, 8(2), 25-49.
Monday, 30 March 2015
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Filler Elevator Music...
The Differential Association has been AWOL for some months now. Its winning mix of light-hearted banter, deep criminological ponderings and devotion to holding monthly meet-ups in Dublin pubs has no doubt been much missed.
There has been a very good reason for its prolonged absence.
Members of the DA have been beavering away tirelessly behind the scenes to arrange a conference in which a lot of what happens at our monthly meetings will take place on a larger scale.
On Friday 27 March, the inaugural Irish Postgraduate Criminology Conference will be held. The conference is being co-hosted and funded by Dublin Institute of Technology, and the School of Law at Trinity College Dublin. It will bring together dozens of postgraduate researchers in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, criminal law, historical perspectives on crime and many others, to provide a space for research, both Irish and international.
The invited speakers at the conference are Professor Ian O'Donnell, of University College Dublin, Professor Eamonn Carrabine of the University of Essex and Dr Claire Hamilton of NUI Maynooth. We feel hugely honoured to host these speakers, especially as each has authored a text which at one time was the selected reading material of a monthly meet-up!
Normal service will resume for all those criminology discussions following the conference!
There has been a very good reason for its prolonged absence.
Members of the DA have been beavering away tirelessly behind the scenes to arrange a conference in which a lot of what happens at our monthly meetings will take place on a larger scale.
On Friday 27 March, the inaugural Irish Postgraduate Criminology Conference will be held. The conference is being co-hosted and funded by Dublin Institute of Technology, and the School of Law at Trinity College Dublin. It will bring together dozens of postgraduate researchers in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, criminal law, historical perspectives on crime and many others, to provide a space for research, both Irish and international.
The invited speakers at the conference are Professor Ian O'Donnell, of University College Dublin, Professor Eamonn Carrabine of the University of Essex and Dr Claire Hamilton of NUI Maynooth. We feel hugely honoured to host these speakers, especially as each has authored a text which at one time was the selected reading material of a monthly meet-up!
Normal service will resume for all those criminology discussions following the conference!
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Democratising Punishment by Julian V Roberts and Jan de Keijser
Julian V Roberts and Jan W de Keijser (2014) ‘Democratising
Punishment: Sentencing, Community Views and Values’, Punishment and Society, 16(4), 474-498
How far should public involvement in punishing criminal
wrongdoing be facilitated? A recent movement towards greater participation from
the ‘lay’ public has suggested that these voices are lacking in the criminal
justice system as it is currently conceptualised. Those in favour of this
movement towards ‘Democratising Punishment’ have argued that a crisis of
legitimacy is impending as decision-making in criminal justice matters becomes
ever more divorced from ‘common-sense’.
In light of this, one of the key rationales put forward by the
democratising punishment scholars, the notion of ‘common-sense’, presents itself
for examination. It is hard not to think of Gramsci’s view of common-sense as
‘a reservoir of historically discontinuous and disjointed ideas that functions
as the philosophy of non-philosophers’ which suggested that it was hardly the
wise arbiter it often purported to be (In Selections
from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci 1971).
In their forcibly articulated argument Roberts and de
Keijser critique, and in turn, criticise the models of participation and
rationales proposed by advocates of the democracy in punishment movement.
As Lon Fuller articulated, through the person of Justice
Handy, in ‘The Case of the Speluncean Explorers’,
the place of public opinion in justice has been a recurring question in legal circles:
‘I have never been able to make my
brothers see that government is a human affair, and that men are ruled, not by
words on paper or by abstract theories, but by other men. They are ruled well
when their rulers understand the feelings and conceptions of the masses. They
are ruled badly when that understanding is lacking.
‘Of all branches of the
government, the judiciary is the most likely to lose contact with the common
man.’
Fuller presented Justice Handy as entirely swayed by the
‘common-sensical’ views of the public, as revealed to him through opinion polls
in newspapers; Handy used this evidence to solve the difficult case at hand,
namely the saving of four men accused of murder (the case is worth a read, and
it makes great dinner party/pub banter).
Interestingly, given the concerns of democratising punishment
advocates about the apparent disconnect between the people and the courts, Ireland’s
highly discretionary system would surely provide acute cause for concern. It
ensures that there is even less input from democratically elected persons, while tools such as sentencing guidelines, for example, are not a feature of this
jurisdiction.
Advocates of democratising punishment extol the virtues of
community involvement. One issue not explored at length in Roberts and de
Keijser’s article however is the assumed homogeneity of ‘community’ which must
necessarily underpin these treatises. The concept of the ‘community’
in each of the models of participatory justice is presented without nuance or discussion of what
this nebulous term actually consists. Using a vague term such as 'community' also serves to glorify and romanticise the idea of lay participation, in a manner which becomes difficult to sustain when subjected to scrutiny. The direct participation of ‘community’ in this abstract form would inevitably incorporate the discrimination and inequity of society; currently within a professionalised criminal justice system there is the veneer of equality and neutrality. This is allied to the dangers of a reduction in transparency and accountability, as laypersons would not be held accountable to the same extent as professionals acting within carefully determined parameters. The entire debate suggests that a key question must be answered - is dispassionate deliberation a desired trait in decision-making? If this is not agreed on, then proportionality and principled sentencing make way for emotive and expressive justice. The argument put forth by 'Democratising Punishment' advocates that sentencing is ‘dysfunctional’ is interesting in this vein. ‘Dysfunctional’ how? In reality, this appears to mean lenient. Therefore, public participation in sentencing poses a risk of increasing punitiveness in the form of longer sentences, with the resultant rise in prison populations and expense.
Following on from the uncertain concept of 'community', even juries in many jurisdictions, including Ireland (see the Law Reform Commission report on this), are rarely representative, inevitably showcasing a selection of society skewed towards certain sub-groups. The small proportion of criminal cases which end in a jury trial is also regularly glossed over in the fiction of the jury trial as the cornerstone of the legal system. The valorising of the jury trial also sits uneasily with calls for greater expert juries or calls for a complete absence of jurors, for example in sexual offence cases or in cases of financial complexity deemed particularly specialised.
Following on from the uncertain concept of 'community', even juries in many jurisdictions, including Ireland (see the Law Reform Commission report on this), are rarely representative, inevitably showcasing a selection of society skewed towards certain sub-groups. The small proportion of criminal cases which end in a jury trial is also regularly glossed over in the fiction of the jury trial as the cornerstone of the legal system. The valorising of the jury trial also sits uneasily with calls for greater expert juries or calls for a complete absence of jurors, for example in sexual offence cases or in cases of financial complexity deemed particularly specialised.
The question of how public reactions are to be gauged
is also problematic. The equation of a media with a public reaction raises
issues of causation. To what extent can a media reaction be viewed as
reflective of a public reaction? In Ireland, an intense media reaction to the
Lavinia Kerwick case in the early 1990s led to the Criminal Justice Act 1993 in which victims were
given an opportunity, through the use of victim impact statements, to express
in court how the crime had impacted them. However, the untangling of genuine
public disquiet from media noise is difficult to quantify and assuming that media reactions are a proxy for public opinion can have the paradoxical effect of shutting the public out of debate.
Ultimately, the democratising punishment argument appears to
locate the citizen as consumer, and to prioritise concerns of getting value for
‘your’ money; a sleek criminal justice system, incorporating Points of
View-style feedback, is envisaged. The question of how great the want is among the public to
assume their starring role in the administration of justice is debatable, for
example the record low turn-out at the elections for Police Commissioners in
England and Wales, which suggested a tokenistic exercise in devolving power to
a people who had little interest. Over the previous two centuries, civil society
gradually gave up its role in the punishment of offenders, it is questionable
to what extent it has the desire and capacity to participate in a meaningful
way.
Ultimately, The Differential Association suggested that education
and information campaigns targeted at the public may offer a more feasible means of
incorporating public acceptance of criminal justice processes. Those present
discussed the possibility of televising trials, for example The Murder Trial (aired by Channel 4) and the blanket
coverage of the Oscar Pistorius homicide trial, both presented opportunities to
assess how such a proposal could work in practice. However, inevitably, the
entertainment imperatives and the danger of misleading editing presents issues
of ethics, exploitation and sensationalism.
What is lost in the literature calling for greater
democratisation is the idea that professionals in the criminal justice system are citizens; they are merely citizens
that have been tasked with acting impartially and to the best of their ability
according to pre-set parameters. Further, judges are already to an extent
influenced by public opinion in sentencing. Arguably, the use of restorative justice practices are already an attempt to introduce the community into the criminal justice process, as is community policing.
Finally, justice cannot be devolved as a discrete area which
operates without reference to other areas of policy-making. The criminal
justice system comprises one part of a symbiotic relationship with other areas
of policy and politics such as welfare and education. Should public
participation extend to these diverse other areas? To consider criminal justice
policy in isolation merely perpetuates the use of its institutions and agencies
as a catch-all for failures elsewhere in society.
Friday, 7 November 2014
'Policing Sexting' by Lara Karaian
The law is continually called upon to address emerging
issues of concern arising from technological advances. The increasingly
ubiquitous use and ownership of smartphones has presented its own novel
catchment area of behaviours, including the neologism of ‘sexting’, the taking
and sending of sexual images electronically. This year saw a high-profile news
story in which the hacked, stolen and leaked images of celebrities, mostly
women, were published online. This news story helped publicise some of the
issues around ‘sexting’ and has brought the practice to general public
consciousness. In England and Wales recently, so-called ‘revenge porn’, the
distribution of explicit images without the consent of the subject, is to be enshrined as a criminal offence, carrying a maximum penalty of two years in
prison. In the brave new world of smartphones therefore, law enforcement and
legislators are grappling with issues of security and privacy. However, the rise
of the smartphone has also ushered in child protection fears.
Lara Karaian, in a recent article for Theoretical Criminology, explores the discourses around ‘sexting’ and teen online safety.
Using the real-world example of a Canadian public service campaign designed to
educate teenagers on the harms of the internet and ‘sexting’ in particular, she
sets out her task: ‘to expose how antisexting initiatives that reify and
mobilize a culture of sexual shame in order to responsibilize certain girls for
their own, and others’, safety constitute meaning-making projects that
reproduce and reify gendered, racialized, classed and hetero-normative ideas of
sexual value, propriety, privilege and blameworthiness.’ (284)
Since the advent of the internet as an everyday tool for many people,
accessible to greater numbers of households worldwide, a rumbling about its
pernicious effects on children has been palpable. Hanna Rosin, in a recent
article in The Atlantic, highlights the difficulty in pitching a response to
the teen behaviour of sexting, and documents attempts, of varying degrees of
success, to develop responses. The concerns about children and the dangers
of internet usage can be added to the legacy of ‘respectable fears’ outlined by
Pearson (1983).
In her article, Karaian draws on Garland’s (1996) theory of
responsibilization, put forward in ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State’, to
suggest that teenage girls are being made responsible for their own sexual
safety, and for the criminalisation of their peers who may redistribute images.
Karaian locates the Canadian campaign within an identified tendency to blame
women for their own victimisation; Karaian quotes one US police officer who
rationalises the decision to focus on female behaviour with regard to
‘sexting’, to the effect that, ‘without her [the girl] there would be no crime’
and provides further contemporary relevance by citing the discourse evident
during the ‘Steubenville Rape Trial’ which concentrated on the blighted futures
of promising young men rather than the wrong they had perpetrated.
The Canadian ‘anti-sexting’ campaign was targeted
particularly at teenage girls and appeared to tap into the informal social
control mechanism of shame. The focus on teenage girls underlined a societal
emphasis on the purity and virginity of this group; innocence was
therefore understood as an identifiable form of social capital for a teenage
girl. Karaian notes the tension inherent around this form of ‘privileged’
sexuality; teenage girls are unintelligible as sexual beings while also
suffering fetishisation as sexual objects. The ‘framing’ of the Canadian
campaign, explored by Karaian, once again prioritised this privileged yet
unintelligible sexuality and further reified sexual double standards and the
concept of the 'ideal' victim.
However, Karaian contends that teenage girls were not accorded universal concern
in the campaign. Fears were concentrated in a specific sub-grouping of white,
middle-class and feminine teenage girls; which effectively presented the ‘good
girl’ in opposition to the ‘Other’, in this context the ‘Other’ as a racialized,
queer or differently classed teenage girl.
Karaian presented statistics which suggested that teenage
boys are more likely to redistribute images, and contrasts this with the
message of the campaign which targets instead the consenting ‘image creator’, framed as a girl. This
leads inevitably to questions of why the campaign did not direct more of its
focus towards this cohort of teenage boys, who distribute images without consent. However, the fears underlying disquiet about
‘sexting’ centre specifically on the sexualisation of teenage girls. The
opprobrium could be more accurately located on the act of taking pictures in
the first place, and less on the issue of distribution (which, as per victim-blaming, is then often understood as a natural consequence of a girl’s initial ‘mistake’).
The Differential Association cited some recent campaigns, aimed at locating responsibility for sexual assaults with the perpetrator. Are small but significant shifts evident in public awareness? A recent White House campaign,
‘It’s On Us’, and the ‘Don’t Be That Guy’ campaign have been developed to raise awareness among males, in contrast to many public safety campaigns which exhort to potential victims. (Interestingly, the Irish Examiner article above refers to the campaign targeting 'potential sex offenders' – which tends to make it sound like 'potential sex offenders' are an identifiable category of persons, easily spotted by their shifty eyes).
The Differential Association segued into a discussion on the well-worn chestnut, the 'sexualisation of youth', understood inevitably as the sexualisation of teenage girls. Presumably, 'sexting' is viewed by many as another indicator of sexualised youth. Is 'sexting' merely an expression of sexual autonomy? Or is it an adverse impact of the 'pornification of society'? A post-feminist argument might counter that the radical feminist
position further condemns girls for breaking the boundaries of convention by
displaying themselves as sexual beings. However, is it purely coincidental that expressing sexuality often implicitly implies expressing 'raunch' sexuality (Levy 2005). The received societal wisdom on 'sexuality' often appears monolithic, and uniform, framed from a 'male gaze' perspective. This presents a very problematic balancing act for teenage girls, as their sexuality has tended to exist as a binary, the concealed sexuality of the 'respectable' and the overt sexuality of the 'Other'. Expressive/excessive sexuality can become a marker of shame. Teenage girls seemingly cannot legitimately include sex as part of their identity and not have it become a transformative, often degrading, aspect in this identity.
Karaian’s article presents a fascinating exploration of how visual cues can be read. It also provides an
interesting example of the increasing prominence of images within criminology as a
further means of explicating how understandings of crime and deviance are
constructed. The theoretical underpinning is rigorous and is drawn together and
used to explicate a tangible case study. The Differential Association did note, however, that the arguments made in the article could have been illustrated with the images
described therein, to reinforce the interpretations and findings made throughout.
Xmas DA - Sentencing!
This December, The Differential Association will get together to have a festive chin-wag about sentencing (what makes it festive, you say, the port and the woolly jumpers!). The reading material is a recent article by Julian V Roberts and Jan W de Keijser which explores the question of who is qualified or entitled to pass sentence, and the role of the public in decision-making:
This essay explores and critiques a theory of criminal justice which privileges the role of public intuitions about punishment over more traditional influences on sentencing principles and practice. This movement may be termed ‘Democratising Punishment’ and it has important consequences for sentencing in all jurisdictions. Several recent books advocate reforms such as deriving sentencing principles from public opinion research or sentencing by juries rather than legal professionals. In the essay we critique this perspective and note the threats to principled sentencing arising from greater public involvement in the sentencing of offenders.
When: Wednesday 3rd December at 6pm
Where: Mulligan's Back Room, Poolbeg Street, Dublin 2
Monday, 13 October 2014
Policing 'Sexting'
The issue of 'sexting', or the sending of explicit images via smartphone, has received a considerable volume of publicity in 2014. The very real concerns this matter poses for the criminal justice system, and for civic organisations such as schools and colleges, has therefore been subject to considerable debate.
In an article written for Theoretical Criminology, Lara Karaian has explored the issue of policing 'sexting', from a critical perspective which incorporates elements of race, gender, feminist and queer theory. The article addresses the questions of blame which can attach to young persons, especially girls, who engage in 'sexting', and asks the question whether teenage girls are being 'responsibilised' for preventing the harms which can flow from 'sexting'.
Where: Mulligan's Pub on Poolbeg Street, Dublin 2 - back room
When: Wednesday 29 October at 6pm
In an article written for Theoretical Criminology, Lara Karaian has explored the issue of policing 'sexting', from a critical perspective which incorporates elements of race, gender, feminist and queer theory. The article addresses the questions of blame which can attach to young persons, especially girls, who engage in 'sexting', and asks the question whether teenage girls are being 'responsibilised' for preventing the harms which can flow from 'sexting'.
Where: Mulligan's Pub on Poolbeg Street, Dublin 2 - back room
When: Wednesday 29 October at 6pm
Monday, 29 September 2014
Orange is the New Black
Through the summer, The Differential Association took to Netflix in a big way, abandoning well-worn pathways created by a lifetime of experiencing television as a platform that demanded audiences kneel to its schedule. Our decision to watch Orange is the New Black was borne from the wealth of media commentary on the show, as well as our own interest in how women's imprisonment would be interpreted. Can a show be so successful, and yet retain integrity of representation?
OITNB inevitably prompted a lot of discussion about women’s bodies. Watching the pilot episode suggested it was pitching in the realm of the prison sexploitation genre without the bad dialogue. The hoary truism that sex sells was writ large across the small-screen, and as a pilot episode it was duty-bound to bring the goods, namely, sex and female flesh.
The show is also a blatantly middle-class perspective of a prison regime, a regime which is itself anomalous across the US estate. Our POV, entry-level character is Piper Chapman, the analogue of Piper Kerman. The privilege of telling other people’s stories is essential to an understanding of intersectionality and power in the show. Those without power, or capital, are vulnerable to representation by others. It was the account written by the more privileged, atypical, white inmate which gave her experience a voice and communicated her story in a language which could be understood and disseminated for our cultural delectation.
Laureen Snider’s 2003 article argued that feminist criminology and feminism had created self-aware subjects of women in prison; in her assessment of the impact of feminist criminology she remarked that it had replaced innocence with resilience and awareness. It is debatable to what extent such self-awareness and resilience has penetrated women's prisons. In the show, this kind of self-awareness is exercised by a minority of the characters. The character of Piper speaks with a rights-based discourse for example, but few share this language with her. Yasmin Nair has written that the white, middle-class characters in the show are possessed of greater agency and awareness and were more able to agitate for change and appreciate their situation. Perhaps, considering the widespread success of OITNB, it has the capacity to be consciousness-raising, and to effect actual change in the punishment of women in the US?
Dawn Cecil has written on the newspaper representation of Martha Stewart, and the prison regime, during Stewart's time spent in Alderson, Virginia. She argued that the media coverage focused on sex, violence and motherhood. Media coverage on ‘Camp Cupcake’, as it was dubbed, provided a misleading view of Martha Stewart’s incarceration experience as a normalised experience, and gave the impression that women were not punished in prison. She concluded that the press and media had failed to grasp the inherent opportunity, namely, to highlight the realities and inadequacies of the prison system. This demonstrates the power and the corresponding responsibility of the media to offer a representation of a hidden population. In Ireland, when Kathleen McMahon resigned as governor of the Dóchas Centre she highlighted the irresponsible reporting of women prisoners as one factor which made prison more difficult. A glance at the newspaper accounts of women in the Dóchas Centre support her criticism. Reports are often sensationalised accounts of sex behind bars and commentary on the appearance of the female prisoners.
The sex in OITNB is overwhelmingly portrayed in positive terms, the show presents sexual relationships in prison as generally unproblematic and consensual. This obscures the issue of sexual assault within prisons, which has recently been raised by the Howard League for Penal Reform in England and Wales (despite an uncooperative Minister for Justice barring the possibility of research being conducted with serving prisoners). The issue of sexual assault in US prisons has been acknowledged by the Prison Rape Elimination Act 2003 - and to its credit OITNB does reference this piece of legislation. Kristen Bahler has written on the implementation of this Act, especially with regard to transgender persons in prison in the US. Bahler writes that the Act started to take effect late in 2013, when specially trained staff were required to provide respectfully conducted searches of transgender individuals, and accommodation for safe housing, which would be assessed on a case-by-case. Certain jurisdictions have made the news for incorporating initiative for the non-discrimination of transgender prisoners. One issue tackled in the show is the access to healthcare, particularly access to hormone therapy. The Prison Rape Elimination Act provides no requirements about the provision of this treatment, despite recommendations otherwise from various professional medical bodies. Bahler quotes a figure from the National Center for Transgender Equality which suggested that about 47% of black transgender people had been incarcerated at some stage in their lives. This would make the provision of hormone therapy an issue of huge importance which touches simultaneously on issues of marginalisation, race and punishment. While OITNB tackles this question, it resolves this issue quickly and neatly.
Another issue raised is the care of older prisoners. The ageing prisoner population presents a particular concern for contemporary justice agencies as prisoner demographics show a cohort of prisoners ageing within prison, which prompts questions about the most suitable form of care. Issues such as dealing with degenerative illnesses in prison, and the provision of hospice care, and whether this should be available within the prison estate, or beyond it, are all pressing questions (which have been tackled by some academics, for example Azrini Wahidin). The show's portrayal of age is another of its strengths. In season two particularly, the prominence of the older characters is emphasised. This creates a further aspect of diversity of representation, as 'the Greys' become integrated in plot developments. Intriguingly, within the show, the identifier of age seemed to supersede the identifier of race, certainly as illustrated by 'the Greys'. These characters were also painfully aware of their invisible and marginalised place within the prison hierarchy.
One of the central themes running through the show is the importance of food - as a means of asserting oneself, as a focus for individual characters who are deprived of autonomy over their diet, and as a point of communal exchange and interaction. This preoccupation highlights the mundane quotidian fact of prison life and research into the importance of food within prison is currently being undertaken by academics such as Alicia Crowther. The topic of food does much to highlight the informal barter economy of prison. Other issues which arise with regularity are themes of privacy and the importance of appearance in preserving identity.
The show has sparked a considerable amount of commentary. One article by Noah Berlatsky carried the clickbait headline ‘Orange is the New Black’s Irresponsible Portrayal of Men’. Berlatsky wrote:
‘Of course Orange is the New Black is under no obligation to accurately represent prison demographics, and just because they’re a minority in prison doesn’t mean that women’s stories there aren’t important. The problem is that the ways in which OITNB focuses on women rather than men seem to be linked to stereotypically gendered ideas about who can be a victim and who can’t.’
While the criticism that characters were presented as victimised has validity, the article seemed to fail in its recognition that women's stories were as important as men's stories, despite its above disclaimer. Season one also received criticism based on the perceived differentiation of flesh based on class and race. Middle-class white breasts were artfully draped by discreet folds of fabric while minority and working-class breasts were exposed to the full glare of objectification (see Yasmin Nair's article on this). Yasmin Nair has also written on race and class in the context of the use of heroin. Heroin, in season two, is the all-consuming evil. Nair writes that season two determinedly shows pathologised white women being given heroin by dangerous black women; this racialized difference is epitomised in the comparison between Red and Vee, and Nair concludes that the show cannot sustain an out-and-out, irredeemable character like Vee so must destroy her. Nair concludes further that the show fails to identify systemic prison industrial complex issues, focusing instead on individual weaknesses.
There are very few female-centred television shows, fewer with large female casts, and fewer again that have prominent minority women as characters (plural, beyond the token), or LGBT women in prominent roles and which present a nuanced array of femininities and masculinities. The writing is good, and the performances are superb. OITNB may be fronted by a white, middle-class archetype, but the show itself is something of an outlier. Its presentation of many of the deprivations of prison - from the mundane to the painful - as well as its role as a forum for women's voices, has led to a wider discussion about women's imprisonment which has been a welcome development.
This blog was written by Lynsey Black.
The views expressed herein are those of the author alone.
OITNB inevitably prompted a lot of discussion about women’s bodies. Watching the pilot episode suggested it was pitching in the realm of the prison sexploitation genre without the bad dialogue. The hoary truism that sex sells was writ large across the small-screen, and as a pilot episode it was duty-bound to bring the goods, namely, sex and female flesh.
The show is also a blatantly middle-class perspective of a prison regime, a regime which is itself anomalous across the US estate. Our POV, entry-level character is Piper Chapman, the analogue of Piper Kerman. The privilege of telling other people’s stories is essential to an understanding of intersectionality and power in the show. Those without power, or capital, are vulnerable to representation by others. It was the account written by the more privileged, atypical, white inmate which gave her experience a voice and communicated her story in a language which could be understood and disseminated for our cultural delectation.
Laureen Snider’s 2003 article argued that feminist criminology and feminism had created self-aware subjects of women in prison; in her assessment of the impact of feminist criminology she remarked that it had replaced innocence with resilience and awareness. It is debatable to what extent such self-awareness and resilience has penetrated women's prisons. In the show, this kind of self-awareness is exercised by a minority of the characters. The character of Piper speaks with a rights-based discourse for example, but few share this language with her. Yasmin Nair has written that the white, middle-class characters in the show are possessed of greater agency and awareness and were more able to agitate for change and appreciate their situation. Perhaps, considering the widespread success of OITNB, it has the capacity to be consciousness-raising, and to effect actual change in the punishment of women in the US?
Dawn Cecil has written on the newspaper representation of Martha Stewart, and the prison regime, during Stewart's time spent in Alderson, Virginia. She argued that the media coverage focused on sex, violence and motherhood. Media coverage on ‘Camp Cupcake’, as it was dubbed, provided a misleading view of Martha Stewart’s incarceration experience as a normalised experience, and gave the impression that women were not punished in prison. She concluded that the press and media had failed to grasp the inherent opportunity, namely, to highlight the realities and inadequacies of the prison system. This demonstrates the power and the corresponding responsibility of the media to offer a representation of a hidden population. In Ireland, when Kathleen McMahon resigned as governor of the Dóchas Centre she highlighted the irresponsible reporting of women prisoners as one factor which made prison more difficult. A glance at the newspaper accounts of women in the Dóchas Centre support her criticism. Reports are often sensationalised accounts of sex behind bars and commentary on the appearance of the female prisoners.
The sex in OITNB is overwhelmingly portrayed in positive terms, the show presents sexual relationships in prison as generally unproblematic and consensual. This obscures the issue of sexual assault within prisons, which has recently been raised by the Howard League for Penal Reform in England and Wales (despite an uncooperative Minister for Justice barring the possibility of research being conducted with serving prisoners). The issue of sexual assault in US prisons has been acknowledged by the Prison Rape Elimination Act 2003 - and to its credit OITNB does reference this piece of legislation. Kristen Bahler has written on the implementation of this Act, especially with regard to transgender persons in prison in the US. Bahler writes that the Act started to take effect late in 2013, when specially trained staff were required to provide respectfully conducted searches of transgender individuals, and accommodation for safe housing, which would be assessed on a case-by-case. Certain jurisdictions have made the news for incorporating initiative for the non-discrimination of transgender prisoners. One issue tackled in the show is the access to healthcare, particularly access to hormone therapy. The Prison Rape Elimination Act provides no requirements about the provision of this treatment, despite recommendations otherwise from various professional medical bodies. Bahler quotes a figure from the National Center for Transgender Equality which suggested that about 47% of black transgender people had been incarcerated at some stage in their lives. This would make the provision of hormone therapy an issue of huge importance which touches simultaneously on issues of marginalisation, race and punishment. While OITNB tackles this question, it resolves this issue quickly and neatly.
Another issue raised is the care of older prisoners. The ageing prisoner population presents a particular concern for contemporary justice agencies as prisoner demographics show a cohort of prisoners ageing within prison, which prompts questions about the most suitable form of care. Issues such as dealing with degenerative illnesses in prison, and the provision of hospice care, and whether this should be available within the prison estate, or beyond it, are all pressing questions (which have been tackled by some academics, for example Azrini Wahidin). The show's portrayal of age is another of its strengths. In season two particularly, the prominence of the older characters is emphasised. This creates a further aspect of diversity of representation, as 'the Greys' become integrated in plot developments. Intriguingly, within the show, the identifier of age seemed to supersede the identifier of race, certainly as illustrated by 'the Greys'. These characters were also painfully aware of their invisible and marginalised place within the prison hierarchy.
One of the central themes running through the show is the importance of food - as a means of asserting oneself, as a focus for individual characters who are deprived of autonomy over their diet, and as a point of communal exchange and interaction. This preoccupation highlights the mundane quotidian fact of prison life and research into the importance of food within prison is currently being undertaken by academics such as Alicia Crowther. The topic of food does much to highlight the informal barter economy of prison. Other issues which arise with regularity are themes of privacy and the importance of appearance in preserving identity.
The show has sparked a considerable amount of commentary. One article by Noah Berlatsky carried the clickbait headline ‘Orange is the New Black’s Irresponsible Portrayal of Men’. Berlatsky wrote:
‘Of course Orange is the New Black is under no obligation to accurately represent prison demographics, and just because they’re a minority in prison doesn’t mean that women’s stories there aren’t important. The problem is that the ways in which OITNB focuses on women rather than men seem to be linked to stereotypically gendered ideas about who can be a victim and who can’t.’
While the criticism that characters were presented as victimised has validity, the article seemed to fail in its recognition that women's stories were as important as men's stories, despite its above disclaimer. Season one also received criticism based on the perceived differentiation of flesh based on class and race. Middle-class white breasts were artfully draped by discreet folds of fabric while minority and working-class breasts were exposed to the full glare of objectification (see Yasmin Nair's article on this). Yasmin Nair has also written on race and class in the context of the use of heroin. Heroin, in season two, is the all-consuming evil. Nair writes that season two determinedly shows pathologised white women being given heroin by dangerous black women; this racialized difference is epitomised in the comparison between Red and Vee, and Nair concludes that the show cannot sustain an out-and-out, irredeemable character like Vee so must destroy her. Nair concludes further that the show fails to identify systemic prison industrial complex issues, focusing instead on individual weaknesses.
There are very few female-centred television shows, fewer with large female casts, and fewer again that have prominent minority women as characters (plural, beyond the token), or LGBT women in prominent roles and which present a nuanced array of femininities and masculinities. The writing is good, and the performances are superb. OITNB may be fronted by a white, middle-class archetype, but the show itself is something of an outlier. Its presentation of many of the deprivations of prison - from the mundane to the painful - as well as its role as a forum for women's voices, has led to a wider discussion about women's imprisonment which has been a welcome development.
This blog was written by Lynsey Black.
The views expressed herein are those of the author alone.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)