Imprisoned bodies: the life-world of the incarcerated.

• Author: Leder, Drew

WHY PAY ATTENTION TO THE EXPERIENCE OF THE IMPRISONED? THERE ARE SEVERAL important reasons, some sociological in nature, some phenomenological. I begin with the former. One reason, in 21st-century America, to focus on inmates is simply because there are so many. The United States now incarcerates over two million men and women. (1) In 1972, the United States held a little over 300,000 inmates (see Justice Policy Institute, 2000). This six-fold increase in the last three decades is a result of myriad factors, including the war on drugs with its focus on criminalization and punishment, and an overall trend toward longer sentences and reduced use of parole. The incarceration binge has continued largely independent of criminal activity. Crime has decreased for the last nine years, (2) during which time the prison population has risen precipitously.

Our incarceration rates are six to 10 times as great as similar Western industrialized countries. For example, we hold more prisoners in one state (California) than do the nations of France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. The United States, though it has but five percent of the world's population, holds fully one-quarter of the world's prison population (Ibid.).

We might say the U.S. has embarked on a unique social experiment. In response to a complex variety of social ills, we respond with one "simple solution": place an ever-increasing proportion of our citizens in cages. Needless to say, this strategy has disproportionately affected minority populations whose social position is already disadvantaged. Though African-Americans compose 13% of Americans, they represent 46% of all inmates in U.S. prisons. Fully 63% of inmates are either Hispanic or black. (3)

For sociological reasons alone, it is thus important to pay careful attention to the experience of these two million. Their presence has been erased from the common society, but must not be from our scholarly and public discourse. Otherwise, the wisdom of our prison "solution" will continue to go unchallenged.

In addition to the sociological import, the experience of inmates has phenomenological meaning. Phenomenology developed as a branch of philosophy dedicated to investigating and describing the structures of human experience: time and space as lived, movement and perception, the embodied self in its encounter with objects and Others. But what happens to all these when a human being is confined for decades on end, often in cells the size of a normal bathroom? What then becomes of lived temporality and spatiality? What then the relation to one's own embodiment, or that of other people? To investigate these is to understand better the human capacity to construct a life-world even in the most constrained of circumstances.

From a sociological and phenomenological standpoint, issues of power are key within this world. The severe constraints mentioned above are imposed by state power in response to individual behaviors judged intolerable. We might say the prison exists to disempower the individual, and re-empower the threatened state. Yet the prisoner is not passive in this equation. His or her construction of a life-world is not only provoked by mechanisms of power, but constitutes a strategic response to them, sometimes carefully reasoned through, sometimes pre-thematic. I will thus examine the inmate's life-world as an active constitution. We will find that the inmate's experience of space, time, and body are interwoven with strategies of resistance, reclamation, and escape vis-a-vis a hostile environment.

Philosophically, I will draw on the work of a variety of Continental philosophers, including Heidegger's phenomenology of the life-world, Merleau-Ponty's focus on the lived body, and Foucault's attention to the body in the field of power relations. I will also draw heavily on work I did with inmates, mostly serving life sentences, in the maximum-security Maryland Penitentiary. As a volunteer, I taught some 10 to 13 men (it was an all-male prison) in a not-for-credit philosophy seminar that continued over two years. We studied a broad range of texts, including several in Continental thought by authors such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. The inmates used concepts from such works to analyze their experiences of life on the street, and in maximum-security prison. The conversations were so powerful and illuminating that I began to record them. From transcripts I produced edited dialogues that are published, with my own comments, in a recent book, The Soul Knows No Bars: Inmates Reflect on Life, Death, and Hope.

This article relies heavily on these dialogues, cited here by page numbers in parentheses. My goal is to allow the inmates to articulate their own life experience, though I gather their insights into an overarching framework. The voices we hear are mostly those of African-American men from an inner-city environment, unusual for their level of educational achievement (largely secured through prison college-extension programs that have subsequently closed down as a result of the 1993 Omnibus Crime Bill). I make no pretense that this is a representative cross-section of all inmates. If anything, categorical thinking about all "prisoners" and "criminals" has tended to feed the incarceration binge. Yet I believe the individual voices represented here do shed light on the range of human responses possible in condition of incarceration.

Aspects of the analysis may be applicable to other institutions. Foucault argues that in the modern regime of "discipline," similar mechanisms of power are at play not only in prisons, but also in the military, schools, workplaces, and hospitals. (4) I believe the work of reclamation, escape, and integration may be employed by individuals within those institutional settings.

Ultimately, inmates may provide insights into something even more general about human strategies for coping with adversity and restraint. "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it hot that I have bad dreams" (Hamlet, Il, ii, 263). So says Hamlet, struggling with an inward dilemma--or so might say someone suffering from a debilitating disease, the constraints of poverty, or other existential limitations. And so say the inmates. Bounded by the nutshell of a prison cell, the inmate can strive to be king of infinite space and time--but contends with a world of bad dreams.

Lived Time

Husserl, Heidegger, and many other Continental philosophers have distinguished between lived time and clock-and-calendar time. The latter is grounded metaphysically by Newton's vision of an absolute time that flowed forth equably, independent of observers. It is susceptible to mathematical measurement, can be divided into standardized increments, and even plotted geometrically as on a timeline. By way of contrast, lived-time, time-as-experienced, is a complex and variable phenomenon. Past, present, and future do not simply unfold consecutively as on a time-line. Heidegger (1962: 378) suggests that, in a sense, the future comes first. Our future goals and anticipations organize our present activities, and even out interpretations of the past. Nor does experiential time unfold in equable increments. Time may slow down, as when we check the clock repeatedly during a tedious lecture, and are stunned to find the minute hand all but paralyzed. At other times we wonder "Where did the time fly?" A day of delightful play may seem gone almost before begun. Yet, after the fact, it might expand in pleasant memory, while the tedious lecture contracts to insignificance.

Ultimately, our experience of time has much to do with the rhythms of our daily life and out extended projects. Waking and sleeping, washing and eating, works begun and accomplished, friends and family encountered, special events, and the change of seasons, all combine to create a textured temporal field. Often, this field can be altered, even shredded by "life on the street." The problems of the inner city--drug addiction, chronic poverty and unemployment, disrupted family life, community fragmentation, loss of hope concerning the future, all have the power to distort lived temporality. Yet life on the street is nonetheless a life, with its own goals, rhythms, activities, and interactions.

All this is radically disrupted by a prison sentence. (5) Lived-time is supplanted by an abstract Newtonian framework of mathematically measured calendar time. "Twenty years" says the judge. This is time turned into alien beast--or automaton we should say, given its blind and abstract nature. Twenty years are to be taken from a person's life. They belong not to him or her, but the state. Time itself has become something that must be served, an instrument of disempowerment. This is true not only on the macroscopic scale, but also in the intricate management of daily time to which an inmate is subjected. When you sleep, hours in and out of the cell, and limited opportunities for action will be largely predetermined by prison authorities--not natural inclination.

A massive disordering of temporality can ensue. The past may be brooded over as a scene for repetitive regret, if only at having gotten caught. The experienced present may be slowed almost to a halt by the lack of things to do, the boredom, the paucity of meaningful projects offered to inmates as they are "warehoused" for their duration. Experience of the future may be transformed, to use Minkowski's terms, from one of "activity" to one of "expectation." He writes, "through its activity the living being carries itself forward, tends toward the future, creates it in front of itself." However, "expectation" involves an inversion of lived-time. While awaiting an event that we do not control, instead of moving toward the future, "we see the future come toward us and wait for that (expected) future to become present"...