Institutional Consumption: Material-Organizational Bricolage and Everyday Life in U.S. Prison

• In Event: 240 - Section on Consumers and Consumption Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Consumers and Consumption Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Places and Spaces of Consumption

Abstract

Consumption research often assumes an unlimited world of market goods available to the choosing subject. Yet, for all the fine-toothed navigation of symbol and value going on in shopping centers on a Saturday, consumers may return to work on Monday for a workweek spent with tools, technologies, and uniforms chosen for them. In this paper, we examine prisoners’ bricolage as a case of ‘institutional consumption’, a term we introduce to describe the acquisition, use, exchange, manufacture, and modification of goods in formally-regulated material contexts. Such settings offer unique heuristic opportunities to examine consumption and related practices when unlimited goods and choices are starkly bounded and held somewhat constant. The prison is an ideal-typical setting, in which a single bureaucracy asserts total control over the material milieu of members through formally-defined sanctions. Relying on participant-observation in New York State prisons and interviews with former New York inmates, we describe how prisoners walk gauntlets of risk and regulation to share meals with one another and to groom themselves and their cells. Our case of institutional consumption in prison challenges the scholarly and popular portraits of prison as marked overwhelmingly by conflict and violence. Rather, the effort and risks entailed in prisoners’ bricolage strongly reflect prisoners’ everyday commitment to projects of selfhood and social membership. Our case recommends institutional consumption as a location to focus on use over choice, on making over buying, and on affordance over symbol.

Authors

• Noah McClain, Illinois Institute of Technology

• Robert Riggs, New York University