Learning to be a Safe Ex-Con: Race, Symbolic Violence and Discipline in Prisoner Reentry

• In Event: 376 - Regular Session. Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the ways in which conceptions of race interact with symbolic violence to produce a responsibilised subject who is willing to participate in the racialized forms of deference necessary for participation in the secondary labor market. It is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Career Development class in an agency that serves formerly incarcerated individuals. The Career Development class is a site in which stigmatized individuals, the product of the “waste disposal prison” are made safe for participation in the neoliberal State. In order to meet job placement goals, the reentry services agency must focus job development efforts on the secondary labor market. Participants in the class must be prepared to accept these positions and this occurs through the imposition of discipline and symbolic violence in the context of the Career Development class.

Author

• Deirdre D. Caputo-Levine, State University of New York-Stony Brook