Intimacy, Agency, and Authority in New York State Prisons

• In Event: 21061 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Intimacy, Romance, and Relationships

Abstract

This paper examines tensions between institutional control and individual agency over intimate aspects of incarceration. Building on ethnographies of prison society, literature on the institutional production of intimacy, and work on intimacy as a site of resistance, I theorize prison as an intimate institution, characterized by the lack of privacy and routine patterns of social interaction among incarcerated people. I analyze over 50 administrative documents describing the regulatory apparatus of New York State prisons and 25 in-depth interviews with men and women who served time in New York State prisons to examine how incarcerated people and prison administrators wrestle for control over intimate spheres of life behind bars. I find that both incarcerated people and prison administrators develop strategies for how to use the inevitably intimate nature of confinement to their advantage. Prison administrators assert control over the intimate sphere by (1) developing formal rules that define and disrupt “dangerous” intimacies, while strategically producing certain “docile” intimacies; (2) reserving an arsenal of discretionary methods for severing ties between incarcerated people, including forced mobility within or between facilities; and (3) promoting narratives of danger by equating social interaction with the threat of rape. At the same time, people in prison assert their authority over the intimate environment of the prison by (1) developing an oppositional gaze towards prison authority; (2) carefully observing other incarcerated people over long periods of time; (3) asserting individual agency through embodied strategies; (4) creating sites of solidarity through emotional support networks, forms of kinship, knowledge sharing, and resilient relationships. This work sheds light on how institutional and personal locations of power interact in daily life behind bars in male and female facilities. I also discuss how these institutional and personal strategies are weighted differently across gender.

Author

• Lauren Hagani, University of Chicago