The Perils of Parole: California ‘Lifers’ and the Ideology of Insight

• In Event: Towards a Bourdieusian Criminology: Theorising Inequality and Injustice

Abstract

Following a series of ruptures in California’s field of penality, growing numbers of inmates serving indeterminate life sentences (or “lifers”) are facing realistic prospects for release from prison. Before securing release, however, California lifers must present themselves before a parole board. Here they are confronted with an ideology of insight that posits self-knowledge and confessional admissions of guilt as preconditions for parole suitability. While this process is portrayed as a neutral evaluation of incontrovertible human qualities, decisions are in reality a function of arbitrary categorial precepts, institutional capacities as well as political, legal, and cultural trends. Parole boards neglect the individual’s embeddedness in wider relations of social domination and deny the strategic competence required to navigate the ritualistic linguistic ritual of parole. Parole boards are language games, and inmates must appropriate a particular competence involving the ability to produce a self-representation according with a parole board’s categories of perception and action. These symbolic categories, based on psychological evaluation reports, rely on a decontextualized vision of inmates that neglects heteronomy and the structuring forces of social history, exaggerating agentic capacities for individual transformation under conditions of penal austerity and generalized ontological insecurity.

Author

• Victor Lund Shammas, University of Oslo