Prison Suicide and Excessive Truth

• In Event: Roundtable: Critical Criminology: Theory and Application

Abstract

Prison suicide is one of the leading causes of death in prison, preceded only by medical and natural causes. As has been consistently demonstrated in the literature, suicide is higher in prison than in the general population, which poses considerable public health and criminal justice challenges. While research has tried to understand prison suicide for programmatic and preventative purposes, there is a general lack of theorizing suicide within the larger deployment of state punishment. Knowledge of prison suicide is further complicated by its entrenchment and construction from within total institutions. As demonstrated by Bourdieu (1994), the informational capital of the state authorizes the very representation and archival of social facts. Theorizing prison suicide therefore must forefront the truth regime of state power. In this paper, critical and post-structural theory will be used to interrogate the operation of knowledge, power, and subjectivity within the social construction of prison suicide. In particular, it will be examined how prison suicide is overdetermined by various manifestations of truth and the ways in which punishment makes particular forms of knowledge possible.

Author

• Justin Donald Strong, University of California, Irvine