It Makes me Feel Less of a Human Being: What Incarcerated Men Say About “Inmate”/“Convict”

• In Event: Convict Criminology Panel #4: Perspectives on Stigma

Abstract

In contemporary scholarship on punishment and criminology there has been increasing attention to the language used to describe people involved in the carceral system, with a recent push towards using person-first or person-centered language. To date, the emphasis of this push has been on words used to describe people living in prisons, jails, or living with convictions, highlighting how words like “convict,” “inmate” and “felon” are dehumanizing and stigmatizing (Cox, 2020). Others have pushed back, arguing such efforts may perpetuate oppression by “policing” the language of people with direct experience with the carceral system (Ortiz et al., 2023). This paper shifts the focus of the language debate away from the preferences of academics to center the perspectives of those subject to some of the harshest current penal practices: those who are currently in prison. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with over 90 imprisoned men we ask these men about their language preferences, as well as how they feel about being called “inmate,” “prisoner,” and/or “convict.” The majority of men express a desire to be referred to by their name, rather than a label. Most men describe all these words as stigmatizing and dehumanizing, some express ambivalence, while a few prefer specific terms.

Authors

• Veronica L. Horowitz, University at Buffalo, SUNY

• Synøve Andersen, University of Oslo

• Jordan Hyatt, Drexel University