‘You Can’t Tell Me Who I Am’: Misrecognition, Refusal and Turning Away Within Parole

• In Event: Navigating Mental Health, Trauma, and Identity in Community Supervision

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic and interview data, this talk explores how individuals navigate parole supervision in the United States. More specifically, it examines what happens when people on parole sense that they are misunderstood – misrecognized – by the parole agency and by the entire penal state. This leads to a delicate balancing act where participants refuse certain aspects of the penal state while accommodating to others. On the one hand, individuals largely acquiesce to parole’s supervision and quotidian rules. On the other, they refuse parole’s misrecognition of them, reject the state’s authority to determine who they are, and ‘turn away’ from the penal state. Turning to the concept of refusal highlights that individuals do not just attempt to resist penal power, they flatly reject the state’s epistemic constructions. They do this by turning away from parole and by turning towards other forms of sociality beyond the penal state. This creates material and affective distance from parole, and opens up space for self-recognition and for receiving positive recognition from others.

Author

• Robert Werth, University of Southern California