From total institutions to totalitarianism: Formerly incarcerated people are bringing the fight for justice

• In Event: Convict Criminology #1: History, Research, and Praxis in Convict Criminology

Abstract

The United States of 2025 finds itself within a declining democracy, yet resistance and justice movements are rapidly growing. This is an administration with aspirations of giving their president almost king-like powers that many are comparing to fascism. Such a totalitarian leaning government begins to resemble that of a total institution (Goffman, 2016 [1961]), which within its definition, includes prisons. Concurrently, another feature of the United States is hyper-carcerality; there are literal millions of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people living here, who have already directly experienced the traumatizing and oppressive total institutionality of prisons. Thus, those who are currently or were formerly confined within prisons, an institution with a long history of organized resistance and justice efforts, now find themselves living in a totalitarian-leaning society. This paper argues that carceral lived experience, framed as carceral hardship empowerment, may have forced formerly incarcerated and incarcerated people to develop skills needed to navigate, lead, and organize resistance, justice, and freedom seeking efforts within the ‘˜total institution-like’ society they now find themselves in. System-contacted people have been widely oppressed and stigmatized by our society and accused of having little or no socially redeemable value. Thus, many people within the currently and formerly incarcerated population, a group society has deemed as throw away material, may possess many attributes and skills needed to help save the very society that has oppressed, traumatized, and imprisoned them.

Author

• Grant Tietjen, University of Washington Tacoma