Teaching the rhetorics of imprisonment.

On one unremarkable Sunday afternoon, along with a host of other SPAM, I received an email from "Freedom Fighters" with a subject line that read, "Homeland Security is Creating More Jobs." On Monday, I received the same email text, but this time it was from "Criminal Justice Professionals" and the subject line read, "Help Protect Our Country." A third email arrived on Wednesday with the same text and a new subject line, "Help Fight the War on Terrorism." After stewing over the rhetorical savvy that linked "freedom fighters" with Homeland Security, suggesting that a criminal justice degree would both protect our country and contribute to the fight against terrorism, I thought about the telephone call from the almost certainly underpaid telemarketer who contacted me on behalf of the local police department to ask for a donation toward bullet-proof jackets. When I politely told her that I was not interested in giving at this time, she further inquired if I was concerned with terrorism, presumably setting up a connection between police uniforms in a small, southeast Georgia town and the elaborate workings of the Al-Qaeda underground. When I preempted this unlikely association, she asked me abruptly where I worked. It was this question that gave me the most reason to pause. How did we go from a solicitation to an investigation into my occupational status? Boldly, I parodied her, answering that I was a professor at the local university and asked if she would like to make a small donation toward our new copy machine in order to help fight the war against illiteracy. This ended our exchange.

What connects these emails to that phone call is their investment in repression as the solution to our collective fears. Because people fear the potential destructions so horrifically manifested in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, they willingly respond to aggressive, preemptive policies and rhetoric. Alternatively, they are affronted by talk of political diplomacy, economic responsibility, and cultural understanding. The classroom mirrors these sentiments, with students quick to jump on the military bandwagon and resisting slower, more complex theorization of terrorism. A society based on knee-jerk emotions divides and antagonizes, so my thoughts moved beyond initial anger over these correspondences toward more useful musings. I wondered how I got on a list recruiting criminal justice majors with the promise of increased job opportunities, the lure of fighting for freedom, and the reward of securing our "homeland." I wondered what list I might be placed on if I followed the email's link to remove me from their so-called newsletter. I wondered how long it would take this rhetoric aligning domestic policing with global terrorism to implode, revealing poor people and people of color as the de facto "terrorists" within our borders. And I wondered how I could use this series of emails in my upper-level rhetoric course titled "The Rhetorics of Imprisonment: Globalization and the Prison Industrial Complex."

As one email noted, the field of Criminal Justice is predicted to increase 27 per cent by 2010 on top of the already colossal increases that have occurred since the 1970s, along with the collapse of the steel economy, the tough-on-crime rhetoric popularized by President Nixon, the explosion of the prison industry, and the belief that the country harbors internal threats. My concerns over this burgeoning prison industrial complex, which I believe to be the domestic partner of our global war on terror, prompted me to create a course about the historical, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of policing and imprisonment. The course was met with enthusiasm from students and faculty in both its home department and the Criminal Justice program--remarkably, since we were to study how language and institutions contribute to repressive aspects of globalization such as militarized borders, an aggressive war on terror, and the policing of dissident speech. If my experience is anything more than anomalous, this course's exploration of criminality and its pedagogical approach could point to more thoroughgoing deliberation about who count as enemies of the state and what count as acts against the state, potentially opening up a conversation about how better to create a free and open society. In an effort to promote such dialogue, I will discuss how what I call the rhetoric of historical materialism helps interpret discursive valuations and their effects, links this method to a classroom pedagogy that could be applied to virtually any theme, and calls for greater attention to the production of criminality.

THE RHETORIC OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

For me, historical materialism entails thinking about language as an evolving process that helps construct reality. In my course, I want students to explore how multiple imperatives contribute to a hegemonic truth about criminality, institutionalize it within the U.S. prison industrial complex, and distribute it worldwide. To ask how this happens is not just to ask about politics, economics, or culture, but to inquire into the rhetorical processes that combine these three spheres and produce repressive effects that go hand-in-hand with an ill-conceived and on-going war on terror.

Any process of community-building exemplifies how the circulation of persuasive language across political, economic, and cultural realms produces specific, though not inevitable, realities. For instance, individuals often believe they can identify the criminal element simply by locating differences such as race, comportment, and style. These markers unite and differentiate people based on cultural experience; but such valuations also emerge from and contribute to political and economic values that are embedded in the markers. A so-called criminal class might converge around drug-use--a cultural experience--but legislation regulates what is and is not an illegal drug, while limited opportunities for profitable working-class jobs hasten participation in alternative economies. The method I espouse tracks rhetoric language invested with values--across the political, economic, and cultural spheres that collectively shape our many taken-for-granted assumptions about the world. In my experience, such an approach deflects the traditional practice of blame, opening up a space for discussion that is both more accurate and potentially more enabling to students whose identifications situate them on one side or another of the accuse and defend divide. In other words, students are less likely to resist course materials that situate their affiliations within a complex circulation of responsibility rather than offering an easy scapegoat that unilaterally causes the world's problems or, alternatively, as unequivocal and innocent victims.

Opposed to binary constructions, the rhetoric of historical materialism is an interdisciplinary inquiry into this valuation process that builds from two founding principles. First, because all discourse can be understood as containing persuasive aspects and effects, all discourse can be interrogated rhetorically. As a site of struggle, language must be explored through history and in conjunction with the political, economic, and cultural spaces of lived experience. Second, our material world is shaped by these rhetorical processes, not static positions nor fixed institutions; thus analysis of language must emphasize the dynamic flows of that process in order to come to terms with the concrete effects of symbolic valuations and exchanges. If the culture we consume on television--reality police shows, docudramas, and talk shows--pictures a depraved criminal class lurking among the inner-city poor, politicians have a readymade campaign promise--tough on crime with heavy prison penalties--and corporations can easily cash in on the captive market of prisoners for both low-wage labor and high-priced consumer goods, such as exorbitantly priced telephone cards. While each of these issues might seem a separate theme in the imprisonment debates, the political, economic, and cultural spheres work in tandem, exchanging and negotiating rhetorical values among them. Politicians could not easily pass high minimum sentencing and businesses could not readily exploit prison labor if our dominant cultural representations of crime depicted criminals as people in need rather than irreproachable and antisocial misfits.

By examining such exchanges through delimited themes, like contemporary imprisonment, students can begin constructing a more complex picture of how our repressive world came to be--what cultural practices normalize repression, what legislation mandates and universalizes repression, and what institutions finance and profit from repression. Students can do this without a sense of defensiveness, without aggression at an easily marked enemy, and without hopelessness derived from the belief that repression is a "necessary evil." Bringing this rhetorical approach into the classroom redirects conversation from the usual binaries of innocent and guilty or good and evil into questions of how we arrived at this moment and how we might forge new paths. Like all social facts, repression--especially notable since the September 11th terrorist attacks--has been constructed by individuals, groups, and institutions. Through this approach students learn that such constructions are fluid and open to change.

RHETORIC OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM: A PEDAGOGICAL SKETCH

The rhetorical method that I am calling historical materialism tracks valuations and exchanges among the three spheres and illuminates the rhetorical boundaries that such exchanges constitute. There can be nothing final about the historical reality created through such processes. That such reality can be torn apart, like a sheet of a paper along dotted lines, is a key assumption of this methodology. But we cannot tear along lines we do not know exist. For me, this means doing extensive research on a given theme before developing a course. After gathering reading materials, I construct a preliminary narrative that suggests how the phenomenon emerged and developed. Within this history, a course should offer as many explanatory voices as possible, as well as texts that approach the topic from differing angles, transcending classical rhetoric's dominant two-sided approach to argument. Pedagogies such as Gerald Graft's "teaching the conflicts" thrive because they explain how different takes on an issue emerge from people with different interests. However, such approaches can also devolve into pro-con battles that leave little room for understanding and no room for a genuinely multiperspectival approach.

To move beyond such limitations, my methodology does not begin with two sides of an argument, but begins with the different ways that our social structure creates and reinforces particular versions of an issue to the exclusion of others. David Harvey calls this approach dialectical and suggests that its method is to ask "by what process was [a social fact] constituted and how is it sustained?" (50). Edward Said calls it "contrapuntal" analysis, in that it reads the dominant narrative while remaining aware of the multiple "intertwined and overlapping histories" it organizes (11). With these theories in mind, I developed the "Rhetorics of Imprisonment" as a course for humanities and social science students at Georgia Southern University. A regional university in the rural South, GSU has a diverse student body (primarily African American and Caucasian American with a growing number of Hispanic and Asian students), many of whom are first-generation and most of whom are traditionally-aged college students. My course mirrored these demographics.

A major goal in the course was to provide students with a variety of competing voices questioning the hegemonic belief that simplifies the world into bad criminals and good citizens. Such a goal requires that students continuously grapple with the myths and ideologies that define the criminal classes. I divided the course into five sections: (1) History of U.S. Prisons: Building the Nation and Criminalizing the Native; (2) Imprisoning Difference and Deviance: Race, Gender, and Sexuality; (3) The Capitalist Political Economy and the Prison Industry; (4) Policing the Border: From the Mexican-American War to the War on Terrorism; and, (5) Globalizing U.S. Policy and the Creation of Resistance. In each section, we read texts by academicians, prisoners, policy-makers, and activists, debating the history, evolution, and reality of imprisonment as it intersects with political, economic, and cultural realities. We avoided the question of whether some acts deserve to be punished through imprisonment and focused instead on the effects of imprisonment and the myriad ways political and civic campaigns persuade the public of the need for imprisonment without posing alternative means of maintaining a lawful society. After only one semester, students were of course not ready to abolish the prison system, but the constant questioning of major tropes surrounding criminality certainly destabilized their attachment to those narratives and helped them see society as an interdependent, historically and discursively constructed entity.

To highlight both continuities and differences in criminality, I provided students with what Walter Benjamin calls dialectical images. According to Benjamin, "every image of the past that is not recognized as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" (255). Because historical evidence must be made to matter in our contemporary world, I offered two visual texts separated by over 100 years. The first was imagery from Cesare Lombroso's nineteenth-century anthropological study The Born Criminal, which contains sketches of indigenous people worldwide, ranking their criminal propensities according to facial features. The second was a page filled with sketches of different faces used by police to identify gang members, presumably as actual or potential criminals. Both texts picture only black and white faces, one after another; both focus on nonwhite male bodies; and, both suggest a clear link between visible features and criminality. The question we put to these texts is not who is to blame, but what processes constructed these rhetorical artifacts and what kind of society do they help sustain. We also explored the history of U.S. slavery, alongside the imprisonment of startling numbers of African-American men and women. Resisting the easy slippage into the black-white racial divide, we also analyzed the imprisonment of American Indians, Chicanos, and native Hawaiians, asking why these groups were the most frequently imprisoned in different regions across the country. Again, our questions focused on historical progression, political struggle, economic imperatives, and cultural norms. We were trying to piece together a map of the contemporary prison-industrial complex, not an indictment of any individual or group.

I designed the course to be transdisciplinary--not just to study various disciplinary perspectives on criminality, but to include students from various disciplines so that no one interpretative frame became the dominant lens of the course. We read academic articles from historians, political scientists, criminal justice experts, and cultural theorists, but also read "insider narratives" that included Angela Davis's Autobiography and John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers; creative nonfiction accounts, including Henry Jack Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast and Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing; and the short prison reports collected in Mumia Abu-Jamal's Live from Death Row. We read the poetry of Luci Tapahanso, the autobiography of Jimmy Santiago Baca, Miguel Pinero's play Short Eyes, and several first-person accounts from prisoners. We attended a gallery showing, titled "Hunger, Madness, and Crime," and studied prison art. We examined government legislation alongside activist work opposing such legislation. We viewed documentaries ranging from Stanford University's prison experiment, Quiet Rage (where participants in a mock prison demonstrated that even well-adjusted people become perverse with power and powerlessness), to an expose of the repression and violence waged against the black organization MOVE in The Bombing of Osage Avenue.

Students responded well to the variety of texts, which helped keep the course moving in new, but related, directions, forcing us continually to revise our own internal narratives as well as the academic picture we were collectively piecing together. Throughout the course, students took in and wrestled with the implications of different perspectives on the same issue. Of course, they didn't always agree with the author's conclusions, and often had difficulty imagining viable alternatives to imprisonment. It would be misguided to assume that my one-semester course could stimulate a student-led movement to overthrow the institution of imprisonment. My goal was more modest: to instill a practice of questioning, in the Freirean sense, that not only leaves students suspicious of the intertwined political, economic, and cultural foundations of the prison industry but also encourages them to use this rhetorical method in their understanding of other aspects of our social fabric. It is my experience that students do not resist thinking if they are given a method for such inquiry. In fact, they often find that critical reflection enhances their experience with different media: they continue to enjoy reality police dramas, but they bring to their viewing and to their conversations with others an additional layer of engagement.

In the hope of connecting these lived experiences with course readings, I encouraged students to make connections between local issues and larger national and global patterns. For instance, I included a speaker from the Center for Disease Control who was working with the local prison population to decrease the rapid transmission of AIDS after infected prisoners were released. This speaker's comments provided an immediate context for the ideas discussed in several articles on sexuality and imprisonment. Some of these articles suggested that the traditional domestic, caretaking role of women has made them particularly vulnerable to imprisonment through new legislation targeting those who accommodate criminals in their homes--often mothers, girlfriends, and wives--while others explored the varied sexual activities of imprisoned men who define themselves as heterosexual outside prison. Both of these issues came to light in our conversation about the regional increase in young women of color contracting AIDS as a result of sexual relationships with previously imprisoned male partners. Thus, the broad discussions of our classroom connected to social issues facing our community.

To emphasize this locality, the course asked students to participate in community activities. For instance, I took a small group of students to the Marxist Reading Group conference in Gainesville, Florida to hear Christian Parenti and Susan Buck-Morss give keynote addresses that directly and indirectly resonated with our course material. Students presented on the work they were doing in this class and how it informed their other personal and professional goals, met with other academics, and networked. They attended a meeting of the local chapter of Critical Resistance (a nationwide prison abolition organization) and began discussing how to start a chapter connected to our university and local community. Other students visited local prisons and worked with literacy programs. One group discovered a nearby prison museum and explored the origin and development of such museums nationwide. These relationships with community members and local organizations helped students see the course material in concrete connection to lived experience, but the relationships also helped students understand that rhetoric both interprets and alters the world. Consequently, students began to conceive of themselves as both in the world and creating the world, taking responsibility for their agentive power to intervene in repression and injustice.

I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. While I definitely think this course was a success, in great part owing to its focus on the rhetoric of historical materialism, there were sections of it that fell fiat. White collar crime and border issues were less well received than race, sexuality, gender, and drug issues. Students had a visceral understanding of problems associated with race, sexuality, and gender; they were well acquainted with the drug culture; they heard, on news programs, about different laws and their effects. But even in the face of Enron and WorldCom, students didn't fully respond to the ramifications of white collar crime. Instead, they held onto their belief that such crimes are merely the result of the few "bad apples" George W. Bush identified in his 2002 speech on corporate responsibility. Students could see imprisonment as clearly related to political grandstanding, to racist, gendered, and sexualized stereotypes, and to the economic limitations imposed on poor people. Yet they resisted indicting capitalism itself by clinging to the notion that white collar crime was somehow exempt from the contamination of these other processes. White collar crime might not be analyzed as fluidly as other topics in the course because of its invisibility in the spheres with which most students are familiar. With the exception perhaps of Enron (which seems to have functioned as the sacrificial lamb cleansing the rest of corporate America), corporate crime does not receive the same attention as racialized drug crimes, for instance. Nonetheless, this section remains important to a full understanding of imprisonment, requiring me to find better reading material, more diverse representations, and different approaches to corporate criminality.

CRIMINAL RHETORICS: A CALL TO INCORPORATE CRIMINALITY INTO POLITICAL DISCUSSIONS

I designed this course to place the topic of imprisonment in an historical context, highlighting the various effects produced from the exchange of values discursively linked to the construction of criminality. As the policing and prison industries quietly stockpile resources and acquire nearly limitless power, a double effect comes into being. The effects of this valuation process produce some realities: more prisons provide jobs for an unskilled labor force in an otherwise shrinking job market and for others, life in a 10 by 14 foot cell. They restrict other realities: treatment programs, job creation, and cultural understanding, to name only a few. I want students to understand this double reality and to engage rhetoric as dialectical reflection.

Politically, I want students to understand that campaign rhetoric facilitates new legislation, and that that this legislation often limits the freedom of people and ideas by erecting artificial boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable activities. Economically, the prison industry rescues failing job markets in both the Rustbelt and Deep South states, but that economic revitalization costs millions in state and federal support, frequently at the expense of education and other social services. Culturally, criminalization has advanced new media reality TV programs and militarized video games, for instance--at the same time that it has contributed to the increased incarceration of racial, ethnic, national, and sexual Others. Armed with such dialectical knowledge, students are less likely to resist classroom discussion and more likely to resist easy rhetorical constructions.

Rhetorical valuations within different spheres help forge the larger boundaries of possibility--that space of constantly evolving reality in which we live. The more contact students have with a diversity of representations on a given theme and the more practice they have connecting the dots between and among these representations, the less they resist critical analysis and the more complex their thinking about a given issue becomes. The content of my course asks students to see criminality as an identity category to which we are all, in quite asymmetrical ways, subjected. When we do this, we can begin to, in Angela Davis's words, create "unpredictable or unlikely coalitions"--between community activists and prisoners, between anti-WTO protesters and prison abolition groups, among queer groups, civil rights workers, and labor organizations, between consumer advocates and ethically-minded business organizations, and even between soldiers fighting the war on terror and students studying criminality (322). One way to achieve these unlikely coalitions, I argue, is to use an historical materialist perspective to interrogate the rhetorical constructions of criminality and of terrorism.

WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Illuminations." Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 1968: 253-64.

Davis, Angela. "Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA." The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham: Duke UP, 1997: 303-23.

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993.