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Article Excerpt
How much of this right here are you
gonna take out there and pass along? [...] I mean, if you don't listen to what people are telling you, what are yon fighting for? --Rae, North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women
Women in prison read, in authorized and unauthorized ways. I've learned a great deal about prisoners' reading practices from speaking with a number of incarcerated women--in Minnesota, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.--about their practices of reading sensational paperback "true crime" books. In the words of Melissa, a twenty-seven year-old Native American woman incarcerated in the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, some women in prison "live to read true crime." Employees in the North Carolina prison library estimate that 75 percent of library patrons come in search of true crime books. Because overuse and theft continue to diminish the library's true crime collection--which is replenished only through donations--true crime fans who can afford to do so order books directly from publishers, while fans of lesser means borrow books from others' personal collections.
In order to explore what it might mean for imprisoned women to "live to read true crime," this essay draws on individual interviews and group discussions with seventeen women incarcerated in the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. (1) Ranging in age from 22 to 47, ten of the interviewees are African American, four are white, two are Native American, and one identifies herself as white and Indian. Their criminal charges range from drug sales to first-degree murder, and their sentences vary from three years to life imprisonment. (2) Some of the women had only an eighth-grade education before coming to prison, while others had taken college-level courses; many have pursued further education in prison.
Imprisoned women's enthusiasm for true crime books invites further consideration given the genre's largely vilifying and racist nature, and its overwhelmingly white, middle-class female readership. Bearing titles such as Sins of the Mother and Cruel Sacrifice, true crime books usually take the form of a clearly-defined battle between noble law enforcement agents and an evil criminal protagonist, most often a male serial killer or an "All-American housewife" who kills her husband or children for purely selfish ends. The racial economy of the genre relies on a distinction between the exceptional, shocking criminal acts of its almost exclusively white protagonists, and the assumed, un-noteworthy criminality of black and brown people. The only African American men featured in true crime books include Wayne Williams--the man falsely accused of the Atlanta child murders, and O.J. Simpson and George Russell--two men whose successful immersion in white culture facilitated their alleged rape and murder of white women. African American women never appear as protagonists of true crime books. They occasionally surface in the most sensational collections of mini true crime stories, but only if they have served as accomplices to white criminals or if they are marked by a titillating quality such as lesbianism. Furthermore, true crime books frequently foreground the troubled childhoods and dysfunctional family backgrounds of the protagonists as evidence of their deep-seated pathology, while at the same time undermining such evidence as cliched attempts to invoke "the abuse excuse" (Dershowitz 4).
Critics as Philip Jenkins, Edward J. Ingebretsen, Karen Haltunnen, Mary Jane DeMarr and Bryan Morgan Kopp have analyzed how true crime books divert attention from existing political and domestic arrangements by featuring aberrant criminals as the source of social ills, yet no existing study addresses how variously situated readers engage with true crime narratives. (3) I argue, in this essay, that incarcerated women's practices of reading true crime books merit critical attention because they illuminate the crucial work that women perform with the scarce resources available for literary and intellectual life behind bars. The constant drone of the television now pervades what little common space exists in prisons, and "library" sometimes refers to a dozen cast-off, outdated, silverfish-laden books. In more well-stocked prison libraries, the shelves of Harlequin romances, self-help books, and "Cops & Crime" novels make it difficult to imagine prisoners reading Fanon and Angela Davis, or--as San Quentin inmates did in the late 1960s--circulating handwritten pages of The Communist Manifesto via clothesline. Moreover, the "dumbing down" of prisoners and the infantilization of women prisoners--both at the level of prison administrations and in the wider culture--profoundly shape incarcerated women's reading practices, sometimes in astonishingly explicit ways. When I was leading a book club in the North Carolina prison, for instance, an administrator attempted to maintain a clear distinction between a select group of book club participants and "the regular population"--the majority of prison library patrons--by locking the "book club" books in the correctional officers' station. This paucity of available resources renders particularly significant the complex and resourceful ways in which imprisoned women work to challenge, complicate, and alter true crime narratives' reductive accounts of women's crimes.
Incarcerated women's true crime readings merit critical attention, moreover, because they function as forms of testimony that contribute to the ongoing project of theorizing women's experiences as objects and subjects of violence. I define testimony, in this instance, as women's witnessing to the specific experiences of atrocity they have both perpetrated and sustained. This notion of testimony also includes women's accounts of their cumulative experiences with "ordinary" forms of violence--their daily, embodied encounters with race, class, gender, and sexual inequalities--which fall outside the domain of clearly-defined instances of atrocity. In their engagements with true crime books, the incarcerated women often shuttle back and forth between their own and the protagonists' experiences, sometimes using true crime narratives to shape and to validate their own testimonies, and sometimes using their own testimonies to challenge and to revise true crime narratives. Drawing on conceptions of testimony as a political and intersubjective act which takes place in a performative context (Cubilie 14), I argue that the forms of testimony which emerge in incarcerated women's discussions of true crime books help to theorize the complex interrelationships between subjective and social/structural forms of injury, violence, agency, and healing.
The theoretical terrain of victimization and agency has proven particularly difficult for leftist and feminist theorists to negotiate. Given the tendency, in conservative discourse across a range of disciplines, to address questions of victimization in the depoliticized terms of individual responsibility, attitude, and initiative, some leftist theorists remain highly skeptical of political and legal formations that foreground subjective experiences of wounding. Some feminists wary of essentializing women as victims likewise caution against foregrounding women's experiences of victimization. While it would be difficult to address the full spectrum of such arguments, Part I of this essay critically engages with the work of Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and Lauren Berlant in order to illuminate how these theorists' skepticism about political and legal engagements with subjective forms of wounding, as well as their efforts to segregate the political and the therapeutic, ultimately preclude adequate consideration of the circumstances of incarcerated women. Although incarcerated women's experiences may seem exceptional, theorists' tendency to marginalize prisoners in their conceptualizations of injury and agency threaten to exacerbate our escalating practice of "disappearing" the human evidence of profound social problems behind prison walls. In Part II, I explore how the testimonies that emerge in imprisoned women's true crime readings help to re-articulate the political and the therapeutic, contributing to more nuanced theorizations of the relationship between individual and social forms of injury and healing. In sharp contrast to the legacy of "bibliotherapy"--the practice of prescribing reading as a cure for what ails prisoners--I read the women's testimony as a resource for theorizing what ails us as a society.
Part I: Rendering Prisoners Visible
The question of testimony and prisoners' subjective experience occupies a paradoxical place in the work of Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault critiques "knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct)" as the "object-effect" of the carceral network (305). He argues that criminology's individualizing, pathologizing, depoliticized knowledge project "establishes the 'criminal' as existing before the crime," linking her to her crime by "a whole bundle of complex threads (instincts, drives, tendencies, character)" and marking her as a member of a quasi-natural class or species (252-253). According to Foucault, seeking the causes of the criminal's crime "in the story of his life, from the triple point of view of psychology, social position and upbringing" (252) involves judging criminals "on what they are, will be, may be" while eliding the political, economic, and discursive practices by which the criminal subject is produced (18).
This emphasis on "the biographical" (Discipline 252) as a mere "alibi" for vengeance and normalization ("Prison" 47) stands in tension, however, with Foucault's later emphasis on techniques of the self. In "What is Enlightenment," for instance, Foucault valorizes modernity as a willingness to "take oneself as [an] object of a complex and difficult elaboration," and as an eagerness to transform the historical present "not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is" (Ethics 311). He calls us to perform a "critical ontology of ourselves," which should be considered not as "a permanent body of knowledge" but rather as "an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them" (Ethics 319). In Foucault's formulation, performing a critical ontology entails an "aesthetic" commitment to developing oneself ("Michel" 131)--to making one's very existence a "work of art" ("What" 312)--through a continual practice of freedom which draws on models that are suggested and imposed on us by culture.
Although he briefly...
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