Tactics for Enduring Imprisonment: Personal Belongings in a Women's Correctional Facility

Del 2009-2010 estuve con un grupo de colegas trabajando en un centro penitenciario, femenil en el que hicimos diferentes actividades recreativas y de acompañamiento con las mujeres de ahí. En paralelo hicimos una investigación en la que estudiamos el significado que tienen los objetos y pertenencias que ellas tienen ahí dentro, que aunque son muy pocas cobran bastante importancia por todo lo que a ellas les representa.

The present work analyzes the role that personal belongings play in the everyday life within a women's penitentiary in Mexico. The sense of personal belongings was noted through discussion groups held at a prison workshop that lasted for nearly a year. Personal belongings are recognized inside prisons as an important part of the adaptation that takes place on the overall incarceration process as it plays a fundamental role between the institution and the prison subculture. Notions of possessions, self-conception, relationships, and spaces as well as other concepts surround the construct of personal belongings. Finally, notions related to 'having' and 'not having' personal belongings while being incarcerated, are discussed.

The current research was the outcome of a workshop that took place inside a women's penitentiary in Mexico, in collaboration between a university anda correctional institution. The overall purpose was to elaborate from the inmate's perspective the everyday life that takes place inside prisons, particularly for the place that 'personal belongings' have within these institutions. In the early stages of this research personal belongings were considered only as physical objects; however, once the workshop progressed our conception of personal belongings was redefined in order to reflect richer notions. Our first approach to understanding personal belongings was founded on Goffman's (2007) notion of possessions. Through discussions with various inmates our attention was drawn to the prisoner's acquisition of a particular aspect, whenever there was less chance of acquiring possessions, a richer sense regarding personal belongings was found. Hence, working, listening to music, the utilizing of select spaces in certain ways, and, even situations like gazing into the stars, involve this wider sense of personal belongings in the common goal of enduring prison.

The present paper reflects the inmate's conception discussed through the workshop, enhancing the role of possessions, considering personal belongings as possessions proper of a prison subculture that is present in the everyday life of inmates as ways of tactically ameliorating a hostile environment that tends to erode personality (thus the personal notion). First, the literature review elaborates on the conception of possessions within institutions, contrasted with notions of how inmates organize the everyday life within penitentiary institutions. The second section explains the purpose and methodology of the workshop and establishes how the inmate's conception about possessions was acquainted. In the third section the evidence found within the workshop is presented, grouped by types of personal belongings discussed by the inmates: clothing, music players, work, spaces such as dorms, rooms, beds, and the Institution. Finally, the discussion section considers possessions as tactical behaviors that oppose institutional measures that seek to reinforce institutional strategies, as ways of tactically subvert the established order from within the inmate's subculture.

1. Literature Review

Marc and Picard (1992) define an institution as a form of social organization that through a "structured set of values, norms, roles, ways of behaving and of relating" (p. 91) regulates the interactions of the individuals who constitute it. Regarding the life inside penitentiaries and other institutions where groups of individuals are isolated or contained, a total institution features certain characteristics that set it apart, according to Goffman (2007). In total institutions all aspects of life are conducted in the same place under the same central authority in company of others that are treated alike and required to do the same thing together. Daily activities are tightly scheduled and imposed by a system of explicit formal rulings enforced by a body of officials conformed into a single rational plan which reflects the official aims of the institution. A women's prison-a total institution-deprives the newcomer of her identity through "abasements, degradations, humiliations and profanations" (Goffman, 2007, p. 31), understood as institutionalized procedures or mortifications of the self. Initially people arrive to total institutions with their own possessions, their own lifestyle, or their own presenting culture which will be eventually modified or taken away by a series of institutionalized rituals with the purpose of producing at large, an inmate. Foucault (1976) posed the following question: "How has it come about that the power to punish is accepted, or simply that those punished put up with it?"(p. 310). Total institutions rely on mechanisms -such the erosion of self and individuality- as disciplinary technologies, in this sense their purpose must not be considered solely as negative or punitive, instead it should be understood prior to other objectives as a generalized way of granting compliment to an institutionalized, absolute order. Total institutions adapt and mold inmates to the norms, through primary adjustments whenever "the individual cooperates, providing the required activity under the required conditions" (Goffman, 2007, p. 190). Inmates have a limited capability of adjusting the environment through secondary adjustments, "techniques which do not directly challenge staff management but which allow inmates to obtain allowed satisfactions by disallowed means" (p. 64), distinguished by "not being openly claimed or openly discussed" (p. 192). Conviction sets in motion a primary adjustment: The admission procedure could be characterized as a farewell and a start, with the midpoint marked by physical nakedness. Leaving off of course entails property dispossession, important because persons invest self feelings in their possessions (Goffman, 2007, p. 31). Dispossession enforces rules through personality's raw material, possessions, that are either physical objects, "periodic searches and confiscations of accumulated personal property reinforce property dispossession" (p. 31); or immaterial, "perhaps the most significant of these possessions is not physical at all, one's full name; whatever one is thereafter called, loss of one's name can be a great mortification of the self" (p. 31). 

There is an interesting inquiry related to the importance of secondary adjustments. Pérez (2000) through his research in several correctional facilities in Latin America found out that there is an alternate structure run by inmates, which is parallel to the prison authorities, founded on the informality that in some cases rules the life within prisons. He defines this alternate structure as a prison subculture: An informal organization run exclusively by the inmates that, in accordance with social and cultural parameters from outside the prison, takes precedence over the formal organization in the flow of everyday prison life ..., reproducing more or less spontaneously an already existing organizational structure (Pérez, 2000: p.41, 43). The subculture is founded on common principles; the inmates inside a prison share the same norms, the same criteria of morality, the same language, and socializations that are grounded within normative parameters, but shift the official rules. Prison subcultures have the ability to organize and regulate themselves recognizing an institutional order, but establishing an informal structure that has its own rules, demarked by the amalgamation with institutional deficiencies and nurtured by social problems that tend to reproduce asymmetric conditions from the exterior, where we continue to find "the elite, the middle class and the lower class" (Pérez, 2000.p.57). Such parallel orders are better appreciated through informal practices, such as black markets that are fostered by overpopulation1 and tolerated because of institutional problems. According to a study in which a group of inmates of both genders from Mexican prisons was surveyed,2 it was found that: The problem of overcrowding in the prisons that we studied was evident and particularly severe in the dormitories ... half of the inmate population... slept in spaces that were overpopulated, in some cases housing over twice as many inmates as they were designed for. (Azaola, 2007. p. 90).

Personal items constitute a problem when to a large extent families are expected to provide supplies for basic needs, "items that the institution has stopped providing" (Azaola, 2007, p. 91). The lack of institutional supplies has reached alarming proportions in Mexican prisons, "98 per cent of inmates ... indicated that the institution did not supply them with items for their personal hygiene" (Azaola, 2007, p. 91). This condition associated with the economic problems of the inmate's family, contrasted to others who maintain an economic status and are capable of providing, produces a differentiated capability of having personal items within. Asymmetries reflect worsening conditions, where problems such as resentments or robberies3 are quite common; over 50 per cent of the inmates stated that "at least on one occasion their belongings had been stolen" (Azaola, 2007. p. 94). Artículo completo en:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285417598_Tactics_for_Enduring_Imprisonment_Personal_Belongings_in_a_Women%27s_Correctional_Facility