CONFINED​

Discussion

          In Erving Goffman’s Asylums (1961), he describes the characteristics of a total institution. Goffman explains that total institutions, such as a jail, have a way of creating, and sustaining, “a particular kind of tension between the home world and the institutional world and use this persistent tension as strategic leverage in the management of men” (Goffman 1961:13). When the guard asked David what he has to do to “push his buttons”, he was hoping that David would respond, well, normally. If David were on the “outside”, he may have been dragged into that confrontation. But David, however, managed to maintain his power. The guard wanted him to react, and David knew this, but David managed to come out on top, so to speak, by simply saying “my button is broken”.

          Goffman (1961) also explains that upon admission to a total institution, a person is “likely to be stripped of his usual appearance and of the equipment and services by which he maintains it, thus suffering a personal defacement” (Goffman 1961:20). Danielle certainly went through “persona​l defacement” when she was forced to sit in wet, soiled pants all day. The women that Danielle said “smelled bad” suffered through personal defacement. Goffman (1961) explains that without “identity equipment”, the individual is not able to present “his usual image of himself to others” (Goffman 1961:21). What Goffman means is when people are sent away to jail, they are no longer their typical selves; they have lost their image.

          In jail, there is a “forced deference pattern” (Goffman 1961:22). The women must pester the corrections officers about why they are not allowed to have a job, or why they could not use the weight room. Mary said she had to “push it” to get a job mowing the lawn. She did not have the freedom to just go and get the lawn mower and start cutting the grass. She had to ask for this chore. Goffman calls this a “verbal act of deference”, where the inmate must ask to do the most simple and mundane things (Goffman 1961:22).

           When a person is in jail, they undergo a “mortification of the self” (Goffman 1961:28). This means that the inmates’ sense of self is broken down – the institution does anything it can to separate the person from their identity. This happens by way of personal defacement, which I previously noted, and by “contamination…by forced interpersonal contact, and, in consequence, a forced social relationship” (Goffman 1961:28). My study participant Mary explained that she could tell the some of the corrections officers did not like women, and yet she still had to deal with them day in and day out. There was nothing she could do. Goffman compares this kind of forced relationship to rape – because a person is being forced to do something that they do not want to do. This kind of treatment is very detrimental. As Danielle said, her time in jail was the most traumatic experience of her life.

           Even though Goffman very accurately describes the characteristics of jail, he does not talk about this issue of gender discrimination, which was very prominent in this study. A sociologist that does discuss gender inequality, however, is Joan Acker (1990).

           Acker (1990) explains that hierarchical organizations are created around the man. Organizations are created based on masculinity, and women are marginalized because of it. Men are always “in the highest positions of organizational power” (Acker 1990:146). Within the jail that Mary, Danielle and Kelly were confined to, the male inmates held power over them. The men were allowed “free roam of the place”, as Danielle put it, while the women were stuck inside their unit. Because the men were allowed to go where they pleased within the walls, the women had to stay locked away. If the men wanted to go outside, the women had to stay inside. A gendered organization; such as the jail that my study participants went to; means “that advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine” (Acker 1990:146). This means that if an organization is divided by gender, then one group over the other has the advantage, and has the control; and it is not difficult to figure out which group that one is. The women at this jail were already disadvantaged. They had problems severe enough to lead them to commit crimes, (such as  low income jobs), and then they were sent to a place where the little remaining control they had left was taken away from them.

          The participants of this study experienced things that no one in their right mind would want to experience. They went through a process I call dehumanization. They suffered physical confinement. They were deprived of basic human rights to things like fresh air. They were stuck inside crowded, cramped rooms day in and day out. They endured mental confinement. They did not have access to educational, enlightening books; and the only books they did have access to were worn out and old. They did not have access to counseling or drug rehabilitation programs, which were things that they felt they needed to get better. The women had to deal with discrimination: they were not only the minority in numbers but in status because they were in an institution built for men they were disadvantaged and ignored (Acker 1990, Williams and Rikard 2004). A woman’s experience in jail is more than unpleasant; it is dehumanizing.