Speaking of crime: narratives of prisoners

Stages, volume 17 Series Editors General Editor: Gerald Prince University of Pennsylvania Michael Holquist Yale Univers...

Author: Patricia E. O'Connor

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Stages, volume 17 Series Editors General Editor: Gerald Prince University of Pennsylvania Michael Holquist Yale University Warren Motte University of Colorado at Boulder Patricia Meyer Spacks University of Virginia

Speaking of Crime Narratives of Prisoners

Patricia E. O’Connor University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

© 2000 by the University of Nebraska Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ` V

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Connor, Patricia E., 1949– Speaking of crime: narratives of prisoners / Patricia E. O’Connor. p. cm.—(Stages; 17) “A Bison original.” Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8032-8608-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Prisoners—United States. 2. Prisons—United States. 3. Prisoners’ writings, American. I. Title. II. Stages (Series); v. 17. hv9471.o36 2000 365’.6’0973—dc21 00-027201

To Michael Regan Knapik

Contents

List of Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Transcription Conventions xiii Introduction to the Prison Research 1 1. Getting into Prison 13 2. Agency and the Verb Position 38 3. Pronouns and Agency 75 4. Reflexive Language and Frame Breaks 118 5. Conclusions and Implications 153 Appendixes 173 Notes 179 Bibliography 185 Index 199

Tables

1. Continuum and Examples of Agency 44 2. Frequency of “I” and “You” 91

Acknowledgments

The invitation to teach in prison came from the inmates of cellblock 5 in maximum security at the District of Columbia’s Department of Corrections in Lorton, Virginia. I am indebted to those inmates and to the administrators of the dc Department of Corrections and Georgetown University for the opportunity to teach and for the access later to conduct research into the life stories of inmates. That teaching commenced in 1984 and has greatly changed my life and my world of work. To those whose stories appear anonymously herein I owe deep thanks. For the gifts of story, especially those by Tony Mo, “T,” and Rickey, who have reached outside the walls with the eloquence of their words and the generosity of their spirit to encourage this work, I send back “inside” a special thanks. To Elvin, now “outside,” I gratefully acknowledge the constancy of inspiration and belief that the seeds we plant mature even without our knowledge. To my mentors and colleagues, thanks for your guidance, your patience, and your welcome into new communities of knowing: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, Rom Harre, Jim Slevin, Leona Fisher, John Staczek, Jeff Connor-Linton, Randall Bass, Pamela Fox, Lucy Maddox, George O’Brien, John Pfordresher, Michael Ragussis, Margaret Stetz, Kelley Wickham-Crowley, Peter Adams, Laine Berman, Charles Briggs, Sheila Cavanagh, Barbara Craig, Teun van Dijk, Susan Huss-Lederman, Dan Moshenberg, Ron Scollon, Lynne Thiesmeyer, Raffaella Zanuttini, and Yuling Pan. Special thanks to Dean Michael Collins of Georgetown University’s School for Summer and Continuing Education, who supported this prison project from its inception. To the tutors from Georgetown who participated in the 15 years of the teaching program that inspired this research, I offer thanks and encouragement for you in the many careers you have taken up—from lawyers and teachers to journalists and politicians. Your work, like mine, has been changed by time spent with those inside the prison walls.

xii Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the great debt to my father, Michael, and my mother, Opal, whose stories of growing up in orphanages whetted my appetite for studying institutionalized lives. I appreciate deeply the difficulty of growing up with this project that my son, Robert Knapik, and my daughter, Ellie O’Connor, managed, one day at a time. Special thanks to my husband, Michael Regan Knapik, who believed in, supported, and respected this project from the start. He knew when to help and when to let go. Thanks also to my several transcribers, who worked with such difficult tapes: Carmie Fisher, Paul Gaudio, Christina Curtin, Anne Abbruzzese, and Tim Mitchell. To Eilleen and Fred Lauersen and Cassie Fennel, readers of various versions, and to Bev Horn, Kate Knapik, and Mary and Patrick Hynes, and to the Friday and Sunday “regulars,” thanks too for your help and friendship through this long process. To my editor, M. J. Devaney, to Gerald Prince, Jane Curran, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, I send appreciation for the many sound suggestions that helped clarify this work. Errors of reasoning and infelicities that remain are, of course, my own.

Transcription Conventions

,

Commas represent sentence-falling intonation at a slight breath group pause. . Periods represent longer breaks, with each successive period indicating an increase in pausing of a half second. = Latching of phrases together is shown by =, which indicates that the speaker does not pause even when might be expected. loud Loud emphasis is shown by using all caps. hhhh Laughter is indicated by hhhh, with more h’s meaning longer laughter. / / Simultaneous speaking is represented by slash marks / / on each line where it overlaps with the other speaker on the line below. { } My remarks on the text appear within curly brackets {door slams} [?] Unclear or inaudible words appear within straight brackets, guesses are sometimes put inside the brackets [church?].

Speaking of Crime

Introduction to the Prison Research

Language inside the prison setting strikes harshly and yet poignantly for “outsiders,” who can come and go from such walled settings. As I invite you inside the world of prisoner discourse, consider below two statements chosen to illustrate these points: If you’re afraid to die, this is the wrong place to be. You’ve got to come back. There are no new conversations here.

The first of these utterances was spoken on a videotape in a classroom drama course, toward the end of an experience narrative about prison life.1 The speaker was telling the class how he was stabbed inside the prison, emphasizing how prisoners must be ready to fight to the death for their survival.2 The second comment was spoken in a phone conversation over 15 years ago, after the prison course I had been teaching had ended. “You’ve got to come back” began a plea for discursive opportunities, something that showed more than a mere desire to break the boredom. Intuitively, that prisoner appears to have realized the power of exchanging new words, new ideas with others in the formation of new ways of thinking. The request for new conversations came before I began my research project interviewing prisoners and collecting their life stories. The warning about being ready for dying came after the interviews had been completed. The tensions between those two lines (and between those two times) clearly illustrate the danger in, and yet the need for, new ways of reaching into the worlds of crime and punishment. The Need to Speak of Crime The many years inmates spend in prison parallel the long, unconcerned, and counterproductive silence by the world beyond the bars, gates, and walls. In over 15 years of working with prisoners in a maximum security prison, I have learned a great deal about time

2 Introduction

slowed down to prison pace. I have also had many opportunities to break through the indifferent silence of that isolation. To pierce that world of silence, this book presents a look at how inmates speak of their lives, particularly how they speak of crime. I ground my analysis in the contexts of relationships among inmates, between inmates and guards, between administrators and guards, and between all these and outsiders, those who do not live or work within the closed systems. While teaching part-time in prison, I was able to observe closely the productive conversational interactions between inmates and noncriminals that I brought into the cellblocks to tutor or take classes together with the prisoners. My opportune access to and sight of such newly emerging discourses sparked the linguistic and cognitive inquiry that is but a beginning for this work. As Charles Briggs (1986) states, time is never sufficient for a total understanding of another’s discourse; however, more time brings more possibilities for understanding. This 15-year endeavor takes up Briggs’s challenge that discourse studies investigate “speech situated in its social, cultural, and historical surroundings” (1993:33). Such “situated” knowledge is a most powerful instructor. Few not employed by the criminal justice system spend time in the company of the incarcerated. In spite of the obvious connection between our tax dollars and our publicly supported prisons, rarely do citizens go inside the public institutions of prisons. That is, after all, the result of design, as Michel Foucault noted in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.3 Having offended, prisoners have been categorized and set aside from the mainstream. This book uses the tools of discourse analysis to look into “set aside” lives by analyzing narratives elicited during 19 in-depth interviews of maximum security prisoners. Thus, this work contributes to our understanding of a closed society whose members have negatively affected our communities at large. At the beginning of the 21st century we are finally seeing a drop in crime rates, and especially in murder rates, in the United States. This is matched with a sharp increase in numbers of persons incarcerated. As of 1994, 195 percent more people had been incarcerated than in 1985, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (Maguire and Pastore 1995:548). The growth of U.S. prisons and jails to hold 1.8 million inmates (Beck and Mumola 1999:1) makes clear the need for a better understanding of the lives and choices made by criminals who will eventually be released.

Introduction 3

Design of the Book and Key Terms The introduction and five chapters of Speaking of Crime discuss (1) the ethnographic challenges of, and moral imperative for, researching within what Erving Goffman calls a “total institution”; (2) the nature of talk about acts of crime as they create a continuum of more (and less) personal agency for behavior; (3) the shifts inmate storytellers employ that (could) engage listeners and speakers in co-constructions of knowledge; (4) the interplay of speakers’ strategies for framing discourse within stories they tell; (5) the implications this work can have in rehabilitation; and (6) the larger contexts of language analysis to which these strategies and features can apply. Key terms used in these chapters include agent, agency, and agentive—all used to detail how subjects are (or are not) engaged, personally and morally, in relation to the action depicted in the narrative. Personal agency is the positioning of the self in an act or in the reflection on an action indexed to that person as figured along a continuum of responsibility. Positioning is a way for speakers to configure themselves and others in the statements they make and stories they tell. Framing of discourse occurs at many levels, with the entire interview as the largest frame and episodes of a story as smaller frames. Frame breaks are ways of stopping the flow of action (or what would be called plot events in literature) in order to speak directly about the events, to evaluate openly what is being described. Frame breaks provide moments for epistemic consideration, for thinking about what one knows. I suggest that during frame breaks speakers have the opportunity for the most self-reflective discourse wherein they reveal their own “take” on life events. These moments when the speakers step outside the action frames in the narrative also reveal to a listener the moments for speakers’ readiness for deeper contemplation on their moral responsibility for an act (as victimizers), or on their situation (perhaps as victims, or as both victims and perpetrators who are paying for their crimes). Such moments recall Lev Vygotsky’s 1934 work on inner speech, concept attainment, and the Zone of Proximal Development (zpd), wherein children learn by being challenged at a level slightly above their own. A simple example of the zpd operates when a child hears a new word in the public sphere (those who speak around the child at home or perhaps at school). The word is taken in, mulled over, even tried out in inner speech—a rather private kind of talk sometimes heard in solitary play. The word is then used by the child in play or interaction with another (thus attempting to enter the public, communal discourse). There the word is refined by the interaction

4 Introduction

between the private, individual realm and the other speakers in the public realm. Often, another speaker helps shape the use of the word, repeating its proper use, providing a more apt context, and so on, until the speaker becomes so comfortable with the “new” word, it ceases to be “new” at all.4 How does this work by Vygotsky help us see frame breaks as a potentially therapeutic moment or maneuver? That contemplative moment when a speaker reaches beyond the action recapitulation in a life story enacts a Zone of Proximal Development, with the listener providing an audience on whom the speaker tries out his self-concept—a new word, as it were. Chapter 4 takes up in detail this concept of reflexive language and how frame breaks cue sites for productive introspection and moral development. This attention to breaks in the story line and the agency therein adds to the work by Charlotte Linde (1993), who looks at the importance of, as well as the impact of, telling the life story. This work is interdisciplinary in nature and draws from fields of sociolinguistics (particularly narrative discourse analysis), theories of social construction in psychology, and narratology. Because all those interviewed for this study are African American, research on African American speaking style has heavily assisted my analysis of the features of storytelling at work in these narratives.5 Thematically, this research contributes to studies of conflict, violence, and, of course, incarceration and community response to crime. In particular, Speaking of Crime contributes to the study of crime by analyzing the discourse of violence, especially the climate of violence within prisons. A breakdown on statistics for reported assaults and deaths in 1993 shows that American prisons and federal incarceration facilities officially reported numerous incidents of violence: 46 inmates killed by inmates; 4,829 assaults by inmates on staff; 8,220 assaults by inmates upon inmates; and 100 inmate suicides (Maguire and Pastore 1995:586). The details behind these numbers, of course, are the stuff of narrative. Gerald Prince (1982:147) notes that the difference between a narrative and narrativity is seen in these two sentences: The cat sat on the mat. The cat sat on the dog’s mat. And thus ensues the conflict or intrigue that makes for narrativity. As a critical discourse analyst, I offer this study of prisoners’ narratives as a display not only of narrativity but of sites wherein we can locate ways of seeing the self that might also lead to a rehabilitative change in the self—a change such that in the sample sentences above we might forego a third sentence: Thus, the dog attacked the cat. Prior research clearly identifies narrative as a well-developed structure in discourse and a powerful force in the formation of the self.

Introduction 5

Prior literature looks, as well, at issues of agency as central to the structuring of human experience in one’s life and shows that we reveal agency in discourse about life experiences. Research into the world of criminals’ stories on life experiences is scant. (See, however, Cardozo-Freeman and Delorme 1984, Burke 1990, and Parker 1995.) This book shows that analysis of narrative from various fields leads to a useful discursive rubric for analysis of criminals’ stories by placing that analysis within a search for the agentive self, which I argue is cued in reflexive discourse. The gap my research tries to fill is one that uses tools of discourse analysis to connect the act of crime with the acts of telling, by examining the words, structures, and agentive positionings used in narratives by prisoners. Sociolinguist Deborah Tannen’s (1989) analyses of casual conversations and of speeches show that narrative functions simultaneously as an extension of, and a repetition of, importantly evaluated events. Significantly, she notes that narrative is a key element for involving the listener in the world of the teller. Livia Polanyi (1985) explains that narratives model the community and cultural standards as well as contribute to their making (77). Charlotte Linde’s (1993) Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence shows the folk understandings and partial templates that speakers use to categorize their lives. My work proposes that one’s own story (shaped by world knowledge) also serves to shape one’s sense of self. I argue that in the world of criminal discourse (and perhaps all discourse) this very recursiveness is a powerful instrument in formation and display of the agentive self. This work on narrative as a socially situated and personally “forming” speech genre will help clarify the multiple functioning of narrative in personal discourse. I argue that stories told about the self are speech acts (Austin 1975) that have not only an illocutionary force but a perlocutionary effect (Searle 1969) taken up (or contested) by both the audience and the speaker. In narration of life stories we see that the interaction between the social and the personal does affect the development of the agentive self. For instance, Alyssa McCabe states that narrative is used by speakers to bridge separations, create intimacy, make warnings, remember, and “translate knowing into telling” (1991:x). We must consider as well that the act of telling can inform the knowing as speakers try out presentations of their experience in the public spheres of discourse. Wallace Chafe (1990a:80) notes that the mind has the ability to imagine, “to create elaborate representations of the world around it, to represent within itself its own view of what the world surrounding the organism is like.” This view is in contrast to the limiting stimulusresponse view, with mind as mediator, and also in contrast to the

6 Introduction

information-processing view, which says that the function of the mind is to take in information from the world and submit it to various kinds of processing through “filters.” I agree with Chafe (1990a:79), who sees “narratives as overt manifestations of the mind in action: as windows to both the content of the mind and its ongoing operations.” Such windows on the mind are sites for linguistic investigation of what criminal psychologist Samuel Samenow (1984) has (perhaps too globally) dubbed “the criminal mind.” In this book, however, I look through “narrative windows” by looking directly at the grammar of utterances about crime by prisoners, whose models of the world have been at cross-purposes with the larger society. In the data analysis chapters that follow, I locate in narratives of criminal acts several units of discourse that help in an analysis of positioning, particularly through personal pronoun choices and pronoun shifts, verbs and voice, and frame breaks. I see autobiographical narrative as a dynamic speech presentation that is simultaneously a re-presentation of and to the self and thus functions as an agentive form of sense making at the levels of both discourse and sociocultural interaction. Narratives of prisoners, indeed narratives of all persons, do not exist in a vacuum (not even when extracted by one group for study by another.) Sociolinguist Deborah Schiffrin (1984a) reminds us that the oral narrative conveys a meaning and accomplishes an action in the world of conversation. Composition theorist Robert Scholes makes clear this association between telling and culture when he writes some “afterthoughts on narrative,” saying that “narrative is not just a sequencing, or the illusion of a sequence. Narrative is a sequencing of something for somebody” (1980:209). Narratologist Prince suggests, “If narrative represents (my) life, even more it constitutes it” (1992:132). What these scholars point us toward is the notion that narratives, spoken as well as written, do much more than report events. Narratives assist us in the social formation of our cultures and ourselves. Linde’s (1999) recent work on narrative’s role in institutional memory points out the shaping effects of a bureaucracy (a social service agency) on the narrative, effects that give narrative a future orientation, not just recount a past event. In analyzing stories we must take into account varieties of ways of using words as well as ways of limiting the use of words as so often occurs in isolation, especially the bureaucratized isolation of prisons. Distancing is a feature in narrating that contributes to the stance of the judgmental narrator and is made up of language that allows the speaker to look at the act recalled. Walter Ong claims that in writing, not in orality, comes distancing and that through “distancing

Introduction 7

the original emphatic identification can be attended to as we [readers] are attending to it now, and as oral folk could not attend to it” (1986:48). He notes that human knowledge demands both proximity and distance and that these two are related to one another dialectically. Yet, my data show that some structures in orality also achieve this distancing, in particular at those junctures of evaluative speech in frame breaks in narratives where agency is being recognized or deflected by the speaker. Much that is salient in any speech event is inferred not only through the words but through contextual cues and cooperative work among participants in the speech situation. In the works by Austin (1975) and Searle (1969) we find that words can be acts. In matters of indirectness (Lakoff 1973, 1979; Brown and Levinson 1987) we also find that speech acts are open to interpretation and must be agreed upon to count as acts.6 In literary theory, inference is fundamental to understanding texts. Wolfgang Iser (1989a, 1989b) calls for an active role from the reader as interpreter to recognize and to fill in what is not overtly presented in a narrative, similar to the function of ellipses in oral speech. Iser (1978, 1989a, 1989b) allows that the narrative as written is open to the interpretation of the reader, even including interpretation of the “blanks”—what is not there and yet what is brought positively to mind even when presented as a negation. Iser further states “blanks and negations increase the density of fictional texts, for the omissions and cancellations indicate that practically all the formulations of the text refer to an unformulated background, and so the formulated text has a kind of unformulated double” (1978:225–26). Iser calls this double negativity. In a personal narrative, especially so in a personal narrative about a criminal act, I have found that the negations and ellipses in reflexive frames cue sites of (or for) agentive discourse. Such sites (extending Iser) call for the interlocutor to fill in interpretations. They also call attention to the speaker himself to attend to multiple interpretations, what Norman Fairclough (1992) would deem tensions of interpretations in the dialectical and critical discourse analysis of a text. In the prison setting, such a multiplicity of interpretations also becomes vital to safety, as we see in the narratives below depicting the violence within the prison, particularly as is shown in chapters 3 and 5. Recovering implied or inferred information in a story is fundamental to understanding the display of language in speaking styles of the inmates interviewed, all of whom are African Americans. Linguist William Labov and other researchers have shown that displays of language for the audience are particularly meaningful in African American speaking styles but can also be particularly misconstrued by those

8 Introduction

who do not share the same speech community.7 Ron and Suzanne Scollon (1981, 1995), Shirley Brice Heath (1983), and Keith Basso (1970), for instance, make clear that understanding when crossing cultures requires that time be spent on analyzing what is meaningful in different ethnicities. Within the analysis of prison discourse, several dynamics of difference must be considered: race, gender, offender status, insider/outsider. African American speaking strategies are reputation centered and achieved through performance for an audience (Abrahams 1989; Briggs 1993). For instance, topic-chaining (Michaels and Cook-Gumperz 1979) and styling on the “plaza stage” (Heath 1983) by black children have been perceived as scattered, not dynamic, especially in school settings. The preferred style by the white middleclass teachers is a focused method of storytelling, one that dominates school programs. Jack Daniel and Geneva Smitherman (1990) write of the call-response dynamic in African American style that expects the audience to interweave its interpretive response to the call of the speaker (often a preacher). They claim that the call-response style of telling is “shot through with action and interaction” and is a concentric approach to communication in which the “audience becom[es] both observers and participants in the speech event” (40). Signifying and marking are two very recognizable strategies that figure into the study of African American narrative speech and especially into the interpretations that I offer in the following chapters, where many of the stories include performance aspects. Claudia Mitchell-Kernen (1986:176) notes that speakers who are “marking” not only include the words of other speakers in the telling of actual events but also deliver those words in the “voice and mannerisms” of the speakers and often for a mocking effect. Such “work” on the storytelling often shows signifyin’ on others. Signifyin’, or signifying, according to Kochman (1981:99), means “intending or implying more than one actually says” and is most often commented on as a method of verbal dueling. All language is capable of such: more than the face value of a word is at play as soon as words are put into utterances. However, when issues of social and political dissonance occur, as they have so regularly in American racial relations, the coding of language to mean something that the addressee might misconstrue but that others (including the speaker) can “catch” becomes more salient. Add to that racial overlay, the further onlay of outsider versus insider (or newcomer versus oldtimer) in prison, and you have a rich potential for mockery, mayhem, or, at the least, multiple meanings. Mitchell-Kernan (1986) dwells more on the indirectness of signifying within a speech event, rather than signifying as the speech

Introduction 9

event itself, thus showing how smoothly internalized is this linguistic resource. Such uses of words and expressions to achieve multiple meanings are salient in the discourse of African Americans and may be missed or misinterpreted by those who use other styles that may privilege directness or less interactive approaches (Kochman 1981). Combining this discourse style with the secrecy of prisons further marks the narratives that I collected as carriers of more than simplified event structures. Arguments about the necessity for such multiple meanings and coding are embedded within the historical frameworks of slavery and subjugation in American history (Gates 1987), a history that some inmates contend is continued in incarceration, since the current population in U.S. prisons is over 50 percent black. We cannot ignore the massive overrepresentation of minority populations in prisons in considering the contexts for interpreting prisoners’ narratives. Such findings and cautions about the use of narratives and the interactive manner and style of speaking in the African American community are necessary for the close reading of the form, the delivery, and the content (and its potential reversal or double) in the speech of the prisoners I interviewed. Within both the African American speech community in general and within the closed community of a prison, with its hierarchies of control, words are in use for multiple purposes, signifyin’ not merely signified. Particularly useful for this narrative analysis is the role of marking—a pointing out through linguistic devices—which appears, especially in constructed dialogues within narratives, where the speaker marks his text by enacting voices, gestures, and mannerisms of others. Also, the embedded nature of many narratives shows an interesting chaining effect when the whole discourse is considered. These features indicate sites of more evaluative and reflexive speech when double meanings or larger shapings are considered. A prison is a place of isolation and secrecy, fertile ground for coded discourse and for open-ended interpretations. A simple example of signifying within the interview plane occurred when I asked an inmate the classic Labov query, “Have you ever been in danger of death?” and he answered, “You mean other than right now?” Should this reply be taken as a joke? As a threat? As a simple statement of fact? The context of the prison interview has to be considered as I hear such a line, knowing that the prisoner alone can see over my shoulders as I face him. He could mean that danger looms behind me and he sees it; thus we are both in a deadly situation. He could mean that I have the advantage and could be putting him into jeopardy by conducting an interview with him where others can see

10 Introduction

this and perhaps conclude that the interview could harm them; thus the inmate with whom I talk is liable to be singled out for suspicion or attack. He could be being ironic, knowing that no one in a cellblock is safe. Most of all, he knows and the interviewer begins to know that all the interpretations are possible—a veritable buzz of possibilities and tensions surrounds the discourse, which has onlays connected with race, with gender, with incarceration, to name the few I have figured out thus far. All of this has to do with agency and positioning, situating the self and others in discourse. In the chapters that follow I show how we can observe the teller’s agency, his moral stance toward his own projected autobiographical self or selves in relation to the noncriminal society. The teller places personal significance on the event told and signals that importance not only by the content but by how he tells the event. Central to a personal understanding of what is told is what psychologist Jerome Bruner (1986) notes happens in autobiography: the speaker subjunctivizes his experience by contemplating what might have been, not merely telling what happened. This is most noticeable in passages that break the action frame to evaluate the experience. Such cognitive “work” on the part of the speaker supports the conclusion of psychologist Malcolm Westcott, who says that “the psychological understanding of human freedom lies in what we do and how we talk about what we do” (1992:85). For those who have forfeited freedom through their criminal conduct and incarceration, how they talk about what they did can possibly shape what they will do next. Thus, the very act of telling one’s stories of life experiences makes a potentially therapeutic space similar to that found in traditional locations for counseling. Kathleen Ferrara’s (1994) Therapeutic Ways with Words shows how collaboratively constructed discourse in formal counseling occurs as therapist and patient jointly construct stories of the patient’s acts. My work does not suggest supplanting such formal counseling. Rather, it recognizes that few inmates receive such expensive and deep counseling and that they could still benefit from the simple task of narration to someone outside the prisoner population, someone to whom the prisoner can relate his story, putting his life in perspective, putting himself in a new Zone of Proximal Development. Narratologists confirm such psychological claims by focusing on the significance of new perspectives on past events that are the topic of autobiographical representations. Wallace Martin says that in autobiography “someone describes the personal significance of past experiences from the perspective of the present” (1986:75). Thus he attests to the importance of the stance created in the narration. Martin further postulates the significance of telling on the formation of a self

Introduction 11

when he says “autobiography is typically a story of how a life came to be what it was, or a self became what it is” (75). Narrative is used as a way to struggle with understanding, and as such, stories are an interactive component of human communication, a much underused component in prisons. Applicability of This Study This book should appeal to those who consider words more than a linguistic code—those who see language as part and parcel of what it is to be human. If language gets its meaning in use, as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958, 1969) suggests, then it also makes sense that we investigate use in as many circumstances as possible. This book particularly fills a gap by using specific accounts of crime from outside the court system. For those who want to see the stories behind the rising statistics of incarceration, this book provides some detail, a method for probing further, but no easy solutions to preventing crime. This book contributes to generalized studies of narrative by its specific contributions analyzing a discourse community more vilified than studied. It analyzes how words work on us, not just for us. This work contributes not only to a discussion of prison life and crime but also to current research on narrative, remembering, personal agency, violence, conflict talk, social construction of identity, and social responsibility. In a discussion broader than that of the prison setting, readers will find that the reflexive elements presented here also indicate highly salient involvement strategies that are at work in everyday discourse about personal experiences. As such, all speakers, not just those incarcerated (who many assume are conning the interviewer), manage their discourse not only to shape a hearer’s perceptions but to imprint or reinforce the speaker’s own self-perceptions. This work shows that in recalling moments of significance in personal narratives, we as speakers participate both in the construction of a social fabric and in the social construction of our own lives—made observable by telling our stories to interested others who can learn with us from our own budding understandings of what we have done, what has been done to us, or what we have done to others. Narratives by prisoners about violence tend to heighten the visibility of the reflexive elements, due to their contrast, and thus make it easier to see the features at work in everyday discourse. I began this introduction by noting both the danger (“this is the wrong place to be”) and the desire (“You’ve got to come back”) in imprisonment. The inmate remark that “There are no new conversations here” revealed a deep and intriguing understanding of the power

12 Introduction

of language to shape the self. That remark led me to seek a better understanding about how “new conversations” reflect and affect the formations of self and society, especially in the closed society of prisons. What new conversations can do is help the prisoner see himself both as criminal in the past and as capable of change in the future. The silence of the carceral can be penetrated only if those who are noncriminal are willing to locate themselves inside the carceral along with the criminal, not walled out from but involved in discourses that allow all participants a self-positioning. This self-positioning can permit us to see ourselves as agentive, too, in the sense that agency means positioning oneself as one who does an action and as personally responsible for the action and for future acts. New conversations make opportunities for a discursive presentation in narratives located in new Zones for Proximal Development. It is now to the close examination of the situation of imprisonment and the narratives elicited in new conversations there that we turn. Chapter 1 shows how I entered into prison work and set up the research study. Chapter 2 discusses a continuum of agency in prisoners’ narratives about crimes. Chapter 3 details the shifts that speakers employ that engage listeners and ratify the speakers’ positionings. Chapter 4 shows frame breaks as sites of reflexive discourse. Chapter 5 summarizes this research and recontextualizes it within a necessary literacy of current prison situations and briefly addresses the larger contexts of language analysis to which these strategies and features can apply.

1 Getting into Prison

Since 1984, I have taught college-level English composition and literature courses inside the District of Columbia’s maximum and medium security prisons at Lorton, Virginia.1 I have noticed in my conversations with the inmates that they often create a distancing when speaking of crimes—for example, “I caught a murder charge” or “I was picked up for armed robbery.” These wordings do not straightforwardly say “I murdered someone” or “I robbed a store.” Literally, distance between the acts of killing and robbing and the pronoun that indexes the speaker as agent is created by less semantically agentive words. Both expressions, “I caught a murder charge” and “I was picked up for armed robbery,” deflect the actors from the acts. These structures might be safe ways to speak at the moment to prevent casting an impression of guilt for a crime that is part of a current legal case. However, as inmates serving long sentences in a maximum security prison, these men have long since been convicted and incarcerated. Does such talk, what might be considered less agentive talk, reflect a more serious shift in responsibility for actions? Does it show an inability, an incapacity indicated in criminologist Samuel Samenow’s (1984) premise that offenders think about themselves differently than the way responsible people think about themselves? Or, as I propose, does this shift indicate a lack of agency without which persons cannot see themselves as capable of change? To begin such an inquiry we can look at what prisoners say about themselves, what we consider a “self” to be, and what relationships there are between language, the community, and the self. To show that inmate speakers appear to understand those relationships, I offer the vignette below from a telephone conversation I had with an inmate I taught in the first year of my prison work: On a hundred-degree summer day, long after the prison education program had shut down for the year and the tutors and I had left for summer jobs, vacations, or postgraduate study, I received a call from Tony Mo, a man who


had told me how he bragged that he was a “Man” for doing time in maximum security. Tony Mo said: “Ms. O, Ms. O, you’ve got to come back.” I answered: “I guess it’s pretty awful there in the summer.” He said: “It’s not that, Ms. O. You’ve got to come back. There are no new conversations here.”2

“There are no new conversations here.” As I noted in the introduction, this was one of many utterances that were simple and eloquent, one of many utterances that revealed an intriguing and intuitive understanding of the power of language to shape the self. Such remarks led me to explore “new conversations” in the closed society of prisons. I coupled that interest with a question about whether these men saw themselves as criminal and as capable of change. Did they see themselves as agentive in the sense that agency means positioning oneself as one who does an action and as one who is personally responsible for the action? Thus, out of curiosities about agency (or lack of it) in criminal acts and prisoners’ reflections on the effects of the discursive involvement of others in their lives, I was motivated to closely study the language of criminals. I wanted to answer these questions: (1) How can the tools of discourse analysis contribute to locating a sense of moral agency within the language of criminals? (2) How are narratives of acts of violence sites of agentive discourse? (3) How do speakers encode agency? (4) More speculatively, would having more discursive opportunities promote rehabilitation? Before taking up these inquiries, I present below some background information on imprisonment in order to contextualize data I have gathered from prisoner interviews that represent current and recent prisoners’ experiences. Prisons and prisoners are situated in a 250-year history of incarceration. To contextualize the narratives within this work, we first look briefly at various perspectives and pertinent statistical data on prison. Background on Imprisonment Historical, psychological, sociological, and prisoner-written information on prisons combined with current statistics reveals much about those imprisoned in the United States. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979), Michel Foucault chronicles the movement from the monarchial use of the “spectacle”—public displays such as hanging or drawing and quartering—to thwart crime to the use of the carceral to enclose, categorize, and observe criminals. It is a book that is overtly about imprisonment mostly in European and early U.S. history, and yet it serves, as Foucault puts it, “as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalization and the

Getting into Prison 15

formation of knowledge in modern society” (308). Foucault expressly notes that the concern about prison today is not “whether it is to be corrective or not” but that prisons have become “mechanisms of normalization” (306). He notes that “the penitentiary technique bears not on the relation between author and crime, but on the criminal’s affinity with the crime” (253). Thus, a focus on the criminal’s act of committing the crime is subsumed by the prison’s compartmentalization of prisoners into normalizing categories of criminality. Fourteen years before Foucault’s publication of Surveiller et punir in France in 1975, Erving Goffman in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates reflects on how total institutions establish patterns for behavior for their inmates: “a total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (1961:xii). What Foucault later calls “discipline” as translated from the French surveiller, Goffman clearly details as controlled observation and action as he reports on his own field work at St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital in Washington dc and finds comparison with writings on research into life in convents, concentration camps, the military, prisons, and other closed communities: First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member’s daily activity is carried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together. Third, all phases of the day’s activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at a pre-arranged time into the next, the whole sequence of activities being imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution. (6)

Goffman says that supervision by “surveillance” replaces any kind of “guidance or periodic inspection (as in many employer-employee relations)” (7). Foreshadowing Foucault’s concentration on British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s observation of the “panopticon” (Foucault 1979:209), Goffman further describes such surveillance as “a seeing to it that everyone does what he has been clearly told is required of him, under conditions where one person’s infraction is likely to stand out in relief against the visible, constantly examined compliance by the others” (Goffman 1961:7). Such a view in “relief” matches that of Bentham’s panoptic gaze wherein a warder sees the prisoners in their backlit cells, whose several-tiered structure surrounds the guard


tower in his ideal carceral (Foucault 1979:201). Goffman claims that more interest in such asylums, such total institutions, should come about because “these are the forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self” (1961:12). What actually is done to the people who live inside total institutions? Are they changed for the better and thus better prepared to live outside again? Inmates of prisons have themselves presented gripping and appalling descriptions of the shaping experiences they undergo in institutions. Inmate Views The capacity to form, to change the self (we presume for the good), however, operates within the constraints of modern incarceration. Readers can consult the following authors and researchers for detailed accounts of experiences of imprisonment. Inmate Jack Abbott’s letters to author Norman Mailer, originally published in 1981 as In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, chronicle Abbott’s life as a “stateraised convict” formed in the “gladiator schools” of youth detention, where delinquency is perfected. Inmate investigative journalists Ron Wikberg and William Rideau, in Life Sentences: Rage and Survival behind Bars (1992), collect the best of their prisoner-written magazine articles from inside the Angola, Louisiana, penitentiary, exposing the daily lives, forgotten inmates, dangerous lifestyles, and ignominious deaths of those long incarcerated. Inmate Dannie M. Martin and journalist Peter Y. Sussman (1993) detail not only the difficulties of a prisoner’s right to publish but also the particular view of a criminal from inside the fence looking out in Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog. Linguist Inez Cardozo-Freeman, who wrote The Joint: Language and Culture in a Maximum Security Prison in collaboration with Walla-Walla, Washington, inmate Eugene P. Delorme, notes in the introduction that they study how “in the process of describing life in prison, prisoners reveal their world view through the language they use” (1984:xi). She premises their work on Whorf’s hypothesis that “language shapes and in turn is shaped by culture” (xi). In this folk ethnography the prisoners’ world view is revealed to be all about survival within the total institution. In recent autobiographical accounts by former inmates Nathan McCall (1994), Sanyika Shakur (1993), Assata Shakur (1987), Patricia McConnel (1995), and Patrice Gaines (1994), we see insights into survival, race, and racial connections with the economics of life before, during, and after prison. Such autobiographical works depict in the particular what Foucault presents in the general and historical: prisons shut off from view (but do not eliminate) the corporal punish-


ments, the spectacle connected with crime. The focus in American criminal justice is on the investigation, as is seen with our fascination with dramatic reenactments of the crime and the hunt for motive, as depicted in television and film dramas that concentrate on the legal requirements for prosecution: means, motive, opportunity. Recently, more discursive approaches include documentaries that provide us with interesting data for analysis. Motivations for crimes are imbedded in Tony Parker’s The Violence of Our Lives: Interviews with American Murderers (1995), a book that provides virtually unedited transcripts of admitted murderers’ stories. Sundance Film Festival for 1997 featured Arthur Dong and AnnJanetta Rosga’s Licensed to Kill, a documentary film of interviews with imprisoned murderers of homosexuals, prisoners who blatantly speak of a perceived right to kill. These works attempt to reveal through the criminals’ own words the sources for decisions to commit heinous acts. Thus, researchers on the topic of and participants in the situation of imprisonment have presented historical, sociological, ethnographic, autobiographical, epistolary, and investigative views, to name a few. Regardless of the methods underlying such works, much remains to be explored about the centrality of the impact of imprisonment on the formation or change in the self. The sheer and overwhelming numbers of the incarcerated in the United States place all work by and about prisoners not only inside a frame of a total institution but also inside a maze of changing bureaucracies dependent upon multiple funding sources and shifting political and social climates. Nowhere on the planet, except for Russia, do more people per capita spend time in prison.3 Crime and Imprisonment Statistics The latest information from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics states that at midyear 1999, 1,860,520 persons were incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails (Beck 2000:2). At midyear 1999, the rate for those in prisons and jails rose to 682 per 100,000 (2). The state of Louisiana currently has the highest incarceration rate of the 50 states, with 1,025 per 100,000 (3). Many cities have even higher rates. In the U.S. capital, Washington dc, in whose prisons I conducted my study, the rate was an astounding 1,583 persons per 100,000 when I did my study; as of midyear 1999 that rate has grown to 1,594 per 100,000 (3). Racial demographics have been steadily changing in American prisons and jails, making the overrepresentation of blacks more and more shocking. Many terms for race are used in the course of this book. The terms white and black are used by the Department of Justice’s


Bureau of Justice Statistics, and I adopt that use in statistical counts. I use the term African American in reference to linguistic studies of speaking styles of blacks raised in America. Inside the prison, inmates use various terms—Africans, African Americans, Moorish Americans, Europeans, Caucasians, whites—in references to various groups. I gloss these as necessary, fully understanding that the myriad of terms reveal rather clearly the importance of and tensions about race in the United States. In 1985, 528 white males per 100,000 people were incarcerated in prisons or jails. In 1991, the number rose to 740 whites per 100,000. Adult black males, however, for the same two comparison years, were incarcerated at a rate 6 times that of whites: in 1985 there were 3,544 blacks incarcerated per 100,000 persons, and in 1991 that rate had increased to 5,717 blacks per 100,000. An adult black male was 8 times as likely to be incarcerated than a white male adult at the time of my study in 1991 (Maguire and Pastore 1995:548). That disparity is even more marked in more recent statistics reported in 1996, when we find that by 1994 more blacks than whites are incarcerated, in spite of the fact that blacks in America comprise only 12 percent of the entire population. In 1997, “the rate among black males in their late twenties reached 8,630 prisoners per 100,000 residents compared to 2,703 among Hispanic males and 868 among white males” (Beck and Mumola 1999:1). The interview data that I collected comes exclusively from black prisoners in the District of Columbia. Of those incarcerated in Washington, 99 percent are African American, although the city itself is only 65.9 percent African American, according to the 1990 U.S. census. Speculations on the underrepresentation of whites in prisons in dc include assertions that whites can more often afford private legal counsel and thus mount better defenses, avoid prosecution, and seek alternatives to incarceration by paying fines where applicable. White prisoners are also sometimes sent to federal prisons (ostensibly for their safety), where they would not be as pronounced a minority. On 31 December 1993, at the time of my study, nearly two-thirds of all sentenced prison inmates in America were black, Asian, Native American, or Hispanic (Beck and Gilliard, 1995:9). Over 4.5 million adults were under correctional supervision in the United States at the end of 1991 when I began to collect the data for this study. According to the U.S. Department of Education: “Approximately 17 percent were in prison; 13 percent on parole; 9 percent in jail; and 61 percent on probation” (Haigler, Harlow, O’Connor, and Campbell 1994:16). Despite the proliferation of incarceration facilities, few citizens distinguish the various institutions in casual


speech, often using jail or prison as interchangeable terms and thus revealing how far out of the realm of daily life is the world of incarceration. Prisons are state or federally administered institutions where offenders serve longer time for more serious offenses. State systems in 1995 operated between 114 percent and 125 percent of their capacity, and federal prisons operated at 126 percent (Gilliard and Beck 1996:1). Jails are city or county facilities used for short-term incarcerations, usually less than a year. With overcrowding in prisons, however, many local facilities now house offenders guilty of less serious offenses for as long as two years. Prisons are usually graded as minimum, medium, maximum, or super-maximum, the gradations referring to the relative seriousness of the crime, the amount of movement allowed a prisoner within the facility (little to none in super-maximum), and the amount of security the community has from the offender (perhaps one fence for a minimum security facility or a 20-foot wall and barbed wire for a maximum security facility). Not only are there over 1.8 million inmates in prison and jail, but many have been imprisoned before, suggesting that effective rehabilitation is not happening in these facilities. In a study of state prison inmates by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 1991, 94 percent had been convicted of a violent crime or had a previous sentence to probation or incarceration (Beck et al. 1993:11). In another analysis, the Bureau of Justice reports that of 79,000 felons sentenced to probation, 43 percent were arrested within three years (Langan and Cunliff 1992:1). The Bureau of Justice reported in 1987 that “approximately 69 percent of young parolees [ages 17–22] were re-arrested for a serious crime within 6 years of their release from prison, 53 percent were convicted for a new offense, and 49 percent returned to prison” (Beck and Shipley 1987: 1). The facts—that the United States is imprisoning more and more people and imprisoning them over and over again—indicate a need to understand more fully not only the situation within the “total institution” of prisons but also the situation of the formation or reformation of the selves in relation to criminal behavior within and beyond those walls and bars. Such situations give rise to constant questions of why we have so many criminals and why imprisonment or probation fails to deter crime in communities or in an individual’s later life. How a Criminal Sees Himself Can what Goffman (1959) calls a “presentation of the self” be analyzed in the inmates’ verbal representations of themselves? Inmates I have taught often speak and write of the “environment” in which they grew up as one in which crime was part of the normal life. One


inmate serving a 30-year sentence wrote in a letter to youth offenders: “I used to watch the older guys and see them gamble and hustle drugs and fight a lot.” A former inmate I call Jesse offered the following remarks during a speech on “Community and Prison.” He spoke to a first-year Virginia college class in a course on orienting the students to community concerns in the metropolitan Washington dc area. In the passage below he recalls his youth observing “the cool guys, the ones on the corner.” Example 1.1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Then we talk about the cool guys, the ones that’s on the corner, the ones that’s always smiling, the ones that got 50 cent to give you= =the ones that got a dollar to give you, we talk about them guys. “Yeah man, Jim is the coolest of all, they’s none other cooler than Jim.” “Naw, man, Mike got Jim beat, man. You see that car Mike got?” And this is what we get into. And we’re trying to emulate these men now, you know, what is they doing. We have to find out exactly what it is to ’em, so we watch,

By saying in such utterances as “we talk about” in lines 1 and 6 and “we watch” in line 15, the parolee noted that, as a child, he and his friends observed and analyzed behavior. And in “we’re trying to emulate” (line 12), he claims that they sought to imitate those actions. Such language reveals that the man recollects the surroundings—the actions and the words—in which he began his criminal activities, and he reconstructs them for the listener, doubly marking the significance particularly by his enactment of childhood voices discussing the dealer “Big Jim” in lines 7–10, where he animates the youthful voices of Big Jim’s admirers. Does this language then support Samenow’s 1984 statement that criminals choose to commit crime, or does it reveal that these “choices” are limited to what one is exposed to? Or, can the language about the actions only inform us of the stance the prisoner takes about the choices he makes?4 Is that very language also forming the self? This study takes up these questions by examining the connections between our language and our identity formation.


Self and Narrative What is a self? Goffman’s (1959:xi) early work, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, says that a speaker presents himself in various roles as if in a theatrical performance in which he “guides and controls the impressions they form of him.” Social psychologist Rom Harre (1984) considers the self as a social construction, not merely a presentation but a self whose personal being has a unity of identity that is maintained over time and that is related to location of the body in space and in memory. Donald Polkinghorne (1988:147) traces a history of the “self” by noting that “the question of self-identity seeks to understand the basic substance or substratum that remains the same and confers individuality on a person.” For Harre and Polkinghorne, each person has an identity of the body and a unique set of memories experienced. Formerly, a view of a self as distinct from a bodily construct drew upon ideas of noncorporeal substance, that is, the soul and Descartes’s determination that our knowledge of our thinking determines our existence (Polkinghorne 1988:148). Hume rejects the idea of soul and instead offers the self as “simply the sum of all one’s experiences” (quoted in Polkinghorne 1988:148). The self as a construction rather than an underlying substance to be discovered is central to William James’s three constituents of self—material, social, and spiritual (Polkinghorne 1988:149). Polkinghorne concludes his review of these definitions with the recent moves in human sciences to “attribute the development of the notion of personal identity and the self to symbolic and bodily interaction within the social environment.” He concludes that the self “is a construction built on other people’s responses and attitudes toward a person and is subject to change as these responses, inherently variable and inconsistent, change in their character” (150). What does this catalogue of definitions add to a study of minds of criminals? They point to a shift to views of a self as dynamic, rather than static—all fairly obvious to us as moderns. Thus, we can see the understanding of self as changeable, a concept that should be compatible with a rehabilitative notion of correcting unlawful behaviors. The idea, however, that a “criminal mind” or a “criminal self” is changeable does not readily adhere. Rather, the opposite view permeates folk understandings of criminal behavior. The idea that “once a criminal, always a criminal” appears to fuel the current increase in prison proliferation. With recidivism rates as high as 65 percent, we can easily understand such beliefs. How then can we work to modify the conception that criminals cannot change and also to deter the


high recidivism rates? The missing pieces of the puzzle are twofold: time inside the prison needs to be conducive to changed thoughts, and time after release needs to be conducive to changed actions. Thus both symbolic and bodily interaction with the social fabric of a life need to be shaped. The work that I present in this investigation into “speaking of crime” marks locations in autobiographical texts that indicate opportunities for dynamic interaction in the construction of new selves. In becoming a self we are not only negotiating our location in the models around us, but we are also impacting others and ourselves. Cognitive scientist Jerome Bruner notes that it has become clear that “Self too must be treated as a construction that, so to speak, proceeds from the outside in as well as from the inside out, from culture to mind as well as from mind to culture” (1990:108). Coming to grips with this constructed identity requires serious sense making. As Polkinghorne puts it, “the person needs to synthesize and integrate the diverse social responses he or she experiences” (1988:150) and, through narrative, accomplishes just that. Sociolinguist Barbara Johnstone (1996) advocates some tempering of a social constructivist view on language development. Following A. L. Becker, she advocates a place for the particular, for the individual’s own stamp on or innovation in language style. Few prisoners I met had had (or perhaps had taken) opportunities for synthesizing and integrating their experiences of their own crimes in relationship to the societies they had left. That sort of deep contemplation that would be found in a counseling or therapeutic discourse is rarely available for the average prisoner. Many in criminal justice work and many citizens in general see “counseling” as coddling a prisoner. Talking with another inmate, however, could provide some of this depth of introspection, and I did see mentoring relationships, which indicated that older prisoners took under their wing newcomers to the prison. Inmate journalists Wikberg and Rideau report such accounts in Life Sentences. I also relate, particularly in chapter 3, how such overtures to mentor can also turn into dangerous alliances. Talk alone is not the same as deep discursive analysis of one’s thinking in an ongoing relationship that is aimed at rehabilitation and positive change. An embrace of this concept of synthesizing reactions to one’s acts can help us see how salient social pressure is in conforming. As the former inmate Jesse noted concerning the flashy men he saw in the streets as a child, “We’re trying to emulate these men.” Desire to acquire similar possessions, expensive cars, fine clothes, and


other consumer goods permeates the life stories of the incarcerated in America. The tension is troubling between establishing a self and the lack of variety of positive models on which to choose how to try out the trappings of that self. Should we be socially engineering neighborhoods to show children more options? We would balk at such a suggestion, yet housing availability and economic restrictions tacitly narrow the options already. How can a society provide for options in determining a self? Can knowing the stories of others’ lives and articulating your own stories assessing your life in comparison with others lead to options for changing a self? It is these questions, too, that this book undertakes. I suggest that the self becomes a negotiated (and contended) positioning, a dynamic process. To carry out the work of rehabilitation, it is change in the particular life, in the individual choices, that ultimately must occur. This research seeks not only to describe the kinds of shaping situations prisoners discuss in regard to crimes but also to suggest that moments revealed in the tellings indicate sites for collaboration on or co-construction of a self-awareness necessary for individual change. Missing in incarceration is in-depth attention to the life of the mind and its role in shaping actions. Instead, similar to monarchial days of punishment, attention is given to the bodies of the incarcerated, and a dangerous assumption is made that the minds will be changed to do good merely by the act of incarceration. Return rates to prison defy that assumption. In the following analysis of prisoners’ personal stories about crimes, much can be made of the social imperative to join into committing crimes, as Jesse implied about the role of the “cool guys, the ones that’s on the corner,” who so intrigued Jesse and who led him into crime. Not just the criminal environment in the streets but much of prison life itself fosters crime, as was noted in the chilling words I used in the introduction by the inmate who said of prison, “If you’re afraid to die, this is the wrong place to be.” Jerome Bruner is in the forefront of new kinds of research in a “culturally sensitive psychology” that “is and must be based not only on what people actually do, but what they say they do and what they say caused them to do what they did” (1990:16; emphasis in original). Crediting John Austin’s speech act theory, Bruner contends that not only do people do things with words, but that “saying and doing represent a functionally inseparable unit in a culturally oriented psychology” (19). In this connection between saying and doing, the discourse analytical tools of a sociolinguist become apt in investigating the world and view of prisoners. This book suggests that discursive


analysis can be adapted for the purposes of promoting rehabilitation through fostering the telling of one’s own stories and through fostering the speaker’s interpretations of his own motivations. Thus, this study explores prisoners’ narratives as more than mere presentations of a self. I show that we can begin to discern how a prisoner speaks of himself through a linguistic study of autobiographical discourse in which he says what he did. I further consider that through involvement in such worlds of discourse, spoken and written, we can see sites of “anticipations” of change in that view of self in a way that could lead to locating, even constructing, a more responsible self. Although rehabilitation is an issue typically addressed by criminologists, psychologists, and behavior specialists, I argue it can be addressed by the sociolinguistic analysis of prisoners’ discourse, specifically the autobiographical narratives of criminal acts and evaluative language about those acts. My research into and interest in prisoners’ life stories center on this possibility, these “anticipations” as central to making prisons become more about change. Methodology How I Heard These Stories Examples in the following discussions originated in the narratives collected within the maximum security institution where I had taught for six years prior to doing my main study of 19 life stories. Some of the initial data underpinning the interview studies were experience narratives audiotaped in small groups in the classroom during the course of teaching. Particularly useful were cues for stories that recall Labov’s (1972) work with New York gang members to tell their most frightening experiences. Such cues assisted inmates to make the transition from storytelling to written narrative. The 19 interviews in this study were elicited during one-on-one audio-taped interviews in 1991–92. No monetary incentives or institutional behavior incentives such as earning “good time” were offered to inmates for participation in this study. For those not serving mandatory sentences, “good time” means days off a sentence earned for good behavior, for participation in educational programs, or, in some cases, for having no behavior infractions. At first I was rather amazed that inmates would be willing to be interviewed at all. I found that talking about one’s life with nonprisoners was not a common experience, nor was it a regular part of any structure or program after the inmate was initially classified for maximum security. Other than guards, few noncriminals spend time talking to the inmates,


and guards by the nature of their positions cannot devote attention to individuals. Thus, as inmate Tony Mo succinctly put it, the fact that there are few “new conversations” may have increased the possibility that inmates would talk in detail to someone from beyond the walls. That I was known (either personally from the classroom or by reputation as a cellblock teacher and not an employee of the prison) also facilitated the sessions. In order to tap into the deep fund of insider knowledge that an inmate himself has, I used the former inmate Jesse as an informal research consultant to assist me in contacting inmates to collect some of the narratives. This man was first incarcerated at age 17 and spent all but 6 months of the next 16 years inside prisons, including 8 years in the maximum security units in which I conducted my study. He had worked for many years inside the prison as an educational aide to the literacy programs and knew all inmates quartered in his cellblock. Jesse had also been a member of the first class I taught and had taken several other courses as well. When he was paroled, a friend in the block, John, took over the role of teacher aide, as well as inside mentor for the prison education program I conducted. He also helped me find subjects for the interviews. References to both these men appear throughout the data. Inmates signed two release forms, one for the prison that is a general release for those being interviewed by any type of media representative and a second release I wrote to assure them of confidentiality and to indicate that I was using the interview for sociolinguistic research. Because part of my purpose in doing the research has been to improve my pedagogy for teaching in a prison, I explained that a major purpose of the research of eliciting life stories was to plan better teaching materials designed for rehabilitative education.5 Knowing more about the men’s past educational histories, interests, family situations, and aspirations would assist me in preparing reading lists, courses, and follow-up programs more particularly geared to a prison population. Copies of these three forms, two releases and the questionnaire, appear as appendixes A and B. I invited inmates from the course and their recommendees to participate in personal interviews, which ranged from 20 minutes to 90 minutes in length. I was able, through the help of the inmates, to tap into the social network in the cellblocks somewhat like Leslie Milroy’s (1987) door-to-door pilot study in Belfast. My own situation in working with the prisoners in the maximum security unit was conducive to using a social network method because such a personto-person approach is less invasive. Because the prison system has to


withstand much negative scrutiny, administrators and inmates alike are wary of study by outsiders. I had the advantage of already having a social network inside the maximum security unit based on my six years of work teaching inside cellblocks 1 and 5 prior to beginning the life-story interviews. Reference to that informal referral network appears in several of the recordings and in the excerpt included below. “poc” represents my initials. Pseudonyms are given to the speakers. Example 1.2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

albert: poc: = albert: poc: albert: poc: albert: poc:

Alright I heard a little about you that’s= Have you? oh, yeah /in the uh/ /is that Jesse?/ yeah, right. Jesse knows me /pretty well/ /that’s my best/ buddy. oh really?

Thus, I invited the inmates who had taken courses with me to participate in the first interviews and to refer others for subsequent interviews. I invited each participant to suggest three to five persons for the study, getting permission to use the original participants’ names as recommenders to the study. Conditions for Taping The life-story interviews were conducted under less than ideal conditions for sound reproduction, as one would expect, given the nature of American prisons. Although most facilities are operating at an average of 123 percent capacity, with those at the highest point of the overcrowding at 161 percent occupancy (Maguire, Pastore, and Flanagan 1993:617), the maximum security unit where I conducted my research has a federal court mandated limit strictly adhered to. Thus, the facility in which I worked was at capacity, not beyond capacity. However, constant compartmentalization (what Foucault, 1979, calls surveiller) creates its own “crowding,” for all spaces are designated, allocated, and observed. My one-on-one interviews were conducted within view of prison officers but not within hearing distance of those officers or other inmates.6 I have since found out that video reception of the open areas in the unit can be turned on from the control center of the prison, something I was unaware of at the time of the interviews. This did, of course, help guarantee the safety of the interviewer. Each inmate being interviewed and I sat in folding chairs or at


small school desks, side-by-side or face-to-face. We conversed privately, mostly in a small 9-foot 3 12-foot locked room with two large plexiglass windows affording the prison officers and other inmates a view of the room. For a few interviews, we conversed less privately outside that room in a short hallway adjacent to the payphone that was not used while I interviewed. For three interviews, we sat in the small room in one corner (incongruously perched side by side on a bench seat discarded from a van) while small-group tutoring of four men was being conducted in the farthest corner. Only two inmates whom I approached for interviews decided not to be audio-taped. One, a convicted rapist who now saw visions, told me his story on condition of not being taped.7 (None of his stories are used.) The other declined to be interviewed at all after the equipment was set up. I have not counted those men as participants, though their roles in refusal play a part both in ethnographic research as well as in the political sensitivity of inquiring about criminal actions. By going ahead and telling me the story of the rapes, the inmate may have made his own use of the research situation. He may have benefited from the act of telling, indeed an act rather like confessing, to a female audience. The converse of this might also be operating: telling a woman a life story about rape has its own measure of intimidation. Also, understandably (and counterproductive to forming a moral agency), a speaker might be intimidated by taping a life story, especially if not all that story were as yet known to the authorities. That I represented no authority within the prison, was not paid by the system, and held no sway over their lives most likely contributed to the rather high success rate of permissions to tape (19 of 21). Noise is a major factor in prison life and the bane of those who audio-tape data. The dayroom adjacent to the small room I used was in heavy use in the evening hours (6:30–8:30 p.m.) when I conducted the interviews. A loud television provided a constant background. Men who were not locked down (confined to their cells 23 of 24 hours) conversed while playing cards, chess, or dominoes. Some lifted free weights or used a noisy weight machine. Occasionally the buzz of an electric clipper from an inmate barber joined with the shouts of officers, loud arguments, clanging of electronically operated metal cell gates, and warning buzzers—sounds that punctuate the taperecorded data, just as they permeate the daily lives of the incarcerated. Over the years I no longer jumped at these sounds and learned, as have the inmates, that it is more often silence that signals danger in the cellblock. In the transcriptions, I have referred to the sounds if they have caused an interruption in recording or if they have cued notice by the speaker or created a change in topic.


I know, as participant-observer researchers must, that my presence in many significant ways shapes the data. At the time of the interviews I was 41 to 42 years old, in the same age range as the older inmates but, more often, 10 to 15 years older than most of the inmates interviewed. Among African American incarcerated men I differed as a white, as a female, and as a teacher of English from a major university collecting data from people who live inside a “total institution.” As a quasi-insider, as one who regularly spent time with inmates over so many years, I gained a detailed and frank account of lives. As a woman who had “status” as an educator from a major university, I also gathered rather “clean” language in the data. In deference to my status as respected teacher and to my female gender, inmates with whom I researched and whom I taught eschewed profanity and coarse language. Therefore, a person interested in collecting nuances of prison slang or the speech of the “streets” will need to look elsewhere, particularly to the informative work on “con-language” in Cardozo-Freeman (1984) and to the studies of David Maurer (1939, 1981) on “con-lingo.” Some have suggested that inmates thus spoke to me of their lives as “cleaner” than in reality. The narratives, however, reveal more instances of crime than those for which the men were serving time, suggesting the opposite—the men were more, not less, forthcoming. Though I have had many years of experience teaching inside the prison, I have only a partial, but growing, knowledge of the entire life inside the prison. As might be expected, while there as a teacher I have seen the best of these men’s lives when they struggle to achieve an understanding of literature. In the courses I conduct, I teach one evening a week and then leave, each time adding small bits of understanding to what I have learned of their lives: how the stainless steel toilet and face bowl are combined into one fixture in a cell, how shower privileges are rotated, how the management of telephone time can cost a man his life, how gaining a work position to sweep and mop can cause deadly rivalries and give dangerous access to a whole tier, how the prison is not quiet enough for a man to study until between 2 and 4 a.m., how 40 homemade knives were confiscated from this facility the summer after I finished my interviews, and so on. Each inmate learns all this knowledge at a more rapid and life-preserving pace, what I call the “necessary literacy” of prison life.8 Interview Data The interview data were tape-recorded and solicited from an openended questionnaire designed more to elicit narratives than to get any specific answers, as shown by such entries as: Tell me the story of


your life; What was important to you in growing up? and How did you come to be here? A list of the questions was read by all inmates at the time they signed release forms. The questions include the following, some of which roughly parallel Labov’s (1972; Labov and Waletsky 1967) cues: Where did you grow up? What was your neighborhood like? Your family? What do you remember most about your school years? Can you recall a time when you were in danger of death? Can you recall a time when you were blamed for something you did not do? Can you recall a time when you felt compelled to continue doing something even when you did not want to? How did you end up at Lorton? What are your goals while a prisoner and after prison?

After “warming up” with talk about the early years and home life, prisoners readily gave narratives in response to the question, “So, how did you end up here at Lorton?” These responses often elicited the most detailed narratives of specific criminal encounters. However, on occasion an inmate made a thoughtful one-word sweeping generalization such as “drugs” or “stupidity” as an initial response. The query most like Labov’s (1972) famous danger of death cue also elicited a whole subgenre of stories of how criminals commit crimes against each other. One such subgenre turned out to be stabbing stories. After many of the interviews were over, I realized that a direct question about stabbing might have been appropriate, as stories of being stabbed (or stabbing) while inside prison became a noticeably frequent occurrence in the life stories (see O’Connor 1994). Prisoners’ Confidentiality To increase the likelihood of candor in the life-story interviews, I arranged to protect the identity of the speakers. Thus, throughout the data I have supplied pseudonyms for all speakers and for those of whom they speak. This does, however, present something of a dilemma because readers are curious about the circumstances of the speakers’ incarcerations. Imprisonment, after all, is the central indicator for inclusion in this study. People ask: What are they in for? What did they do? Does knowing make a difference? The simple answer is yes. More complexly, not knowing that the person I sat beside or across from was a sex offender, or a murderer, or drug dealer—or all these combined— gave me a useful naive questioner’s stance that was helpful in asking


for more detail. Such a stance is usually not possible during other kinds of questioning in the discourse of criminal case processing. For instance, in Britain, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act requires that criminal suspects are interviewed on tape. Analysis of such police interrogations in which the crime is uppermost in the minds of the questioner is quite different from the setting I describe in my data. (See Auburn, Willing, and Drake 1995 on accusatory interviews in the British system.) Not being a prison employee nor a police official gave me another kind of naïveté. Since I was not privy to the official prison record, I was also unaware of how docilely or how aggressively the speakers had spent their prison time. Were I to conduct a long-term project of narrative work with each inmate, however, the background information would be crucial. However, just as in a counseling session, having the speaker bring up the past incidents would likely be far more useful than the model from police interrogation that establishes the crimes and queries from there. During the interviews I think these “ignorances” were assets allowing me to bring fresh perspectives to the stories being told. In the analysis of the data, however, it would be intellectually naive to continue with a lack of understanding of specific acts of crime that may have led to the speaker’s incarceration in maximum security. The crime and the time served for it both provide important contextualizations for the stories imparted. These parameters are further contextualized within the physical perimeters into which a cellblock figures within the maximum unit. We add to this the way the maximum facility is embedded in the corrections system of graduated severity of punishment, and to this system we add the final circles of surrounding modern American cultural context. The duty of the discourse analyst is to constantly recontextualize the discourse to enable more thorough and ever-expanding analysis. From post-interview research on the speakers, I present general information on the kinds of crimes that are behind the speaking scenes. I do this for several reasons: to indicate the variety of cases and situations that contribute to incarceration in a maximum security prison, to indicate the serious nature of criminal acts, and to counterbalance the potential for glossing over the crimes committed by dwelling only within the prisoners’ versions of their actions. Familiarity with the prisoners through teaching them can result in a willingness to accept their version of events, much as one does in a normal teaching setting, until evidence of a contrary situation appears. By this I mean that in teaching in a regular classroom I have rarely sought out extra information on students unless an unusual


situation of bad behavior or failure in work has resulted. In schools and in the prison, this created an atmosphere of “no assumed baggage.” Even though it is obvious that all prisoners have negative acts on their records, I found in teaching them that I gained little by knowing their criminal pasts; rather, I achieved a lot by allowing them to start with a clean slate in the intellectual environment. There were exceptions that prisoners themselves brought to my attention. When I taught Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes, a play about an accused child molester, one class member alerted me that his own crimes included child molestation and that he did not know how the class would react with him in the room, since everyone’s crimes were common knowledge to the other inmates even though they were not usually known by me. No incidents occurred during the teaching nor the mini-performances of that play. What They Did In spite of the frightening aura surrounding the words maximum security, the crimes committed by those therein are not all the most severe. This particular maximum unit also housed prisoners in protective custody. Such prisoners can be in need of protection from other prisoners. The converse is also true at this unit—those who had been perpetrators of violence on other inmates are also housed in the maximum unit, as are prisoners who had given evidence against other prisoners. A maximum unit thus contains a mix of prisoners, sometimes a volatile mix. Four of those interviewed were convicted of murder or voluntary manslaughter. Fourteen had burglary, armed robbery, armed burglary, theft, and/or armed assault on their court records. Drug peddling and distribution figure prominently for six, and, in fact, drugs underlie many of the other convictions. The three sex offenders range from those convicted of child molestation, indecent acts, and carnal knowledge to those convicted of rape and sodomy. Two of those interviewed had sentences for comparatively minor crimes: theft, attempted larceny, shoplifting, carrying a deadly weapon. Their placement in maximum security suggests that they were considered at risk of becoming victims in the general prison population, or that they were in protective custody for giving information on other criminals and thus were vulnerable as “snitches.” Child molesters and informers are classic categories of very low status within prisoner hierarchies. The aforementioned Short Eyes by inmate playwright Pinero presents a shockingly illuminating treatment of both child molesters and informers. Inmates I interviewed were serving a variety of sentence lengths.


Recent harsher sentencing policies for violent offenders and more arrests leading to incarceration for drug offenders have resulted in an expanding prison population: “the bulk of prison population increase from 1988 to 1994 consisted of increases in violent offenders— 146,700 and drug offenders 123,000” (Mauer 1997a:9). The longest sentence among those I interviewed was for one of the multiple murderers, who might not be released until his entire sentence is served in 2035, when he will be 75 years old. For all prisoners in the United States, the average time incarcerated is 60 months; several of those I interviewed will spend twice to four times that much time in prison before release. The crimes listed on the court reports of these inmates are not necessarily the only crimes they have committed. In their interviews, many prisoners spoke of incidents that were not recorded on their court records. Plea bargaining accounts for many dismissed and lessened charges in inmate records. Sometimes incidents discussed in interviews did not appear in court documents because inmates were discussing their early years in crime. In most U.S. jurisdictions, crime committed while a juvenile is not publicly accessible. Other incidents, especially those that occurred inside prison, may have been “settled” without police or court action. Narratives in the Data Designation as Narrative I designated as a narrative any report of a specific event (Labov 1972; Labov and Waletsky 1967) noticeably bound by opening and closing markers (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). Labov’s terminology of abstract, giving the gist of a story, orientation, filling in the background information the audience needs to understand the story, the complicating actions, delineating the events (the plot), the evaluation, indicating the attitude of the speaker (and often contributions from the audience), and the coda or resolution, bridging to the present, are terms that I have applied to the narratives collected. An example of a brief narrative from the data is coded below with simplified Labovian terms, features that I use throughout this book. Sample Narrative and Terminology The inmate whom I call Walt has been talking for a few minutes, generally describing his early involvement in drugs, his experience of hitting “rock bottom” and then cleaning his system out and doing better, when he tells another brief story of how he got to Lorton.


Example 1.3 1 walt: clean my system out, 2 get some stability about myself with some responsibilities again. 3 Uh . . that’s when I made this stupid move here. Abstract 4 poc: How’d you end up here? 5 walt: Greedy. Greedy, and being stupid really. Evaluation 6 Uh . . I have, very close friends Orientation 7 that’s been dealing drugs, selling drugs for like years, Orientation 8 and never been caught. Orientation 9 So, at that time bills had got backed up. Complicating event 10 And . . I . . . decided to be brilliant. Complicating event/ evaluation 11 And decided to go help my cousin and my, my best friend Complicating event 12 sell some drugs. Complicating event 13 you know, hoping that maybe one or two nights, Orientation 14 I could make up enough money Orientation 15 to pay my bills and that would be it. Orientation 16 And that’s what landed me here. Evaluation 17 I got caught. Complicating event 18 Forty minutes after being out there trying to sell some drugs. Orientation/ Evaluation 19 and . . I thank the Lord that I’m here though Evaluation 20 because it’s a learning experience, you know, Evaluation 21 and uh . . this is madness here really. Evaluation/Coda

Walt provides an abstract that acts as a story synopsis in “this stupid move here” in line 3. He starts telling of the stupid move by backing up to give orientation about his friends who have sold drugs with impunity for a long time in lines 7–8. In narratives, speakers carefully give background information that not only makes the story understandable but that sets up subsequent events, the understanding of which depends upon such prior knowledge. Line 8, “and never been caught,” describes the friends’ success in drug dealing and is a good example of that kind of functional setup for us to comprehend the irony that follows later in lines 17–18 when Walt gets caught in his first 40 minutes of dealing. Evaluation appears throughout the narrative. A good example of the speaker’s evaluative attitude shows up internally in the words “I . . . decided to be brilliant” (line 10). The long pause between “I” and “decided,” the choice of “brilliant” rather than “smart,” and the tone of sarcasm used on the word “brilliant”


indicate the negative evaluation placed on that life choice. External evaluation appears in lines 19 and 20 where Walt makes a summative statement about how he is actually glad that he was caught and put in prison. Complicating events are few in this slender story of only 21 lines: “And decided to go help my cousin and my, my best friend / sell some drugs” (lines 11–12). This is an example of one event, a mental decision that implies an act. Line 17’s clearly stated “I got caught” is the most definitive past action statement in the story. It operates as the climax would in a short story. His ironic revelation about it taking only 40 minutes for him to be caught rounds out the story by offering the final bit of evaluative information not only to explain his incarceration but to reverberate on his word choices of “stupid,” “greedy,” and the ironic “brilliant.” We are given all we need to comprehend his crime, his rationale for doing it, and his attitude on his act. His final comment, “and uh . . this is madness here really,” concludes by giving us a coda, an end line that bridges to the present—in this case, his evaluation of the insanity “here” at Lorton prison. Number, Length, and Types of Narratives From the 160 inmates housed in two cellblocks I made 19 recordings. These 19 in-depth interviews included 187 narratives. I also have used as data two spoken narratives elicited during classroom small-group work on “fearful situations,” one narrative videotaped in a drama workshop and the narrative discussed earlier in this chapter extracted from a videotape of Jesse, the former prisoner in that same maximum security prison, addressing a group of college freshmen on the subject of “Communities and Prisons.” Thus, the total number of narratives gathered and transcribed for this research is 191. The particular focus of this analysis of the data is on narratives about criminal acts: 102 narratives were so designated. In these stories a speaker recounts a story of himself either as a perpetrator or as a victim of a criminal act. Narratives varied in length from 4 lines to 130 lines. Most of the shortest of the narratives came from one inmate. Several elements may contribute to his brevity: his was among the first interviews I conducted; his personal speaking style is a bit reticent; his crimes were heinous; and he did not disclose them to his teacher-turnedinterviewer. As I noted above, this information on the inmates’ court cases came to light years after the interviews. As a teacher I had been careful not to investigate the particular crimes of each inmate, preferring to get on with the business of teaching, with the business of helping to form a new life. Such a preference may have been naive, but it was useful in the teaching situation not to be dwelling on the


particulars of the past crimes. It also prevented the situation of quasivoyeurism among the students I brought along as tutors to the prison courses. My reticence to know in advance may seem odd in light of what I suggest is the power of narrative in this book. Perhaps the difference is in who is doing the disclosing. As a result of courthouse research two years after the taping, I discerned that some inmates may have spoken little because they would not tell about crimes such as sodomy, child molesting, and kidnapping. When speakers used wholly fleshed out narratives of their deeds, I was better able to locate them in Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development struggling for the concept attainment necessary for rehabilitating a life. While it is difficult to argue about what is not presented, the omission cannot be ignored, nor can its importance in the interpretive act be excluded. (See Iser, 1978, 1989b, on the “not mentioned,” Prince, 1992, on the “disnarrated,” and Johnstone, 1996, on narrative styles.) However brief the minimalist speakers’ narratives might be, they are revealing. In the following narrative, Thomas recalls times when he was in danger of death. Example 1.4 1 One time when . . we was . . 2 my brother and I were doing something . . 3 uh a dude stuck a shotgun out at us, 4 right, that’s one time. 5 Second time . . I was in the service . . 6 uh . . why we stumbled, 7 stepped on a hole with some vc {Vietcong} in it, right, 8 so that’s the second time.

The enigmatic “my brother and I were doing something” in line 2 contains a world of omission that an interlocutor in a more conversational setting (or a therapist doing treatment) might have probed for details. The second story requires the listener to fill in all details after the brief catalogue of complicating actions showing the precipitating cause of the conflict: “we stumbled, / stepped on a hole with some vc in it” (lines 6–7). No next events are revealed, requiring the listener to assume that the endangered soldiers were not killed (obviously not the speaker), and thus the listener intuits that the speaker himself killed the vc and saved himself from death. So much omission occurs in this speaker’s data that it serves little to construct a template for how a prisoner’s stories can be studied. It is, however, extremely useful in looking at the entire data set to remind us that speaking styles differ, that social and political factors contribute to amount of talk used, and that, as Wolfgang Iser reminds us, the not-said is also significant. Is the


war too painful to relate? Is his “doing something” with his brother a crime for which he could still be prosecuted? Is the researcher too timid in a first interview? None of this can be discounted, and only the researcher’s insights are available. Most narratives were more fully fleshed out, with actors and actions less cryptically reported than those “minimalist” narrations. One of the longest narratives contained 130 transcribed lines and included five narratives-within-the-narrative, a common enough story structure in folklore and study of literature. (See Bakhtin 1986 on intertextuality.) That longest story, of William’s purported child molestation, included the related narratives of a landlord dispute, a move into his girlfriend’s home, a meeting with the grandmother he said was molesting the girlfriend’s child, a fight and visit by the police inquiring about abuse, and a culminating incident in which William tears off his clothes in a church. Framing these substories and interwoven within them are the parts of the larger story that charges him with sexual abuse. (This narrative is discussed in detail in chapter 4.) Other topics addressed in the interviews included conditions of neighborhoods where the inmates grew up, memories of their family life, educational experiences, early involvement in crime, reasons for current incarceration, prison conditions, and inmates’ future goals. Many of these topics were directly cued from the list of questions; some sprang from associations prisoners made within their narratives. Thus, the kind of narratives collected built a large base for examination from which I have extracted for this book narratives that directly address criminal activities. The particular constraints of getting inside and participating in such new conversations that allowed me to acquire this material have also provided its richness. This opportunity will end in 2001 with the closing of the Lorton prison complex by act of Congress. Prisoners from the District of Columbia are being distributed to federal, state, and privatized prisons throughout the United States. These ethnographic and geographic challenges do not outweigh the moral imperative for researching within our total institutions. Plan for Remainder of the Book In the following chapters I analyze the narratives of the prisoners, looking at units as small as the pronoun, as large as whole stories embedded within other stories, in an effort to gain more understanding of how prisoners view their acts and ultimately their selves. Discourse units that show reflexive thinking include the pronouns “I” and “you,” which are used by speakers to locate themselves


in discourse about actions and states. In reflexive language, verbs show actions and states indexed to the speaker by those pronouns. In epistemic structures (utterances about knowledge states), speakers reveal their information about a situation. These three reflexive elements—pronouns, verbs, and meta-comments—assist us in determining agency in discourse. Not only by doing, but by telling about doing, people are agentive: we are going about sense making in the construction of narratives in a life story. The entire narrative, offered as part of a life story, can also be considered a large reflexive discourse unit. In seeking a reflexive understanding in prisoners’ narratives, I focus on their display of knowledge of not only their acts but also those acts within the context of forming, indeed re-forming, a life. Thus I analyze material relevant beyond the world of criminal justice, for narrative is a powerful tool of self- and social-formation. The remainder of this book presents data about the nature of prisoners’ talk about acts of crime as they create a continuum of more (and less) personal agency for behavior; the shifts inmate storytellers employ that (could) engage listeners and speakers in co-constructions of knowledge; the interplay of speakers’ strategies for framing discourse within stories they tell; the implications this work can have in rehabilitation; and, finally, the larger contexts of language analysis to which these strategies and features can apply.

2 Agency and the Verb Position

Speakers use language not only to report or describe events but also to comment on, and to help understand, actions in those events.1 In a special issue of Text on the future of discourse analysis, Wallace Chafe (1990b) suggests that linguists not view “language as a string of words, but as a magnificently complex, many-sided phenomenon that is the best pathway we have to understanding humanness in all its exciting richness and complexity” (21). Chafe is far from alone in this assertion. Charles Taylor (1985) notes that “a reflection on the kinds of beings we are takes us to the centre of our existence as agents.” He further states that “we think of the agent not only as partly responsible for what he does, for the degree to which he acts in line with his evaluations, but also responsible in some sense for these evaluations” (25). Thus, more than the action or state, more than the doer or experiencer, is revealed in the words and structures we use. A speaker’s positioning toward the event and toward involvement in that event are also revealed in the way of speaking. I have found that the language of criminals I interviewed is, as Chafe proposes, a rich, exciting, complex, and tragic pathway into understanding human subjectivity. In this chapter, I argue that a prisoner’s discourse can be a pathway into the prisoner’s view of himself, focusing here on predicate structures that reveal agentive, puzzled, or deflected positionings. Examples in this chapter are taken from five narratives about crimes that are chosen because they represent a range from minor to major crimes (vandalizing an auto, burglary, bank robberies, murders). The crimes all were committed by the storytellers. Thus, the possibility for agentive display is great in the narratives in this chapter. In the analysis, I concentrate on utterances about criminal acts that reveal the speaker’s agentive positioning.

Agency and the Verb Position 39

Agency in Reporting Acts I use the terms agent, agency, and agentive to evoke definitions of the subject as more active, more personally and morally involved in relation to the verb. Personal agency is the positioning of the self in an act or in the reflection on an action indexed to that person as figured along a continuum of responsibility. In response to a query about why he is in prison, a person could have responded, “I murdered a man,” but instead responded, “I caught a murder charge.” Such discourse is a cue into a speaker’s positioning toward his responsibility for his own past actions. It can also reveal his positioning within the context of imprisonment as he speaks of crime in autobiographical stories. Positioning the self, both in the past and in the current setting, helps mark the construction of the self. This chapter sheds light on the way criminals recount criminal acts showing that (1) narrations about crime can place a speaker in a continuum of personal agency in regard to his own actions; (2) a prisoner’s personal agency shifts in relation to modes of telling throughout his discourse; and (3) thus, a prisoner’s autobiographical speech positions him in a multilayered participation framework (Schiffrin 1987, 1994) that may be conducive to rehabilitative thinking. The criminal positions himself in a participation framework with an interlocutor, but also simultaneously within the framework of establishing a personal being in the chronology of his own life and within the synchrony of his current living situation (i.e., prison). That junction is illustrated in the life-story interviews, where for a short time the criminal’s autobiography, mine, and now yours, intersect.

Overview of Verbs Speakers telling life-story narratives use “I”-centered discourse and, even when using “you,” are often still indexing the speaker. This analysis of American prisoner discourse, and African American speakers in particular, does not presume to indicate that all languages use selfindexing pronouns to show agency. See, for instance, Mühlhäusler and Harré (1990), who in Pronouns and People give a broad overview of methods for indexing in different languages.2 The verbs in this data attached to self-indexing acts and states can show even more agency when the speaker is the doer of the act, or in these cases, the doer of the crimes. Simple past tense forms of action-oriented verbs in active voice with a personal pronoun subject “I” are expected in taking claim for an act (e.g., I drove the car). In the data, instances of such clear-cut agency include “I broke the antenna,” “I robbed,” “I


shot him.” Including others in the described act shares the agency, for example: “we robbed,” “me and two of my closest buddies . . . broke into a barber shop . . . snatched what we could.” These are examples of the clearest types of agentive self-reporting in the data that are contextualized and discussed. Sometimes, however, inmates responded with statements that referred not to their acts but to the result of being charged with a crime. Thus their utterances encoded their position as “having caught a charge” rather than as having committed a crime: “I caught that charge” or “I got a robbery beef.” I call these deflecting structures— arrangements of words that shift the focus from the speaker’s agentive act (robbing, shooting, etc.) to his position as acted upon by the criminal justice system. Another kind of construction also bears on the issue of agency. Speakers in the data use phrases that interject, before the action, a structure that makes the criminal act seem appropriate or necessary. Such a structure might show necessity, as in “I had to do something” or “and I couldn’t let it happen” spoken before the verb of action. Or it might show a quasi-passivity as in “me and number one ended up doing, doing six robberies all together” (emphasis added) at the end of a list of crimes. In other examples, speakers postpose the words that tell of the criminal act: “I participated in a lot of stealing”; “I don’t know whether I thought ‘Shoot him,’ or not”; “I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him.” Such structures are not as simply agentive, even when they do reveal that the speaker did the action. They do, however, reveal the speaker’s current positioning toward the act. Understatement or irony and epistemic statements before an agentive structure reveal that the speaker is presenting a “thinking” self, one who is grappling with the moral stance connected with the acts of crime. These structures are discussed at length as key moments, instances in narrative fruitful to the rehabilitative and therapeutic processes. Thus, verb structures do not merely recount the actions of the sequential events of the crime. In combination with the indexed speaker, they show the act and the speaker’s position toward his role in the act. Later in the chapter I describe these various kinds of uses and explain how they show agentive positionings that vary from strong agency to deflected agency. Agency and Positioning in a Continuum of Responsibility If we consider agency on a continuum rather than in a binary way, we can more readily see its relation to self-reflexive language in general.


Utterances that deny involvement (whether true or not) show the speaker’s stance toward his involvement. For example, “I did not drive the car” indicates that the speaker does not claim the act of driving. That clear, active-voiced statement—unqualified, unhedged, does assert a stance as one who did not drive. In a sense, as the teller, this speaker is clearly an “agent” of this non-agency. Such an act of making a claim is a self-positioning, one that can also position others. (If I say, “I did not drive the car,” and yet the car has been driven, then I position someone else or some other force as the driver or mover of the car.) In the data I have collected, I have tried to put the statements about criminal acts into agentive or non-agentive slots. As speakers who have been convicted of crimes and who are telling a life story (not in a courtroom), the prisoners did not claim they had not done the crime. Prisoners’ ways of telling of the acts, though, were not simply active-voiced reports. Their words were contextualized in ways that showed the prisoners’ nuanced positionings toward their crimes. Thus, a simple dichotomy of agentive/non-agentive does not suffice to describe the language used. Most, Least, and Problematized Agency I determined that simple active-voiced first-person indexed utterances (un-negated) were most agentive (“I shot him”). Utterances that included passivizing or necessitating phrases or verbs (“we ended up doing six”; “we had to exchange gunfire”) or that took no involved stance from the speaker (“I caught a charge”) were deflecting the position and thus least agentive. Phrases that problematized the speaker’s stance I placed in a middle ground in regard to agentive positioning. These categories are expanded in the data analysis later in the chapter. But before I describe the evidence from my data, I first examine some utterances heard in everyday speech that can help us put the issue of deflecting agency in a larger perspective, one not confined to the prison environment. Everyday Speech The examples below show common utterances about speeding tickets. Here are samples I have collected in casual conversations with nonprisoners: I got a speeding ticket yesterday. I got a ticket for speeding. I got caught speeding. I got picked up for speeding.


Have we often heard anyone say, “I was speeding yesterday, so a cop stopped me and gave me a ticket”? No, more often we hear people remarking in brief narratives (as above) or in elaborated narratives such as the following: “I was doing 60 in a 55 mph zone. Believe me, everyone was passing me! And, can you believe, a cop pulled me over and gave me a ticket for speeding?” On a continuum of agency, these narratives about “getting” tickets rank in a middle ground—not so detached or remote as reportorial speech using agentless passives we might hear in a newscast: “A record number of speeding tickets were given to drivers yesterday on Interstate 66.” Nor are they as agentive and self-incriminatory as “I was speeding.” Even saying “I was doing 60 in a 55 mph zone” implies the marginality of my excess. The actual speeding is not at issue; being caught is. The expression “to get picked up for speeding” sounds rather innocuous, and we easily dismiss the agency at question, for the focus is not on the crime of speeding but on the helplessness of the speaker being caught. Weiner and Labov note that the “majority of passive constructions has only one argument, that is, no agent is present.” They contend that “got” passives in examples like “he was arrested” or “he got arrested” are equivalent in people’s interpretations unless they are followed by a phrase such as “to test the law”: “He was arrested to test the law”; “he got arrested to test the law” (1983:31). In this case, “got arrested” was interpreted as more agentive if the person got himself arrested in order to test the law. In my created example above (“I got picked up for speeding”), the focus is on the speaker’s status as singled out from other speeders who were worse offenders. The speaker seeks sympathy (and usually gets it) for the situation as a “victim,” ironically, of police procedure in enforcing a community safety law. Deflecting Agency How different was it, then, when I was surprised one evening to hear the men in the maximum security unit talk about why they were in prison using the expression “I caught a murder charge”? That phrase literally stopped me. It was extremely marked, charged (as it were) with a mysterious deflection of agency. “I caught a murder charge” contained a focus on the act of being caught for murder as the cause for his incarceration, not on his act of murdering as the cause. When an inmate who is serving a sentence for which he will not be eligible for parole until the year 2010 used the expression “I caught a charge,” it was noticeable wording, for there was no question that the language was merely cautious as if the trial had not finished. This expression


was marked, at least for a listener who is not part of the criminal experience. Indeed, first hearing this expression, I recall being struck by how odd and distanced it sounded, as innocent as someone who says “I caught a cold.” In such a remark as “I caught a cold,” the speaker “I” is not intended to be the recipient of the second argument of the verb. This is semantically quite different from the syntactically similar “I caught a ball.” In the sentence with the ball, we have an image of an active subject who at the very least positions her arms and hands in a fashion to accommodate the ball that has been sent her way. In “I caught a cold” we have an image of random bad luck in health. Indeed, this may be the way the expression “caught a charge” has taken root in a society in which few criminal acts result in charges being brought against a perpetrator. Though the expressions “I caught a cold,” “I caught a ball,” and “I caught a charge” share a surface structure, their essential difference is that of agency: the positioning of the actor-agent toward the event recalled. Simply put, agents are “humans as doers” (Dancy, Moravcsik, and Taylor 1988:3). Yet, agency is more definitive. One of Charles Taylor’s (1985) chief concepts of agency involves whether a person is a weak or strong evaluator. He uses pastry examples to show a weak evaluator as one who merely “weighs” choices, like deciding to have an eclair over a mille-feuille. Taylor, in Human Agency and Language, states that “a fully competent human agent not only has some understanding (which may be also more or less misunderstanding) of himself, but is partly constituted by this understanding” (1985:3). A weak evaluator is concerned with outcomes—wanting a custard filling, perhaps. A strong evaluator, however, is concerned with quality of motivation and qualitative worth—perhaps with the labor practices behind the making of the pastries. Such a person shows articulacy and depth in choosing between “virtuous” and “vicious” (15) choices in relation to who that person is, not in relation to what she or he wants. Whether prisoners make choices based on what they want or on who they are can be an intriguing question while examining the narratives from their lives. The rest of this chapter explores the ways criminals speak of crimes they have committed and addresses the question of how criminals think of themselves as represented in utterances within the autobiographical narratives. In making this analysis, I show that the autobiographical discourse of inmates does reveal their concern with matters of agency in weighing choices not merely about outcomes and in assessing their own motivations and worth. Recall Samenow’s view that “[c]rime resides within the person and is ‘caused’ by the way he thinks, not by his environment. Criminals

Table 1. Continuum and Examples of Agency deflecting problematizing claiming We ended up getting caught On occasion, I participated in a lot of stealing I broke the antenna off a car We had to exchange gunfire I don’t know whether I thought “Shoot him” or not I’ve always did what I wanted to do I caught my first charge I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him I went from running numbers to using the pistol I shot him I let both of them have it Source: Patricia E. O’Connor, 1995, Speaking of Crime: “I Don’t Know What Made Me Do It,” Discourse & Society 6 (3):431.


think differently from responsible people. What must change is how the offender views himself and the world” (1984:xiv). Although I agree that the offender must change his view of himself, I do not think that crime resides within the person; rather, I believe that criminal attitudes are socially constructed (and personally taken on) and, as such, are presented in the language as well as in the actions of criminals. Similarly, one can “take on” changed perceptions of the self and new actions. Statements of agency about crimes fall along a continuum of agentive possibilities. Table 1 shows examples of the types of utterances I collected and places them on a continuum from the left—deflecting agency, to the right—claiming agency. In the middle are utterances that problematize agency. In the first section below I describe examples of the utterances I label as most claiming of agency (far right on the chart). Following that are the utterances I analyze as deflecting agency (far left on chart). Those utterances that are in middle ground I discuss as instances in which the speaker shows he knowingly grapples with the agentive position (problematizing). In these problematizing utterances the speaker shows the agentive position embedded in an epistemic display of reflexivity, for he is using language that shifts the positioning of the self from doer or reactor to one who contemplates as well as displays his actions through language. I am suggesting equating this stage as akin to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development in the move to the public sphere of discourse where the speaker’s words show he is trying to figure out his agency. First, though, we look at direct claims of responsibility in acts of crime. Claiming Agency Edward’s Narrative Simple past-tense forms of action-oriented verbs in active voice combined with a personal pronoun subject “I” or “we” are expected in taking responsibility for an act. Among the most straightforwardly agentive utterances are these remarks from Edward, a man serving “back-up time” on a twenty-four-year sentence for which he had been previously paroled but, due to parole violation, was now finishing the years owed (i.e., “back-up time”). Speaking about his earliest prison experience on a first charge, Edward makes the following comments. Example 2.1 1 After I graduated from Johnson High School, 2 I was arrested about six months after my graduation,


3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

for what they call tampering with an automobile. In other words, I broke the antenna off a car . . while I was walking down the street drinking beer. I didn’t know the police was behind me, but he saw me do it. And they charged me with tampering with an automobile, you know . . and I did the ten days.

Edward’s “I broke the antenna” in line 5 is most agentive and in contrast to the more euphemistic and generalized wording from the courts in lines 3 and 9, “tampering with an automobile.” The more straightforward utterance is further marked by the introductory phrase, “in other words,” when he says in lines 4–5, “In other words, / I broke the antenna.” He cues the listener that plain talk will follow the euphemistic generalization “tampering” used by the criminal justice system. This frankly agentive admission is, however, tainted by the narrative that follows in which Edward implies he might not have been drinking and breaking antennas if he had known, as he put it in line 7, “the police was behind me.” Thus his choices would have been based on outcomes, not on his moral code. In his meta-talk on how the police speak, Edward uses sarcasm— ”what they call,” which appears in lines 2–3—when he abstracts the whole event: “I was arrested about six months after my graduation, / for what they call tampering with an automobile.” Thus Edward implies that he considers “tampering” a petty reason to be stopped. He does, however, take responsibility for his actions. Among other agentive statements mentioned later in Edward’s interview come the remarks that followed questions about whether he was addicted to alcohol or other drugs. Example 2.2 1 Oh naw, naw, 2 I can’t stand the taste of alcohol, you know, 3 so anything that I did I put myself in. 4 that’s why I try so hard to get myself out. 5 no one’s responsible for me being here but me, 6 you know. 7 I’ve always did what I wanted to do.

Indeed, line 3, “so anything that I did I put myself in,” and line 7, “I’ve always did what I wanted to do,” are examples of utterances I call lifeassessment remarks. In matters of agency, they show the speaker, here represented by the “I” pronoun, holding himself responsible for his life’s actions and, in this case, not allowing cause to be put on alcohol,


drug use, or any other person: “no one’s responsible for me being here but me, / you know” (lines 5–6). Thus, Edward, in this life assessment—“I’ve always did what I wanted to do”—interestingly takes responsibility for his actions and simultaneously reveals that he did what he pleased, what might be called “attitude” today. Taylor says that to be a strong evaluator “is to be capable of a reflection which is more articulate” (1985:28). Thus, Edward’s (line 5) “no one’s responsible for me being here but me” shows him capable of such a strong reflection. Such life-assessment utterances, then, show Edward capable of assigning himself that agency. Roman’s Narrative To further indicate the active stance prisoners have toward their actions in speaking of violence, I next present statements that not only show the event agentively but that also display the narrator telling why he did the act by contextualizing the agentive statements. In the narrative that follows, Roman, a drug dealer and now a convicted murderer serving 40 years to life, tells how he was being robbed by a supplier of drugs. He says he shot some people because (lines 8– 9) “they was just gonna take my money . . / and I couldn’t let it happen.” This rationale comes after the clearly agentive abstract, “we was selling drugs” (line 3), in response to my question about going to prison. Example 2.3 1 poc: 2 roman: 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

What led you here? . . . It was like I said, we was selling drugs, and I was supposed to go see some people, get some more drugs. And, when we got there, they decided they wasn’t gonna give me any drugs. They was just gonna take my money . . and I couldn’t let it happen. And I saw one of the guys reaching for his gun, so I let both of ’em have it . . Witnesses say that it was a arm, they thought it was an armed robbery, because I gave the guy the bag with the money in it. When he refused me, I shot him. And he dropped it. Witnesses saw me pick the bag up,


20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

poc: roman:

poc: roman:

so they thought it was a robbery. They was trying to hurt me, so I had to do something. So what’s the charge then? Murder, armed robbery, murder one, murder to [commit?] armed robbery, carrying a pistol without a license. And for that you got how many years? I got 40 to life.

Roman refers to his crimes using active-voiced verbs. He first claims, “we was selling drugs” (line 3), and then he says, “I let both of ’em have it” (line 11). He follows this up with the most definitive language when he says, “I shot him” (line 17). Clearly agentive, these utterances are contextualized by other event clauses and stative clauses that build a case for Roman’s actions as appropriate or at least as necessary—in his view. After Roman says, “They was just gonna take my money” (line 8), he pauses briefly and then says, “and I couldn’t let it happen” (line 9). Thus he simply reports why he chose to act: he invokes a familiar scene in hero tales by implying that he acts to protect his possessions and to defend his own life against “one of the guys reaching for his gun” (line 10). He also uses a metaphoric phrase for shooting to report how he takes action, “so I let both of ’em have it” (line 11), but if there is confusion here that he perhaps let the dealers have “it,” meaning the bag, the inference of the phrase is cleared up in line 17: “I shot him.” Verbs of killing form a class of verbs; Beth Levin notes that “kill” is least specific, showing nothing about means or manner or purpose (1993:231). The types of verbs break into two basic categories—those that entail death and those that do not necessarily do so. Instruments of means are lexicalized in some of the members of this class of verbs, such as “poison” and “knife.” “Shoot,” the verb used by Roman, above, does not necessarily entail killing, though Roman makes it clear that death results when he reveals his convictions. He does not, however, assign to himself the agency of murderer. Murder entails intent. The courts, however, differed with Roman’s view and convicted him of murder, not manslaughter, nor killing in the act of protecting his property. In his third instantiation of the crime, Roman tells how witnesses interpreted the scene as seeing him committing an armed robbery, not the reverse, that is, they were robbing him, as Roman claimed. Roman recaps the event in lines 16–17: “When he refused me, / I shot him.” Here, Roman has dropped idiomatic language; he succinctly and agentively claims, “I shot him.” The singular personal “I” as


subject and the active action verb clearly associate the speaker as the doer of the act and a gun as the instrument. Roman further explicates via another interpretation of events and an even more evaluative stance in lines 21–22 when he says, “They was trying to hurt me, / so I had to do something.” Jonathon Dancy et al.’s (1988) “humans as doers” takes on a chilling note here when Roman says, “I had to do something.” Roman frames this narrative with evaluations of his act embedded in the descriptions of his state: “I couldn’t let it happen” and “I had to do something.” He positions himself as one who was not able to let events go the way they were going. In between these statements, he twice tells that he shoots others. This way, he gives reasons for his actions that serve to contextualize and valorize the agency of even his most cryptically agentive utterance: “I shot him.” Because Roman felt he “had to do something,” because they “was trying to hurt” him, because he saw “one of the guys reaching for his gun”— for all these reasons, Roman shot them. Thus we have a speaker claiming his actions and making a case for their logic. He admits to the shootings and justifies his actions by narrating a scenario for protecting a business venture. At question for those who analyze this account morally is whether one can justify use of deadly force to defend one’s illegal enterprise and one’s person while involved in an illegal transaction. In Roman’s estimation, which obviously did not convince the courts, he has done what he had to do. He positions himself as making the right choice. To have chosen otherwise might have been his last choice. Kingston’s Narrative In another scenario, an inmate whom I name Kingston relates how he and his accomplices did what was inevitable (in his view) when he tells how they “ended up” exchanging gunfire in a bank robbery that led to his current imprisonment. The agency in this account is not so personally fixed: “one of the . . the customers was a police. / And we had to exchange gunfire with him / to get away” (lines 14–16 in example 2.11). Kingston concludes that in a robbery involving another armed individual it is appropriate for robbers to fire weapons in order to escape the surprising element of one bank customer actually being an armed law enforcement officer. Thus, such speakers apply to their situations a construction of the cause and effect of the events that led to shooting. In Kingston’s case, he and his accomplices shoot because a customer turned out to be an armed policeman. In the word “exchange,” Kingston implies that he and his friends were shot at as well as shooting their weapons.


(The nature of this expression as a euphemism is discussed later in the chapter.) In Roman’s story, he decided to shoot and now serves a 40-year sentence for his actions. Roman’s and Kingston’s concerns in these utterances are with outcomes. Roman implies that his own life would be taken (he would be shot) when he says in line 10 of example 2.3, “And I saw one of the guys reaching for his gun.” Not so simple a choice as Taylor’s (1985) pastries is this decision: my life or yours. In these accounts we see that although speakers can simply make agentive statements about the criminal act, they actually contextualize the acts in language that (in their view) mitigates the criminal act as necessary. They can, as shown below, also shift the focus away from the act. Deflecting Agency with Passivizing Structures Deflecting structures shift the focus from the speaker’s agentive act (robbing, shooting, etc.) to his position as acted upon. In the following section, I show that speakers use structures that deflect agency even when admitting to the crime and describing the events of the crime that led to incarceration. Speakers use verb forms that have shifted from dynamic to more stative meanings. Key examples occur in the phrases “ended up” and “caught a charge.” How It Happens In this section, we see Jackie, an inmate who tells how he and his friends from the neighborhood “ended up getting caught” for burglary. We might assume at first that Jackie shows no agency, seeing himself as one who is merely apprehended and perhaps not guilty. This phrase is recontextualized in the actual narration of the break-in story. Jackie tells of the criminal acts: “broke into” (line 5), “ran in” (line 8), “snatched” (line 9), and “ran out” (line 9) and evaluates the technique as very “amateur” (line 6). Example 2.4 1 Yeah, as a matter of fact, 2 uh, me and two of my . . closest buddies out there, 3 out of the neighborhood, 4 out of the gang there, 5 broke into a barber shop, and uh . . 6 It was very amateur, burglary, 7 to break=bust the front window, 8 ran in, 9 snatched what we could, ran out. 10 Uh, we ended up getting caught.


11 12

And, I was the only one going to the receiving home now.

Here, we see shared agency represented by the “we” of “closest buddies” from the “neighborhood,” and “the gang” (lines 2–4). And we see a phrase—“ended up getting caught” that would be rather unagentive on its own, but for the contextualization of the phrase at several levels. A discourse-marking “uh” helps us see that “Uh, we ended up getting caught” (line 10) is delivered as a finishing remark since it comes at the end of this narrative. The “uh” can reveal as well a temporal break (Schiffrin 1987) between the time of the robbery and the time of apprehension for the robbery. The coda-like line can also cause us to look closely for this man’s self-evaluation. He is not speaking of himself as singularly at fault. He does not directly comment on his state of mind or his choices for joining in with the gang. Through details, however, he builds rationales, noting his role as part of a “we,” a group composed of “closest buddies” from the “neighborhood,” the “gang.” This we-group “snatched what we could, ran out.” That they “ended up” getting caught could also be merely a formulaic concluding remark, but I also consider that “ended up” may reflect the statistical unlikelihood of criminals being apprehended for crimes like this. In the Sourcebook on Criminal Justice Statistics, 1992, information from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program reveals that of 13,334,099 known offenses in 1991 (when much of this data was collected), 21.2 percent were cleared by arrests (Maguire et al. 1993:450). According to the fbi, an “offense is ‘cleared by arrest’ or solved for crime reporting purposes when at least one person is (1) arrested; (2) charged with the commission of the offense; and (3) turned over to the court for prosecution” (as quoted in Maguire et al. 1993:451). However, this rate of 21 percent clearance by arrest does not indicate an equal number of convictions or incarcerations for crimes. Sixty-four percent of defendants were convicted in felony cases adjudicated in 1990 (P. Smith 1993:12), and 75 percent of convicted defendants were incarcerated (15). If 100 crimes result in 21 arrests, then 13.4 people would be convicted and 10.5 of those incarcerated. (We do have to realize that many perpetrators commit many crimes other than the ones for which they are arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated. We must also realize that many crimes are never reported and that people are arrested who are not guilty and are later released.) Even with our world-leading rate of incarceration, no strong cause/effect relationship between crime, arrest, conviction, and incarceration occurs in the American criminal justice system. A


1994 analysis of 1990 Offender-Based Transaction Statistics by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows higher percentages that result, with 45 persons for every 100 arrested being prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated with felonies (Perez 1994:1). Thus, if a criminal remarks that he “ended up” being caught, his remark is at least reflective of the statistics about probability. This passivizing phrase “ended up” appears throughout the data.3 Returning to Jackie’s story, we see he has described the robbery and evaluated the group’s technique, which he calls “amateur,” showing his evaluation of the act. He focuses on the outcome when he notes, “we ended up getting caught,” which suggests, perhaps, that arrest came later from clues left at the scene via the sloppy technique of smash and grab. More proof of that focus on outcomes rather than motivations comes in the last lines of the narrative, where the speaker focuses on the self. Example 2.5 9 snatched what we could, ran out. 10 Uh, we ended up getting caught. 11 And, I was the only one 12 going to the receiving home now.

In lines 11–12, “And, I was the only one / going to the receiving home now,” Jackie focuses on the self, on the outcome that he does not share with the group. The discourse-marking “and” may merely show an additional comment. Schiffrin’s 1987 work on discourse markers cautions us that these words function in various ways and sometimes do simultaneous work. Thus, another interpretation could be that “and” with the brief pause signals the shift in focus as the speaker calls attention to his singular situation when he uses the first person and says he was the “only one” sent to serve time in the “receiving home,” a juvenile facility where youthful perpetrators are placed. The deflecting phrase “ended up” comes after several directly agentive, active-event verbs and may function to conclude the list and then show the result—apprehension—in a formulaic phrase. At the level of the discursive act of telling (i.e., in the interview), the speaker’s evaluation of the criminal act (“it was amateur”) helps the speaker make the point and helps the interlocutor to get the point (possibly that the thieves were so inept that they would be apprehended, i.e., “end up” caught by consequence). Thus the speaker concludes by describing his state and not his acts, a maneuver that is more evaluative and self-reflexive. As I noted earlier, at a macro-level, the phrase “ended up” also figures in the societal context of infrequent


prosecution or incarceration in relation to the number of criminal actions committed. Thus, while “ended up” deflects the agency by putting the emphasis on the unmentioned agent (the police), the narrative itself clearly identifies the act of burglary of the barber shop by the speaker “and two of his closest buddies.” “Ended up” more readily identifies the situation in a cohesive manner that connects up the life described with the passivizing situation of being charged and incarcerated—winding up in prison. Next we see how the phrase “caught a charge” becomes a description of a situation over which the prisoner, now that he is “caught,” seemingly has no control. To Catch a Charge versus to Do a Crime The chief example of deflecting phrases, “I caught a charge,” is the one most often used by prisoners to tell why they are in prison. Of course, one obvious conclusion to be drawn is that without a formal court case (a “charge” of murder, robbery, etc.) the person would not be convicted or incarcerated, regardless of how many or severe his crimes. Although the phrase “caught a charge” is pervasive (as shown in the narrative below) and deflective, I do find it significant in considering the self-positioning of the doer of a criminal act. In a sense, like those with speeding acts who “got tickets,” speakers in prisons tell of robbing and shooting acts and then “catching charges” in much the same way, presenting the self as the focus but using language that is detached from the criminal acts. This phrase appeared regularly in everyday discourse in the classroom as well as in the interviews. The narrative of Kingston, the bank robber, is singled out for discussion because of the copious repetition of the phrase. Consider the following narrative in which Kingston first chronicles small crimes. He is a convicted robber who tells his history of moving in his career from numbers running to jewelry robbery and then to bank robbery. After preliminary questions about his early life, I asked about his drug use. He does not take up that topic. Instead, with the briefest of answers, “Yeah, yeah,” he moves the topic to his repertoire of crimes with a temporal return marker, “so then.” Example 2.6 1 poc: 2 3 kingston: 4 5 6 7 8

Do you feel you developed a real habit? You were addicted? Yeah, yeah, so then I went from running numbers . . to . . using the pistol to get it, my money uh . . which was at the time very, you know, it was dangerous then,


9 10 11 12 13 14 15

it’s really dangerous. It was dangerous then, it’s really dangerous now. But, I went from running numbers to using the pistol to get my money uh, and that’s where I caught my first charge . .

Note the self-assessing utterances in lines 4–6 and their almost exact repetition in lines 12–14: “But, I went from running numbers / to using the pistol / to get my money uh.” Kingston assertively chronicles his escalation in criminal acts. He shows his sense of humor and play with text in his use of “my money.” Depositors, of course, consider the banks to be holding what would be called “our” money. This man, using some interesting irony, spoke of money he was stealing as “my” money. Later in the narrative he also refers to making “withdrawals” when he is robbing banks, further signifying (and no doubt signifyin’) his ironic take on the matters. Kingston follows this humorous phrasing with the summative “and that’s where I caught my first charge” (line 15), indicating that his mere involvement with illegal gambling did not result in his being arrested but that “using the pistol” finally did have that result. This is a significant escalation from illegal gambling, theft, and burglary to armed robbery. Violent crimes against persons carry a greater likelihood of arrest, prosecution, and conviction. Rate of prosecution, for instance, on homicide arrests is 67 percent (Perez 1994:1), but that is a national average, one that the District of Columbia rarely achieves. However, Kingston’s patterns of behavior that have resulted in no jail time have been well established, as is suggested in the passage below. In the long, rhythmically repetitive passage Kingston speaks further of “catching charges” and “getting off,” not serving time for them. Example 2.7 1 And I was, uh, nineteen, going on twenty. 2 It was burglary while armed. Uh, 3 it was a manager of a jewelry store, 4 we found out where he lived at, 5 found out where he kept the jewels. 6 Uh, he had a safe in his office, 7 and we had been doing things like this, 8 might come off with three, four thousand, 9 five, six thousand dollars, uh, and plus jewelry. 10 We already had somebody that would buy the jewelry. 11 So when we got uh, 12 we just didn’t have no pieces on us . .


13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Then I caught . . . I got sentenced on it I got, caught that charge, got out on bond. My father got me out stayed out about eight, or nine months, I caught another charge . . My father got me out . . Then I caught another charge but they didn’t catch right then. They had a warrant for me. But they finally caught me. So I ended up getting the Youth Act . . .

This long passage shows not only the escalation in acts but the cyclical nature of his crimes and the relative ease with which he avoids prosecution. Recall that for all crime the clearance rate is only 21 percent and that the number of reported thefts is enormous. Kingston’s narrative is not the story of his first crime but the story of his first “charge.” He has already said he was a numbers runner. (See example 2.6.) This narrative, which immediately follows that example, is interesting in its minimal approach to events. While it is clear that a jewelry store manager was robbed by the storyteller and his accomplices, the actual event clauses are few: “we found out where he lived at” (line 4) and “found out where he kept the jewels” (line 5), plus the aborted line 11 phrase, “So when we got uh.” In lines 7–9, Kingston interrupts the event clauses and contextualizes this burglary as part of a series: “we had been doing things like this” (line 7). “Things like this” are jewelry robberies, as evidenced by his quantifying the dollar amounts and goods taken in lines 8–9: “three, four thousand . . . plus jewelry.” The amounts stolen are used as a confirming detail in building up the agentive (and generalized and habitual) phrase “we had been doing things like this.” Additionally, Kingston reveals that they had arranged for someone to buy the stolen goods. Details, such as the type of store, where the manager lived, where the safe was located, and how they would get rid of the goods reveal a list of the knowledge needed to successfully pull off the crime. All this background preceded the final event, which is only partially spoken in line 11: “So when we got uh.” This is perhaps an interruption of “got caught” in order to provide more details that follow after the “uh”: “we just didn’t have no pieces on us.” An alternate meaning for “pieces” could be weapons, though I find jewelry more consistent with the passage. This detail implies that had the jewelry pieces been


on them, Kingston and his accomplices would have had a more serious case against them. Kingston, then, contextualizes this robbery in a series of such crimes. What makes this crime salient is that he is caught and sentenced, though not incarcerated, because his father got him out by posting bond. Kingston’s list of catching charges gives some of the specifics, the support for his narratives. Schiffrin (1994) notes that the major function of lists is to describe, an obvious point, but the function of description is not only to orient listeners to the scene but also to build up speaker evaluation of the large event being described: a patterning into criminal impunity. Kingston gets away with robbery. An extension of this work to be gleaned from the discourse analysis would be for a counselor to review such a story tape and script with the prisoner, noting the techniques of repetition and listing as well the kinds of deflections that are going on. It would be interesting to use this type of data in other forums as well, such as for discussion of how one as a youth becomes habituated into crime through the prolonging of consequences or how families enable drug users. For instance, when Kingston deflects the question about drug use, those who work with addicts would take notice and see the father to be “enabling” by arranging a “soft landing” rather than normal consequences for his son’s criminal activities, which could be supporting a drug habit. Kingston uses the “caught a charge” phrasing in lines 15, 19, and 21 as event clauses in the larger story of how he finally serves time. In this narrative, such repetition contributes to an overall stance of a teller to whom things happen. A simplified synopsis of this narrative is that Kingston catches charges and his father gets him out of jail. Thus, Kingston presents a series of actions for which he takes no responsibility. (Later in the chapter further reports tell how others’ actions affect Kingston when he tells of how an accomplice turns evidence that puts him into prison for his current stay.) In lines 13, 15, 19, and 21 of Kingston’s account in example 2.7, when he uses the wording “I caught,” he is switching from the “we” in the previous utterances. In line 13 he begins “then I caught,” pauses, and changes his wording from “caught” to “got sentenced” (line 14), then back to “I got, caught that charge” (line 15), and proceeds to tell of getting out on bond through his father’s efforts. Though the “I” pronoun signals the speaker is indexing the act to himself, Kingston uses the deflecting verb “caught” and descriptive phrasings such as “it was burglary,” not “we burgled.” Compare his “we had been doing things like this” (line 7) with Edward’s “I broke the antenna” (example 2.1) or with Kingston’s own “I went from running numbers to using the pistol” (example 2.6). What I surmise is the difference here is that the


acts of stealing, tampering, and robbing are being recalled by these speakers as acts they did. While in telling about the involvement with the criminal justice system—the police and courts—the speakers adopt less agentive phrasings because they are considering themselves acted upon, the “victims” (“patients” in linguistic terms) of the police action of apprehension or the Justice Department’s prosecution. What is interesting is the “I” focus that is retained while deflecting the personal responsibility for acts. This may be accounted for by what I call the “I”-centered discourse of autobiographical narration, which is discussed at length in chapter 3. The expression “I caught another charge” (in lines 19 and 21) refocuses Kingston’s story by shifting away from the active stance of the speaker. Like catching a cold, catching a charge “happens” to the one indexed by the pronoun “I” in this type of utterance. Like an agentless passive, there is no one mentioned in relation to making these “charges,” until lines 23–24, where the pronoun “they” (implying the police) is used. In this story, Kingston shifts to passivizing structures but not grammatically passive voice, which would be represented by “I was caught.” Some passivizing phrasings are due to the nature of the situations. Kingston does not himself leave the court custody; his father “gets him out” with the involved positioning assigned to the father shown in the refrain “My father got me out.” The verbatim repetition about his father’s acts and the obvious lack of change in the young man’s criminal behavior, as noted by the major line “Then I caught another charge” (line 21), give us a clear illustration of the cyclical nature of crime in one man’s experience. Kingston keeps on committing robberies. In lines 21 and 22 he says: “Then I caught another charge / but they didn’t catch right then.” We see Kingston saying “they didn’t catch” and possibly meaning that the charge did not stick. In light of the following lines, though, we might better analyze this as an utterance with a missing word “they didn’t catch me right then,” for he proceeds to say in lines 23–25: “they had a warrant for me. / But they finally caught me. / So I ended up getting the Youth Act.” Here we see the more standard use of “caught” as a transitive verb with its agentive subject and its object. Kingston eventually serves time; or, as he put it, and as Jackie the smash-and-grab robber stated earlier, he “ended up” being sentenced under the Youth Act, an indeterminatelength sentencing law that releases young offenders from prison when they are deemed rehabilitated. Shifting Agency Thus, speakers position themselves with different stances in their


recollections of their actions even in the course of one interview. In these examples we have criminals listing many instances and enumerating dollar amounts of thefts, even classifying criminal acts into categories, and yet using deflective expressions such as “ended up” or “caught a charge.” Thus their narrations show that a prisoner’s personal agency can shift throughout his discourse. When refocusing on the self, but not on the act, the prisoner Kingston (as does the speeder) presents the culminating event as one in which the doer is acted upon, not acting, revealing a state or condition in the life situation. Such a shift, I argue, is one in which the speakers place such event(s) in a life story in order to achieve coherence through describing a state in their life situation and to make sense of what “ended up.” Although the phrasings above suggest deflection and passivizing, other speakers in the prison data do openly and more directly puzzle about their past actions, especially about actions that have resulted in significant changes (like imprisonment) or that do not make sense as they look back upon them. A speaker’s attitude can be revealed in the word selection (as seen above) but also in his stance about those words. When that puzzlement is revealed, I argue that the person is making a shift in order to make sense not just of the past events but of the current self as one who presents and represents his past acts. Below we will see examples of such situations as a middle ground in agency and, as such, a shift into a more reflexive language that shows a person examining his life. Such self-reflection is more thoroughly analyzed in chapter 4. Middle Ground: Problematizing Agency I have placed those phrases that reveal a speaker’s epistemic state or his stance on his actions in a middle ground in the continuum. Note that I have found such structures are quite likely to be embedded in language that shows more reflection. Understatement or irony and epistemic statements reveal that the speaker is presenting a “thinking” self, one who is grappling with the stance connected with the acts of crime and with his current subjectivity. Ironic Stance In the previous narrative by Kingston I noted his subtle irony in referring to money to be stolen as “my money.” He plays a bit in a metaphoric sense with the literal terms of banking, as in his coy use of “withdrawals.” Irony is presented as well in the narrative of John below. Ironic situations are set up in a two-part format. The


expected is presented or implied first; then the unexpected is divulged. In the passage below John sets up the expected by telling of his early experiences after his father left. He tells of working as a laborer to help out with the bills. This working to help out is the expected in a “good son” scenario where the general theme (Prince 1992) is that of a boy taking on the role of an absent father. Example 2.8 1 and it was like me and my mother, 2 in the house together. 3 Uh . . as I noticed the apartment bills, 4 and things like that, 5 I took uh . . upon myself the position, 6 like a man of the house, 7 trying to do things I could do. 8 I would work, 9 work as a laborer.

In the example above John mentions the legitimate pursuits he took on to help his mother out after his father had left the family. Throughout this data are many examples of speakers interpreting what it is to be a man in various situations. Here, we have the home setting showing a missing father and the attempt to replace duties associated with the “man of the house,” particularly working to acquire money. In other chapters we see prisoners speak of how to be a man in the prison setting.4 In John’s story he, too, reveals the unexpected in such a “good son” theme—that he did crimes at the same time as he helped his mother with running the house. He tells that when “work got slow,” he turned to the world of crime and lists his repertoire in the continuing narrative. Example 2.9 10 and, at the same time, 11 I’m still hanging out with the guys. 12 You know, we were doing different things, 13 smoking, stealing, smuggling, robbing people, 14 things of that nature. 15 On occasion I participated 16 in a lot of stealing.

The agentive listing of what he and his group were doing (starting with smoking, which could refer to tobacco or to illegal drugs, and then escalating to robbery) culminates in a different structure, the postposing wording in lines 15–16: “On occasion I participated / in a lot of stealing.” Here his frank and escalating list of crimes, fol-


lowed so closely by his euphemistic amplifying phrase “on occasion I participated / in,” invokes a feel of sampling crime. Ironic Juxtapositions and Other Play with Words In John’s remarks, is he using that culminating utterance to make the situation sound better? Is he adopting an inflated style? I propose that he is making an ironic juxtaposition as he looks back on his early situation: he “worked as a laborer” and “on occasion [he] participated in a lot of stealing.” Thus, irony becomes a way of doubling the telling. He is setting up a situation for display noted as meaningful in African American speech (Mitchell-Kernan 1986, Daniel and Smitherman 1990, Gates 1987, Goodwin 1990, Briggs 1993), admitting the stealing but mocking himself as one who lives a double life. I argue that this play with the language shows John becoming more reflexive. He is saying that not only do I see, but I see myself as a person who led a double life. We saw some working of this sort of play with the text in Kingston’s “withdrawals” from the banks. John’s play with the word structure emphasizes (through implication) that he knows he is minimizing. Signifyin’, as Gates notes in Critical Inquiry, requires that the listener/reader do some work to “catch” the meanings. If “caught,” such a remark will produce at least a raised eyebrow or a knowing smirk in the interlocutor/reader. The thematic presentation of the loyal, hard-working son appears in other prisoners’ narratives, in intact families as well. One inmate detailed how he kept two sets of clothes, one to go with his legitimate job of doing yard work to help out his mother and father with bills and another flashier set to go with the two cars he maintained secretly around the corner from his family’s home, using his stolen assets from his hustling pursuits—all this at age 15. His irony involved not being able to disappoint his mother by showing her he was living the fast life. His act of telling about this shows his reflective grappling. Further use of an ironic and reflective stance comes from the bank robber Kingston, who reveals that during his time in Youth Center (at that time, a prison for men under age 25), he made plans to get together with some of his fellow prisoners after they all got out. Recall that when sentenced under the Youth Act, the time spent in prison is determined by rehabilitation. Here, however, the irony is that by planning to come together on the streets to do more crimes, we actually have a testimony to habilitation into crime in prison. Kingston talks at length in the following narrative. Example 2.10 1 We had all agreed to come together 2 when we got on the street . .


3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

We had already planned what we was gonna do, before we got on the street . . One got to the street first. Other got there second. And I come, got there, I got in the street third . . . The one that got in the street first, me and him, we got together immediately . . The third one, I mean the second one, we couldn’t find him at first. So we moved on without him. So we started robbing banks. I was in my thirty-first day in the streets, and I was in my first bank . . . and we got nineteen thousand dollars, government bonds and things. Uh, after about a year, number two came into the picture after he heard that we was getting some money. He didn’t know how we was getting it, but he knew we was doing something to get some money. Anyway, he, he caught up with us. He went to my mother’s house. He kept going to my mother’s house. So he came one Sunday. My brother called me, said, “Man, there’s a dude here, keeps looking for you, and I don’t know this dude.” So I said, “Go,” I said, “Go ask his name.” And he asked his name, said he was Frank. I said, “Look, just take care of him until I get there.” So I got there. I called number one, and we all met at my momma’s house . . . We kept him with us for about . . . two months. Kept money in his pocket. Everyday he had at least a hundred dollars in his pocket, don’t matter,


49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

just being with us. Every time we bought something, he got something . . . So, we took him on . . the next . . bank robbery. He did pretty good. He could have did better, but he did pretty good. Uh . . he did two with us. We ended up doing, me and “number one” ended up doing, doing six all together. Uh . . number two got caught for another charge, and told on us, to get a lesser sentence . .

Kingston’s story of doing six robberies with friends from prison shows much internal evaluation through use of lists. Some of this reliance on listing and numerical accounting also contributes to an ironic stance set up by the situation of leaving prison only to perfect what took him there. Kingston’s internal evaluations through listing contribute to a view of him as someone trying to understand his cyclical career in crime. The importance of lists to give descriptive information is highly salient in this narrative. People, robberies, and amounts taken are enumerated. People are most likely numbered in an effort not to name accomplices: “me and ‘number one’ ” (line 58); “number two came into the picture” (line 22). Only once does Kingston reveal a name. In line 38, the “dude” of lines 32 and 34 is reported to have said his name was “Frank.” The numbers given to the accomplices are related to who got out of prison first (number one), second (the accomplice Frank, who found them and joined in after a year), and third (the speaker, Kingston). Since the use of numbering has a pragmatics of concealment, I find this act quite strategic. Non-narrating would have the men omitted; numbering conceals their identity while positioning them strategically for the speaker’s benefit. Calling then number one, number two, and so on not only gives them chronological distinction according to releases from prison, but it also gives the speaker a way to continue to distinguish them for the narrative events without revealing identities. Numbering is purposeful and mimics the researcher’s own disclaimer that she uses pseudonyms for prisoners’ names (including, of course, Kingston and Frank here). We have at hand, then, another example of the trope of doubling, a playing with the discourse that has added advantage for the speaker who takes


protection of his accomplices into his own hands. He has no need to rely on the researcher’s promises. Robberies are numbered as well, helping to build a scenario of accomplished thieves. Criminal number two (once called Frank) only commits two robberies with them: “he did two with us” (line 56). There is importance in the concealment of locations and times for the robberies since Kingston and number one have forestalled number two robbing with them for several times by keeping “money in his pocket” (line 45) and buying him things. Robber number two’s ability in the two crimes he does commit with them is impugned in line 54: “He could have did better.” Kingston finishes his narrative with a coda that reveals that six robberies are committed: “We ended up doing, / me and ‘number one’ ended up doing, / doing six all together” (lines 57–59). The location of this total at the end point of the narrative not only shows a total but also signals it as a significant point of the story. Six bank robberies is rather extraordinary, as is the amount of money he accumulates so quickly. His story is status centered. The emphasis on accounting for amounts of money shows the serious nature of the shift back into crime after coming out of jail: as Kingston remarks in lines 17 and 18, using a personally accountable “I,” “I was in my thirty-first day in the streets, / and I was in my first bank.” The emphasis on in and the resonance of thirty-first day with first bank is effectively showcasing the pathetic situation he now sees in his past acts. I argue that Kingston is presenting his story in an ironic fashion, not merely boasting about his financial gains. While the numbering of people and robberies provides brief and anonymous accounts of crimes, Kingston’s repeated emphasis on numbers helps highlight his self-presentation as ironic: he is someone who lasted only 31 days in the community before reverting to crime. In a little over a year he has committed six bank robberies. The “expected” good result of incarceration would be to turn away from crime after serving the sentence. Recidivism statistics, however, confirm Kingston’s path as the more common pattern in American incarceration. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (bjs) found in a 1991 survey of state prison inmates that 94 percent had been convicted of a violent crime or had a previous sentence to either probation or incarceration (Beck et al. 1993:11). In 1987 the bjs noted that “69 per cent of young parolees [ages 17–22] were re-arrested for a serious crime within 6 years of their release from prison” (Beck and Shipley 1987:1). Kingston’s precise accounting shows self-evaluation of his story through details that help set up the irony. I posit that such details and especially the technique of irony indicate that the teller is shaping


the tale for more than just the interviewer. He is seeing himself as calculatedly unreformed and thus a “joke” on the criminal justice system that gave him the Youth Act sentence. It is, perhaps, also a joke on the father who kept getting him out of jail when arrested. (See example 2.7 above.) The “disnarrated,” according to Prince, are “all the events that do not happen though they could have and are nonetheless referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text” (1992:32). If we look at the “disnarrated,” we can see that Kingston sets up for us the elements that lead to his reincarceration in a fashion that shows he is most likely aware of his own contributions to his situation. In noting that bank robber number two did not do well, Kingston foreshadows the irony in his eventual arrest, as a result of number two giving evidence against them: “Uh . . number two got caught for another charge, / and told on us, / to get a lesser sentence” (lines 60–62). Irony signals that the speaker is taking a stance on the content of what is told. Kingston positions himself as one who does not name accomplices each time he uses numbering rather than naming. His co-conspirator, however, “told on” the rest in a plea bargain. Thus, Kingston shows his cynicism about the other man as well as about his own story of returning to crime. This kind of internal evaluation is more than simply crafting his speech. Tannen (1989) indicates the prevalence of “literary” devices in her remarks on formal speeches, such as Jesse Jackson’s orations, but also in the everyday conversation of speakers in general. In reality, as Tannen shows, literature depends on many historically oral devices, not the converse. These techniques indicate authorial shaping. I assert that the authorial shaping revealed in these oral narratives is a significant act of self-reflection, fruitful in this setting in promoting rehabilitation. This use of evaluative techniques (repetition, enumerative detail, juxtaposition, and irony) contributes to a self-assessing, a positioning in the narratives of inmates that signals a start of the kind of consideration that Taylor (1985) indicates is strong evaluation about a life. Irony, especially, doubly positions the teller as one who not only tells but also shows an attitude on what he tells. The showcasing is a form of signifying or marking that depends on the interlocutor’s uptake for full effect. This “show” is aimed at the hearer and is also turned onto the self as well. Thus, the discourse of the speaker becomes a site for locating the agency needed to assess a life, not just one act in a life story.


Steps to Strong Evaluation Steps leading to strong evaluation would include, first of all, an agentive stating of the events by telling the acts the speaker did perform. Many of the narratives reveal this step is taken. Locating those acts in a stance that reflects on their significance in a past stage would be a second step. This positioning has been indicated in the sustained ironic stance. John, in examples 2.8 and 2.9, presents his double life as ironic. In example 2.10, Kingston presents his series of lucrative bank robberies beginning after only a month on the streets as a way of showing his life unreformed by a prison stay. A significant third step in strong evaluation would be shifting from a stance on a life to a change in actions, demonstrating a change in motivations. However, few prisoners make remarks that signal that kind of shift. Rather, movement back and forth to deflected agency is common, as we have seen in phrasings like “ended up.” As I previously remarked, “ended up” does note a finishing move in a narrative, as is seen when Kingston shares a deflected agency with his partner, number one, as he states, “we ended up . . . doing six all together” (lines 57 and 59; emphasis added). This “ended up” phrasing is much less agentive than the earlier “we started robbing banks” and seems to be only partially accounted for by the semantics of summation. His “ended up doing six” in that example can be contrasted with what was not said: “All together we robbed six banks.” What had been a dynamic verb of action now becomes more of a stative verb, revealing they were in a state or situation of “doing” robberies. He may be using “ended up” as a way of downplaying his prowess, even as a reverse of boasting. Such a stance might thus be appropriate for a narrative spoken to an interviewer. Tailoring of the stories to show more self-reflection for the interviewer must not be discounted. Being known and trusted as a volunteer and teacher inside the institution gave me access. It also must make me wary of the extent to which I can assign value to interpretations such as this one. I suggest, though, that we consider that “ended up” removes the onus of agency, at least partially, from the speaker. The past transitive verb form “ended” can take an object when the subject is agentive: “we ended the dance,” meaning we closed it down or concluded the event. “Ended up,” as Kingston uses it, however, requires another verb for its completion. Compare these two nontransitive uses of “ended”: “that’s how things ended” and “that’s how things ended up.” “Ended up” implies a passivity in being finished, more than a finishing of things. “Ended up” works as a marker of less agentive stance, especially in collocation with the phrase “had to exchange gunfire” that follows in example


2.11 below, when Kingston tells the narrative of the shooting that occurred in his final bank robbery. Kingston’s interview is one of the longest in the series of audiotapes. After he enumerates with no details the six robberies in example 2.10, he discusses many other topics—his son in the army, his elementary school aged daughter, times he was in danger of death. A full 1,000 lines of transcription later he tells more about his sixth robbery in response to my query, “Have you ever felt compelled to do something even when you didn’t want to do it?” Such a question opens opportunities for a speaker to examine motives, not just causes. His response shows a slide into deflection of agency. Example 2.11 1 In that particular bank, 2 we ended up, 3 as we was coming out, 4 we had to exchange some gunfire. 5 and I just didn’t like . . 6 something about this joint. 7 And come to find out, 8 after we was arrested over a year later, 9 see, the police . . 10 in Morgan County 11 was cashing their checks there. 12 not knowing that at that particular morning, 13 one of them, you know, 14 one of the . . the customers was a police. 15 And we had to exchange gunfire with him 16 to get away

When Kingston says in lines 3–4, “as we was coming out, / we had to exchange some gunfire,” he does not say most agentively, “we shot at the police.” By using the “had to” expression, Kingston indicates that he felt compelled to act. “We had to exchange” implies that forces beyond the speaker’s control caused the “exchange” (presumably being chased and shot at by the Morgan County policeman who happened to be there cashing checks). Thus, the speaker’s discourse reveals a distancing from the intent involved in an act of shooting. Presumably the guns were for “show” in the past robberies, but in this one they “ended up” being used in self-defense because guns were used against the robbers. The word “exchange” indicates (again euphemistically) that people were giving and taking in shooting at each other. “We had to exchange,” in its euphemistic distancing, is rather like “On occasion I participated / in a lot of stealing” (lines 15– 16 of 2.9) mentioned earlier in this chapter in John’s narrative. Such


delicate phrasings appear in sharp contrast to the courtroom wordings of “assault with a deadly weapon” and “armed robbery.” Kingston is playing with his text, showing off his life as a fool’s adventure. His doubly signifying phrases are in keeping with African American speaking styles that offer speeches, sermons, stories, jokes, and so on as interpretive texts for the speaker and the audience to work out together, as we see in the passages below. Clearly, Kingston knows his own contribution to his sorry state, as is shown in the buildup of details and in the ironic stance, features of internal narrative evaluation discussed earlier in this chapter. At the end of Kingston’s interview he discusses how easy it was to adjust to criminal ways. He prefaces the following comments on his robberies with an admission that he had “got used to a certain, monetary lifestyle.” Example 2.12 1 It’s just that 2 when you start, 3 just like, when I robbed that first bank . . 4 I knew the second one was going to be, 5 just as easy, if not easier. 6 After the second one, 7 I knew the third one was going to be a piece of cake. 8 After the third one, 9 “Ah, this ain’t nothing,” you know, 10 I knew the fifth one 11 that was just like walking in

This passage in its rhythms and repetitions mirrors for us a simple understanding of pathways into crime: people repeat successful behaviors. As one of his last comments, Kingston deepens the ironic stance after I suggest that crime is like a drug for him. In the passage below he comments on going in to rob banks. Example 2.13 1 you know, when I’d go in 2 I was in control, you know, 3 this was my bank . . you know, 4 this is my money. 5 and I’m coming to take my withdrawal.

Kingston’s emphasis through repeating “my” in these utterances shows how he knows he had turned wrong into right. Even his slide into the historic present tense adds to the evaluation he makes about his behavior in making a robbery into a normal banking procedure like a “withdrawal” from an account. There is a more chilling irony


now for him to contemplate as he sits inside prison in a completely controlled environment. Thus far I have argued that criminals do use much specifically agentive language in speaking of their criminal pasts. They cast themselves as determined to do things their own way (“I always did what I wanted to do”), as doing many crimes (“smoking, stealing, smuggling, robbing people”), and as planning criminal activities for the future— all indicating admission of their parts in their criminal experiences. Yet, these same speakers also use phrases that passivize the experiences, a process that may indicate that although the acts are being recalled, the speakers are deflecting agency, not yet to be seen as strong evaluators of the motives, responsibilities, or results of their criminal acts. Kingston’s and John’s narratives do show that each has moved along the continuum to problematize his own agency with an ironic stance and thus show a puzzlement about the self in criminal acts. Below we see how that puzzling becomes more of an epistemic stance that is made more noticeable by a narrator’s use of statements about his thinking, both at the time of the criminal event and at the time of the telling. In the data I examined, one narrative stands out as indicating a prisoner is making a deeper accounting of the action that led to his murder conviction. In the section that follows I analyze this narrative as one that shows a strong evaluation by the criminal in his use of agentive forms embedded in reflexive utterances. Strong Evaluator Taylor says that “a reflection of the kind of beings we are takes us to the centre of our existence as agents” (1985:26), and Harré (1984) tells us that as persons, we locate ourselves in space, in time, and in a moral array of persons through our discourse on our actions. We can locate some such self-reflection and placement in the discourse of criminals as they tell of their crimes. The narrative that follows is from John, quoted earlier as saying, “On occasion I participated in a lot of stealing.” He is serving a 20year murder sentence with no parole. Midway in his interview he recounts the events that led to that conviction: he shot a man who had driven a car into a wall, trapping John’s friend against the wall.5 Example 2.14 1 before I could look again . . 2 he had drove his car right up on the curb= 3 =right toward us, he was gonna hit ’em . . 4 So, uh I think me and my friend saw him


5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

poc: john:

at the same time. At the speed he was going, wasn’t much we could have done. I jumped to one side . . I think I jumped to the side, the passenger’s side of his car, once he was coming at me and I was unsure as to what happened to my codefendant. So, once I jumped to the side, and he missed me . . Car came up on the curb and it hit the wall, that uh was like a safety barricade Uh huh that keep cars from going over the bridge, keep [?] cars and things like that. I heard the car hit the wall . . and when I turned and looked back at that car, I saw my codefendant in the middle of the car in between the car and the wall . . . At that point . . I don’t know what good I was thinking about at that point I had a gun on me at the time . . Uhm, I saw the condition that my friend was in . . . and I saw some movement from the guy . . . . . I don’t know whether I thought “Shoot him” or not I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him . . The last thing I remember was that he was reaching for something, between the seats . . . and I shot him at that point, in the shoulder . . Uh . . once I shot him I believe he went unconscious, from that . . uh, initial shot. And the car drifted back, a few inches. Two of my friends wriggled himself free from being pinned. I think he panicked at the time and ran out in the street, ran away from my car.

From the example above, I argue that the epistemic remarks John makes show he is capable of the “strong evaluation” Taylor suggests is needed for agency. Just after the car traps his friend against the wall, we see that John uses the temporally deictic framer “At that point” in line 24, pauses, and then says in lines 25–26, “I don’t know


what good / I was thinking about at that point.” This reflection on his own thinking interrupts the narrative of the killing in what Goffman (1974) calls a frame break, where the action scene is interrupted in a manner similar to a spectator in an audience speaking out to an actor on a stage, or vice versa. John’s interest in the “good” perhaps cues the more philosophical remarks coming next, foreshadowing his direct discussion of his thoughts. John next describes that he had a gun and tells events that occurred when he saw his friend’s situation and the driver’s movements. Then he breaks from the events to tell of his mental state. In “I don’t know whether I thought ‘Shoot him’ or not” (line 30), John becomes reflexive, assigning this figure of himself in the narrative the possible role of a “strong evaluator” in Taylor’s terms. Then John says, “I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him” (line 31). John is investigating himself, his motives, his actions in this narration of his shooting. Inside this pointed-out segment is language that shows John at work in sense making, for John mulls over his past act. Interesting in a consideration of agency are the parallel structures of lines 30 and 31: “I don’t know whether I thought ‘Shoot him’ or not” and “I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him.” This pair of utterances is epistemic meta-commentary about the thoughts he speculates he may or may not have had at the time he killed a man, whether he stopped to consider before deciding to shoot. Support for shooting to protect his friend comes in line 28 when he tells, “Uhm, I saw the condition my friend was in,” referring to his being trapped against the wall by the car. John notes he may have acted instinctively, a more or less physical reaction to the situation of his friend’s potential death by being smashed. In lines 33–34 he says that the driver “was reaching for something, / between the seats.” John’s next line, “and I shot him at that point” (line 35), finishes the contemplation of the act and temporally reconnects the passage back into the frame of the narrated act. Especially significant to a consideration of moral responsibility in the issue of agency is line 31: “I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him.” Here we have the speaker appearing as possibly powerless over instinct, mitigated only by the preceding qualifying clause “I don’t know whether.” Is he deflecting the agency from the personal act to some kind of inherent construct, “instinct”? Reflexive Commentary on Intentions I propose that John’s reflexive commentary about his thoughts at the time of the shooting indicate that he is now assigning thoughts to


the figure he re-creates in the scene and thus may be beginning to change his own belief system as he manipulates the figure presented. A counselor could thus examine this tape transcript in the company of the speaker and do considerable therapeutic work discussing how John sees himself at the time. Is he protecting himself? Protecting his friend? Ready for escalating criminal activity? (He has brought a gun with him.) His break in the narrative to talk about his thoughts at the time of the act indicates that he is thinking those kinds of thoughts now, for he is pondering now (lines 30 and 31: “I don’t know whether”) about his motives at the time of the event. Seeing the self as agent, according to Harré, “is not a mysterious thing but a belief which endows the believer with certain powers of action in accordance with the interpersonal models available in society” (1984:180). Harré says that “practical experience has forcefully demonstrated that behavior changes only in so far as the belief systems upon which it depends change” (200). We see John’s discourse as revealing a person examining his beliefs and his actions. John has said that he did not know what good he was thinking about (lines 25 and 26) and that he wonders whether he thought at all about shooting (line 30), or whether he reacted instinctively (line 31). At the time of his crime, he may well have been reacting according to what Harré calls the “interpersonal models available” to him or as a character in a thematic presentation in Prince’s (1982) thematic renderings. In the world of crime, in what the prisoners call “the life” of the streets, what a man with a gun does when he sees another man reach for something is simple: shoot first. We saw the same rationale in Roman’s story in example 2.3 when he saw “one of the guys reaching for his gun” during the aborted drug deal. In John’s case, however, years later in the storytelling world, through John’s discursive presentation of the self we see that he grapples to discern his motives. This struggling is a productive moment, a moment that is not sufficiently taken up in the interview setting, but that could be taken to task in a counseling session with the benefit of an interdisciplinary approach joining discourse analytical methods to those of counseling. (For more on this, see chapter 5.) Not only a linguistic interest could be called to John’s “I don’t know,” which marks the text three times in this short excerpt—in lines 25–26, “I don’t know what good / I was thinking about at that point,” and in lines 30 and 31, where he has the parallel “I don’t know whether” construction in each line. As Iser (1978, 1989b) notes in his work on reading the text, the negative always evokes the not negative. In the seconds it took to pull a trigger, John may or may not have considered his action. What we do have is evidence that now, in


his discursive frame break, in looking back, he evaluatively ponders these possibilities. The very act of suspending the action of the telling signals that evaluation. In what Livia Polanyi (1985) and Katherine Young (1987) term the storyworld, John imagines he might or might not have taken time to decide. John is perhaps Taylor’s (1985) strong evaluator, at least in this situation of narration, for he is assessing intentions, not just outcomes. The person figured by this “I” in John’s “I don’t know” is simultaneously located—as a figure in the past, constructed in the narrative told, and as the speaker in the “now” of the telling. Not only has John created a figure in a narrated past about an old event, but he sits in the interview in the new event of telling of his crime. Thus he is positioned—once by me as his interviewer positioning him via questions that he takes up to tell his story, and a second time by himself positioning the John of the past as a thinking (or perhaps merely reacting) man in the act of shooting another man. The selfreflexive nature of the doubting expressions in line 30, “I don’t know whether I thought ‘Shoot him’ or not,” and line 31, “I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him,” reveal those positionings. The “I don’t know” is in the world of the interview, not in the event of the shooting. Thus, this convicted murderer is agentively presenting his act of killing, marked in the wording of what is being told (“I shot him”) and by the act of telling. And now, through the reflexive frame break, he brings us to the possibility of a further onlay of agency in positioning himself as one who expresses his doubts about the thinking he may (or may not) have done at the time of the crime. He assigns a position for himself (at least a possible position) as a self-evaluator. Such a site, such a narrative, could be a rich resource into Chafe’s (1990b) “pathway of understanding humanness,” even humanness in a most perverse act of murder. Thus, speech of criminals shows a range of stances of strong or weak evaluation of one’s own actions, capable of revealing one’s agency in regard to one’s own story, in which the agentive speaker in the teller’s world can admonish or question the figured self in the autobiographical world constructed. DeWaele and Harré note that in autobiography “the individual’s past is not a relic carried along from early to later periods in the life-course. Quite the contrary, it is part of the living present, continuously affected by actual and future concerns . . . the past not only makes us, but we also make it by putting pieces together into a more or less coherent whole” (1979:180–81). Speakers such as John, given the opportunity to narrate their actions, have a way to puzzle over the pieces of their past actions within the context of the consequences of serving time. There is,


however, little opportunity for such discourse or such scrutiny of discourse in modern imprisonment, where even educational programs are being cut back or cut out entirely in many systems as they respond to budgetary restraints as well as to attitudes against “coddling” prisoners. (Chapter 5 discusses such implications in more detail.) Problematizing as Site for Developing Agency Speakers in these narratives of criminal acts say frankly that they have committed crimes. On the continuum of agency I placed straightforward subject-verb collocations (“I broke the antenna,” “I went from running numbers to using the pistol,” and “I shot him”) as clauses high in claiming responsibility. Speakers, especially in abstracts and in the summing up of a narration on a criminal act, also use deflecting predicates (“ended up getting caught,” “caught a charge,” and “we had to exchange gunfire”) when telling the result of their criminal activity, when they are no longer in control. Midway in this continuum of agency is room for mitigating talk about the acts of crime by way of reflexive discourse. Ironic and euphemistic phrasings, such as “On occasion I participated in a lot of stealing,” may require more interpretive work on the part of the interlocutor and thus are open for various possible interpretations, creating a rich dialectic of discourse as noted by Fairclough (1992) in his discussion of textually oriented discourse analysis. The clearest move toward the morally agentive in the world of telling is the use of reflexive frame breaks in which the speaker breaks the action in the narration and openly speculates on thoughts, motives, and causes. I am arguing that prisoners’ personal narratives of criminal acts are sites of highly agentive and potentially therapeutic discourse. These sites are currently ignored in the systems of incarceration that lack strong emphasis on rehabilitation and that rarely cultivate discursive activities as sites for the development of strong evaluation. One reason perhaps for not employing more “talk therapy” may be that, as one reviewer of this manuscript suggested, prisoners are assumed to always be “conning,” always manipulating their speech and actions in order to gain favors or privileges inside the prison. This is an important point for discussion in contexts broader than prison institutions as well. Inside the prison, as I conducted the interviews I made it clear that doing the interview resulted in no monetary rewards or privileges, nor were the taped materials to be shared with any prison authorities, other than in ways that protected the anonymity of the participants. If, however, a prisoner chooses to construe his life as having changed after having committed a crime


or having realized now that his life needs to change, I do not construe this as manipulation that would be harmful to the inmate in the long run. He is, even if “conning,” practicing a type of talk that could be analyzed for its veracity, its quasi-veracity, or its lapses in veracity. Whether that analysis occurs briefly in the course of an interview or in a sustained counseling setting (more ideal) will make the difference in how this prisoner’s efforts in recollection can foster attitudes for change. This book does not purport to be a longitudinal study of prisoners who have been in sustained therapeutic settings where narrating life stories and dissecting them with a trained discourse analyst and psychological counselor is available. (See DeWaele and Harré 1979 for an account of such a study in Holland, where murderers’ autobiographies were closely analyzed prior to determining parole.) Such in-depth work, however, is a goal of this study, which suggests that because the narratives produce thoughtful, epistemic moments of deeper reflection, they suggest that narrating is a neglected resource in promoting rehabilitation during prison terms. When a criminal is willing to present his acts discursively, that act of telling could provide the seed of a moral agency. Agency is not simply active versus passive relationships between human agents or patients/experiencers and the verbs humans use to recount their actions. Structures using verbs such as “I caught a charge” and “we ended up getting caught” and I was “picked up for” indicate less agentive stances on criminal actions. Active verbs such as “I broke the antenna” and “I shot a man” are indicative not only of active voice but of agentive positioning toward criminal acts. Agency goes into the deeper issue of a moral stance on one’s actions. We think, and we know that we think. Our discourse reveals just that by how it encapsulates our evaluation of our lives as we tell narratives of personal, even criminal experience. In telling one’s experiences, a speaker seeks to have those acts ratified by those around them. Discourse analysis of the prisoners’ narratives locates such pragmatic work around the verb structures, as noted above through straightforward claiming, mitigated puzzling, and outright deflecting of actions. In chapter 3, close attention is given to the speakers’ uses and shifts of pronouns during the tellings, for these manipulations of language affect the listener’s response and indicate the speaker’s positioning, both of which will affect his agency.

3 Pronouns and Agency

“You” as Indicator When telling autobiographical narratives, speakers sometimes break from “I” to “you,” using a “you” that brings about a sense of shared agency or experience while still indexing the speaker.1 In an example from the data on stabbing stories, “you could feel it through the skin,” the speaker, whom I call Roland, assesses his own experience of being stabbed while in prison. This evaluative comment and its audienceinclusive and self-inclusive “you” comes near the end of his narrative. Roland says, “It was like you could feel it through the skin partly, but you couldn’t do nothing about it,” showing the futility of such a lifeendangering situation. The shift to “you” (not “I could feel it”) in the narrative of a stabbing is a significant move that is taken up in this chapter. In using “you” instead of “I” in autobiographical narratives, the speaker can be positioning the past self in a cohesion maneuver to make sense of the past act. Such uses of “you” are inclusive of both the speaker, the addressee, and a generalized other. The so-called generic or impersonal “you” (Kitagawa and Lehrer 1990) can more accurately be analyzed as a “you” that indexes the speaker’s past self now being positioned within a public sphere (O’Connor 1994a). In this analysis such a “you” is a site of reflexive thinking in the discourse. This polysemic focusing on the past self, the generalized other, and the current self are part of discourse maneuvers that occur regularly in these narratives of violence and that contribute to the quality in story that Gerald Prince (1982) calls narrativity. With the involving “you,” we too begin to see ourselves as similar to Prince’s cat sitting on the dog’s mat. Such a quality not only makes for a good story in fiction but signals real life-and-death saliency when applied to the stories collected in the prison setting. Calling up a “you” invites the listener, as it would a reader, to participate in the experience. First-


person accounts often have this effect in fiction. Recent research on novels also looks at second-person narration in ways that help us see the significance of the uses of “you” in discourse. Complexities of “You” James Phelan (1994) argues that we can learn much about the complexities of “you” narration if we join narratological theory with rhetorical theory in processing how we receive the “you” in fiction. He suggests, “Second-person narration shows that the two concepts [narratee from narratology and narrative audience from rhetorical theory] are, ultimately, complementary and that both structuralist narratology and rhetorical theory need to recognize that complementarity” (355). He adds that the “you” address also invites us to project ourselves—as narrative audience, authorial audience, actual readers—into the narratee’s subject position. Consequently, the inferences we make as we occupy the narrative- audience position lead us to a complicated vision that mingles narratee and self in the narratee’s position. We both occupy the position and know what the position is like in a way that the narratee herself does not. In this way we feel addressed by the narrator but not fully coincident with the narratee. (361)

In oral narratives in which a speaker has switched into uses of “you address” we can also see that the narratee, the same person as the narrative audience (in my case, the interviewer) is positioned to identify with the narrator. Because narratives in this data are of the speakers’ autobiographical and criminal experiences, this identification has ruptures and tensions that form a resistence while also suggesting identification, giving rise to an interesting complexity that most reserve for analysis of fiction. Indeed, this complexity of identification was what first struck me as absurd about the phrasing “you could feel it through the skin” to describe to me an experience of being knifed in prison. I was being positioned to empathize in an experience as if it were generic, usual, when in reality (for me) it was not, though for other prisoners it was sadly routine. In autobiographical narratives, the speaker usually indexes the self with the pronoun “I” or “me”—for example: “I was stabbed twice, before I even woke up”; or, from another speaker in the data: “I was . . I was stabbed in the back.” These two passive voice examples, though indexed to the speaker with the pronoun “I,” do not present the scene in the most agentive fashion. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1981:147) stated that “as speakers we represent ourselves through the offices of a personal pronoun, typically “I,” and it is thus a figure— a figure in a statement—that serves as the agent, a protagonist in a

Pronouns and Agency 77

described scene, a “character” in an anecdote.” Thus, speakers of their own autobiographical narratives authoritatively present themselves. However, as the data and analysis in this study show, autobiographical speakers do not always index themselves through using “I.” As Emile Benveniste (1971:218) noted, the “instances of the uses of “I” do not constitute a class of reference since there is no “object” definable as “I” to which these instances can refer in identical fashion. Each “I” has its own reference and corresponds each time to a unique being who is set up as such.” He refers to “I” as a “unique but mobile sign,” one that “can be assumed by each speaker on the condition that he refers each time only to the instance of his own discourse. This sign is thus linked to the exercise of language and announces the speaker as speaker” (220; emphasis in original). (See also Brinck 1997 for a discussion of “I” as an indexical that irrefutably refers to what we understand as the self.) In the prison data on stabbings, the passive voice phrasing “I was stabbed” is partly due to the nature of the event. As survivors of others’ acts of aggression, the speakers are the recipients of the action of stabbing. These speakers might have positioned another person as agent by stating “he stabbed me” or “someone stabbed me twice”; however, in the storyworld of autobiographical narration, keeping the focus on the teller is more likely. Even in cases when the “I” pronoun is changed to “you” to gather in others in similar plights, the focus remains, partially and perhaps most meaningfully, on the speaker. When the speaker switches to “you” yet still indexes the self, several activities are going on: (1) the speaker is distancing himself from the act by dropping the “I” and using a “you” that indicates the self as generically or commonly like others in that position; (2) the audience is being involved through the positioning as fellow agent in a situation commonly experienced or, curiously, as participant in an act not ever experienced; and (3) the speaker, by using the “you,” also is addressing the figure of the self in his own past and is perhaps closing up, not distancing, the “space” between the past act and the current understanding of that act. This analysis thus suggests that nondeictic “you” can be both interpersonal and intrapersonal. Monika Fludernik, in her editorial introduction to the special issue of Style in fall 1994, notes Helmut Bonheim’s term “conative solicitude,” which captures the emotional effect of second-person narrative for its involving quality. Fludernik also refers to “referential slither,” another term from Bonheim to describe “ ‘you’s’ inherent capacity for addressing both the actual reader and a narratee as well as denoting a fictional protagonist and the narrator into the bargain” (1994:286).


Fludernik, though, rejects the last part in which the narrator becomes included. On this point I differ, assigning at least the possibility of selfaddress in the epistemic frame breaks that I explicate in prisoners’ narratives when they switch into uses of “you.” In the previous chapter we saw how various types and uses of verbs and meta-commentary signal reflexive language that shows agency in the discourse of violence. Here we look at the smallest of signifiers, the singular personal pronoun “I” and its shift to the potentially more collaborative “you.” Data: Stabbing Stories The spoken narratives used in this chapter are five stabbing stories from maximum security inmates serving time in protective custody because they have attacked others, have been violently attacked themselves, or are in danger of being harmed by other prisoners. This volatile concoction of residents is a particularly illustrative example of how bureaucracies’ attempts at compartmentalizing according to categories are superceded by space and economic considerations. All five of the speakers in my stabbing data are African American males and had previously studied with me in courses or workshops. At the time of the tape recording, Edward was 45 years old, Roland and Roman were 23, and James was 26. Roland presents two narratives and the others, one each. The written text used as a parallel example is an excerpt from prison inmate Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast, first published in 1981. The segment I analyze from that epistolary account describes a way to commit a stabbing and is useful in pointing out the switch in indexicality that I find salient in the audio recordings in my data. Indexing the Self: The “I” of Discourse and Shifts to Interpersonal “You” In the following autobiographical narrative the speaker notes mostly what he did or what happened in relation to him. In the passage below, Edward describes himself being stabbed repeatedly while asleep in his supposedly locked, single-bunk cell. Edward’s narrative begins on line 7 after mentioning that he was in his bed in his cell asleep when the attack occurred. Example 3.1 7 And uh. I was stabbed eight times. 8 I was stabbed, 9 once in the face,


10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

once in the . . right lung . . hit in the shoulder and back. And uh, I was stabbed twice, before I even woke up. ’N’ but when I turned over and looked up. I saw this . . three-hundred pound man you know. with a, a, a, a, a, short mach-machete, in his hand, you know. That’s what it looked like, you know, when I saw it, you know. And like uh, he come down. He . . brought his hand down to stab me a third time. I reached up and grabbed his hand, and jumped up out of bed. We tore my cell up in there fighting, you know. I was busting him up, you know, busting his face open. But . . while I’m busting him up, he’s punching holes in me. But see my adrenaline was . . so high at the time, I didn’t feel none of that. I didn’t feel none of that, until about two days later, you know.

The focus on the speaker as figure in his own telling is emphasized by the use of “I” in 12 utterances. Only 3 times do we hear utterances that position the attacker as sole agent: in lines 20–21, “he come down. / He . . brought his hand down to stab me a third time”; and in line 29, where we hear the chillingly not-metaphoric “he’s punching holes in me.” In line 25 the pronoun “we” signals a shared agency in “We tore my cell up in there fighting, you know.” Over 20 lines later in this narrative, in line 50 (see below), the attacker is described as leaving. Until that line, the focus remains on the teller and how events affected the teller, the key figure in the autobiographical narrative. Example 3.2 34 And then they had to give me painkill, but I was tubed everywhere. 35 I had tubes running everywhere, you know. 36 and like blood was shooting out. 37 I had a blue jump suit on= 38 =like the ones they wear around here, you know. 39 Blood was shooting out everywhere. 40 But still . . that didn’t stop me. 41 I knew I had to get this knife out of his hand, 42 because if I didn’t . .


43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

I would have been dead in there, you know. That was my objective right there. I wasn’t worrying about dying at the time, you know. I just had to get this knife out of his hand. And when I did get the knife out of his hand, it fell up underneath the bed. I didn’t even try to reach it, you know. He ran out the cell on the tier, you know, and left me standing in the cell. But by this time I had lost so much blood, the floor look like it had about a inch of blood on it, you know. I had lost so much, I was sliding down. But I picked myself back up, and walked out on the tier.

The passage above (lines 36–58) loops back upon the scene described in lines 7–33 where Edward noted the attack, his struggle. When he backs up in his story in line 40, he returns the action from the medical treatment to the stabbing scene, and in so doing he shows a further emphasis on himself, the speaker, as most salient in his own autobiographical narrative. In the example above he has told of the tubes and pain killers (“painkill,” line 34) used after going to the hospital, but he refocuses his tale back on the horror of the events by describing the blood in lines 36 and 39: “And like blood was shooting out,” and “Blood was shooting out everywhere.” This very descriptiveness and repetition sets up the actions next reported, actions of a most agentive nature when the bloodied speaker takes control to remove the knife from the attacker’s hand. Edward tells of his physical and mental states at that time: “But still . . that didn’t stop me” (line 40), and “I knew I had to get this knife out of his hand” (line 41). His reference to both mind and body help make a positive self-evaluation of someone who survives against the odds and against a lax security system. When he achieves this goal of getting the knife, he further focuses on his ability to get himself out of his cell and into the passageway where guards could see his bloody condition in lines 57–58: “But I picked myself back up, / and walked out on the tier,” showing his physical prowess in engineering his survival, even while a blood-soaked victim.2 The speaker predominantly focuses his telling thus far through the pronoun “I.” In the section of data that follows, Edward tells of his discovery by the guards, using a constructed dialogue of their conversation and of his thoughts at that time. The speaker’s choices of pronouns in


this reflexive construction are not so predictable as those seen in the first section. Pronouns in constructed dialogues often index a wide array of personae, as people’s voices are being enacted, increasing the interactive quality of a narrative by dramatizing the story through performative reenactment.3 I follow Tannen (1989) in the use of the term “constructed dialogue” rather than “reported speech” since in speaking about past events of such a dramatic nature as being stabbed, inmates make use of what Tannen (124) describes as “animation of dialogue with paralinguistically distinct and highly marked voice quality” to construct a “drama to involve lifelike characters in dynamic interaction.” This facet of narration, particularly salient in the African American community, is part of the linguistic competence that contributes to the reception of the story’s point and the listener’s comprehension of the narrativity. As we see in the example below, the speaker constructs, rather than reports, these voices in an instance where he himself was actually unable to speak due to losing consciousness. In Edward’s own narrative the pronoun “he” in the constructed dialogue of the officers (lines 80 and 88 below), really indexes Edward. Thus the pronouns “he” and “I” index himself, the speaker in the utterances relayed in the following narrative. Example 3.3 79 and like some of the officers say 80 “He gonna die,” you know. 81 And I saying to myself, 82 “No, I ain’t going nowhere, 83 just get me to the hospital 84 and stop this bleeding,” you know. 85 This what I’m saying to myself. 86 I didn’t say that out loud. 87 They was, walking behind me. 88 Talking about, “I know he gonna die. 89 Blood shooting everywhere.”

Here, the “he” in constructed dialogue in line 80, “He gonna die,” and line 88, “I know he gonna die,” and the constructed dialogue “I” in line 82, “No, I ain’t going nowhere,” all index the speaker (emphases added). By having the police guard speak about Edward, Edward positions himself as the subject of discussion (not just as a victim of an attack). This positioning sets up the irony of his survival. The meta-comment “I” in line 81, “I saying to myself,” and its echoes in line 85, “This what I’m saying to myself,” and line 86, “I didn’t say that out loud,” also further emphasize the speaker’s weakened condition. This passage holds several layers of positioning.


The silenced and stabbed person who hears officers predict his death animates now what he recalls then—when he was too weakened to speak aloud. Edward does not say, “I thought I was gonna die”; instead, he has the officers say, “I know he gonna die.” This manipulation of the dialogue has some interesting effects. Putting the outside observers forward in the voice of police contrives an intriguing objectivity that is quickly refuted. It positions the police as ironically ignorant. They say, “He gonna die” (line 80) and “I know he gonna die” (line 88), something we listeners and readers realize had to be wrong. This passage has the ironic twist of presenting one whose body is failing and whose mouth cannot produce words, yet it still emphasizes Edward’s strength, at least of mind, when his body has “blood shooting everywhere” (line 89). The self in the meta-comment, “No, I ain’t going nowhere” in line 82, is the self of the current speaking situation, not the one constructed for the storyworld where the severe injury has actually silenced him. Readers should note that the storyworld, a term popularized by Livia Polanyi and Katherine Young, is the world of the time of the event being retold. In Edward’s case, it is the time of the stabbing in the cell. Why not say the “real world” for that time of the narrated event? This goes to the heart of narrative study. Stories told about real events do not necessarily re-create the “real” events. They do present an account of the event as recalled by the speaker and as crafted by the speaker for the audience. Neither does the storyteller’s world—the time of the interview, in this case, talking with me inside a cell in 1991—represent the “real world,” but a construction of that world represented to you by me. What sense we make from stories others tell and stories we tell is co-constructed, ever negotiated between tellers and hearers (or now, readers). Thus, the speaker overtly wields the discourse for the benefit of the current audience (interviewer) and future audiences (those who might hear the tape or read the research). In bringing up the notsaid, the part he claims he was thinking at the time, “No, I ain’t going nowhere,” the speaker agentively re-creates the moment of his decision to prove the guards wrong. Edward is commenting on this experience with much meta-discourse. Clearly, Edward most agentively labels his unspoken (yet reconstructed) speech as his by articulating what he says was in his mind at the time of the stabbing, but, as he put it in line 86, “I didn’t say that out loud.” In the retelling he does not have to be helpless. This function of story as a place for analysis of a life event figures most prominently in the narrative analysis that follows. This feature of narrative as available for epistemic expansion holds out much promise for rehabilitative work through formal counseling or merely for informal, interactive


discussions. These features of prison life, however, are usually denied due to cost cutting or attitudes that it is a “lost cause” to talk with the incarcerated, who may be adept at “conning” average citizens. However, an inmate’s evaluation of his own life-and-death struggle shows further features that cue rehabilitative moments. Problematizing with “You” We have seen thus far that pronouns are flexible, dependent upon context for their meaning. As speakers, we use a variety of pronouns and a subtlety in switching them. Below, in the final passage of this narrative about being stabbed eight times while asleep in the supposedly locked cell, Edward shifts to the pronoun “you” in the evaluative section near the end of his narration. This switch opens up the following narrative as a way of puzzling over or problematizing the situation. Example 3.4 107 I don’t ever wanna go through nothing like that again, 108 you know. 109 I’m not scared of a knife. 110 I would never run from a man with a knife. 111 Get nowhere, you know. 112 But uh, just the thought of laying in your bed, 113 in a . . in a helpless position, you know, 114 with your back turned, you know, 115 and somebody over you. 116 I don’t care what he got, a knife, a stick, or whatever. 117 You in a helpless position.4 118 There’s nothing you could do for yourself . . 119 I don’t ever want that to happen again. 120 If I can help it, it won’t happen again.

This passage ends Edward’s narration of the stabbing. He starts the evaluation with a summative statement expressing a wish never to experience something like this again. He closes the section with a doubly emphatic statement (lines 119–20) that “I don’t ever want that to happen again” and “it won’t happen again.” Yet, inside this section (lines 112–18) he uses “you/your” five times (besides in the expression “you know”). With the “you,” Edward creates a scene in which “you” others, like himself, would also feel helpless: “You in a helpless position” (line 117) and “There’s nothing you could do for yourself” (line 118). Such a “you” generalizes the experience to include others who could be attacked while asleep; thus, it generalizes the experience without losing sight of the personal involvement. In


fact, that “you” invites the listener into the experience, making the “you” interpersonally involving. Prince (1982) comments that uses of the second-person pronoun in literature carry a trace of the one the narrator addressed when they appear in passages that are not uttered or thought by a character by indirectly indicating that the narrator is present. He offers an excerpt from Le Pere Goriot: “All is true,— so true that you may recognize its elements in your experience, and even find its seeds within your soul” (9). Similarly, the listener is addressed by Edward’s seemingly generic “There’s nothing you could do for yourself” and is invited to recognize this helplessness. Focus on Self The speaker of autobiographical discourse quite naturally focuses on the self in the telling. However, at the moment of most evaluation at the end of the telling of a near fatal attack, this speaker shifts from “I” to “you” and thus invites the interlocutor and others in general inside his experience. Simultaneously, he claims a position like that of others—not the isolation of one man telling his unique adventure. As incongruous as it may seem, this incarcerated man is like others— he positions himself as like “you” in that he is vulnerable to attack. Implied also is the reciprocal: you are like me, vulnerable to attack. Such a positioning maneuver shows a reaching out to incorporate a larger understanding of a personal event. In a sense the speaker who, as a prisoner, is assumed to be the outcast has just managed to present himself as one of the folk, as a person who fears the unexpected, who fears being helpless where there’s “nothing you could do for yourself.” As addressee, the listener, and now you, the readers, enter this world of the helpless, asleep in a bed (whether a cell, a hotel, or a home) and vulnerable to attack. Edward’s segue into “you” helps the audience empathize, showing “conative solicitude” in Bonheim’s term and even perhaps causing a Searlean uptake on this discourse to consider investigating prison safety. Positioning “You”: You-Centered Discourse The Case of Jack Abbott Below is an excerpt from the epistolary writing In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott (1991), an inmate who corresponded with author Norman Mailer while Mailer was researching the life and death of American death row inmate Gary Gilmore for the book Executioner’s Song, just after the return to capital punishment in


some U.S. states in the late 1970s. Abbott is a male of Caucasian and Asian ancestry, born in Michigan, but, according to Abbott, “in and out of foster homes almost from the moment of [his] birth” (1991:6–7), incarcerated in juvenile detention at age 9, resident of the Utah State Industrial School for Boys from 12–18. Six months after his release from this institution, he became an inmate of the Utah State Penitentiary for writing checks against insufficient funds. In his late 30s, Abbott was serving an indeterminate sentence for the murder of another inmate at the time of writing the letters that are published as In the Belly of the Beast, letters that viscerally describe American prison life to Norman Mailer (Abbott 1991:7). I am pairing the segment Abbott wrote depicting an act of stabbing with the selections from the spoken narratives collected for this study in order to show that stabbing is prevalent and that involving the listener/reader is tactical in the way agentive and non-agentive discourse is presented. In Abbott’s passage the predominant pronoun is “you,” though most of the book is written in the first person, as would be expected in letters. Consider first, for contrast, the agentive claim in this segment from Abbott where the “I” indexes the writer and the self from the autobiographical past. Abbott writes: “Before I was twenty-one years old I had killed one of the prisoners and wounded another. I never did get out of prison. I was never a punk” (79). This “I-marked” passage is in contrast to the deeply detailed “you-marked” passage below that precedes it in the book. Abbott appears to tell what any inmate must do to any prisoner who tries to dominate. Consider Abbott’s heavy use of the pronoun “you” in his depiction to Mailer. Example 3.5 Here is how it is: you are both alone in his cell. You’ve slipped out a knife (eight to ten-inch blade, double-edged). You’re holding it beside your leg so he can’t see it. The enemy is smiling and chattering away about something. You see his eyes: green-blue, liquid. He thinks you’re his fool; he trusts you. You see the spot. It’s a target between the second and third button on his shirt. As you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot to the side to step across his right-side body length. A light pivot toward him with your right shoulder and the world turns upside down: you have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest. Slowly he begins to struggle for his life. As he sinks you have to kill him fast or get caught. He will say “Why?” Or “No!” Nothing else. You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder. You’ve pumped the knife in several times without even being aware of it. You go to the floor with him to finish him. It is like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all. They always whisper one thing at the end: “Please.” You get the odd impression he is not imploring you not to harm him, but to do it


right. If he says your name, it softens your resolve. You go into a mechanical stupor of sorts. Things register in slow motion because all of your senses are drawn to a new height. You leave him in the blood, staring with dead eyes. You strip in your cell and destroy your clothing, flushing it down the toilet. You throw the knife away. You jump under the showers. Your clarity returns. There is no doubt you did the only thing you could. Most of the regulars know that you did it. No one questions, but whenever you see one, he may embrace you, pat your back, laugh. You just downed a rat everyone hates. In the big prisons, such murders are not even investigated at all. In ———, when I was there, between thirty and forty bodies were found stabbed to death. There was only one conviction, and even then, it was because the killer turned himself in and pleaded guilty to ten years. (76–77)

A man who has killed a prisoner and has wounded another before age 21 chooses to represent the detailed act of stabbing without selfindexing through the pronoun “I” except for one instance when he describes the numerical details of one unnamed prison: “In ———, when I was there, between thirty and forty bodies were found stabbed to death.” One way of analyzing the “you” is that Abbott is merely protecting his identity as a murderer. The line, “They always whisper one thing at the end,” however, readily connotes through the plural, though nonspecific, pronoun subject that Abbott is not telling of a singular experience with stabbing. To hear such an intimate utterance as a whisper also cues personal experience, or how else would one know of the whisper? As a listener, or as readers, we eerily feel Jack Abbott’s “you” indicates personal knowledge of stabbing, yet by his choice of “you,” Abbott places himself at a distance and potentially places his readers as perpetrators of a stabbing. Or, perhaps he places us as one of those who (like him or like any inmate succeeding in survival) might often stab, using thus a generic but involving “you.” This letter to Mailer positions him to take on the feel of murder, much as the state will do, though less graphically, in Gilmore’s capital punishment. Kitagawa and Lehrer (1990) distinguish between “referential,” “impersonal,” and “vague” use of personal pronouns. They note that referential uses “identify specific individuals” and that “deictic uses are a subset of referential pronouns, where the identification of individuals is specified in terms of the speech situation” (742). For Kitagawa and Lehrer, “impersonal use” is akin to what I call generic use. Impersonal use “of a pronoun applies to anyone and/or to everyone” (742). They specify “vague” use as that which applies to specific individuals, but who are not identified, or identifiable, by the speaker. Abbott’s “they” in “They always whisper” is not clearly identified in the text, though the reader suspects that Abbott could so identify them.


Kitagawa and Lehrer follow Laberge and Sankoff (1979) in characterizing uses of impersonal “you” by saying that “it conveys the theme of generality—particularly a generally admitted truth or a personal opinion that the speaker hopes is shared or it can be replaced by the indefinite pronoun (e.g., on in French, one in English)” (quoted in Kitagawa and Lehrer 742; emphasis in original). Such a general “you” may be one interpretation of Abbott’s “you“-marked passage, for he supposedly is giving Mailer generally useful information on how to survive in prison when affronted. Abbott writes, on the page prior to the passage quoted above, “You’re killing someone in order to live respectably in prison” (1991:75). I propose that Abbott mostly is using the “you” passage, however, to position the reader (Mailer) as a learner or novice, rather like the audience in a recipe. Positioning with “You” A positioning “you” extends beyond a generally applicable “you” to assign a stance explicitly or implicitly in the participation framework of a discourse. It always also signifies an “I” doing the positioning, as if it really said, “I tell you: here is how it is: you are both alone in his cell.” Schiffrin (1987:27–29; 1994) expands on Goffman (1981) in defining participation frameworks as part of a discourse model in which speakers and hearers interactively negotiate meaning in relation to each other and in relation to the utterance. Davies and Harré (1990) define positioning as a dynamic process different from the more static term role. For them, positioning is “the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines” (48). I consider Abbott’s writing a positioning also, for the written story line becomes jointly produced upon reading (see Iser 1978). The switch to a narrating “you,” as Prince (1982:13) would call it, indicates the importance of the passage. For instance, Abbott’s “you” in this instructional passage carries with it a sinister presupposition, and thus a positioning, that “you” might actually need to have that knowledge of stabbing revealed much like a recipe card tells you in its command forms to “Take two cups of flour. . . .” Thus, we picture Abbott giving Mailer, or any potential inmate (or now you, the reader), a recipe for a stabbing. An ironic note on stabbing and Norman Mailer must be added here. At a party in his New York City home in 1960, Norman Mailer was reported to have stabbed his wife Adele with a penknife in the back and in the abdomen. According to a follow-up article, “No Mailer Complaint,” in the New York Times of 22 December 1960, his wife refused to sign a writ of complaint, and thus charges were dropped.


Whether Abbott knew or did not know of this report could greatly color any deeper interpretation or speculation on what Abbott is presenting or who he is positioning with his choice of pronouns. Is this passage merely generic advice? Distancing of a troubling situation? A sinisterly involving “you”? Or a polysemic overlay of all these? Regardless of Abbott’s ignorance or prior knowledge, Mailer was fully knowledgeable of the allegations of the stabbing and must have read that “you”-marked letter with a personally involving impact. Recall how Abbott put it: “you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot” (Abbott 1991:76); juxtapose that with the image of Mailer at a party chatting in his own home and then allegedly stabbing his wife with a penknife, an instrument used (at least originally) to sharpen one’s quill. Mailer’s pen(knife) could easily represent his sharp prose.5

Involving “You” Abbott’s switch from the most personally agentive “I” to an involving and agentive “you” draws the reader in much like in first-person narration. Involvement in a first-person narration, of course, does not always entail associations of a positive nature (Chafe 1982; Tannen 1984b, 1985, 1989). Nor does it always get the audience to mentally nod “yes.” In the social management of discourse we have to consider that involvement need not necessarily be agreeable, just as argument need not necessarily be disagreeable as a discourse strategy. Schiffrin (1984b) notes that argument is often erroneously deemed negative based upon cultural perceptions. Abbott’s involving “you,” while effective, is, at the least, problematic for the reader outside the prison culture. Although some prisoners (and data below) agree with the premises of “kill to establish a reputation” or “kill or be killed,” the reader beyond the walls may adhere to a “thou shall not kill” premise. (Capital punishment, war, and self-defense, however, emerge as exceptions even for the latter opponents of killing.) Abbott himself, in a subsequent book called My Return (1987:58– 62), comments on how this very passage on stabbing from In the Belly of the Beast was used against him later in courtroom testimony. After 19 years in prison as an adult and five years as a juvenile, Abbott was released after serving his time in 1981, the same year In the Belly of the Beast was published. Six weeks later Abbott was charged with murder. He was later convicted of manslaughter in the stabbing death of a New York City restaurant employee. During the trial the prosecuting attorney read aloud several times this same passage from Abbott’s book to show evidence of Abbott’s career criminal status,


obviously taking the “you” passages as personally agentive, rather than merely instructional or ironically involving. In prison, inmates speak earnestly of hostile survival experiences from which others can learn. Such a sharing of information on survival in prisons is, for prisoners, an example of a macro positive involvement strategy—even though the situation of stabbing to survive is itself a negative situation. Taking command of such a situation is an act of agentive behavior, as is demonstrated by the spoken autobiographical stabbing stories in the data analysis in the remainder of the chapter. “You” in Prisoners’ Spoken Autobiographical Narratives In general, when speaking of personal events, inmates used the expected pronouns “I,” “my,” “me” (and occasionally “we”) to denote their involvement in acts of crime. In the five subsequent stabbing narratives, I have located 199 uses of the personal pronoun “I” by the prisoner speakers. Not including the 80 instances of the refrain-like “you know,” I found 44 instances of “you” that include nominative, objective, and reflexive forms of the pronoun “you.” The first-person pronoun use indicates the obvious and unremarkable emphasis on the self in personal experience narratives. The obvious conclusion that the uses of “you,” however, would denote the one spoken to are not confirmed in these narratives; I noted that in only 3 instances was the current interlocutor the referent for the word “you”: “you know what an ice-pick is, don’t you?” and “I know you’re familiar with it.” The narrative data is predominantly monological. As would be expected, in my own utterances as interviewer, asking the questions or providing follow-up, the pronoun “you” most often indicates the one spoken to. For example, I ask, “Did you ever feel you were forced to do something you didn’t want to do?” “Have you ever felt you were in danger of death?” and “How did you end up at Lorton?” Predictably, in the frame of expectations for an interview, the questioning was not reciprocal since the querying rights tend to default upon the one conducting the interview. Uses of “you” that I have analyzed as having a multiple or broader sense than second person are prevalent in the discourse of stabbing. Table 2 assembles the number of instances of the pronoun “I” used to indicate the speaker (199), the number of instances of “you” that index the interlocutor (3), the number of “you” uses in constructed dialogue that index a third person (2), the number of “you” pronouns that appear in constructed dialogue and that index the speaker (12), and the number of uses of “you” that I call personally involving (27) and that appear to indicate more reflexivity or more inclusion. The


chart also shows that two-thirds of the uses of “you” (80) are in the expression “you know,” which figures heavily in the speaking style of two of the narrators. The four speakers are listed at the top of the chart. Roman, James, and Edward each tell of one instance of being stabbed. Roland contributes two narratives about stabbings. In Roland-1, he is the victim of a stabbing; in Roland-2, he commits a stabbing. “You” Indexing the Second Person, the One Spoken To The supposedly traditional use of “you” to point to the person spoken to appears least frequently in the five narratives. As I noted before, once a narrator takes off on a story, second-person singular is rare, mostly employed for clarification. Of course, in non-narrative passages in the data, during more of the give-and-take of closing maneuvers to end the interviews, inmates made direct uses of “you” to question me about education programs or other topics. “You” Indexing the Speaker in Quoted Speech Before I discuss in detail the more prevalent involving “you” that invites us into the speaker’s interiority, I want to note briefly the “you” that indexes the speaker embedded in constructed dialogue, for it also gives us a view of the speaker’s view of himself. Twelve instances of this “you as I” use were found in the stabbing narratives, all within narratives told by Roland. Realize that while much about these speakers’ contexts (i.e., their current location in the same maximum security prison) seems to be the same, the actual experiences they describe are individualized. So, too, are many of their styles of speaking individualized even while being broadly patterned as African American Vernacular English. Johnstone reminds us that “newness, idiosyncracy, personal choice, and creativity are more pervasive in language than traditional ways of conceiving of language lead us to think” (1996:177). Roland’s uses of constructed dialogue to show how someone talked to him not only achieve for him a way of figuring out how he came to commit a stabbing, but they also add a measure of creativity to his telling, as did Edward’s constructed dialogue of the officers in his story earlier in the chapter. Those acts enhance the narrativity, which as Prince (1982) notes, is dependent on the constituents of the story as well as on its context and its receiver’s reception and evaluation. Listening to (or in Prince’s texts, reading) stories, the audience also mentally enacts the parts they have seen or heard. A good proof of trying on this other person’s experience through interiorization occurs when people retell the stories someone else told them, complete with external evaluations (such as saying, “this is the

Table 2. Frequency of “I” and “You” Name and number of utterances

Roman 44

James 104

Edward 117

Roland-1 victim 129

Roland-2 stabber 89

TOTAL

I

17

23

52

49

58

199

2

2

“You” as third person “You” as second person

2

1

3

“You” indexing speaker in quoted speech “You” as involving and inclusive “You” in “you know”

5

7

13

2

5

42

31

7

12

27

7

80


good part”), gestures, repetitions, dialogue (sometimes verbatim), and even embellishments. In the passage below, which is Roland’s second narrative (Roland2), he tells about a man in the prison who came to him for sex.6 Roland has said that he is newly arrived in the prison and that though he is aware of what he calls “the homosexuality,” he has explained that he is not interested in what he calls “things that go against his manhood.” Example 3.6 250 So, he came to me give me some cookies, 251 put some cookies on my bed, 252 some cigarettes, some comic books, 253 because in the cell, 254 I had gotten an old comic book, 255 and I was reading, so, he came by, 256 said, “How you doing, youngster?” 257 I was just lying there. 258 I didn’t say nothing to him . .

Here, in line 256, the words of the inmate who visits Roland’s cell are enacted: “How you doing, youngster?” Roland speaks here as if he were the inmate and is speaking kindly to Roland. The “you” and the word “youngster” indicate Roland in the past, but it is Roland in the present who speaks and thus indexes the self through the “you.” Roland reports himself as saying nothing in reply. Constructed dialogue about the self is agentively interesting for it is a presentation of the self as seen by others, but filtered through the speaker. I noted in the last section how Edward used dialogue to present the prison guards’ assessment of his dismal chances for living. Here with Roland we have another inmate presented as trying to influence his sexual lifestyle, trying in prison terminology to “turn him out.” Constructed dialogue shows an awareness of the public sphere’s influence on formation of the self. If the concept the older person wants to form here for Roland is tried out by Roland, then Roland in this Zone of Proximal Development will engage in a different sexual orientation from the heterosexual one that he has professed in the interview. Those unfamiliar with prison may not realize how dangerous this situation was for Roland. The giving of cookies, magazines, cigarettes, and other items is often used as sexual overture. Taking such items implies acceptance of the sexual offer. Calling a young man “youngster” is also a term of affection. Thus by gifts and by words, this man is signaling his interest and expectations. (See Wikberg and Rideau 1992, “Sexual Jungle,” in Life Sentences, for a full discussion of sexual acts in prisons.)


Let us consider now the next passage from Roland, which again uses “you” in constructed dialogue. These utterances immediately follow the passage above where the other inmate gives the cookies and addresses Roland. For advice, Roland tells that he has consulted his uncle, who also is housed in that prison, not an unusual circumstance in the dc prisons. My experiences in these many years of prison work have shown that several generations as well as many members of the same generation in families are or have been incarcerated in the dc prisons. According to the Sentencing Project, this fits with the high incarceration rate for blacks in the District of Columbia: 2,966 per 100,000 (Mauer 1997b:4). Blacks are put in prison or jail at more than 10 times the rate of whites (3). Roland’s description of his uncle’s advice appears in the following narrative. Example 3.7 259 So, uh, I happened to see my uncle who was there, right, 260 and uh, I was talking to him 261 and he tell me like uh, 262 “You gotta be a man, or a girl” 263 He say, “What you gonna do?” 264 I say, “Man, I can’t beat that big old dude.” 265 So he, he gave me a knife. 266 Say, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

Four instances of “you” appear here in constructed dialogue. Only one of these appears to be a “you” solely directed to the past Roland by the uncle: “What you gonna do?” This remark seems most clearly to be a case of the uncle asking his interlocutor for information (i.e., what is his plan to deal with the sexual overture?). As simple as that may sound, he is also in his query signaling that Roland should take a decisive action. In short he is asking, Will you be a man and fight the other guy, or Will you be a girl and be used sexually? Readers will note that this nonsymmetrical comparison carries with it an assigned low positioning for women: man versus girl, not woman. It also assumes that being treated as a female means to be used. The remainder of the uses of “you” are in constructed dialogue but are simultaneously in aphorisms. Lines 262 and 266, where the uncle says, “You gotta be a man, or a girl” and “You gotta do what you gotta do,” are generalized expressions about behavior. “You gotta be a man” is similar to the often-heard expression—“Don’t cry, be a man about it.” Because this phrase has general applicability (though gendered masculine, it is sometimes spoken even by women to women, albeit ironically), it could be said to be pointing something out to Roland, not just pointing to Roland as listener, as in “What you gonna do?”


(line 263). “You gotta be a man” and “You gotta do what you gotta do” become more normalizing instructions or perhaps simultaneously both normative and a specific indexer of the one to whom the uncle wants the normalizing phrase to apply so that Roland will enact the uncle’s words. It is the uncle, after all, who gives Roland the means (the knife) to “be a man” and to “do what you gotta do.” In Propp’s classic folklore morphology we would have the uncle providing the hero with a magic element, potion, sword, shield, or, as here, knife to solve his dilemma. Distancing “You” I found few examples of a purely distancing “you” that appears to leave the speaker out of the act or state described. However, I present one below because by looking at an example of an infrequently used “you” as the impersonalized other, it helps us see the involving nature of the other instances of “you” that I have found to be so frequent in evaluative passages. Consider the example below from James, whose story describes being attacked and stabbed by four men in a dispute over who would use a Scrabble game inside the recreation room of James’s cellblock. After that incident, James was moved, but later moved again and put into a cellblock with the very men who had stabbed him. The distancing use of “you” occurs after 74 lines of transcript with no use of “you.” James shifts from “I” to “you” after saying that they (we presume the prison officials) had no information on the stabbing incident and thus had not purposefully placed him in danger. Example 3.8 71 james: they didn’t know any= 72 =have any information about this, 73 and no record of it in my file. 74 So, therefore they stuck me here. 75 I been here since . . . 76 It’s real scary, 77 ’cause you don’t know who to trust. 78 And you got a lot of violence here, 79 a lot of it. 80 Me personally, I’m not a violent person. 81 Uh . . I don’t condone violence, 82 and I don’t believe in it. 83 poc: Where were you stabbed? 84 james: Uh my arm, 85 and about an inch from my kidney . . 86 and uhm . . It’s just real hard to adapt. 87 See, I’m not from here. 88 Be like, be like stick out like a eyesore.


The falling intonation and the small pause at the end of line 75, “I been here since,” are followed by a generalized description of frightening conditions in this cellblock: “It’s real scary” (line 76). His next two statements use “you” in ways that are rather complicated. When James says, “you don’t know who to trust” (line 77), he generalizes the plight that he has illustrated not only with the story of being stabbed but with the record of the incident being missing from his prison files, an omission that has contributed to his being dangerously housed. In “you don’t know who to trust,” he probably includes himself as part of that “you.” However, in the next utterance in line 78 we find James’s second use of “you,” “And you got a lot of violence here,” which he recontextualizes by offering more orientation on himself and his persona. James goes into detail to separate himself from any generalized or “we”-like interpretation of involvement in the violence in the utterances that follow. James says in lines 80–82: “Me personally, I’m not a violent person. / Uh . . I don’t condone violence, / and I don’t believe in it.” He indicates that since he is from another area (line 87: “See, I’m not from here”) his adaptation (line 86) is more difficult and he is conspicuous (line 88: “stick out like a eyesore”). He presents himself as being at a distance from the other prisoners. His “you” in “you don’t know who to trust” may function, like a “we” or the French on in spite of the quite individualized scenario he builds. Noting his dilemma about trust could be a way of seeking an ally in the interviewer, who also must feel she “sticks out” and needs to be aware that “you got a lot of violence around here.” Clearly, in line 80 James’s use of the phrase “Me personally” shows him reflexively telling of his state, his attitude, and his beliefs about not being “violent.” Thus, contextually, he distances himself from a personally involving “you” in the line 78 utterance, “you got a lot of violence here.” If he were using the “you” the same way he did in line 77, “’cause you don’t know who to trust,” he would need no clarifying of himself as not a violent person. In matters of trust, he is like everyone in the prison—wary. In matters of violence, he is different. His court record confirms this self-analysis. He is serving time for cocaine distribution. He has not been convicted of violent crimes. The “you got” of “you got a lot of violence here” is thus more of an existential statement (Schiffrin 1994:304), as if he said, “there’s a lot of violence,” not something in which he participates. Thus far we have seen that personal narrative passages tend to use “I”-centered discourse, as James’s narrative above indicated. Few “you’s” in the data on crime narratives index the interlocutor, which, as I noted above, is unremarkable in the interview setting. However, speakers do switch from “I” to “you” and still indicate the self, as was


shown in Roland’s stabbing of the inmate who propositioned him. “You” is used in constructed dialogue by a speaker to index himself in the past through the words of another person. “You” also appears in aphorisms that give a generalized view of expected behavior. And occasionally, a speaker contextualizes a “you” phrase to clearly indicate that “you” means people other than himself, as was noted in James’s story about the violence in prison permeating even a game of Scrabble. However, the “you” that does appear most often in the evaluation segments of personal narratives shows a movement toward an involving “you” that I argue takes place when the speaker begins to consider his own actions in the light of others’ actions. This “you” placement during evaluation or high intensity is a shift into an involving “you” that is a significant agentive display. Involving “You”: Further Complications To illustrate the uses of “you” that are involving rather than impersonal uses, we look in detail at the narratives of Roland-1, Edward, and Roland-2. Roland is finishing a 15-year sentence for armed robbery. Edward is serving 15-year sentences for two counts of armed burglary and for robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Roland-1’s narrative describes his “most fearful and dangerous moment.” Example 3.9 2 one time at [XXX prison] 3 at the age of 24, 4 I was involved in a fight . . 5 And in, in the process of fighting, 6 I would be helping to defend a friend of mine, 7 I was, I was stabbed in the back. 8 It just missed my kidney by a fraction,

What Labov (1972) calls the abstract of the stabbing is in line 7: “I was stabbed in the back.” Roland gives few orientation details as to how the stabbing came about other than in defense of a friend. Line 8, “It just missed my kidney by a fraction,” shows evaluation of the seriousness of the stabbing, considering the location of a vital organ. Readers of Labov (1981) will note the similarity in evaluating neardeath experiences where informants in his research mention close calls. For instance, in Labov’s data, the speaker who enacts the words of the doctor who treats the speaker’s knife wound to the head says: “ ‘just that much more,’ he says ‘and you’d a been dead’ ” (232). Thus evaluation by the speaker is encoded by the “just missed” qualifier by Roland and the qualifying phrase “just that much more” by Labov’s


speaker’s recasting of the doctor’s words. Similar to citing authorities to lend veracity (or appearance of veracity) in epic narratives, bothering to quote a figure of authority, a doctor, also shows evaluation of the seriousness of these near-death experiences. Quoting doctors or guards is common in the stabbing stories I collected. In Roland-1’s narrative, many details follow that describe the aftermath, not the act of the stabbing. (Only much later in the narrative does Roland reveal the way he felt.) Roland continues with a curiously structured phrasing on his emotions saying, “anger was in me” rather than “I was angry.” This odd phrasing helps point out the crafting of the tale. Example 3.10 12 At that time of the event, 13 anger was in me. 14 I took . . and . . went after the person 15 that had stabbed me. 16 I started running after him. 17 But at that time, 18 I didn’t know . . central complex. 19 I didn’t know the whole facility that well. 20 I end up, 21 the person end up, the person end up losing. 22 The person I was walking around. 23 But at the time, my adrenaline was so high 24 that I didn’t recognize . . 25 the blood I was losing. 26 So I walked a long way back to the dormitory, 27 where I was stabbed at. 28 When I got back there, 29 I fell out, 30 I became unconscious . . right. 31 But for some contrary reason, 32 I st=still felt, 33 like I could . . you know, sense what was going on. 34 But my body I couldn’t . . 35 I just couldn’t move. 36 I couldn’t move. 37 And at that time fear set in, 38 because I was going to lose, lose the life. 39 It was coming to that . . you know.

In the segment above, we hear how Roland ran after his attacker (line 16), walked back to his dormitory (line 26), “fell out” (line 29), indeed became unconscious (line 30), but in line 33 he tells that he “could . . you know, sense what was going on.” Thus, he builds the


story through the complicating events about his physical state and the assessment of his emotional state. First anger and then fear “set in,” fear of his own death. His focus on his situation is revealed in his frequent use of “I” (shown below in italic print) to bound this event within his perceptual frame. Example 3.11 29 I fell out, 30 I became unconscious . . right 31 But for some contrary reason, 32 I st=still felt, 33 like I could . . you know, sense what’s going on 34 But my body I couldn’t . . 35 I just couldn’t move. 36 I couldn’t move.

Roland’s repetition is interesting, for not only does he repeat cadenced structures as noted in the “I”-phrasing marked in italics above, but he also paraphrases his colloquial “I fell out” as “I became unconscious,” perhaps in deference to his interviewer. He also repeats in lines 34–36 how he couldn’t move. Such management of the story indicates an engaged speaker personally reconstructing the intense feelings of the pain and the intense experience of prison life. His story instructs the listener in dangers of prison life not by admonishing but by presenting the “I”-centered account with which a listener can begin to identify. In the entire narrative, Roland uses 49 instances of “I,” rarely mentioning the roles of others except for the three references to the friend he defended (lines 6, 21, 22) and the person who stabbed him (line 14: “I took . . and . . went after the person”). Later in the narrative, Roland becomes even more expressly evaluative of what the experience meant to him. Example 3.12 68 and at that time, you know, as I recovered, 69 coming back around, you know, 70 began to humble myself, you know . . 71 and took a change in attitude.

With “at that time” he locates his narrative temporally, positioning himself as the figure in the autobiographical past in the storyworld. This expression points out that “now” he is (as teller) in a different time and position (namely, no longer a man losing consciousness). The pronoun “I” predominates in these portions of the narrative except for the refrain-like quality of the “you know” throughout the monologue that serves as a cadence marker, punctuating the utterances with a rhythm that adds pattern to the discourse.


Roles for “You Know” Roland uses 31 instances of “you know” in his narrative. Though “you know” has been criticized, especially in the speech of public speakers, the phrase functions in various ways. Janet Holmes (1986:7) notes two major categories for the functions of “you know”: speaker confidence or certainty about either the message or the interlocutor’s agreement with the propositional content of the message or, conversely, speaker uncertainty about the message or about the interlocutor’s acceptance of the message content. Roland’s “you know” in lines such as 70, “began to humble myself, you know,” strike me as places for nodding in agreement as is indicated in Schiffrin (1987:ch. 9), who has noted that “you know” can mark a change from new information to shared information. Erman notes that, in close discourse analysis, “you know” functions as a pragmatic expression “mainly as a boundary marker between information units and frequently in the differentiation of information at the sentence level; it is also used as a marker of lexical search and lexical shift” (1987:ii). Schiffrin also states that “ ‘Y’know’ can create a joint focus on speaker provided information” (1987:295). She sums up the discourse marker “you know” as one whose role as “information-provider is contingent upon hearer reception” (295). The hearer of Roland’s tale of being stabbed is thus invited to get inside the experience through the “I” identification and also through the cadenced “you know’s” that invite the spoken “hmm” or nod indicating “Yeah, I know,” or at least, “Yeah, I can imagine.” I find that in the speech of these men, the “you know” usually provides a cadence, even a breath-taking marker as the intensity of a passage builds. “You know” also works as a framing device that surrounds and permeates a display of reflective discourse in these narratives that indicates contemplation of the acts described. Those who do transcription note how easy it is to neglect to transcribe such a phrase when it does not appear to actually describe a knowledge state. And speakers are often amazed when a transcript of their talk contains so many instances. The current expressions “you know what I’m saying” and “you see what I’m saying” appear to be used in much the same ways, providing even more “think time” for the speaker to assemble more words while also giving the listener more space for nodding or saying “yeah.” How conscious a speaker is of these seemingly phatic phrases is worth more study. Assumptions that phrases such as “you know” indicate careless speech cannot be disregarded, for the uptake on a speaker’s words determine much of the ultimate effectiveness. In the case of this narrative one could also wonder if the “you know” repetition is a way of pressing that the speaker’s story be believed.


“You” Joins with “I” in Evaluative Discourse At a critical juncture, Roland changes from an “I”-marked text to several interesting uses of “you,” “you’s” that I propose include the speaker and hearer in more than a generalized fashion. I am positing here an analysis of various kinds of an involving “you.” Such a “you” results from a self-indexing “you” and a generic “you” working in concert. This “you” affects the participation framework and the social construction of the self. Autobiographical speakers, not just those telling of being attacked, switch from “I” to “you” at moments of high evaluation. Consider how evaluatively Roland’s narrative continues as he tells in the following passage what he has learned. Example 3.13 74 But I also learned from this experience, 75 you have to take a chance, with people, 76 and trust someone, 77 but not to put it all out at that, you know.

Consider the use of the pronoun “you” in these utterances. Thus far, in 74 lines of transcript, Roland has used no other pronoun than “I” and only five references to the stabber and the friend. I referred to this as “I”-centering. However, in an evaluation of what he has “learned from the experience,” he switches to “you.” In line 75, “you have to take a chance,” we see a seemingly generic “you” (or “impersonal you” of Kitagawa and Lehrer 1990) similar to the on in French that serves to indicate a common sort of subject persona, less formal sounding than the use of “one” in English. Had Roland said “you have to take chances,” using the plural to indicate the common experiences of taking risks, this interpretation of generic “you” might be even more certain. From an “I” subject in the first clause, “But I also learned from this experience,” Roland switches to a phonetically reduced “you” in line 75: “you have to take a chance.” This “you” broadens the risk of trusting people. (Recall that “trust” has appeared as a strong theme in other narratives such as James’s in example 3.8.) Here Roland moves from his own life experience to a shared risk, making a philosophical stance. Such a use, instead of the more personally agentive “I,” indicates that the speaker is indexing this concept as a common experience. The opposite sentiment of not trusting was expressed in James’s stabbing story, where he revealed that prison “was scary” because “you don’t know who to trust.” Such a “you” is a normalizing “you,” one that makes the idea of learning to trust difficult for Roland after a bad experience— difficult, but necessary. Indeed, we can agree that we do have to take chances sometimes. Rather than deeming this “impersonal,” I see the “you”


as interpersonal, an experience others (as well as the speaker) can see, a move toward discovering “truth” in this awful conflict. Functions of pronouns do shift over time. “You” as referring to the one spoken to may be the prototype, but in practice, the word “you” takes on other functions. In the work of Suzanne Laberge (1976) on the changing distribution of indefinite pronouns in French by speakers in Montreal, she writes that indefinite uses of tu and vous have come to replace on, since on is now being used instead of nous to indicate the first-person plural—“we.” The new indefinites tu and vous can be used to indicate general statements in which a speaker’s experience can “embed him in a much wider class of people by assuming that it is only incidentally his experience, but in fact could or would be anybody’s” (79). Another situation Laberge notes is one in which the indefinite phrase is more of a moral reflection “based on conventional wisdom . . . it usually possesses an evaluative connotation in the sense that it refers to socially conditioned custom” (80). Thus Roland can be saying that the speaker already indexed as “I” has learned something further, something that has a general applicability—namely, that you (everyone including himself and the interviewer and those beyond the scope of the speaking situation) can learn after misjudging a situation. “You” in Speculation Consider what happens when the evaluation becomes more speculative as Roland’s narrative continues. He imagines possible scenarios that could play upon his fear. Example 3.14 90 ’cause, I have learned 91 how to communicate with people, 92 and understand people better, 93 where they’re coming from. 94 But still . . there’s a fear 95 that’ll always be there. 96 Even if someone take and . . you know . . 97 pretend like they going to stab you, 98 the fear comes . . like a flashback. 99 It sometimes may make me act . . 100 to the person . . you know. 101 and no telling what may . . 102 be the reaction from that, 103 from that, from that cold. 104 Because the fear still there, 105 and there’s a feeling that’s there. 106 It cannot be described,


107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

because the knife . . is very cold and . . you know, it was like you could feel it through the skin partly, but you couldn’t do nothing about it, right, you know. So this is . . you know I’m trying, to find words to describe. It’s a very hard feeling to describe . . you know.

After summing up in lines 90–91, “’cause I have learned / how to communicate with people,” much of this evaluative passage is marked as speculative by Roland’s uses of such forms as the mood shifter “Even if” (line 96), and the modal in line 99, “may make me act.” He uses the conditional (lines 96, 99, 101) and future aspect (line 95)—features that assist in marking the discourse as evaluative and speculative. This move into possible experiences, to what Bruner (1986) in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds calls subjunctifying, is a maneuver that opens up this experience to potential further application in his life. Roland makes of that event an opportunity for finding a universal truth about trust. Lines 94–95, “there’s a fear / that’ll always be there” in the future, do not just speculate; they provide a permanent (though future) specter of fear, one that will habitually (“always”) be there. In lines 96–98, Roland further speculates and says, “Even if someone take and . . you know . . / pretend like they going to stab you, / the fear comes . . like a flashback.” Roland constructs a scenario of a fake stabbing move in which someone “pretend like they going to stab you” (line 97). Such a maneuver takes us out of the narrative of the actual stabbing and evaluates the normative effects of any act of stabbing.7 The “you” here occurs in a made-up scene with several short staccato words and pauses that slow down the delivery and give it a thoughtful tone. With these words, “Even if someone take and . . you know . . / pretend like they going to stab you,” Roland draws the listener into a figurative context. At this juncture the switch to “you” shifts the participation framework by positioning the speaker and the listener on the same situational plane, albeit a fictional one for the interlocutor. Thus the speaker’s linguistic choices show he is making sense of his experience through such generalizing involvement in his teller’s world by creating a co-construction of the situation. His actual experience is being tied to the generalized possible experience of the interlocutor and others. He seeks and gets empathy. He also sets up a rationale for his possible overreaction when someone is just playing around, pretending to stab. Thus his narrative discourse reaches out to a broader, public sphere in the sense that the “you” includes others


but also includes other selves in a larger sense as he considers his possible behaviors in such scenes. Interpersonal and Intrapersonal “You” In the example below we find the use of “you” that appears to vary with “I” and to most closely indicate the speaker. I argue it is involving in an interpersonal and also intrapersonal way in Roland’s assessing remarks. Example 3.15 106 It cannot be described, 107 because the knife . . is very cold and . . you know, 108 it was like you could feel it through the skin partly, 109 but you couldn’t do nothing about it, right, 110 you know.

Roland says “you could feel it through the skin partly” (line 108). Neither this listener nor the majority of people share stabbing as a common experience. For U.S. prisoners, however, stabbing is increasingly common. In 1993, American prisons and federal incarceration facilities officially reported numerous incidents of violence: 46 inmates killed by inmates, 4,829 assaults by inmates on staff, 8,220 assaults by inmates upon inmates, and 100 inmate suicides (Maguire and Pastore 1995:586). With the exception of deaths and serious woundings requiring hospitalizations, many assaults of prisoners on other prisoners go unreported. An inmate code of silence prevails that contributes to the private settlements of “justice” (referred to by many inmates as “just us” who settle scores). The books on prison life written by inmates, data in my interviews, and the experiences told during courses I have taught inside the prison sadly provide many examples of such violence. When the speaker here describes the feel of the knife by ascribing it to “you,” not “I,” he positions both the speaker and the interlocutor as victims of the knife. Such a “you” is an interpersonal, involving “you” that draws the interlocutor in, especially as this “you” occurs with the descriptive sensorial details of the actual stabbing and appears near the hypothetical “everyman” situation of the pretending-to-stab scenario. We have seen this engaging use of the hypothetical before in Edward’s story of being stabbed eight times while in his cell. His narrative also contains an evaluative and speculative segment, as indicated in the following remarks originally shown as example 3.4. Example 3.16 107 I don’t ever wanna go through nothing like that again,


108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

you know. I’m not scared of a knife. I would never run from a man with a knife. Get nowhere, you know. But uh, just the thought of laying in your bed, in a . . in a helpless position, you know, with your back turned, you know, and somebody over you. I don’t care what he got, a knife, a stick, or whatever. You in a helpless position. There’s nothing you could do for yourself . . I don’t ever want that to happen again. If I can help it, it won’t happen again.

In lines 109–10, Edward shifts from the specific incident of his stabbing experience to an indefinite, hypothetical experience indicated in his use of indefinite articles, indeterminate nouns (“man”) and pronouns (“somebody”), and by shifting to “you.” By using the indefinite article “a” before “knife” and “man” in lines 109–10, “I’m not scared of a knife. / I would never run from a man with a knife,” Edward moves out from his own recalled experience to one in some possible future. This evaluative section also contains a more generalized “you” in line 112, where he says, “But uh, just the thought of laying in your bed,” and in lines 114–15, “with your back turned, you know, / and somebody over you.” These uses serve to open up the experience to others. Edward’s narrative culminates with a comment on the helplessness of the situation of a stabbing in the night in line 118, “There’s nothing you could do for yourself.” Thus he positions himself or anyone in such a situation (“I don’t care what he got, a knife, a stick, or whatever” in line 116) as understandably defenseless. Such a “you” becomes involving, and the listener identifies as one might in reading a piece of fiction. In managing his story, Edward is able to make a point that he was attacked while locked in his cell. He is also subtly getting his audience to accept and to agree with his assessment of what he experienced. We are being invited to ratify. Such involving “you’s,” also seen in Abbott’s “how to stab” passage to Mailer, eerily position the other as central to the experience. In Roland’s and Edward’s narratives, “you” share in being a victim, not a perpetrator as in Abbott’s passage. Either way, the “you” positions the neophyte as participant in the speaker’s autobiography. Polanyi notes that “you” is a discourse shifter of complexity in oral storytelling that contributes to the interactive qualities and sophistication of oral tellings (1982:165–67). The elaborative style of oral discourse is passed along in a culture through apprenticeship.8 Using words in such a way


as to invite the interlocutor in or expand the range of experience outward from the speaker is a particularly meaningful moment in telling a life story, a moment that could be most productive in working with prisoners. I am suggesting that the shift from “I” in Roland’s lines 108–9 marks his passage as meaningful to the one who speaks, that is, to Roland. Roland says (examples 3.14 and 3.15, line 108) “you could feel it through the skin partly,” not “I felt it through my skin.” If we have never been stabbed, this is not a generalizing experience like Roland’s “you have to take a chance, with people, and trust someone” in example 3.13, which was discussed earlier in the chapter. Not only the pronoun change but other features in Roland’s utterances indicate the shift I am marking as significant. Interesting is the use of the negative modal “cannot” in example 3.14, lines 106–7: “It cannot be described, / because the knife . . is very cold.” It is ironic that the socalled inability to describe is so exactly achieved through the sensorial descriptor and its amplifier: “very cold.” That a knife is sharp or shiny is more within his interlocutor’s realm of experience. That a knife when inserted into a body is “cold” is the inmate’s experiential knowledge, not shared by his interlocutor. The pause in that passage contributes to its being perceived as a thoughtful utterance, one that is doubly marked by the cadenced framing accomplished by the two surrounding instances of “you know.” Further evidence of the complexity of this passage appears in the main verb clause when the speaker drops the “I” pronoun and uses “you”; thus he perhaps locates some of the memory at a potentially shared remove. Example 3.17 107 because the knife . . is very cold and . . you know, 108 it was like you could feel it through the skin partly, 109 but you couldn’t do nothing about it, right, 110 you know. 111 So this is . . 112 you know I’m trying, 113 to find words to describe. 114 It’s a very hard feeling to describe . . you know.

By not using the “I”, the speaker may be distancing the self from his singular participation as victim in the experience. He is possibly positioning the experience inside the frame of others’ experiences, though the experiential uptake is not there in the uninitiated interlocutor’s experience: I had never been stabbed. Instead, we get the empathetic involvement of the interlocutor, who now imagines the steely cold blade.


Look closely at the utterance “but you couldn’t do nothing about it, right” (line 109), with its forceful negation of both the modal “couldn’t” and the object “nothing.” The double negative in the speaking style in African American Vernacular English contributes to the meaning, to the understanding of helplessness through its double emphasis. The shift to “you” brings others into that experience: if we can do nothing, we are powerless. Roland’s affirmation-seeking metacomment “right” at the end of that line serves to have the listener move further into agreement while still maintaining the speaking turn for Roland. With his repetitions of “right, right” throughout, he invites ratification of his experience while at the same time he pushes outward by moving from “I” to “you” before refocusing on “I.” We find further evidence of Roland’s discourse management in his meta-comments on the experience, accentuating its value as he recalls his returning fear. In lines 111–14 he continues: “So this is . . / you know I’m trying, / to find words to describe. / It’s a very hard feeling to describe . . you know.” The agentive speaker “I” comes back, but in order to describe the current situation of telling. Being stabbed is put into a contemplative distance, then, in several ways—(1) by inventing a pretend scenario; (2) by speculating, by saying that things cannot be described; (3) by using “you” to stand with the experiencer verb “feel,” rather than “I”; and also (4) by breaking the action frame to discuss the difficulty of making an accurate description. Tannen notes that the “invoking of details—specific, concrete, familiar—makes it possible for an individual to recall and a hearer to recreate a scene in which people are in relation to each other and to objects in the world” (1989:166). Such interpersonal involvement, Tannen states, is brought about by the “individual imagination” (166). In these narratives, we are imaginatively invited to “feel it through the skin” and to feel the powerlessness of being able to “do nothing about it” or to be unable to “find the words to describe.” Recontextualizing “You” How can this pronoun variation also be an intrapersonal “you” if I have just argued that it distances the speaker personally from the event while allowing others to “feel it through the skin”? Since the speaker is putting the utterance to the public now as a move to comprehend his own situation, the “you” could be a way of speaking to the self, the helpless self, while at the same time opening up the experience for others. Because this “you” comes during the evaluation at the end of the narrative (note the same in Edward’s “you in a helpless situation”), it becomes part of a cohesion strategy that operates in the teller’s world to help him make sense of the situa-


tion he has described within the context of his past life experience. Consider how effective such a moment could be if it were to be fully examined, expanded for its potential in a therapeutic setting. Working with this inmate, a counselor in a group session could take such a segment and begin discussions of how others have reacted in helpless situations and work backward to the actual experience of this one person (this inmate) in this particular situation. The counselor would then retrace the “you” from its outermost generic indexing to its innermost specific indexing. Such a path of exploration would provide a multiplicity of ways of looking at experience, decentering the autobiography and recontextualizing the person’s experience into a larger community of experiencers. The idea of rehabilitation is quite similar—recontextualizing a changed person. Getting at ways to make change has far too often been abandoned in prison management. This work suggests that eliciting narrative is a way into such changed behaviors. Kathleen Ferrara’s Therapeutic Ways with Words (1994) analyzes psychotherapy counseling dyads, noting in particular features of coconstructed discourse that aid in the therapeutic setting. Uses of metaphor taken up and extended by either the counselor or the client function to ratify as well as extend key points of progress in therapy. Similarly, Ferrara notes that therapists and counselors sometimes finish utterances for each other, showing that the dyads are acquiring patterns of thinking conducive to working together for the good of the client. In the prison setting where I elicited these life story narratives, little opportunity arises for therapeutic discourse with counselors unless an inmate is diagnosed with a severe dysfunction. Merely coping with the violence of the prison setting or situating one’s own past violence has not been a counseling priority. This research suggests, however, that using the rubric of life stories could open a space for that reflection, a thinking about the self, which, like formal counseling, is conducive to imagining (and eventually going about) change in one’s life. Making Experience Comprehensible Bruner notes that the narrative mode used in autobiographical tellings is a mode that “leads to conclusions not about certainties in an aboriginal world, but about the varying perspectives that can be constructed to make experience comprehensible” (1986:37). In the narrative that follows, Roland does just this as he describes another incident. When he was under 17 he, himself, stabbed another inmate, as he put it, “because he came to me for sex.” (Earlier in this chapter, I presented an excerpt from this narrative to illustrate “you” in constructed di-


alogue.) At the end of his story, Roland makes sense of the sexual approach by chillingly telling me that then he only assaulted that attacker, but that now he could kill him: “if I was to do it, / I, I could put him away, / because I know . . how to do it, right, you know” (example 3.23, lines 303–5). The following narrative gives a perspective on stabbing, similar to Jack Abbott’s, as agent of the act of violence. As noted earlier, uses of the interpersonal or involving “you” are couched inside highly evaluative constructed dialogue in the voice of Roland’s uncle. No uses of the involving “you” occur outside constructed dialogue in this narrative by Roland, which I designate as Roland-2. (Line numbers indicate that this passage appears several minutes into the 40-minute interview.) Example 3.18 217 and uh, my first experience in jail . . 218 was like, uh, I was real scared, 219 cause I was light skinned, young. 220 I wasn’t, I ain’t no bad looking dude. 221 I was like purty to them. 222 So, as I arrived on the bus I said to myself, 223 by me be jail, [?] going to the jail, 224 I said, “Well uh, me, gonna be a man . .” you know. 225 Or, they say at around that time, 226 they say “girl,” right. 227 So when I got there I, I experienced my first . . 228 with the police I went through a thing, 229 and I got locked up again, right. 230 I was under 17 at the time, 231 a juvenile. 232 So I went through like a little change, 233 going through the jail. 234 Not the part that depressed me for sex or nothing, 235 but to a point of adjusting 236 to what they was doing. 237 Because . . I didn’t know. 238 And I thought those things was, was against, 239 my morals and principles, my manhood, right. 240 And I learned.

In this passage, without directly stating his topic, Roland orients the interlocutor to the situation of sexual aggression in prison. In line 221 he says of himself, “I was like purty {pretty}” to the other inmates and that he was going to have to make a decision in lines 224–26 to be a man or a “girl,” a word he emphasizes. The discussion of his appearance gives the warrant for the other inmate’s sexual interest. This is carefully articulated so that the interviewer does not consider


Roland as having enticed the man in any way. The louder voice used on “girl” further shows the importance placed on the scene, as does the interpretive and reflexive interruption to give the prison word “girl” for a man who is sexually used by another man. Roland establishes that he is against this as yet unnamed situation of sex with another man in lines 238–39, “those things was, was against, / my morals and principles, my manhood, right.” In lines 241–42 below he clearly establishes the cause for him having to stab another inmate and how he (“no bad looking dude”) had inadvertently been attractive to another man (lines 246–54). Example 3.19 241 While I was in jail, 242 I got into an incident, right, 243 where I had to stab a dude, 244 because he came to me for sex. 245 Much older dude, right. 246 At that time it was like I was lying in the bed, 247 like I had my legs drawn up, 248 which I had never felt was no problem, 249 was comfortable. 250 It looked more to him like a female stay like that, right? 251 To them, 252 see, being in that atmosphere, 253 it’s like that’s the way the female, 254 it was attractive to him.

Through descriptive assertions (“my legs drawn up,” “like a female”) and emphasized words (To them), Roland establishes that this attraction was unintentional. Such detailed insistence on a heterosexual orientation was common in the discourse of the prisoners, where there was an eagerness to dispel the mythos of rampant homosexuality in prisons. Of course, such an insistence can be partially attributed to the situational context of the interviewer/teacher being female, but it could also be a way to relieve the speaker of his own uncertainties about his past act. In the next passage Roland reveals the way the interested inmate signals his sexual interest through gifts and friendly conversation. Example 3.20 250 So, he came to me give me some cookies, 251 put some cookies on my bed, 252 some cigarettes, some comic books, 253 because in the cell, 254 I had gotten an old comic book, 255 and I was reading. So, he came by,


256 257 258

said, “How you doing, youngster?” I was just lying there. I didn’t say nothing to him . .

Offering gifts in prison can imply more than friendship. The alert inmate learns to read such acts as potentially multilayered and possibly dangerous. Although the inmate in this narrative makes it obvious that he “reads” these acts as sexual overtures, realize that many actual friendships do occur in prison. In my years working inside the maximum security unit I have seen deep friendships that included using terms of friendly expression, sharing of food, books, and other resources. However, prisoner advice in these matters cautions the new inmate to be what we would call a “close reader” in matters of gifts. By taking the cookies or comics, Roland, however, determines that he would be signaling his agreement for sex. Roland reports himself as saying nothing in reply. Such constructed dialogue about the self is agentively interesting for it is a presentation not only of the other but also of the self as seen by others, filtered through the speaker. Such an enacted passage, as noted earlier, shows a high degree of evaluation of the event and can have the effect of drawing the listener into the story by the resonance in the trace of meaning of a second person, as it were, of the “you.” As we have seen, Roland next constructs for his listener the conversation he had with his uncle who was also in the jail. Example 3.21 259 So, uh, I happened to see my uncle who was there, right, 260 and uh, I was talking to him 261 and he tell me like uh, 262 “You gotta be a man, or a girl” 263 He say, “What you gonna do?” 264 I say, “Man, I can’t beat that big old dude.” 265 So he, he gave me a knife. 266 Say, “You gotta do what you gotta to do.”

The first utterance Roland reports from his uncle neatly echoes Roland’s own remark in the orientation of the story, where he was revealing his thoughts in lines 224–26: “I said, ‘Well uh, me, gonna be a man . .’ you know. / Or, they say at around that time, / they say ‘girl,’ right.” The uncle’s words to Roland present a general aphorism (line 262: “You gotta be a man, or a girl”), general at least in the prison setting and in some male speech. That this line also appears as part of the story abstract signals its evaluative importance, and, I propose, it signals the importance of this event in Roland’s autobiographical presentation of the self. The “you” in line 263, “He say, ‘What you


gonna do?’ ” is most clearly indexing the Roland of the storyworld. Both the “you” of line 262, “You gotta be a man,” and line 266, “You gotta do what you gotta do,” function as indexers of Roland in the storyworld and, simultaneously, as involver of the listener in the storyteller’s world because they are set phrases, indeed clichés, and contain the trace of the deictic “you” as the one spoken to. “You” as Interpersonally Involving and Consensual An aphoristic “you,” while delivering the moral, is also interpersonally involving and consensual. Like the discourse-marking “y’know” that Schiffrin (1987:278–79) describes as “a marker of metaknowledge about generally shared knowledge,” the “you” in “You gotta be a man” and “You gotta do what you gotta do” implies generally applicable, agreed-upon aphorisms that are salient within the prison community. The “gotta” construction (reduced from “you have got to”) implies you have to, that is, it is necessary to do something. In this case, the uncle gives Roland the suggestion and the means (the knife) to do what is necessary (fight, attack, stab, maybe even kill) to protect his status as a heterosexual man. This kind of “you” is positioning the nephew into a general and necessary experience of assaulting another prisoner to establish his own status in prison. The uncle then is the educator who gives the student the necessary teaching and tools for learning. It is up to the student/hero, Roland, to apply the normalizing lesson. To continue Prince’s (1982:147) metaphor about narrativity, the cat sat on the dog’s mat, and now there are consequences. The very quality of intrigue that is suggested by Prince’s cat and dog example portends the evaluative aspect of storymaking that compels both the listener and the teller to consider more deeply the events recounted. What happens in the story, in the life (or near-death) intrigues and instructs. It draws us in, partly through the artful use of “you.” “You” in Direct and Indirect Speech As the narrative continues, Roland reveals in the agentive “I” passages below the preparations he made to thwart the attack, and he also constructs the dialogue of the ensuing more direct request for a sexual encounter, which make his attack on the man appear reasonable: Example 3.22 267 So, uh, I went in, set up all that night. 268 I psysed9 myself up, you know. 269 I was nervous, you know. 270 I kept practicing how I’m a do it, 271 ’cause I didn’t know how to use the knife, 272 and, kept practicing.


273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280

So the dude came back by my cell, early that morning came by my cell, say “um,” ask me if I’m really serious [?] right there, right? So he said, “Well I see you a whore, huh?” I say, “What you mean?” He say, “Well I’ll show you later on.”

Above, Roland tells of his physical preparations. He “set up all that night” (line 267) and “kept practicing” (lines 270 and 272). He reveals his mental state, “I was nervous, you know” (line 269), and he tells of his knowledge state, “I didn’t know how to use the knife” (line 271). If there had been any misunderstanding of the cookies and comic books, the words of the other man help clarify the situation, though they do not yet become a directly spoken request. Roland uses indirect speech to note that the man “ask me if I’m really serious” (line 275). Though the next utterance was unclear and untranscribable, the question that follows in line 278 implies more clearly, but through analogy, that the man wants a sexual encounter. Roland says that the man said, “Well I see you a whore, huh?” (line 278). Roland’s response is an attempt to show ignorance: “What you mean?” (line 279). We (in the storyteller’s world) know this is a ruse, for Roland has revealed this through his reported discussion with the uncle and his recounting that he had been up all night practicing how to stab this man who he has decided has approached him for sex. In the way of “doubling” common to black American culture in “signifyin’ ” (see, for instance, Gates 1987, Kochman 1981, Daniel and Smitherman 1990, Briggs 1993), the man’s response to Roland reveals both a sexual innuendo and a threat: “Well I’ll show you later on.” The “show you” could mean that the man will literally expose the sexual intent. It could also mean that he will “show” him as is meant by the word instruct. It is interesting that no account is given for why Roland does not stab the man immediately. However, from my knowledge of prison routines, I surmise that the early morning hour would be one where more staff are present, probably during breakfast (as early as 4 a.m. in many prisons), and thus the acts (of sex or of stabbing) might be more easily observed and prevented. This is confirmed by the temporal reference in Roland’s continuation of the narrative, where he tells of the actual stabbing. Example 3.23 281 So, later on that day round about eight=


282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312

=about nine o’clock in the morning, they have Rec, go outside. So he came down into my cell, into my cell telling about uh . . “You wanna, have sex with me, right”? I say, “Yeah.” So I laid in the bed, right. So I was nervous, so I signaled, “C’mon,” I say “C’mon.” So when he came, when he got close enough to me, I stabbed him. With, when I stabbed him, it was at the point, I really didn’t know how to use the knife. That’s why I wasn’t able to really kill him, you know. I, I assaulted him. I wouldn’t have kill him, you know, [?] right now if I was to do it, I, I could put him away, because I know . . how to do it, right, you know. And . . that happened . . So, he ran out. And I never, I, it wasn’t nothing like I, uh, I strive off of, the reputation came behind that, right, you know. So, I got out, I went down to the Youth Center.

In the segment above Roland describes stabbing, this time as a novice, creating a scene in the retelling that re-creates at least the intent, if not the finesse, of the seemingly generic instructions of Abbott’s passage described earlier in this chapter. In this story we see how a speaker interprets violence as a means of constructing social status by showing that “You gotta be a man” to survive in prison. Labov’s (1981) work on speech actions and reactions is helpful in looking at this passage. Labov found that violent reactions occur “when the sequence of speech acts leads in a direction where speech stops” and that violence “is associated with a dispute over the social status of the participants” (240). Unlike in Labov’s examples where victims or witnesses describe violent actions against them, in the story of Roland-2’s stabbing of another man, we have the stabber, not


the one stabbed, recounting the act. (Of course, Roland is still telling of being victimized through sexual threat, even though he becomes the aggressor.) Similar to Labov’s findings, in Roland-2, silence is described when the man first brings the cookies and comic books; “I didn’t say nothing to him” (line 258), Roland reports in reply to “How you doing, youngster?” (line 256). The entire act of stabbing is directly related to a social status. Roland has said that his “principles” and his “manhood” are all part of his jointly constructed decision (in concert with his uncle) to “be a man” and not a “girl,” as Roland (lines 224–26) and his uncle (line 262) put it, and not a “whore” (line 278), as the inmate phrased it. Consent to the sexual overture appears to be expected. In fact, when the man comes back to Roland’s cell, Roland gestures and says, “C’mon” (in lines 291 and again in 292), to get the man close enough to stab (from Roland’s view) or close enough to commence a sexual act (in the other man’s view). Though Roland has told elsewhere of a time when he was stabbed unexpectedly, he tells here how he stabs someone by surprise. This act of stabbing is done (in Roland’s view) as a means of self-protection and as a means of status protection. He makes this clear when he says his “reputation came behind that” (line 310). The “manly” heterosexual status and the status of a dangerous man thus result from this encounter. In the world of prison, such a status has great value. The fact that he has been both one who stabs and one who has been stabbed in prison reveals much about lives lived within the bars and walls of prisons. That he tells both these narratives is also essential to his understanding of his autobiographical experience in the convoluted world of prison ethics. Involving “You”: Embedded Phrases In Roland’s second narrative about stabbing, the “you” that I have found most interpersonally involving does not appear in utterances with the interlocutor as in all the other stabbing victim narratives. Instead the “you” appears embedded in adages assigned to his uncle’s cautionary speech: “You gotta do what you gotta do” and “You gotta be a man, or a girl.” These remarks address the past Roland. Yet, simultaneously, by nature of the set phrase, they do invite in the general listener/reader. This “you” also assists the current Roland in locating himself powerfully as a “man,” as the kind of strong person who does what he feels he has to do—attack—in the prison setting. He is positioning himself as a dangerous man with a reputation of someone not to be abused. His involving “you” is once removed (in constructed dialogue). The point of such a story as this last example by


Roland may not be exclusively to show what he calls his “principles,” his “manhood,” and his prowess in the storyworld; he may also be showing his “manhood” in the storyteller’s current world—that is, in the prison interview. And, as such, he may not be positioning himself to do anything other than “be a man” in the eyes of his female interlocutor, a stance common among male inmates when meeting women inside prison. Interpersonal and Intrapersonal “You” in Concert As listeners, or as readers, we are in a position to react to, and interact with, tellers of violent situations. Through the tellers’ discursive shifts, we can analogously be positioned inside narrators’ experiences. In Edward’s narrative we are called to think of ourselves in a helpless situation: “laying in your bed,” “with your back turned,” “and somebody over you.” In Roland’s “you could feel it through the skin,” he invites the interlocutor to share in the feeling of being knifed. His stating, “you could feel it through the skin,” rather than “I could feel it through the skin,” positions the listener to become involved in the speaker’s autobiography and positions Roland to be part of a larger group of experienced victims. Thus he creates (or attempts to create) a shared sense of the past. As such, a narrator’s switch from “I” to “you,” while distancing the speaker from a solely personal involvement, also draws the listener and speaker closer. Chillingly, we are positioned, even perhaps warned, to “feel it through the skin” and to be able to “do nothing.” Similarly, in Abbott’s “how to stab” piece, he writes to Mailer that “you can feel [the victim’s] life trembling through the knife in your hand” (1991:76). No longer Mailer alone, but any reader and even a jury can be positioned to be horrified to feel the “trembling.” Abbott’s positioning of his reader is both deflecting of personal responsibility and involving of others. It also can be seen as a speech act of warning, that in any human is the capacity to kill and the vulnerability to be killed. Consider Iser’s work on “play of the text” as we think about these narratives. We can read or hear stories as interrelational between author, text, reader, and, I will add, autobiographical self as another version of author. In these narratives on stabbing we have Iser’s “double operation of imagining and interpreting” that engages us in the task of “visualizing the many possible shapes of the identifiable world” (1989b:327). Here in the spoken world, in the story of stabbing, we have a speaker and interlocutor who can engage in those imaginings and interpretings “so that inevitably the world repeated in the text begins to undergo changes” (327). Part of that change, then, is equating


the world presented with the imagined experience of the listener. That is, the narrator positions the reader/listener inside the act of violence. The prisoner/speaker also intrapersonally addresses himself, a figure of himself, in the story world he creates for the interlocutor when he shifts to the inclusive “you.” Thus these “you’s” that function as interpersonally involving can as well be intrapersonally positioning. We have seen the pronoun “you” shifting from a standard use to indicate a person or persons spoken to (second-person singular or plural) to a “you” that is generalized (like French on or English “we” and “they”) to a “you” that indicates an “I” inclusive of others. In other words, this “you” means “I, like many” or “I, like all such helpless folks”, or “I, like a man.” Thus a word shifts in meaning over time and in contexts to what Elizabeth Traugott (1989) calls a less specific and more epistemic meaning. In autobiography the speaker or writer is engaging, even addressing, the self when the switch occurs from “I” to “you.” Thus, the speaker is using an intrapersonal “you,” a “you” that is not only another person, or even any person outside himself, but another version of himself, the self of the autobiographical past in the storyworld re-created in the narrative. Such an insight about narrative is implied in Polkinghorne, who cited David Carr’s (1985) emphasis on the storyteller as audience as well as author when as narrators “each of us must count himself among his own audience since in explaining ourselves to others we are often trying to convince ourselves as well” (Polkinghorne 1988:151). In the context of Roland’s narrative of being stabbed (in which he has several times offered his assessment of the event as one that changed him, humbled him), we can see “you could feel it through the skin” as a phrasing turned also onto himself. It is as if another speaker addresses him, a present self reminding the figure of Roland in the autobiographical past—reminding him and simultaneously warning him and us of exactly how it felt to be stabbed. Thus, the teller in narratives, in order to construct an understandable experience for himself and for the listener, is (always already) presenting a second self as well, an agentive self who positions himself in the speech act as teller. He is, as well, a self who is thus positioned in the storyworld of his past. This double positioning is mirrored in the simultaneously self-distancing, other-involving, and yet self-addressing switch from “I” to “you.” That switch operates in the participation framework to set up an uptake of involvement not only in the audience but simultaneously in the speaker in the re-formation of the self. Such a shift follows Traugott’s (1989) semantic-pragmatic change showing the order of movement from propositional to textual to expressive. This shift moves the meaning of “you” from its more concrete, de-


ictic function of the “spoken to” to a generalized “you” that has now become also inclusive of an “I.” The understanding achieved is not solely implying a moral understanding but also suggesting an understanding (or at least an undertaking) that is psychological as well, attempting to figure out the workings of the person’s own mind.

4 Reflexive Language and Frame Breaks

How speakers think about selves and about their lives is often revealed in the way of telling as much as in the content of what is told. In narrating, speakers comment on the act of telling, revealing their emphases, their notions of importance through various evaluative means.1 This chapter presents ways prisoners manage discourse in highly charged autobiographical moments, using markers that comment on the telling in recognizable frame breaks that stop the action scenes they are depicting in order to reflect upon the situations and themselves. I designate such a shift as an epistemic frame break, a break in the event structure replete with evaluation and meta-talk devices. This analysis draws on work in evaluative discourse (Labov 1972, Tannen 1989), which has shown that speakers who narrate events in their lives do so in a variety of ways using both internal and external evaluation devices such as repetition, qualifiers, stress, constructed dialogue, metaphor, gesture, loudness—numerous devices that cue the importance of moments, helping the speaker make clear the point of a story. At a macro level, those who tell narratives are presenting stories of their experiences that make clear the events of significance in their lives and thus are performing a large evaluative and reflexive maneuver by the act of telling. Reflexive language shows the speaker at work to make the story of his or her experience cohesive and understandable. In doing so, speakers often comment on the language itself. Speakers in this study sometimes use the word “intentions,” or speak directly about what they desired to do at the time of the event they are recalling—saying, for example, “I wanted to” or “I was trying to.” Others speak of how they did not know what they were trying to do: “I don’t know what made me do it”; or, as previously noted, some try to figure out causes: “I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him.” Such discourse is reflexive because the speaker is contemplating his intentions and his

Reflexive Language and Frame Breaks 119

actions, what caused his actions, and choices he might have made. He is agentively showcasing these embedded thoughts or narrated events for the listener and, epistemically, for himself. He uses language as a guide. The prisoners telling their life stories often directly comment on the words or on the acts they are telling about, thus shifting the footing (Goffman 1981) or positioning (Davies and Harré 1990), or breaking the frame (Goffman 1974), or reframing the narrative act. Lucy (1993b:11) notes that such features as remarking on language (mention, not use), reporting utterances, indexing and describing aspects of the speech event, and invoking conventional names make language “fundamentally reflexive.” Such meta-commentary gives signals into evaluative moments in discourse, doubly marking the telling; for not only is the speaker reporting, but he is also “showing his hand.” Evaluative discourse thus frames and also interpenetrates narratives. Discourse markers and meta-comments can thus mark off the parts of conversations at levels of utterance and participant structure (Schiffrin 1987, 1994), and, I pose, speakers can use frame breaks to mark levels of psychosocial construction as well. Frames, Footing, Positioning, and Reflexive Discourse In this chapter, I join Goffman’s (1974, 1981) work on frames, frame breaks, and footing to Lucy’s (1993a, 1993b) analysis of reflexive language. I thus establish the concept of a reflexive frame break or shift that evaluates and makes cohesive an event in a life story. I begin with a brief overview of these terms and then show how the features looked at thus far in this study all figure in making sense of a narrative in a prisoner’s life story. Frames are ways of structuring experience. For instance, we can have a joking frame, a telephone chat frame, a classroom frame, a locker room frame, a prison frame, and so on. Some frames are also embedded within other frames. When I taught in the prison, for example, we inserted a classroom frame into the prison cellblock frame of experience. Some aspects of a context supercede others in priority in these embedded frames. In the prison, matters of security usually superimpose most other procedures. There are socially, culturally, and power-imposed expectations in any situation, including who opens and closes conversations, who stands or sits, who speaks first, or who can speak at all. Speakers who share common knowledge about a frame of experience know how to establish, maneuver within, or change their positioning within that frame. Much of my adjustment to prison life (and consequently, understanding prison discourse) de-


pended upon acquiring common knowledge, what I call the necessary literacy of prison. Footing, according to Goffman (1981:128) shows the “participant’s alignment, or set, or stance, or posture, or projected self,” and can be shifted “in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance.” I prefer the activity-noting term positioning for such shifting because it connotes the agency of the speaker who sets up the alignment and who maneuvers others as well by the stance taken in the telling (see Harré and van Langenhove 1991, 1999; Davies and Harré 1990; Berman 1998; and O’Connor 1995b). Goffman (1981) considers a change in footing as a change in the frame for events. He credits Gumperz with identifying elements of code shifting that Goffman saw as obvious shifters of footing, some of which also figure in Lucy’s (1993b) classification of reflexive elements of language: “(1) direct or reported speech, (2) selection of recipient, (3) interjections, (4) repetitions, (5) personal directness or involvement, (6) new and old information, (7) emphasis, (8) separation of topic and subject, discourse type, e.g., lecture and discussion” (quoted in Goffman 1981:127). Thus, what is being said is always intertwined with how it is being said; both aspects serve to situate the self and others in the activity of talk. Meta-talk Research has shown that devices of meta-talk have been useful in understanding conversation management and in pointing to evaluation in a speaker’s discourse. Schiffrin (1980:231) suggests that remarks about talk help people to represent their worlds and present their selves. Such bracketed utterances as “that’s what I meant,” “I’m telling you,” or “I’ll put it this way” help speakers focus on their own talk (199). In Lucy’s view, reflexive language is a matter of metapragmatics and large in scope. He includes “language to communicate about the activity of using language,” referring to or reporting particular acts of speech (1993b:9–10). In chapter 3 of this book, for instance, Roland reports his uncle’s advice on how to handle the unwanted sexual overture: “He said, ‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ ” thus implying that Roland should attack the man. Reflexive language, according to Lucy, can also simply characterize someone’s language use (1993b:10), as in “He warned me.” This is a more direct approach that might be in another speaker’s language style, but it would be less interactive than the constructed speech scenarios used by Roland and that must be interpreted by the listener.


Other meta-talk features also help the speaker maneuver. Schiffrin notes that “organizational” and “evaluative brackets” are used “for both referential and expressive ends” (1980:231). Meta-talk “functions on a referential, informational plane when it serves as an organizational bracket” in speech, and meta-talk operates on an “expressive, symbolic plane when it serves as an evaluative bracket” (231). Thus, within a speaking situation, the bracketing phrases one uses help create cohesion and help explain through pointing to the key aspects for understanding. By remarking on one’s own talk, speakers reflexively organize and clarify their speech. They can also remark upon and evaluate the content of their speech and thus the experiences represented in the speech, making then the use of such devices fundamental to reflexivity. The whole concept of a meta-word (meta-message, meta-talk, metacognition) is not simple to define. Talk about a speech act or activity, or talk about talk, or talk about knowing—are the simplest of definitions. Meta-messages may also be sent via body language or transmitted via other paralinguistic features. I say “transmitted” because, as Gumperz (1982a) explains, with examples from English utterances by native speakers of other languages, the meaning of an utterance is filtered through a reading of linguistic and paralinguistic cues. For instance, the rising intonation pattern from a first language, when transferred into a second language, may be transmitting unwittingly a message of hostility or questioning. Thus, much is going on in language beyond the level of the phonemic-semantic interpretation of sounds, beyond the referential value of the words, and even beyond the structures in which words are arranged. Relatively few articles focus totally on meta-talk (but see Schiffrin 1980). Perhaps that has something to do with the murkiness surrounding just what meta means when applied to a concept. As a Greek prefix, meta- means “with, after, sharing, action in common pursuit or quest, and especially change of place, order or time,” notes the Oxford English Dictionary, as it establishes meta- as a prefix that corresponded to trans- (oed 377). The oed claims some “modern uses of this prefix do not follow strictly in accordance with Greek analogies” (377). The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1961 [1933]) tells of the word metaphysics (and its precursor metaphysic), which means the first philosophy or ontology, the first principles of things— being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity. It is thus “the theoretical philosophy, as the ultimate science of being and knowing” (oed 386). However, the oed warns of the misapprehension of the prefix meta- in many words modeled after the “inaccurate or extended uses of the erroneous etymology” that came about with the use of


metaphysical to mean supernatural and fantastic or imaginary in the 16th century (386).2 Following the “mistaken” etymology, many words have been prefixed with meta- “to mean a higher science (actual or hypothetical) of the same nature, but dealing with ulterior and more fundamental problems: meta-mathematical, metaphenomenal, metaphysiological” (377). Thus, the uses of meta- prefixed words may be confusing and at least uneasily interpreted. Whereas not a large body of literature uses the term meta-talk, meta-language is in use by those who study various areas of language, such as computational linguistics, artificial language, and meta-linguistics. Jaime Carbonell writes that a discourse model must be able to cope with interpreting meta-language utterances in purposive discourse by using knowledge of “actions, intent, and other dialogue phenomenon (such as indirect speech acts) as well as more linguistic devices such as ellipsis and definite noun phrases” (1982:5). In this study, meta-talk means talk about talk, not a superior or ulterior kind of talk, though I make the point that the term indicates a possible shift into more personally agentive thinking and thus a kind of interiority. Schiffrin discerns that meta-language is “discourse whose subject is language per se” and that meta-communication is discourse whose communication “focuses on language whose subject (explicit or implicit) is codification of the message and the relationship between interlocutors” (1987:303). Schiffrin shows that expressions like “I mean,” “lemme tell you,” “what we call” are used by speakers to mark the “focus on properties of the code per se (on ‘langue’) as well as on the language used in a speech situation (on ‘parole’)” (303). Meta-talk devices may be virtually unnoticed by speakers during conversations. Indeed, speakers seem only marginally aware that they are using expressions that comment on the talk and that mark the discourse or situation as highly evaluated. Speakers looking for the first time at transcribed discourse are often surprised at all the unnoticed markers in their speech: repeated phrases like “you know,” “as I was saying,” “uh,” whole phrases spoken several times, hesitations, pauses. One prisoner remarked that he feared that the way he spoke looked ignorant when all was written down as it is in these transcripts.3 Speakers, nonetheless, employ meta-talk devices that shift them in and out of the narrative told and in and out of the act of narrating, as Schiffrin (1987) notes, using markers that function in both storyworlds and conversation worlds simultaneously. She is quick to show that no neat division really exists between those words that mark or remark on the words, or words that remark on the speaking situation alone. Even asking for a clarification of the definition of a word could be done in the interests of keeping com-


munication from breaking down, not just in the interest of knowing a word as a piece of a linguistic code. Such discourse management devices feature heavily in the accounts of dangerous situations in the prisoners’ narratives, where understanding both the words and the implications are imperative for getting the point of the story, just as understanding the implications of an offer of cookies or a manner of lying on a bed were imperative in comprehending a sexual advance in the instance Roland described in the last chapter. Thus we see that meta-talk at least signals two planes of discourse are operating, and indeed are being managed by the speaker. One plane of talk has the speaker at work calling attention at the word level. Another is aimed at negotiating the talk situation itself. Both are important in the participation framework constructed by those in conversations. I am posing that, as well as these two planes, the meta-talk may be signaling another plane, one that is “at work” on the speaker developing an even more contemplative and epistemic self, especially when revealing experience in the narration of a dangerous life story. Meta-talk and Frame Breaks In this chapter I show that meta-talk devices can signal a shift into reflexive frame breaks, marking a focus on an epistemic self who is constructing his life in story. An epistemic frame break, then, is a shift in positioning that tells about the speaker’s knowledge state during the act being described. Thus, this shift is a reflexive guide not only at the level of discourse management but also at the level of understanding the self. In noting how the self and autobiography are intertwined, Bruner summarizes Gergen (1982) to call our attention to “man’s way of orienting toward culture and the past” by reflexivity, which is defined as “our capacity to turn around on the past and alter the present in its light, or to alter the past in light of the present” (Bruner 1990:109). Along with reflexivity is our “capacity to ‘envision alternatives’—to conceive of other ways of being, of acting, of striving” (109). Bruner connects these ideas with the notion of the storytelling self, crediting impact of literary theory and theories of narrative cognition. Thus, a self “is cast in the role of a storyteller, a constructor of narratives about a life” (111). In the examples from criminals’ life stories that are presented below, I show how breaks in the story line help focus reflexivity and show speakers agentively grappling with an epistemic, knowing self. In this analysis of language in frame breaks in prisoners’ narratives, the motivations, states, and intentions are being brought to the at-


tention of the interlocutor and to the speaker himself through metadiscursive devices. In the framework of criminals speaking about their criminal acts, this attention focusing is useful in locating (and perhaps even promoting) personal, moral agency. Framing as Reflexivity In the first sections below I show examples of frame breaks, some of which are cued by meta-talk. These narratives are by Antoine, an alcoholic and drug addict, by John, discussed in chapter 2 as shooting the driver who drove into his friend, and Kingston, seen as the bank robber in chapter 3. I analyze the longest reflexive passage in the study (one by Kingston) to show that the levels of reflexivity and agency are intertwined in the situation of the interview and in the sociocultural constructs operating at the time of the event recalled. I conclude the examples of agentive frame breaks with a counterexample from William, accused of child molestation. That narrative, one that contains evaluatively embedded narratives, involves much management (perhaps even manipulation) of the discourse but little evidence of a personal, moral agency. Shifting Frames: Evaluating and Telling Intentions Narratives in this data show numerous reflexive frame breaks cued by discourse markers and discourse-marking phrases in which negations and modals also call attention to the self being described in the narrated event. These shifts break the flow of narration, giving emphases and thus shaping the very act of telling. Finally, they also point to the climactic moment or the “upshot” of the criminal act being described in an emerging agentive discourse. Antoine’s Narrative Antoine, in the excerpt below, uses meta-comments to refer temporally to the situation being recalled. He has been asked how he came to this prison and replies with a very self-reflexive assessment of his actions and an unagentive claim that drugs were controlling him when, as he put it, the “crime happened.” Example 4.1 1 poc: 2 3 antoine: 4 5

How did you end up at Lorton . . How’d you get here? Uh . . it was very stupid. I was, I was under the power of drugs . . I was on cocaine, rock cocaine.


6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Uh, this particular day that this crime happened, I was, I had just gotten by, had gotten over the flu, I had just started this job, working in, uh, working in a produce place. And I had gotten sick over the flu. I came back to work a week later, guy was saying I no longer worked there. So, he gave me my last pay. So when I left there, I went to this girl that I was staying with . . and she was, she, uh, was giving me the flu, but I never told her that I had lost the job. I left her that day, and went to buy some crack.

Thus, Antoine begins the narration of his “stupid” (line 3) path into his current prison sentence, giving details of his crack habit, his case of flu, losing his job, and leaving his girlfriend’s house to “buy some crack” (line 20). Antoine uses the temporal marker “at that time” in the segment below as he shifts to describe his state after the act of taking drugs. Example 4.2 21 When I went to buy crack, 22 and I was walking after I had bought it. 23 I walked, I was walking, 24 maybe about two blocks up. 25 These girls called me to their apartment. 26 I smoked, smoked crack with them. 27 So, at that time, I was very hyper, 28 at that time, under the effects of crack.

In line 27, “I was very hyper” describes the speaker’s physical and emotional state at the time of the crime he is beginning to relate. Crack produces an intense (though brief) high. Antoine has repeated his rationale and reinforced that his behavior is chemically induced and erratic. Below, Antoine continues his narration and shifts the footing briefly to re-index the passage to the question I asked about how he got to prison. Below he tells me what he “never told” his girlfriend (line 36): he goes to steal money for buying crack. Note that even now he does not state this overtly. One unfamiliar with drug purchases could confuse this passage and assume that the Chinese store sold crack. Antoine comments on his intentions in lines 43– 44: “And my intention, you know, / was to just get some more crack.”


Example 4.3 29 antoine: 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 poc:

I left . . there . . to go . . I went to walk through a neighborhood that I know, up in the Brookville4 area . . and . . went to a liquor store and bought some alcohol. I drank two . . pints . . of vodka. I never told her what was going on. Actually I never told her what was going on. uh, I left there, by me drinking and smoking crack uh . . drinking alcohol, vodka. I went to uh . . this Chinese store about 20 blocks away. And my intention, you know, was to just get some more crack. And that’s how af=like I was saying, it was very stupid, stupid . . and took 70 dollars. Four days later they had a search warrant, for my arrest. And that’s why I’m here . . . doing a two to six. So, my . . This your first time?

Antoine’s agency as a criminal is inferred from the context of getting crack (which is always an illegal substance) and more directly from his expression “took 70 dollars” (line 47). Mention of the search warrant by police confirms the event as a theft. Antoine assesses his actions in further evaluative talk in line 46, “it was very stupid, stupid,” which repeats one of his opening statements, “it was very stupid” (line 3), spoken in response to the question “How did you end up at Lorton . . How’d you get here?” His remark “like I was saying” (line 45) refers back to this earlier mention of “stupid” behavior. Thus, as a discourse management move, Antoine gets back to the original question and his response. Such marking draws attention to the content of the remark on “stupidity” that is already salient from its placement as a first utterance in response to the “How’d you get here” query. His assessment of his acts is further emphasized by the qualifier “very” and the repetition again of “stupid”: “it was very stupid, stupid” (line 46). Thus, a cluster of devices highlight the evaluative nature of this passage: Antoine opens the story with a self-assessing remark, he labels his intentions directly with the word “intention,” and he cues


the salient, repetitive, and intensified utterance (“it was very stupid”) with a meta-talk phrase, “like I was saying.” That phrase anchors the self-assessing remark in the utterance plane (in the interview) and cues the evaluative utterance “it was stupid,” which frames the passage and which now penetrates the storyworld to show the speaker making sense of the story. In such a telling, the speaker, perhaps because he has this new audience, articulates this self assessment. Unlike Roland, who told of a reputation coming from stabbing the “big old dude,” Antoine is self-deprecating. John’s Narrative In the next section, we see another such evaluative statement by the prisoner I call John. (His ironic remark “on occasion I participated in a lot of stealing” was analyzed in chapter 2. The passage is renumbered for this discussion.) Like Antoine, who said, “like I was saying, it was very stupid,” the speaker John also uses “like I was saying” and thus reestablishes the interview plane as a first level of discourse in the interview setting. Example 4.4 1 On occasion I participated 2 in a lot of stealing. 3 And uh . . like I was saying at first, 4 how like lot of things that I do 5 maybe because of my maturity, 6 I did well

This passage is taken from the beginning section of the interview when John was summarizing his early involvements in crimes. In chapter 2, I noted how John claimed his part in criminal activities, “we were doing different things, smoking, stealing, smuggling, robbing,” and I stated that he euphemistically and ironically elaborated, “on occasion I participated in a lot of stealing.” In his subsequent utterances he reflexively evaluates his actions, presenting a rationale that he was accomplished at stealing because of his “maturity.” Thus he might present subtly that he was proud of his stealing prowess. Below, in his next utterances, John further evaluates the acts of stealing by saying metaphorically they became “another habit” (line 9). John also directly comments on his thinking at the time: he says he thought he was “intelligent enough” (line 11), and that he thought he “could get away with it, / and not get caught” (lines 12–13)—lines that reflect not only on thinking processes but on capacity to reason. Example 4.5 7 john . . and I think it was gonna be [easy?]


8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

poc: john:

to deal with. It became another habit, as though it was something that, uh, I was intelligent enough, I thought I could get away with it, and not get caught. Made more money. Things that I think, it’s like I adapted to that. You got an A in crime. Yeah, and that added to my ignorance, of thinking that I could never get caught . . .

Thinking on actions here is shown in lines 12–13, “I thought I could get away with it, / and not get caught.” One of John’s life assessment lines follows this as he continues to use reflexive remarks that show he is interpreting the past acts: “it’s like I adapted to that” (line 16). In the interview I interpret this remark in an analogy to doing schoolwork when I say, “You got an A in crime” (line 17). John ironically twists the schooling metaphor around to turn such schooling in crime into an act of ignorance: “Yeah, and that added to my ignorance, / of thinking I could never get caught” (lines 18–19). Researchers on African American English note that speakers’ play with language often turns on “getting” the point of such juxtapositions of opposites: He’s bad = He’s very adept, talented, good, and so on. John’s “schooling,” his intelligence, added to his “ignorance.” Thus, this speaker displays artful uses of euphemistic irony, metaphor, analogy, and collaboratively achieved irony in reflexively presenting assessments of his past criminal activities. By taking up the metaphor and extending it, I cooperate in much the same manner as that described in Ferrara’s (1994) therapeutic counseling. Such interactions foster productive thinking and self-assessment. In that interview John and I cooperatively recontextualized his criminal acts to be seen within a larger view. The school metaphor makes even more of a play on words when the reader realizes John first met the interviewer in a prison classroom setting where he actually did show his intelligence, not his “ignorance.”

Thinking on Thinking Often prisoners used meta-comments to describe their thinking or reasoning at the time of the crime. These breaks in the action parts of narratives signal evaluative moments. Earlier in my discussion of the continuum of agency, I showed John’s commentary on his thinking


prior to shooting the man who had driven his car into a wall, pinning John’s friend. I repeat these remarks below. (Lines are renumbered for this discussion.) Example 4.6 1 I don’t know what good 2 I was thinking about at that point. 3 I had a gun on me at the time . . 4 Uhm, I saw the condition that my friend was in . . . 5 and I saw some movement from the guy . . . . . 6 I don’t know whether I thought “Shoot him” or not. 7 I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him . . 8 The last thing that I remember was that 9 he was reaching for something, 10 between the seats . . . 11 and I shot him at that point, in the shoulder . .

I have argued that John works at “strong evaluation” in this segment, trying to assess intentions and not to be concerned only with outcomes. This reflexive assessment is happening at the time of the interview. In lines 8–10 John tells of the cause-effect nature of the shooting when he describes the driver’s precipitating actions: “he was reaching for something, / between the seats . . . / and I shot him at that point.” John was ready for such an eventuality; he did have a gun with him, putting the whole situation into the crime frame of “life on the streets,” where the evaluation of agentive acts is more immediately involved with “outcomes” than with “motivations,” in Taylor’s terms. John may now, in the present time of the interview, be a “strong evaluator” agentively looking back at the action of shooting the man. This level of agency in the reflective world of the teller is a different level, a symbolic one, superimposed on the recollected activity-level agency. His choices at the crime scene were influenced by perceived needs: to defend his friend who is being hit by a car, to defend his friend from being further rammed by the car, and to defend himself against a possible threat from a perceived weapon. At the time of the crime, the decision to shoot was more reactive than reflective. John’s self-reflexive commentary during the interview, however, is a moment of agentive thinking that holds out promise for changed future behavior. We do not know how long a reflection on an action takes. The next narrative contains the longest stretch of a frame shift in the inmates’ 101 narratives on crimes. It also contains a report of self-restraint from committing a murder, a strong evaluator’s choice. In this story, Kingston who in chapter 3 related a series of bank robberies, tells here about a time he was in danger of death. Such a cue, like one about false


accusations, inherently contains a call for episodes of a heightened self-awareness and offers opportunities for deeper reflection. In the case of the passage below by Kingston (who has stolen two kilos of heroin and $35,000 in cash from a dealer), the awareness is intensified in the moments near death. Example 4.7 1 poc: 2 3 4 5 6 7 kingston: 8 9 10 11

How about, can you recall a time, when you were in danger of death? Have you ever had a situation, when you were assaulted, or you felt that you were, you were going to die? Yeah. uh . . I was in a shoot-out. uh . . We had took . . a guy’s money and uh . . narcotics . .

In the passage above Kingston reveals that he was in a “shoot-out” (line 8). After this abstract and brief orientation to help guide the interlocutor, Kingston explains how he and others stole drugs and drug money from a dealer. In the segment below we learn that the robbed dealers made contact with Kingston’s godfather to recover their possessions. Example 4.8 12 They found out who we were. 13 And they went to my godfather . . 14 and uh . . 15 told my godfather to get in touch with me . . 16 because they wanted to talk to me. 17 So, you know, 18 the word was around in the street . . 19 when it happened. 20 But they didn’t many people know who it was . . 21 and they came to my godfather. 22 And when they said 23 they wanted to get in touch with me, 24 he knew then 25 that I was one of the . . people 26 that are being [discussed?]. 27 So . . he called me, say, 28 “These people want to talk to you.” 29 So I say, “Talk with me about what?” 30 He say, “I don’t know. 31 I don’t want to know . .


32

They want to talk to you.”

Much of the passage above centers on “talk”: the gossip, or “word” (line 18), on the streets; talk that is reported through indirect speech in lines 22–23, “And when they said / they wanted to get in touch with me”; the speaker’s construction of dialogue that was spoken to his godfather, as in line 28, “ ‘These people want to talk to you’ ”; and talk that the godfather doesn’t want to know about, as in line 31, “I don’t want to know.” Lucy (1993b:11) claims all this type of discourse as reflexive.5 The speaker constructs speech of others indirectly (lines 22–23) and directly (lines 28, 30–32). Below, Kingston also directly comments on his own recalled speech when he uses the words “so I say” to announce, in constructed dialogue, his agreement to meet with the dealers: “Yeah, all right” (line 33). Also in this passage are more examples of a meta-pragmatics about specific words, commenting on the code. Speaking of a dangerous partner, Kingston chooses in lines 42–44 a “word for him”— ”homicidal maniac.” Example 4.9 33 So I say, “Yeah, all right . . 34 Where they at?” 35 He say, 36 “They down here on XXX6 Street.” 37 I say, “Okay . .” 38 So . . I called [?] two buddies 39 and told them where he was at. 40 So, the one named Fred like . . 41 he was like . . uh . . 42 I didn’t have a word for him then. 43 I got a word for him now. 44 He was like a homicidal maniac 45 I’m saying . . uh, 46 He didn’t like to take no prisoners . . 47 And he didn’t like to hold no hostages . . 48 So . . either you were with him, 49 or you were against him. 50 There weren’t no in between. 51 There was a very fine line there.

Above, Kingston’s use of discourse markers “then” and “now” in lines 42 and 43 shows contrastive focus (see Schiffrin 1992) in the epistemic sense and a temporal shift between speaking time and reported event. He also reveals two information states: “I didn’t have a word for him then” (line 42); and “I got a word for him now” (line 43). Kingston further fleshes out his “word for him” by declaring that the man


(lines 46–47) “didn’t like to take no prisoners” nor hold “hostages.” He used these images and more clichés, “either you were with him, / or you were against him” (lines 48–49); and “There was a very fine line there” (line 51) to further build up a rationale for calling him a “homicidal maniac.” Use of clichés draws upon an assumed shared use or knowledge and provides a shortcut to understanding. This is a kindred maneuver to the use of “you” mentioned previously, where the speaker seems to seek the companionship of others in circumstances similar to his own. In a cliché such as “take no prisoners,” Kingston attributes ruthless behavior to his companion by drawing upon a wartime imagery popularized on tv and film. So, too, “homicidal maniac” connotes the popularized psychotic killer image. Kingston calls upon fierce images in order to place his own criminal acts in a less vicious category. We will see that he is thus setting up a continuum for criminal behavior in which he sees himself as not reaching the maximum level of depraved acts. Reflexive Guides in Presenting the Self Kingston’s long narrative is replete with reflexive language—constructed dialogue as in line 30, “He say, ‘I don’t know’ ”; indirect reported speech as in lines 22–23, “when they said / they wanted to get in touch with me”; comments on the semantics of words, as in lines 43 and 44, “I got a word for him now. / He was like a homicidal maniac”; reports of information states of the self in line 42, “I didn’t have a word for him then”; information states of others, as in lines 24–25: “he knew then / that I was one of the . . people”; and in lines 30 and 31, “He say, “I don’t know. / I don’t want to know.” These reflexive guides show the speaker discursively presenting his story in an evaluative and self-reflective manner. Thus, on the level of the current interview plane, Kingston helps prepare the interlocutor for the scene that follows in which the speaker, his “homicidal” partner, and another man go to the meeting with the drug dealers they robbed—armed to kill, not to talk. Example 4.10 52 kingston: 53 54 55 56 poc: 57 kingston: 58 poc: 59 kingston:

So when I told him, I told him that I had got called. My godfathers they had uh/ made/ /now this/ was one of your partners? Yeah Oh okay. Uh . . so he said, “Well,


60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

ain’t but one thing for us to do . . Since they want to carry it to us . . let’s bring it to them first . .” So he was the type of guy where you didn’t say “no” to . . uh . . hhh . . in that type of situation . . you know . . So we said, “Yeah alright. Cool.”

My surprise at the “mafioso” word “godfather” used in lines 13 and 54 is finally queried in line 56. Kingston does not really explain, but I infer that “godfathers” are mentors like his uncle and other family members who have guided his criminal exploits. It cannot be missed, of course, that this is the third of his references that draw upon crime family or, at least, movie lore. (Similarly, such references to family by the more recently incarcerated, younger inmates refer to gang structures using family terms such as “cuz.”) At the end of the passage above, Kingston again tells more about the partner who is “the type of guy / where you didn’t say ‘no’ to” (lines 63–64). All this explication of a figure in the narration helps set the stage for the climax of the narrative. It is more than necessary orientation or simply evaluation of the “tough” figure presented as the leader. This passage is reflexive because it sets up a parallel with which to contrast the figure of the speaker to follow in the climactic act of the shootout. Lucy (1993b:10) claims that parallel lines (in poetry) set up reflexivity in language in a display that cues the reader to compare. Here, I suggest that the items (figures in the story) being paralleled are larger “structures” than lines of poetry, but, nonetheless, they are juxtaposed to guide the listener’s interpretation. Example 4.11 68 So we met . . 69 It was two of ’em . . 70 and as we got down there. 71 we parked the car around the corner. 72 on XXX . . 73 Coming off of XXX and come up on YYY Street, 74 That’s when they seen us . . 75 and we didn’t know that they had, 76 they had two other guys, 77 down the street, so like, 78 it was like we was boxed in . . 79 And before we knew it, 80 everybody pulled out guns. 81 And everybody was shooting. 82 We were, you know, like,


83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

they had a little bit more firepower than we did. Fred had two pistols. I had one, and Lamont had one . . But I think they had a little bit more, at that particular time. They were hitting the automatics. I’m saying, they were giving like water, ’cause these are the kind of people they was . .

In the passage above Kingston enumerates the firepower and assesses the opponents’ advantage. His direct reference to what he’s telling— ”I’m saying” in line 91—precedes a simile, “they were giving like water,” which he uses to explain the automatic weapon fire. He further analyzes the figures involved in the account (rather than just reporting the actions) by saying “’cause these are the kind of people / they was” (lines 93–94). This assessment, like the segment on the “homicidal” (line 44) partner analyzed just above, continues to build up the negative character of the others in the story. Shifting to “You” Below, Kingston finishes his story by using repetition to shift back to the question he is answering, about being in danger of death: “where I . . / I come close to death was” (lines 95–96). He thus repositions to come back to the task at hand in the interview frame. This also sets up a shift into an engaging interpersonal “you” and, I pose, a reflexive intrapersonal “you” as well in the long passage that follows. Example 4.12 95 And now, where I . . 96 I come close death was . . 97 We had to split up . . . 98 and . . the guy that was chasing me, 99 that we was exchanging, 100 I was exchanging, exchanging shots with . . 101 that was chasing me, 102 I fell . . 103 as I was going over a fence in an alley. 104 I was going over a fence, 105 and I fell . . 106 And he stood right over top of me. 107 And he pulled the trigger,


108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

and, and, and it jammed. And you know like. hhhh. You know . . people think this is . . this is . . is funny, is a whole cliche, ´ but, you know how you can feel this, you know . . I felt myself dying. I felt . . that this would be my last minute. here . . on earth . . you know . . I thought, you know, it’s, it’s amazing how many things can run through your mind, in such a short period of time. I thought, that I hadn’t seen my mother that day, you know. I thought that . . I hadn’t seen my son that day. I, I, you know, I thought about so many things on that particular, that, that moment . . And . . and . . when . . when I, when I, when he missed, when it jammed, when it misfired . . you know. I still had my gun, you know, and I, you know, I said, “Man, you know I could kill you,” you know. And he said, “Yeah, I know . .” I just couldn’t kill him. But he was going to kill me. But I was just couldn’t kill him. And uh . . I just ran on down the alley. And uh . . you know that’s the closest, I’ve ever come . . come to being . . dead.

Kingston takes up the narrative for 13 lines to recount the exchange of gunfire, the chase down the alley, his leap and fall, his opponent’s pointing the gun and pulling the trigger, and the gun jamming. In this action scene, he uses much repetition: “chasing” appears twice, in lines 98 and 101; “exchanging” appears three times, perhaps repeated with nervousness in lines 99–100. He repeats whole utterances: “I fell” (line 102), “and I fell” (line 105), as well as the twice-mentioned “I was going over a fence” (lines 103 and 104). This repetition builds the excitement of the scene and perhaps reveals the fear in recollecting, though he does not use the word directly.


Immediately after those action lines, Kingston dramatically breaks the frame. At the most climactic moment in lines 107–8, “And he pulled the trigger, / and, and, and it jammed,” Kingston interrupts the flow of the action. He breaks the story frame and inserts an interior passage—”flooding in,” in Goffman’s term. Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974) suggests that speakers can “flood” into or out of a speaking event. He notes that audience members can get so taken up with a play on stage that they have been known to rise and shout at the players, flooding into the scene. Modern theater, which likes to break down the imaginary walls in the frame of play acting, sometimes invites this audience intervention. An older term, soliloquy, also features the power of such audience involvement by having the actor “flood out” toward the audience. Everyday discourse also provides many ways of showing one’s meta-cognition of the situation, as we see here in this situation. In a significant act of reflexivity, Kingston reframes this event by addressing how he felt as the man held the gun to his head. Example 4.13 109 And you know like. hhhh. 110 You know . . people think this is . . 111 this is . . is funny, is a whole cliche, ´ 112 but, you know how you can feel this, 113 you know . . I felt myself dying.

In these lines, Kingston laughs and switches to the “you” that I argue is not only interpersonally involving, but also intrapersonally involving. The lines 110–11, “You know . . people think this is . . / this is . . is funny, is a whole cliché,” show a generalized referent for “you,” which is “people.” His meta-talk comment naming the kind of language he uses—”a whole cliché”—also shows linguistic awareness of how people view speech. The next lines, “but, you know how you can feel this, / you know . . I felt myself dying” (emphasis added), is interpersonally involving, including the interlocutor and people like himself, and is also intrapersonal—for Kingston switches back to the “I” in “I felt myself dying,” showing that the target for these reflexive musings includes himself. He is a sense-maker here, trying to make coherent a near-death experience. His use of “you” keeps us as listeners or readers in the “doubly deictic” place of hesitation that David Herman (1994) suggests pulls us between the virtual and the actual. Kingston then can be seen as reaching out, as well as exploring within. Continuing to construct his interior thoughts, he explicates fully and rhythmically what he says went through his mind in a short period of time.


Example 4.14 120 I thought, 121 that I hadn’t seen my mother that day, 122 you know. 123 I thought that . . 124 I hadn’t seen my son that day. 125 I, I, you know, 126 I thought about so many things 127 on that particular, 128 that, that moment . . 129 and . . and . . when . . when I, when I,

Thus far Kingston has offered many examples of reflexive language. He has commented on which words he chooses. He has explicated where he is in the telling. He tells at length his inner thoughts at the time the gun jammed. This construction of his introspection occurs in the narrative just before he presents the figure of himself as one so unlike the “homicidal maniac” partner or the drug dealer who held the gun to his head and tried to pull the trigger. When in the next passage he tells of his act of not shooting the man whose gun jammed (lines 130–32), he is doing two acts in the storyteller’s world: he is giving the key event in the story by telling the climactic moment (he chooses not to shoot the man who would have shot him), and he is reflexively presenting himself as unlike the other figures. He does this through another epistemic mode, a stretch of constructed conversation, telling of the speech between the opponent and him. Example 4.15 130 when he missed, 131 when it jammed, 132 when it misfired . . you know. 133 I still had my gun, you know, 134 and I, you know, I said, 135 “Man, you know I could kill you,” you know. 136 And he said, “Yeah, I know . .” 137 I just couldn’t kill him. 138 But he was going to kill me. 139 But I was just couldn’t kill him.

Kingston declares “I just couldn’t kill him” in line 137 and repeats it nearly verbatim in line 139, “I was just couldn’t kill him.” The modifier “just,” the negative “n’t,” and modal “couldn’t” show aspectual shaping by the speaker. (The word “was” appears to be a false start on another construction.) The word “could” is not related to being unable physically to kill the man. Kingston assumes his own gun works. Unlike the other man whose weapon jammed after he


pulled the trigger, Kingston displays himself as a figure who is unable morally to pull the trigger when he has been so close to the same fate. Perhaps, he “couldn’t” because he had just gone through the scene he described, wherein he had thought of the family he had not seen that day. Perhaps he “couldn’t” because he is no “homicidal maniac” like his partner or like his opponent. Let me set up in contrast the possible phrase “I didn’t kill him” in opposition to the actual phrase “I couldn’t kill him” in lines 137 and 139. The use of the modal and negative “couldn’t” reveals the speaker grappling with the understanding of that moment, not simply recording the moment as the simple past tense would have done. All the buildup before by using reflexive passages about the others (“homicidal maniac” partner who “takes it to them,” opponents who shoot automatic weapons like water, himself as one who sees his family in his mind as he is about to die), help associate this speaker as a moral agent who is presenting himself as a person who is the kind of man who could not kill in cold blood. These examples indicate that a speaker’s attention to words or to delivery of the narrative, his use of constructed dialogue to represent speech, his attitude or tone in presenting ironically or metaphorically, his evaluative repetition, and his breaks in framing (i.e., his reflexive language in general) can be sites on which we can focus an analysis of a prisoner’s presentation of the self. These reflexive acts show that not only is the teller weaving the story for the addressee, he is also choosing a discursive display through which to address the self. In Kingston’s case, we must recontextualize this display within the myriad criminal experiences he has described—robberies, drug deals, bank robberies, shootouts with police, and now a shootout with other robbers. In a therapeutic setting we could at least build upon his discursive displays of self-reflection in contrast to the dramatic actions he recounts. The moment where Kingston describes not shooting the man who did shoot at him is certainly worth pursuing if one were interested in promoting an end to violence. Full discussion and questioning of his motivations at that juncture could produce discourse that might show a desire to contemplate the sanctity of life. This example is, of course, chosen for its surprise value, no doubt both by the speaker and by this writer. However, not all narrations by prisoners in this study provide such introspective moments as did Kingston, Antoine, and John. Below we will see a long narrative that shows little introspection.


A Counter-Example: Digressive Maneuvers and the Presentation of Self Not all reflexive language in the narrative data in this study is agentive in the sense that the speaker is showing himself as a morally strong evaluator. Some speakers’ narrative strategies reveal more a need for developing morally agentive thinking than an example of such agentive thinking. The following example, William’s story of being an accused child molester, poses such a situation.7 In the first two minutes of his interview, William gives a short synopsis of an event that later in the interview becomes fully expanded. In the early minutes he says: and, love came into my life again in nineteen eighty-three. A young lady I was dating, we worked at the same job at XXX {restaurant}. And she gave me a little son, but she was still involved with . . her daughter’s father, so we split up. One more heart break.

Deeply embedded in “so we split up” is an abstract of the entire narrative that he tells much later in response to the interview question “Have you ever been blamed for something you did not do?” Also important as background for this narrative is the information from another passage early in the interview where William reveals he had been diagnosed with a manic-depressive personality disorder. These two elements, a breakup with a girlfriend and claim of a mental disorder, are part of the background knowledge built up during the interview and, thus, part of a crucial contextualization in which to situate William’s discourse. William’s Narrative Briefly summarized, William tells that he has moved in with his girlfriend, Terry, and her three-year-old daughter, Renee. He says that he had earlier (before the move) suspected the little girl had tried to “seduce” him because the child’s grandmother had been abusing her. When the police come, questioning him about molesting the child, William figures that the girlfriend made this abuse accusation against him because he had had a fight with her, possibly about her seeing her former boyfriend, the father of little Renee. William concludes his account with the surprising revelation of his self-exposure and attack on a minister, his being subdued by police, and his near-death experience. In all, the tale is complex, with various maneuvers that problematize any suggestion that he shows moral agency about his actions.


William’s story of the breakup and the blaming incident appears in its entirety below. Because of its length, I have marked the text into major sections with strategic moves and topics and the line numbers for each section: a: starts story of blame, 1–8 b: breaks to describe seduction scene, 9–42 c: returns to story line, tale of landlord troubles, 43–53 d: continues story line, digresses to drug use, 54–64 e: returns to story line, digresses to terry’s mother, 65–77 f: returns to story line, tells of fight with terry, 78–96 g: continues story line, accusation by police, 97–110 h: continues story line to climax—leaving and exposure, 111–30 i: shifts to evaluation, 131–41 j: gives denouement and describes near-death experience, 142–57 Example 4.16 a: starts story of blame 1 But, I have been blamed for uh 2 things, that I do [?] 3 like uh one time I was, 4 I was dating a young lady I met at XXX {restaurant} 5 poc: mhm? 6 william: Her mother was 7 an addict, an alcoholic in my opinion. 8 Plus—she was a patient at St. Ann’s. b: breaks to describe seduction scene 9 And . . let me tell you this first. 10 She used to come into my room, 11 her and her daughter and stay with me, 12 on XXX Avenue. 13 One day they split out our work schedule, 14 and she worked the day shift, 15 and I worked the, the night shift. 16 So . . . she had left early and I was uh, 17 supposed to watch her little girl, Renee . . 18 That morning I was awakened by Renee . . 19 Renee was sitting on my chest, 20 trying to uh, seduce me, seduce me. 21 I swear to god her mother was crazy. 22 And, so when her mother came home that day, 23 I said, 24 I didn’t know how to tell her, 25 I said, “Your daughter is touched.” 26 Um, she said, “What do you mean?” 27 I said, I said, “Renee was on my chest, 28 and she had, had nothing on except her little top.”


29 poc: How old was she? 30 william: Three years old. 31 She was very bright, 32 I mean very bright. 33 She talked good and everything. 34 And I asked her, 35 you know, I said, 36 “Somebody kiss you there?” 37 She says, she says, 38 I say, “Who kiss you there?” 39 She said, “Gramma.” 40 And I said, “Oh Lord,” 41 I told her mother that, 42 and Terry, Terry never believed me. c: returns to story line, tale of landlord troubles 43 And so, about two months after that, 44 me and my landlord started going through things 45 because he shot dope and, 46 I would pay him his rent every two weeks. 47 Then next thing I know he want fifty dollars, 48 or a hundred dollars. 49 He wants to borrow. 50 So when the rent come around I try to deduct it, 51 because he hasn’t paid me back yet. 52 And we started pitching hell and stuff. 53 So Terry said, “Come on, you can go live with me, okay.” d: continues story line, digresses to drug use 54 I moved with her. 55 And I was always very watchful to see, 56 see what I’m saying, because one thing 57 me and her mother, we was, drinking beer at the time, 58 both of us smoking pcp at the time, 59 things like that. 60 But we were working every day. 61 It wasn’t an everyday thing 62 where we would indulge in alcohol and drugs, 63 maybe weekly, Monday, Tuesday or so, 64 always watching little Renee. e: returns to story line, digresses to terry’s mother 65 So I moved to, to her apartment. {door opens and closes and another inmate comes through room saying, “I’m going to be outside” to poc.} 66 . . . When I moved to her apartment I met her mother. 67 I met her mother for the first time the day we moved. 68 She had cussed me out before on the phone, 69 asking me why I [?] her daughter . . .


70 So I met Mrs. N. 71 I seen her problems, 72 all her bottles of medicine [?] 73 stuff like that, 74 I said, “Jesus.” I said. 75 She looked like she might of did, did that. 76 And so, I never confronted her, 77 I never said anything to Terry about it . . f: returns to story line, tells of fight with terry 78 But when me and Terry had a uh fight one time . . 79 Terry wanted me to leave. 80 I didn’t want to leave. 81 I, I had like . . uh from eighteen= 82 =to twenty-one hundred dollars worth of furniture . . . 83 all in her place. 84 And I’m knee deep in debt and credit . . 85 And, and I said if her mother was the problem, 86 [?] 87 She wanted her to continue to see her daughter’s father, 88 things like that. 89 I was through with Terry, 90 because, basically I guess, 91 I, had been on my own for longer periods. 92 I was twenty- . . four, twenty-five, 93 she was twenty, twenty-one . . . 94 main thing on my mind= 95 =but Terry . . and me had a fight. 96 May have hit Terry or something. g: continues story line, accusation by police 97 So I went to work that day, 98 and I came home in the evening, 99 sit down and watch the tv. 100 I detected, a knock on the door, 101 and, they said they was from the uh . . 102 sexual assault division or something. 103 And . . they asked me questions, 104 all this type of stuff. 105 Explained that they had a report 106 that a child was being molested and all, 107 and all that kind of stuff. 108 hhh I answered all those questions, 109 and they just never pursued it. 110 They never pursued it. h: continues story line to climax—leaving and exposure 111 I don’t know why, but two weeks later . . 112 I caught myself leaving but she wouldn’t let me go.


113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130

poc: william:

poc: william: poc: william: poc:

She kept following me on the street. And if I stopped a cab, she jumped in the cab behind me. I was staying at a little church on XXX Street called second [?] Called the second what? [redeemer?] I went there. I had a few beers, but I don’t know what made me do it, but I tore off all my clothes . . and . . I . . tore off the preacher’s clothes . . and handed him the little girl hhh. She was with you too? Uhuh they, they got in the cab Oh, both of them. Terry was pregnant with my son . . Uhuh

i: shifts to evaluation 131 william: It’s probably the wildest thing I ever did 132 because somebody falsely accused me. 133 I knew what it was all about 134 because in her mind she couldn’t accept, 135 she couldn’t accept the truth that I told her once before. 136 “Your daughter’s touched, 137 your mother’s doing it.” 138 I could never come straight out and say, “It was your mom.” 139 I said, “Who else in the family be around?” 140 I didn’t say anything else. 141 [?] j: gives denouement and describes near-death experience 142 poc: Hmm. So what happened then? 143 william: Well, I was killed for the first time. 144 A cop came in . . He knocked me to the floor, 145 put a nightstick on my throat. 146 Put his knees on the nightstick. 147 I heard my pulse for about oh about maybe eight minutes. 148 And I heard it accelerate, 149 then I just heard it drop. 150 I said, “My God I’m dead . .” 151 so a few minutes later I . . I found, 152 I was on my feet. 153 I seen all these people coming through the church. 154 I thought it was the Host of Heaven. 155 So I asked, where was my mother? hhh hhh


156 157

So I fainted . . They took me to St. Ann’s . .

Reframing Interesting in the issue of agency is how William maneuvers the telling of this story, providing what might be needed “orientation,” in Labov’s terms, but what might also be “needed” rationalization in issues of deflecting agency. Immediately, William breaks the frame from answering about whether he had ever been accused of something he did not do when he shifts his positioning to say: “let me tell you this first. / She used to come into my room, / her and her daughter and stay with me” (lines 9–11). This is all told in the reframing prelude before he tells about sexual assault police coming to question him several weeks later, after he and Terry had had a quarrel and “May have hit Terry or something” (line 96) and then was questioned about molestation. Thus, William starts by digressing and thus deflecting the direct question as he says “And . . let me tell you this first” (line 9). He presents in detail the scene of his suspicions of little Renee being abnormal, being sexually arousing, being “touched.” We can note here that “being touched” connotes the expression “touched in the head,” indicating a colloquial phrase for insanity. It also denotes a sensory act, as in “kissed you there.” William uses reported interrogation of little Renee to discern how this activity came about, constructing the dialogue he had with her and having Renee positioned as abused by the grandmother for having “kiss[ed] you there” (line 36), indirectly implying the genital area by revealing that she wore only “her little top” (line 28). In response to the interviewer question, “How old was she?” (line 29), William uses repetition of adjectives “very bright, / I mean very bright” (lines 31– 32) and a descriptive verb phrase, “She talked good and everything” (line 33), about Renee to establish that she is a mature speaker, in spite of her young age of three. Incredibly, he uses this as if to establish that she is thus old enough to know sexual mores. He positions himself as one who is watchful, concerned about the child, and as the one who cautions Renee’s mother that her own mother (“Gramma”) is the one who is acting inappropriately with Renee, leading Renee to try to “seduce” (line 20). The girlfriend Terry is positioned as a nonbeliever by William: “and Terry, Terry never believed me” (line 42). Thus, William is at work in his discourse, not just in telling, but in guiding his listener’s interpretation of him, casting himself as innocent amidst others who are acting inappropriately. What else does this prelude account fulfill in the management of


the discourse of blaming? Not only has William established that prior to moving in with Terry and Renee that he had suspected something improper going on between the grandmother and little Renee, but he has also reinforced his earlier assessment that the grandmother was an unsavory person by describing her immediately after presenting his “young lady” when he noted “Her mother was / an addict, an alcoholic in my opinion” (lines 6–7), an abuser of prescription pills (line 72), and a patient at St. Ann’s, a mental hospital. Thus, William orients the listener to facets of the story that are central to his understanding of how he was blamed for something he claims he did not do. He orients the listener by discursively positioning others: discrediting the blamer and the victim and presenting the blamer’s mother as the real child abuser. Rather than deliver a straight list of events in the story of accusation (I met Terry, I moved out of my place and into hers, we had a fight, I wouldn’t leave, I was questioned by police, I did leave and did the wildest thing, and I nearly died), William digressively supplements his tale; in so doing he casts himself as less responsible for his wild actions and blameless in the accusation of child molesting. Digressive Maneuvers: Agentive Teller, Unagentive Figure In sections C, D, and E, William proceeds incrementally with the story line while substantially filling in various orientation details to support his overall claim of innocence. In C, he presents a disreputable landlord who borrows from him, precipitating a move. The story he tells, though, culminates in decision making for the move as an act from the girlfriend Terry, not William himself. William presents the dispute between the drug-using landlord and himself, claiming a reasonable reaction for him to be “pitching hell and stuff” (line 52) since his landlord borrows money from him and does not repay it. In constructed dialogue from Terry he shows her as generating the move: “So Terry said, ‘Come on, you can go live with me, okay’ ” (line 53). In Section D, William tells of his move but does not use that story-line event to discuss the particulars of the move. Rather, in another self-interrupting break in the story line he presents himself as a caretaker who is watchful, watchful of Renee, but also an admitted drug user. (Neither readers now nor the interviewer then could put much credence in that situation as being careful of little Renee.) In that section William interrupts the flow of telling of the move with a rationalization that, though he and Terry were using drugs, “It wasn’t an everyday thing” (line 61), nor did it interfere with him “always watching little Renee” (line 64). Thus he invents a responsible, drug-


using, caretaker-self. That this maneuver is strategic is shown by the repetition of the story-line event of moving that appears after this rationalizing. Note how these lines frame the passage: Example 4.17 54 I moved with her. {eleven utterances later} 65 So I moved to, to her apartment.

This pattern of one-line event and then a digressive or amplifying maneuver continues in section E. Again, William says he moved (line 65). This time, however, he uses a temporal marker to show that another event occurred at the same time. This event presents a key complication underlying the story: the girlfriend’s mother. He has well prepared the listener for this figure in the first of his digressive maneuvers, the so-called seduction scene that implicated “Gramma” (section B). Later in the narrative he amplifies the mother’s role in the breakup as well, noting that she was encouraging Terry to keep seeing her former partner, Renee’s father. Throughout the narrative, William positions Terry’s mother as a troublemaker by her actions: by molesting Renee (section B, line 39), by cursing William out on the phone (section E, line 68), and by encouraging Terry to keep contact with Renee’s father (section F, line 87). He continues that positioning by implication with descriptions of Terry’s mother: he says that her mother was an addict, an alcoholic, a patient at St. Ann’s (section A, lines 7–8), and he tells of seeing all her bottles and assumes she “might of did, did that” (section E, line 75). “That” references the act implied in the child’s naming of “Gramma” in section B, as the one who “kiss you there.” Thus, William totally discredits the grandmother. In sections F, G, and H, William presents the complicating event that he assumes causes him to be blamed for something he did not do: he has a fight with Terry and refuses to leave. As is his pattern in the previous sections, he presents the event and then provides much background detail to justify his positions. Example 4.18 78 But when me and Terry had a uh fight one time . . 79 Terry wanted me to leave. 80 I didn’t want to leave. {fifteen utterances later} 95 =but Terry . . and me had a fight. 96 May have hit Terry or something.

Between the bookend utterances (78 and 95), William provides ratio-


nales for his actions: he mentions how much money he has invested in furniture at Terry’s place (lines 81–83) as a reason not to leave; he says her mother’s encouraging Terry to see another man was a problem (lines 85–87); and he claims he “was through with Terry” (line 89) because he had been on his own longer. His agency wavers throughout this passage, as does his accounting of events: he’s not leaving, but he is “through with” Terry. His final remark on the fight adds a doubting aspect to his own recollection as he supports the statement that he had a fight, using two expressions that qualify the act and deflect the agency: the modal May and the indefinite or something in “May have hit Terry or something” (line 96). Though William’s “May” can connote the opposite, “May not have hit,” his “or something” leaves open the idea that he may have done worse than hit Terry. The indeterminism of such expressions appears as well in sections G and H, where William relates the events of accusation by the authorities and his reaction to the accusation. Example 4.19 101 and, they said they was from the uh . . 102 sexual assault division or something. 103 And . . they asked me questions, 104 and all this type of stuff. 105 Explained that they had a report 106 that a child was being molested and all, 107 all that kind of stuff. 108 hhh I answered all those questions. 109 and they just never pursued it. 110 They never pursued it.

In general, in regard to the abuse accusation, William implies he has won against the accusation because, though the police question him after “they had a report / that a child was being molested and all, / and all that kind of stuff” (lines 105–7), they never pursued the issue. Much is missing in this part of the narration. The source of the visit is unclear: the police are from the sexual assault division “or something.” Further vagueness is invoked in his repeated “all this type of stuff” (line 104) and “all that kind of stuff” (line 107) in reference to questions and to molestation. Though he mentions that he “answered all those questions” (line 108), none are repeated in the narrative. This is not an interrupting prelude, where we might expect the narrative to be hurried up as the speaker gets to the main story after orienting us. This is the actual part of the story where someone is being accused of something he says he did not do. This accusation scene lasts for only 14 utterances. Instead, in a maneuver that perhaps shows what is most salient to William, he tells of the way he reacted


to the accusation and to the breakup, thus reframing the event to a story that now focuses on his reactions. Presentation of a Distanced Self In the continuation of the narrative in section H, William tells that he decides to leave Terry about two weeks later, in spite of his reluctance to leave behind a valuable sum invested in furniture. William then describes his bizarre behaviors that result in his arrest at a church. Here we finally have the actual words noting his physical actions in reaction to the speech act of blaming him for something (child molestation) he claims he did not do. William uses several reflexive comments on his actions and one on his words. In lines 111–12, he says, “I don’t know why, but two weeks later . . / I caught myself leaving.” William says he does not know why he left, yet he previously revealed that he had been fighting (and “May have hit Terry or something,” line 96) and that police had questioned him about a child being “molested and all, / and all that kind of stuff” (lines 106– 7). His phrasing is curious. He does not say “I left.” Rather, he catches himself leaving, as though the body was in motion before the mind perceived the activity. I find the negative in “I don’t know why” (line 111) a strange negative in the face of the actual incidents he has listed. Rather than epistemically presenting a knowing self, his inconsistencies may reveal he is feigning ignorance. Thus, he is presenting this figure of the self in answer to the question in the interview plane: Have you ever been accused of something you did not do? This seems quite different from the epistemic grappling or doubting I discussed around the expression “I don’t know” in the narrative described early in this chapter and in chapter 2 when John was reflexively analyzing the moment he shot the man who pinned his friend to the wall. Perhaps more believably, William uses the expression “I don’t know” in the most dramatic moment a few utterances later in the narrative: “but I don’t know what made me do it” (line 122), which precedes the surprising utterances in lines 123–25: “but I tore off all my clothes . . / and . . I . . tore off the preacher’s clothes . . / and handed him the little girl hhh.” Nothing in the story prepared the listener for this exposé. The whole narrative becomes questionable as I strive to make some coherence out of the story I am being told. Assuming Grice’s maxim of Quantity (1989:26–27) that speakers should give sufficient information, I ask about Renee, who appears now to have been taken by William: “She was with you, too?” (line 126). Confusion here may have resulted from the speculative and habitual aspect that


William raised when he said of Terry “she kept following me” (113), not “she followed me.” This nonspecificity is further implied in the use of “if,” not “when,” in lines 114–15: “And if I stopped a cab, / she jumped in the cab behind me.” Thus, these actions appeared to be repeated instances, not a specific occurrence in the particular chain of this event structure. Not specified as well is the location of the child: Had William taken Renee? Or had Terry brought her as she followed William? Revealing Discourse That the speaker tells he tore off his clothes and the preacher’s clothes, too, implies some evidence for the self-admitted diagnosis of mental illness as well as a proclivity for bodily display. Whether William makes coherence out of this narrative and whether he evaluates this experience are problematic. In his negative phrasing, he does note: “but I don’t know what made me do it” (emphasis added) in line 122, which assigns the possible agency to something unknown that could make him do it. I see this as different from John, who does speculate on his motivations in the problematizing comments he makes about shooting the driver whose car had pinned his friend to the wall: “I don’t know whether I thought ‘Shoot him’ or not. / I don’t know whether instincts had me shoot him” (lines 6–7 of example 4.6). William, in his “I don’t know what made me do it” (line 122), may be trying to make sense of the acts.8 Or, perhaps he is only at the last second setting up the interviewer for the climactic moment. This latter interpretation is further enhanced by William’s evaluative meta-commentary on his behavior in line 131 that “It’s probably the wildest thing I ever did.” This reflection on the experience and his choice of “wildest” may reveal his own delight in the flagrant violations of decorum. By his own description, his violation of taboos (and public decency laws) are multiple: he has unclothed himself in public; he has unclothed another person; the other person is a minister and thus is in the category of people assigned more propriety in our society; he has exposed both men in front of a three-year-old female child, flouting yet another taboo about nakedness and directly flouting the accusation of child abuse; and he does all this inside a church, a place reserved for decorous behavior according to custom. This reported episode is wild indeed and amazingly unremarked on beyond that meta-comment. Assigning Blame or Cause William assigns cause for the wild action to “somebody” who “falsely


accused” him (line 132). He also may cast some cause to his drinking, as he says in line 121, “I had a few beers,” which immediately precedes the denial in line 122: “I don’t know what made me do it.” William is serving time for cocaine possession and distribution at the time of the interviews. Research into the discourse of addiction reveals much denial of responsibility for acts, not only of drinking and drugging, but denial of responsibility for the actions committed while under these influences. In a section of evaluation about the whole story (section I), we find more inconsistencies when he repeats the lines from the prelude about the daughter being “touched.” Example 4.20 133 I knew what it was all about 134 because in her mind she couldn’t accept, 135 she couldn’t accept the truth that I told her once before. 136 “Your daughter’s touched, 137 your mother’s doing it.” 138 I could never come straight out and say, “It was your mom.” 139 I said, “Who else in the family be around?” 140 I didn’t say anything else.

Curiously, William says he could not come straight out and tell the girlfriend that it was her mother, though he has just quoted himself as doing just that: “Your daughter’s touched, / your mother’s doing it” (lines 136–37). This is an inconsistency in his storytelling. He constructs a question he claims he asked, rather than saying “your mother,” when he says in line 139, “Who else in the family be around?” This presents William as using implications and indirection in his conversation with the girlfriend. Implication and indirection figure significantly in the speech styles of African Americans, as noted in Kochman (1981, 1990) and Heath (1983), where speakers assume a shared background knowledge and shared strategies of figuring out what is implied or signified in a telling. This involvement style may also be in operation then throughout the interview, for William may be telling various events in order that the listener draw the obvious (to him) conclusions that he is victim of his accusers, a story line continued in the denouement passage, section J. That I doubted this role as victim is shown in various queries I make: about Renee’s age at the so-called seduction and about Renee’s presence in the climax in passage H. In section J we see William position himself as even more of a victim, as one nearly killed by the police, in his response to the interviewer’s follow-up query: “Hmm. So what happened then?” (line 142). Another display of the self in language comes when William replies


with a provocative vignette that begins with the response, “Well, I was killed for the first time” (line 143). His self-positioning in this last narrative within the larger narrative does not reveal a man who has done wrong (for instance, as one who violated a public decency law), but as one who has been made a victim by the authorities. He uses short verb phrases to describe the acts of the police: “He knocked me to the floor, / put a nightstick on my throat. / Put his knees on the nightstick” (lines 144–46). This technique of relating complicating events in a staccato fashion speeds up the narrative, which also adds to the narrativity of the whole by building tension in the depiction of such an action scene replete with asserted police brutality and even supernatural appearances of the heavenly hosts. William evaluatively interjects his own thoughts at the time when he reconstructs what he felt as he heard his pulse accelerate, then drop: “I said, ‘My God I’m dead’ ” (line 150). His awareness as a storyteller here is shown as he laughs after he tells of asking for his mother, who was deceased, when he did not see her in the “Host of Heaven” (who actually were more authorities and bystanders at the church) just before he fainted and was taken away to the mental hospital. All these events of helplessness contribute to the story line of one victimized. In William’s narrative it is the unsaid, however, that overturns any expected sympathetic uptake in this large speech act of self-justification. His digressions and omissions leave much open to what Bruner (1986) calls “subjunctivization” in narrative, where not only what is said but what could be said are available from the discourse. Site for, Not of, Agency William’s story does not convince the listener of his innocence in the accusation of abuse, for his story reveals that he expects too much from a three-year-old and does too little as a “watchful” caretaker. Instead of getting little Renee properly dressed, he lets her sit halfnaked on his chest while he asks her questions. His methods of telling his tale show an intricacy, however, that is worth examining as a display of a version of the self of someone who describes his life as “heartbreak.” William’s long narrative with its narratives-within-thenarrative provide what Bakhtin (1981) calls a rich “intertextuality” in the novel. William’s digressions present unsavory characters (a landlord who swindles renters; a child-molesting, interfering grandmother; a girlfriend who sees her ex-boyfriend; a cop who nearly kills him; and even ghosts), all contributing to a version of the self as a man besieged by contraries and accusations, a man who resorts to doing


“the wildest thing.” William’s evaluative reflections, “It’s probably the wildest thing” (line 131) and “I knew what it was all about” (line 133), as well as his reported knowledge of the mind of another, “in her mind she couldn’t accept, / she couldn’t accept the truth” (lines 134– 35), show the speaker in the storyteller’s world beginning to assess events in the storyworld. He does not, however, go far enough to assign his own acts with a believable moral agency. Narrations of life stories give to the speaker, the interlocutor, and society a rich location for discursive analysis. Here we can locate a place to begin, a place to focus an analysis, to focus a discussion not just on motivations and intentions but on the “not there,” the “what’s left out,” the “blanks” (Iser 1989b) in the narrative that suggest deflection of responsibility for a past self. I argue that using the prisoners’ reflexive frame breaks can be a starting point for establishing productive rehabilitative talk. For someone interested in working with the prisoner to help establish a noncriminal self, lines like “I don’t know what made me do it” or “I knew what it was all about” bear more scrutiny. Such phrases need not be taken naively at face value as truth. They can indicate, however, an opportunity for fruitful probing. Digressions from events can cue a kind of backfilling to shore up a presentation of a self in the current storytelling frame, not just a way to provide orientation information for events that follow in the story line nor a way to evaluate reflexively on an act. Such words and strategies become a call for further work, indeed for the construction of a story of a life perhaps little examined and or too little cared about by others to be deemed worth examining by the speaker. Therapeutic work with an inmate with a story such as this one calls for interdisciplinary approaches combining both psychosocial and discourse analytical study. Thus, in this chapter we have seen discursive displays that are managed by speakers whose narratives reveal their positionings of themselves and others in relation to moral agency. They tell how they were involved in crimes or in suspicion of crimes. The features of language management discussed throughout this book are shown in these stories to be devices that not only get the story told but that reveal the importance of the story in the self view of a life, that is, in the autobiography. Involvement features such as constructed dialogue, repetition, meta-talk, epistemic frame breaks, contemplative predicate constructions, and shifts into involving pronouns all signal the work of the narrator going about the business of constructing his story and thus building a platform on which he showcases his life.

5 Conclusions and Implications

This study analyzes the ways prisoners agentively present themselves in autobiographical discourse, not only positioning themselves in their criminal pasts but narratively constructing past selves and potentially new selves in society. From 101 narratives of criminal acts, I analyze narratives of violent acts by focusing on reflexive moments in the discourse relating those acts. I offer an analysis that extends the idea of a participation framework to include the working of language on the formation and re-formation of a self in society. I argue that a grammar of agency is revealed in the units of discourse that speakers use in telling of past acts. I suggest that the importance of such an act of locating agency rests in the uptake a community takes toward those it incarcerates. In the preceding chapters, I note that speakers grammatically present their personal agency and position themselves as responsible (or not) by using personal pronouns “I,” “we,” and the involving “you.” Speakers use active, passive, or passivizing verb phrases that signal the positioning they have taken on in relation to their actions. Speakers’ commentaries on the information state and evaluation of the past act mark their contribution to personally contextualizing their agency. I suggest that elements of agentive discourse are clustered in sites of reflexive language, particularly in frame breaks where the epistemic self is most revealed, at the level of the participation framework of the interview. Such breaks interpenetrate the narratives and complicate the determination of personal, moral agency because they reveal an epistemic grappling with the action taken (in the past) while showing agentive manipulation of the story (in the present). As discursive presentations of a self, these epistemic frame breaks allow us to locate a site for agentive display, at least at the level of managing discourse where the speaker shapes or manipulates a story.


Refining the Definition of Agency Refining the definition of agency, drawing from its uses in psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory, I define personal agency as the positioning of the self in an act or in the reflection on an action indexed to that person. This self-positioning exists along a continuum of responsibility shown through a grammar of agency with which we can chart the sense of a responsible self, taking into account that speakers are simultaneously presenting and re-presenting selves on several planes of discourse. I suggest that, through positioning of the self, the speaker creates an interpersonally and an intrapersonally involving participation framework, one that operates within the simultaneous tensions of both personal and public expectations. I claim, as sites for agency, the subject-predicate position in utterances. I note that in telling personal stories, speakers use “I” and an active verb as the most agentive grammatical. “You” is sometimes switched with “I” to show interpersonal, involving applications of events. “You” can also include the interlocutor and people in general. Focusing on utterances like “you could feel it through the skin,” I also argue that “you” is, as well, involving in an intrapersonal manner, sending the message of the speaker onto the figure of the speaker in the narrated event and simultaneously onto the speaker now. This positioning of self as like others, I claim, is a site of highly reflexive discourse. Verbs used in active, passive, and passivizing forms show a continuum of personal agency in these narratives. Agency in the narrated event is most pronounced when active verbs accompanied the personal pronouns “I” and “we” as agents of the action—for example, “I shot him.” Passivizing structures such as “we ended up getting caught” and verbs with a deflecting semantics such as “I caught a charge” are considered least personally agentive at the level of the action structure. In middle ground, I argue, are structures found using epistemic language in which the speaker questions or calls attention to his knowledge (“I don’t know whether I thought ‘Shoot him’ or not”) and those passages that show ironic positioning (“on occasion I participated in a lot of stealing”; “I went to the bank to get my money”). Such attention to the mental state and to the tone of the telling are reflexive features in the discourse that help guide the uptake of the point of the narrative. Including negatives in one’s discussion of intentions also reveals elements of special interest in determining agency or deflection of agency because their very negativity invokes the potential positive.

Conclusions and Implications 155

Understanding Prisoners’ Reflexive Comments In this work I propose that a prisoner’s reflexive commentary about his thoughts at the time of the crime indicate that he is now assigning thoughts to the figure he re-creates in the scene, and thus he may be beginning to change his own belief system as he manipulates the figure presented. In the prison where one’s placement is directly associated with one’s crime (i.e., surrounded by like kinds), it may be unlikely that a person would ever consider replacing or relocating the kind of self who did indeed commit that crime. Within a participatory rehabilitative discourse with noncriminals, however, a prisoner’s break in a narrative to talk about his thoughts at the time of the act might indicate that he is thinking those kinds of thoughts now, for he is pondering about his thinking at the time and the place of the event. He may be able to begin to see himself as a strong evaluator of his acts, not as someone alien to his own acts. He may be in a discourse that could prepare him for more morally agentive living. And if there is someone who can provide the uptake, the reinforcement for that postulation, I suggest that new actions are more likely. Fruitful uptake depends, then, upon hearing the stories and reacting to them—validating or challenging, but nonetheless interacting with the prisoner, not isolating him from the potential for changed behavior.

Prison as “Home for a While” Working inside a prison, researching into the lives of prisoners, I have found little to rejoice about, but for the words of prisoners whose turns of phrases and turnings of experiences echo long after the gates have clanged shut behind me. Prison speakers sought an audience for their stories, revealing a power in talk and also signaling the serious nature of their imprisonment and its impact on all our futures. A brief narrative is discussed below to illustrate the kinds of conclusions that speakers themselves draw about their imprisoned lives. Roman, whose story of killing during a drug deal illustrated agentive positioning in chapter 2, gives below an assessment of his future inside prisons. He takes time at the end of his interview for this macro-reflection on his actions, making of the interview an opportunity for deeper consideration of “time”—past, future, and now.1 Important here is not merely linguistic or narrative analysis of ways of telling a story; also important are creating a sense of involvement and developing methods for delving into the complexities in setaside lives, methods that could have useful impact on a community’s


shared future. Below, Roman uses the interview to contemplate the whole of his life. (Numbers indicate the passage is near the end of his interview.) Example 5.1 425 I got caught up on the life, 426 the fast life, 427 the women, the money . . 428 being able to walk through the neighborhood, 429 and have everybody, you know, 430 who had the drug, give their respect. 431 And . . now that I think about it, 432 it’s the dumbest thing I ever did in my life . . 433 It’s gotten me here and so much time. 434 I’m not even 40 years old . . 435 and I got more time than I am old.

Roman’s discourse management in the passage above shows his contextualization of his own story within his life history. Roman’s temporal marker and his reference to thinking in his epistemic remark, “And . . now that I think about it” (line 431), cue the importance of his following words in line 432: “it’s the dumbest thing I ever did in my life.” Several utterances later he also says that he takes responsibility for his wasted life. Example 5.2 451 roman: 452 453 454 455 poc: 456 roman: 457

All the hurt that I, you know, is coming towards me, what I brought on myself, you know, I asked for it. Yeah. . . . It’s sad. It’s a wasted life . . but

With Roman’s statement “I asked for it” (line 454), we come to the realization that in the reflection on the whole life of crime, Roman sees his personal, moral agency. Would that change in a new situation in which someone else reached for a gun? I presume the only answer for that would be a naive one. If Roman, and John, who shot the man who pinned his friend to the wall with a car, carried no guns, they would have shot no one. However, as Roman put it, they were “caught up on the life.” To assume an agency to do one’s life, rather than be “caught up” in one, requires strong choices, strong evaluation. Roman states at the very end of his interview that he had a choice. He uses the agentive “you” that is both interpersonal and intrapersonal.


Example 5.3 473 You had a choice, 474 to make your life here, 475 this part of your life. 476 Get up, 477 Go to work. 478 You live here . . 479 This is home for a while. 480 Whether we like it or not, 481 this is home for a while, 482 this is home for a while.

Roman’s “you” includes other prisoners here in his pleas for making a life out of this, what he calls “sad,” “a wasted life.” And as I argue about other shifts from “I” to “you,” Roman also reflexively targets himself in this discursive display: “you live here” (line 478). His increased emphasis on “live” in “you live here” is a chilling, yet hopeful, remark for someone for whom the cellblock will be all the home he has “for a while” (lines 479, 481, and 482), for someone for whom talk could be a therapeutic discourse, for whom “new conversations” could potentially assist in making discursive opportunities for a re-formation of a morally agentive self, for whom language could be what I note Chafe claims: a “magnificently complex, manysided phenomenon that is the best pathway we have to understanding humanness” (1990b:21). Just how complex and frustrating that path is can be seen in additional information about this prisoner subsequent to the time of the interviews. Two years after this interview, Roman was removed from that facility for allegedly participating in an attack on another inmate. Thus, you see the qualifying “could” modal used in that last paragraph, for we can never know another’s future behavior based only on his talk. (Nor can you be sure of mine, nor of yours, based on our talk alone.) However, we also cannot know for sure the impact that such prolonged talk in a more therapeutic and consistent setting would have, unless we set up such a setting. As Ruth Wodak has noted in studies of group therapy, “the individual’s crisis cannot be regarded out of context from his environment” (1986:269). Breaking the comfortable silence about the carceral in order to comprehend and possibly prevent violation and violence should be explored systematically by delving further into these complex discursive pathways, a contribution that could be made by critical discourse analysis in concert with counseling, educational, and community involvement programs.


Connections to Critical Discourse Analysis Works in critical discourse analysis by Norman Fairclough (1989, 1992), Teun van Dijk (1989, 1990, 1994, 1998), and Ruth Wodak (1989) suggest that not only is discourse analysis analyzable both intertextually and intratextually and is interdisciplinary in nature but, most importantly, that this method has social applications of consequence. In the world of prison work, the findings suggested herein could be recontextualized into the everyday world of prison routines of talk. More difficultly, this work on prisoners’ discourse should be reassessed within current frames of penal studies in criminology and psychology. This research asserts that more time for talk and for analysis of that talk would give a better chance for rehabilitation. This conception of talk by prisoners must be seen, however, within the current constructions of “prisoner” by interested parties, listed here in no hierarchical order—victims, police and law enforcement workers, criminologists, penologists, prison workers, politicians. Such parties produce discourses of both fear and domination. Fear is based on prisoners’ possible further acts, a fear well founded with current high recidivism rates. Domination stems from a social and political stand desirous of eradicating the troublemakers, a view built from legitimate frustration with lack of change in criminals and mixed, as well, with opportunity to garner votes or to secure the burgeoning prison enterprise, which recently has become increasingly privatized and profit driven. The judicial apparatus with its construction of “prisoner” is quite complex and multivoiced through enactment of laws and sentencing practices that differ across the 50 states and that have differed over time within each state. Federal statutes and sentencing practices also add to the veritable stew of criminal justice procedures. Judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and criminal investigators all contribute to and contend with the collective and changing perception of prisoners. Currently the idea that a prisoner is no longer able to be changed pervades much of the discourse and the actions of the groups above. Even the defense lawyer often advises a plea bargain rather than the full outlay of a case that will clog the overbooked calendars of all concerned. Court-appointed attorneys who “prepare” for cases in the hallway prior to court appearances are far from rare, giving rise to a two-tiered justice system—one for those who cannot afford a lawyer and another for those with higher incomes. A deeper attention to these concerns, especially to those of the victimized—the families and communities of the victims and also the families and communities of the perpetrators—needs to be undertaken to test out the usefulness of the discursive analysis I offer


herein. Can knowing, recording, reviewing, and analyzing the stories of all these parties contribute to a rethinking of ways to reclaim prisoners for productive and useful contributions to our society? I suggest that until we change the violence within prisons themselves, we will only be hearing more about acts of retribution, whether they be state imposed or personally enacted by prisoners who experience little opportunity to ponder new ways of acting. As a researcher, of course, I understand that all such stories would be a contribution to understanding, a rich venue for analysis, but not necessarily a path into change, a path many researchers do not attempt, drawing the line clearly between research and activism. In chapter 1 I note Foucault’s statement that his Discipline and Punish serves “as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society” (1979:308). Knowledge about imprisonment is not, however, widespread in our society. If, as communities, we are also in a Zone of Proximal Development regarding incarceration, we are in sore need of mentors who could bring us along to full concept attainment. Listening to and reading the experiences of prisoners themselves is a start at that understanding. Analysis of recorded life stories can lead to wider description and interpretation, providing useful background to researchers in many fields. We can establish that wider knowledge through further investigations of the criminals’ narratives, through comparison of additional tapings of the same speakers with different audiences or through longitudinal studies asking the prisoners to reflect further on the stories they told once before. These efforts would require considerable good fortune and financing since the location of inmates from the dc system is not a simple matter, given the financial and managerial constraints that resulted in the gradual closing of the Lorton prison complex to be completed over a period of several years. Inmates from the initial study are spread about, some released on parole, most remanded to “for profit” prisons from 100 to 300 miles away, and some sent to federal institutions throughout the country. Yet, such restatement and re-analysis would establish more evidence for the importance of epistemic episodes in storytelling as sites for deeper work in prisoner counseling and rehabilitation. Prisons and Discourse The more difficult part of my assertion that narrating itself can lead into rehabilitation is one that is dependent upon prison systems being amenable to arranging “more time for talk.” This application of the


study would truly require a sea change in prison cultures that have dutifully responded to community and political pressure to “get tough” on criminals and at the same time save money by dropping many programs that brought outsiders into prisons. By no means do I suggest that the public should not be alarmed about crime and particularly about recidivism. Rather, that alarm should lead us to investigate the criminal, not just in the proceedings leading to incarceration, but throughout the punishment and parole phases. We need to get more people inside prisons, more people who are not criminals— people who could therapeutically interact with criminals in projects, activities, and programs, which would set up noncriminal Zones for Proximal Development. Thus, this research assumes that critical— that is, necessary—life-saving and life-enhancing work be taken on as a result of these findings. The world of violence and violation that leads to the world of prison is one that we share in the larger community, no matter how fragmented, separated, or segregated by income, race, or culture. We are all changed by crime. What applications, then, might this research take? I suggest here a pilot Participatory Discursive Rehabilitation Program, one that would need considerable discussion and amendment by those who work full-time in the field of criminal justice, by those who are currently incarcerated, by victims, and by those who enter into part-time and voluntary associations with the imprisoned. Research, especially by those of us who claim to be participatory, interactional, and concerned with critical questions and problems, can at the very least offer such a program for discussion and critique. The major role for prisons is that of punishment for crimes. Classification of prisoners is the heart of that work, where officials determine a prisoner’s incarceration location and his opportunities for programming that include those activities I have deemed opportunities for rehabilitative talk. Classification work can be done, I suggest, in concert with three other functional parts of incarceration—counseling, education, and community involvement—that have overlapping domains in systems where they exist. Recall that the climate for such “extras” is cold as well as underfunded at the very moment that dollars for building more prisons are expanding. Education funding has been cut back tremendously since the federal Crime Bill of 1994 eliminated Pell Grant funding, which allowed low-income inmates to use federal dollars for college tuition programs inside prisons. This had as well a trickle-down effect since a great number of collegelevel student inmates taught as volunteers or sometimes worked as teaching assistants in adult basic education and preparation classes for


the ged (Test for General Educational Development). The remaining community involvement in prisons is mostly of a religious nature, with faithful groups from churches on the outside coming weekly to pray with inmates. Few communities support or encourage visitation to prison by nonfamily members in any structured settings. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are notable exceptions in many places, though they were not consistently active in the setting where I did my research and teaching. The program of college student volunteers who assist in teaching the courses with me and others from Georgetown University is a small, workable nontuition effort that could be tried at other institutions. This model provides a common task—a college course—and venue for those “new conversations” that can stimulate settings for fruitful narrative exchanges while accomplishing educational goals. Connections with Counseling In counseling, a great need for one-on-one sessions is left wanting in prisons due to budgetary constraints as well as to doubts about the efficacy of counseling among people known for “conning” others. This “conning” consideration is a huge impediment to all work with prisoners and was at the basis of several reviewers’ qualms about the stories told in this book: how can you know the inmates are telling the truth? All those who deal in research with human subjects that involves eliciting responses to questionnaires, to surveys, to interview queries, or to casual conversational data must also deal with the suspicions about veracity. The loss of credibility that a prisoner undergoes, earned by his acts and conviction, is a serious consideration for the prisoner as well as for all those with whom he interacts. How to build trust? Why risk bothering to trust when assumed unredeemable? These are questions asked by inmates as well as by outsiders. How to start over? This seemingly hopeless situation is well illustrated in a story told below about being in danger inside a prison. Rehabilitation in Contexts of Danger The prison setting provides a somber contextualization of violence for studying narratives. Features of discourse I explicate in the previous chapters build a template for locating important epistemic considerations made by speakers about their lives. In narratives drawn from prisoners, their stories of crime and violence reside within another circle of violence in the prison itself. Often, as we see in the stabbing


stories, the very same kinds of violence for which an inmate serves time continues within the institution that punishes him. To illustrate that violent context and prisoners’ understanding of how very complicated is their everyday prison world, I reproduce below a portion of a reflection by the inmate I call Malcolm-Bey. His remarks come at the end of a long story elicited during a drama course co-taught by Martin Mitchell and myself. It is Malcolm-Bey’s words that help open this book as I juxtapose the necessity for new conversations with his admonition “If you’re afraid to die, this is the wrong place to be.” This videotaped classroom narrative shows Malcolm-Bey telling how he survived an attack.2 He makes the point that prison is dangerous and that he is strong enough to survive it. As we pick up the story, another inmate is trying to get a knife, a “piece,” to the speaker, Malcolm-Bey, who wants to defend himself against an eight-man hit squad of inmates avenging an alleged insult made over preparing a special food tray.3 Example 5.5 1 I’m about from here . . 2 from that wall to maybe about right here . . 3 from my piece . . 4 the piece is sticking out . . the door . . like this. 5 It’s about this long. {He holds his hands about 12–15 inches apart.} 6 He’s sticking it out the door like this here. 7 You know all I got to do 8 is just get there and grab it. 9 Once I get that . . 10 I don’t care how many times they stab me, 11 because see . . I’m not going by myself. 12 So you see that’s the mentality . . 13 that the brothers got to have, 14 when they’re doing time . . . 15 because if you don’t have that particular mentality . . 16 You’re not, you’re not accepted to make it here. 17 Because if you’re afraid to die, 18 this is the wrong place to be. 19 Just as I thought I was going to make it . . to that piece. 20 bam, it felt like a heavy weight . . 21 hit me in the back, but I didn’t feel no pain. {Extra periods indicate longer pauses. Italics indicate the passage I am noting for discussion.}

Thus we see what the speaker, Malcolm-Bey, says is necessary for survival in prison—a willingness to kill others and a disregard for one’s own death. Consider the use of “you” in this passage to suggest


a shared agency for taking extreme measures. If we look closely at the segment in italics, we see the break in the action events of the narrative, a frame break as discussed in chapter 4. Such a break in the action scene implies the social as well as the personal saliency of the event. Malcolm-Bey shifts from the “I”-centered story to speak of what “the brothers” (others like himself, a Moorish American) and “you” have to do to survive. That shift into a more inclusive and shared agency signals the ratification of the actions he is prepared to take: he is ready to die and to take others with him. We might juxtapose that kind of knowing, what I call a “necessary literacy” for prison living, with the recently updated definition for literacy from the National Adult Literacy Survey: “Using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential” (Haigler et al. 1994:3).4 It is not only printed and written information but information signaled in everyday speech and action that most impacts on the learning and living inside the closed society of prisons. Staying alive is the fundamental issue in arranging to achieve goals and develop knowledge and potential. Such harsh standards for acquiring the knowledge and passing the true prison literacy test are too often the requisite for surviving in the negative prison culture. Yet, just such an environment often surrounds and interpenetrates the narratives told by prisoners. This thickly layered emphasis on, and acquaintance with, violence must be pierced to make an impact on the lives circumscribed by prison walls. It is that issue—the perpetuation of violence—rather than “conning” the interviewer that seemed most salient in the narratives. Community Zones of Proximal Development My research into narratives of violence indicates that the telling of a prisoner’s personal story could be a site for a kind of cognition that has reciprocal value in communities. In the company of others one tells of events that have saliency in one’s life. That puts the teller and those who listen in the Vygotskian Zone of Proximal Development (zpd), which I think can have a community-wide application. If we as members of a relational group foster such tellings, we can help process the acts that are being recounted. We function then in the zpd as the prototypical “adult who has the concept” that the learner needs to attain. Through developing his speech, his story, and, eventually, his actions, we assist in new learning, in change. The Zones of Proximal Development inside many prisons, however, are places where harsher concepts of violence and violation are taught far more often than concepts on moral agency, as we saw in Malcolm-Bey’s excerpt above.


There is little belief in prisoners as capable of rehabilitation in modern prisons. Without a communal zpd, without developing a reciprocal literacy on violence, we are in the business of only isolating and compounding “problems” rather than learning their patterns through an interactive introspection. Joining into another’s experiences through the telling can help in a shared subjunctivization. Seeing the what-if amid the what-happened is a beginning of the what-might-be. Thus, I see narrative as a powerful force in social cognition, one that contributes not only to teaching people how to stay alive in prison but also one that could help communities to repair the reciprocal damaging done in the acts of crime. All of us need to know what is going on in the minds of those who commit crimes. This is especially relevant when we consider what a large portion of our population is behind bars and walls. Consider that in 1995 one of the most densely populous nations, Japan, had a rate of imprisonment that was only 37 persons per 100,000 while the United States as a whole incarcerated 600 per 100,000 (Mauer 1999:23). Astoundingly, the District of Columbia, where this research was undertaken, incarcerated 1,682 persons per 100,000 in 1997 (Gilliard and Beck 1998:3). Latest statistics for 1998 have finally shown a drop to 1,329 per 100,000 (Maguire and Pastore 1999:491). As more and more of our populace live in prisons for longer and longer stretches of time, we surely need to investigate further the reasons and rationales to which criminals ascribe their actions. Interviews and Constructing a Self: Developing Coherence Systems I have optimistically suggested that words and structures within the autobiographical narratives of prisoners told in interviews function to construct a social order not just for the speaking situation of the interview and not just for the construction of a self within that communicative event. I postulate that such “construction work” goes beyond that particular speech event and into the discursive construction of the individual life itself. This life a criminal depicts, however, is being juxtaposed within conflicting coherence systems— one represented by the “criminal world” and one by the noncriminal world, a juxtaposition mirrored in the interview situation inside a prison. Charlotte Linde (1993) writes of telling life stories as a way of making sense of a life, of being part of a system of coherence that negotiates the space between “common sense” and “expert systems.” Linde notes that a “coherence system is a system that claims to provide a means of understanding, evaluating, and constructing accounts of experience” (164). She further claims that this system “may also provide, either explicitly or implicitly, a guide for future behavior”


(164–65). I, too, assert this power for narrative, though the population I interviewed differs greatly from Linde’s narratives of middle-class, well-educated workers who, living beyond institutional settings, have many positive discursive opportunities that would be conducive to firming up a coherence system. With prisoners, in a setting where conflict is prevalent and with past (and present) situations where violation and violence are too often the norm, there is little chance for positive “coherence” in life stories unless it is actively fostered. If we offer no opportunities for developing such sites of contemplation, we will have no new conversations nor new actions for future behaviors flowing from such assessments of acts and lives. My work suggests that utterances of evaluative discourse, in particular at frame breaks or footing shifts, at various levels show speakers at work positioning themselves: at the temporal level (“at that point”); at the level of the speaking situation (“let me tell you this first”); and at the level of the speaker trying to make sense of an event presented narratively in the participation framework (“You know, I felt myself dying” or “I don’t know what made me do it” or “You had a choice”). I agree with Schiffrin (1988:272), who says conversation is “both a linguistic unit of analysis and a vehicle through which selves, relationships, and situations are socially constructed.” The stories prisoners told also help to construct the social reality, their take on “prison,” which simultaneously reveals their assessment of the self. No one level of discourse operates independently from the others. As speakers we can shift from telling to telling about telling, and thus we can guide the story for the listeners. I argue that such shifting and guiding indicate agentive displays in the management of our discourse and potentially in the discursive management of lives. Whether that agency is morally strong or weak depends upon the ultimate uptake by the speaker in actions in his own life. Such an uptake would move from utterances to thinking about utterances to appropriately acting upon that thinking within a larger view of a life. Like Bruner (1990), Linde (1993), and Schiffrin (1996), I argue that the construction of narratives and the constructions within narratives show the speakers trying to make sense of their lives. In autobiographical narrative discourse, the prison speakers are putting forth a construction of a past self who committed (or was caught committing) a crime. They are also choosing to tell, choosing to participate in the public discourse, where their words are taken up and become part of the public sphere. In prior Zones of Proximal Development, prisoners have already heard the discourse of crime and now are re-presenting it, positioning themselves as agents in their own life stories and in relationship to


criminal actions, but in a new situation, one that is not fostering criminal acts. The struggle from inner speech to agentive speech is revealed, I argue, in sites of reflexive language where the speaker signals the interpenetration of frameworks. In those reflexive frame breaks, the inner speech meets the outer speech, where the speaker negotiates meaning and saliency not just for the interlocutor. The displays of positioning, evaluation, and epistemic meta-commentary show that the speaker is at work on his own moral agency as well. A speaker discloses that “construction work” (or the lack of it) in discourse. This analysis presses outward the boundaries in the interactional approach to sociolinguistics because it is involved with intentions— intentions not just of speakers in telling their stories but of researchers in critically applying the analysis of discourses. Schiffrin notes that “asking why someone does something can lead us into a search for explanation of human conduct—a domain of inquiry that linguists are probably not prepared (or eager) to enter. Interactional sociolinguistics tries to avoid imputing intentions (or any internal motivations or goals) to speakers” (1994:132). Yet, Schiffrin also notes the interactive relationship of language, culture, and society, saying that they “stand in a reflexive relationship with the self, the other, and the selfother relationship, and that it is out of these mutually constitutive relationships that discourse is created” (134). My study suggests that researchers using sociolinguistic methods can venture into socially reflexive understandings through investigating discursive presentations of selves. Thus, we move into the study of cognition and into the application of what we discover in the lives of those with whom we live, work, and study, even if (as in this analysis) speakers represent a group we have been known to fear because of the heinous acts they have committed. Steps to Something New My argument works from bases of research into discourse strategies and joins them to Lev Vygotsky’s assumptions on how language and society shape speech as speakers develop their language in Zones of Proximal Development in discourse with others. Vygotsky states: “To imitate, it is necessary to possess the means of stepping from something one knows to something new. With assistance, every child can do more than he can by himself—though only within the limits set by his state of development” (1986:187). My study extends the application of the zpd beyond that of child language learning to acts of new learning in general.5 My study proposes that, with assistance


and with what inmate Tony Mo called “new conversations,” prisoners can take such steps toward learning something new. “The ease with which he [the child] is able to move from independent to assisted problem solving is the best indicator of the dynamic of his development,” notes Vygotsky (1986:188). In the invitation to and production of narrative discourse, we may find ways to bring about such a readiness for learning something new and, in so doing, stretch the state of the inmate’s development through exercising new kinds of contemplation. One major implication of this study is that discursive practices themselves could be used more consistently in prison work as a means into rehabilitative thinking. Currently, linguistic analysis is used mostly in courtrooms or police interrogations to benefit the process of criminal investigation and prosecution of cases. (See for example, Walker 1985, Shuy 1993 and 1998, Auburn et al. 1995.) Sociolinguistic analysis could assist in revamping the rehabilitative aspects of imprisonment. Such a use of discourse analysis could be tested in programs that are talk-based, such as educational courses, counseling sessions, and self-help groups, which foster occasions for reflexive discourse, especially discourse with nonprisoners. The climate for such programs is fading while at the same time we are insisting on longer prison terms. “Three strikes and you’re out” legislation has been passed in California, where the largest number of prisoners are already incarcerated. The Virginia legislature has vetoed parole. Other states and the federal system are considering similar changes. With so many serving long sentences, different approaches to rehabilitation need to be researched. As Foucault (1979) notes, the focus of criminal justice systems in the modern era is on the apparatus of the “investigation,” not the criminal. Reams of court documents attest to that focus. Substantive talk by criminals with noncriminals is rarely fostered in the remote and isolated world of prisons. Rather, the reverse is true: talk of crime with fellow criminals, even planning of future crimes (as we saw with Kingston), is more likely. The opportunity to allow a discursive presentation in narratives to occur in new conversations, in new zones for learning, is woefully missing in imprisonment. This book shows narrative as a rich resource, one that could be mined for the precious ore of agentive responsibility that can be brought out for examination, small moments that are worth the effort of digging into a past but that could remain undiscovered if not explored. There is no doubt that these formats for new conversations would be difficult to conduct. Both groups—prisoners and “ordinary citizens”—would need to participate regularly in discourse on the im-


pacts of crime in communities, on victims’ rights and victims’ fears, on prison conditions, on ways to change lives and rebuild the social fabric of communities. This more public involvement in prisons would make a deep departure from current trends. Opportunities to engage prisoners in everyday talk would be contributing to a normalizing experience, using a folk understanding of “talking things out,” which could contribute to work done in more formal therapeutic settings. Since the expense of formal counseling has precluded its widespread use in prisons, an “ordinary” alternative might be conducive to developing new zpds in ways similar to that used by parents, neighbors, mentors, and other nonprofessionals who use language in developing thinking skills. We might then see opportunities for epistemic considerations evolve, similar to those elicited in the narratives examined in this book, where prisoners who were invited to tell of their lives positioned themselves on a continuum of agency as figures of importance in various actions, some of which were revealed as actions they took, some of which were reported as acts they “had to” take, and others as acts occurring to them. Contributions to Studies of Conflict This research adds to discourse analysis work done previously on conflict by examining the language of those found guilty of much violence themselves. In Grimshaw’s (1990) introduction to Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in Conversation, he notes how few researchers have investigated arguments in conversations. His contributors helped fill that research gap by exploring how children learn to argue and how adults conduct verbal conflict. Elsewhere, critical discourse analyst Teun van Dijk has noted, “discourse may enact, cause, promote, defend, instigate, and legitimate violence” (1995:307). Speaking of Crime adds to that work by concentrating on ways that criminal acts have been legitimated in the speakers’ minds. As we have seen, a culture of violence in the prison is considered to be the precipitating ingredient in many of the acts of violence depicted. The importance of contextual understanding in the interpretation of conflict is also made apparent in work by Schiffrin (1984b) on Jewish argument as sociability, by Tannen (1990) on women and men in conversation, by Gates (1987), Kochman (1981, 1990), and Briggs (1993) on black and white speaking styles, and Labov’s (1972) “Rules for Ritual Insults.” This book adds to work on understanding African American speaking styles in various contexts, especially in situations of conflict. Due to the heavily skewed representation of African Americans in American prisons, it is imperative to have a


better understanding of African American speaking styles to work effectively in prison rehabilitation. The growing numbers of latino and latina prisoners, as well as the always disproportionate numbers of Native Americans in U.S. prisons, also require that we establish indepth studies of the socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic patterns of the incarcerated.6 The field of linguistics, particularly linguistic anthropology and critical discourse analysis, have much to offer in such research. As did Labov’s (1981) article on speech actions and reactions, my research looks directly at words and acts people recall, which they claim do lead to actual violence, part of the world of conflict that Grimshaw noted can be a “literally deadly phenomenon” (1990:6). Wood and Rennie (1994) determine that in addition to the discourse of survivors of rape, it is important as well to investigate the discourse of villains. Wood and Rennie’s brave remark at the end of their article points the way for research such as mine, which delves into the narrative mind of the perpetrator, not in an effort to justify crime, but in an effort to explicate its origins in the thinking and its prevention in future volatile settings. Such work asks that we recontextualize in a more holistic way the worlds in which we humans become criminals. In her recent study A Sin against the Future: Imprisonment in the World, Vivian Stern suggests that we will be successful with prisons only when “the prison is turned into an ante-room to the outside world, when whatever is done in prison aims to solve the problems that brought them there in the first place and will reoccur when the prisoner leaves the prison and sets off back into the world. Such successes are achieved only by limiting and mitigating prison’s effects, linking it up to opportunities for work, self-respect, and stability” (1998:308). Sister Helen Prejean’s (1993) work with and book about death row inmates and their victims attempts to flesh out crime and capital punishment, not only from an inmate’s view, but from the families of the victims as well. Thus we see a recent shift into a more dialogic and multivoiced approach to investigating violence, crime, punishments, and time in prisons. Applications beyond the World of Prison Beyond the worlds of speech by prisoners, I propose that this qualitative analysis of reflexive, agentive (or potentially agentive) discourse indicates that formative speech is thus occurring interpersonally between persons and intrapersonally within persons when speakers engage in narrative discourses. In telling autobiographical stories we are shaped and shaping, not just by what we hear others say, but also


by what we position others and ourselves as doing and feeling in what we say. Claiming personal, moral agency requires a progression of acts: We do. We know that we do. We know that we know that we did. Until we evoke that knowledge (or puzzle about what we know of our own actions), we may not be able to change what we do. Speaking is an act of cognition, not merely a code for communicating. Words to describe behavior (acts) are brought to our consciousness in conversation, in discursive practices. Words to describe, shape, and perhaps change our behaviors are accessible and revealing. Thus we can use the narrative act as a bridge into cognition, helping speakers make their positioning of behaviors accessible for personal as well as public scrutiny. As such, the act of narration itself becomes a large agentive and reflexive act, looking back and calling attention to one’s past act and past self. Thus narrative takes on a demonstrative function similar to pointing out a word. A speaker is also selecting and re-presenting actions agentively in “talk about what we do” (Westcott 1992:85). This is similar to the reflexive language of constructing dialogue. Thus, to provide a forum for autobiographical discourse is to provide a forum for reflexive speech and, therein, an opportunity for agentive display of one’s actions. Findings of discourse patterns in this work could be used by those who work in counseling, whose understanding of the devices, strategies, and “tools” of talk can improve the value of the therapeutic talk. As mentioned earlier, Kathleen Ferrara’s Therapeutic Ways with Words underlines, for instance, the importance of joint construction at work in narratives told by patients with their counselors. She dwells in particular on the functions of repetition and metaphor extension in the co-construction of analysis in therapeutic discourse. For teachers or counselors in any institution, my study could make clear the value of writing autobiographies as ways into plotting the templates of life experiences with even a simple structure of “ups and downs” over a life span. For example, useful discussion of whether an inmate places incarceration as a “down” or an “up” could ensue or, for a non-inmate, discussion of whether a loss in life was necessarily a “down.” In narrations of events, speakers cue the importance through various means of managing the discourse. This study, while concentrating on the stories and techniques used by prisoners recounting acts of crime and violence, also indicates ways that language in general is shaped by speakers for effect. Of first importance may be the effect that autobiographical story has on the interlocutor. Information states are changed; listeners/readers gain new or refined knowledge about the life of the speaker/writer when participating in the stories


of that person’s experience. Autobiography is not always convincing by any means, as we saw in William’s account denying the accusation of child molesting. Some discourse features build a convincing case: detail, consistency, use of enacted dialogue, intensity, introspection, for example. Other features—conflicting facts, omitted details, rambling or circuitous mode—contribute to disbelief by the interlocutor. Listening by itself, like reading a book by skimming, does not afford as much time for analysis as does transcribing and analyzing an autobiographical story. And analysis does not replace long-term association and attachment. Casual conversationalists, though they use these features, may not so adeptly discern the reflexive nature of the features of discourse that contribute to the listener’s reactions or the speaker’s own uptake. Systematic discourse analysis, however, holds many clues to that understanding. This study suggests that close attention to autobiographical stories cues us to the workings of the speaker’s own understandings. In particular, shifts in pronouns from “I” to non-deictic “you” indicate that the speaker is manipulating his part in the story such that his experience is being shared (with others) and addressed (by himself) simultaneously. Thus, when we hear speakers saying something like this—”I just hate it when you get in the shortest line at the checkout counter and then it takes forever to get out of the store!”—they are inviting us to join into their experience of waiting in line at the grocery store and also telling themselves that they see how they are being plagued. They reach out and in at the same time, making of the briefest of innocuous remarks a collectivizing experience. Such a trope is a common enough way of speaking, but no less important for its ubiquity, for it provides a moment for the interlocutor to ratify, to empathize, or (as in the case of a knife in which “you could feel it through the skin”) to mark your7 distance. When this “you” slides into student compositions, teachers could better understand its seeming intrusion by analyzing the placement. Is it occurring at a significant moment in the paper in which the writer could be more adroitly signaling broad applications of the finding, feeling, or belief? Noting the “slide” into “you” as a place of reflection and contemplation might make more sense to a student than the marginal note that “person shift” is occurring. The real point is to find out why it was important to shift to seek further ratification and to discern if a more collectivizing or generalizing experience is being sought. If so, then the writer can learn to showcase that thought as one having general (as well as personal) relevance rather than restate it as solely a personal “I” or a distanced “the writer notes” remark. In the world at large, and within the world of prison walls, we can


notice the richness and saliency of epistemic puzzling to help give insight into the workings of communicative autobiographical talk in general. Inviting the public display of discourse on events of deep engagement and high intensity (peak moments in a life) makes possible fruitful pathways to introspection. Such interview and performance settings provide ways in to the thinking of others via the observable frame breaks that act as openings out to the larger social world. As speakers of stories about important life (and death) events, we make connections to our past selves, to our current listeners, and to our sense of current and future selves in the ways we reach out to you with words. In a sense, whenever we tell a story (or publish a book on narratives) we are reaching out to seek understanding and affirmation, we are making “new conversations.”

Appendix A Consent Forms

LIFE STORIES STUDY This taped interview will take approximately 30 minutes. It is designed to ask some general questions about your life, what was important to you growing up and how you came to be in prison. The goal of this study is to help educators understand prisoners’ pasts and prisoners’ goals so that educational materials and programs can be developed that are better able to meet the rehabilitative needs of the community. , DC DC# , understand that the telling I, of my life story to Patricia E. O’Connor is part of her study of narrative as one of the requirements to fulfill the Doctorate of Philosophy in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University. I understand my name will be changed and all analyses of, references to, and documents using these remarks will keep my identity anonymous.

174 Appendix A

D. C. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS RESIDENT’S CONSENT Date RESIDENT’S NAME AND DCDC NUMBER (Print):

NAME OF INSTITUTION: NAME OF NEWS MEDIA REPRESENTATIVE: NAME OF MEDIA REPRESENTED: ADDRESS OF MEDIA REPRESENTED: I, the above-named resident, do hereby freely consent to the above-named news media representative to interview me on or about and I do hereby authorize the news media represented (date) by this person to use any information gathered about me during this interview for any legitimate purpose. I further authorize the Department of Corrections, and their authorized representatives, to release to representatives of the news media any documents or information relating to allegations or comments made by me in this interview. RESIDENT’S SIGNATURE WITNESS

TITLE

I, the above-named resident, refuse permission to the abovenamed news media representative to interview me. RESIDENT’S SIGNATURE WITNESS

TITLE

Appendix A 175

I, the above-named resident, do further freely give permission to the above-named news media representative to make recordings of my voice during this interview and to take photos of me (still, movie, or video) and I do hereby authorize the use of such pictures or recording by the news media represented by this person for any legitimate purpose. RESIDENT’S SIGNATURE WITNESS

TITLE

Original to: Resident’s Personal File Copy to: Media Representative ENCLOSURE #1 to DO 1340.2, dtd February 19, 1982

Appendix B Questionnaire

LIFE STORIES QUESTIONNAIRE Where did you grow up? What was your neighborhood like? Your family? What do you remember most about your school years? Can you recall a time when you were in danger of death? Can you recall a time when you were blamed for something you did not do? Can you recall a time when you felt compelled to continue doing something even when you did not want to? How did you end up at Lorton? What are your goals while a prisoner and after prison?

Notes

Introduction 1. My thanks to Martin Mitchell, who not only taped this narrative but also designed ways to incorporate real prison experiences of inmates into the workings of the drama class he and I taught using many of the ideas of image theater and forum theater found in Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. 2. The narrative of this stabbing is featured in my forthcoming Pre/Text article, “ ‘If You’re Afraid to Die, This Is the Wrong Place to Be’: Necessary Literacies in Prisoner Discourse,” which details the necessary literacy for prison survival. 3. This work was published first in French in 1975 as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. 4. In explaining the zpd to graduate students, I ask them at what moment did they become comfortable using the word “hegemonic.” 5. Information on prison demographics is included particularly in chapter 2 and elsewhere as appropriate to the discussion. 6. Tannen (1989:23) demonstrates that ellipsis, silence, and implicature all contribute to cooperation and involvement in understanding discourse. Misunderstood utterances and even silences (Becker 1985) and ellipses (Okazaki 1994) undergo repair to clarify acts and intentions. 7. This is shown by Labov’s Language in the Inner City (1972) in particular. Labov’s structures for narrative are used throughout the following chapters. See also Labov and Waletsky (1967). 1. Getting into Prison 1. An interesting history of the prisons of the District of Columbia is found in Journey from the Gallows: Historical Evolution of the Penal Philosophies and Practices in the Nation’s Capital by Mary H. Oakey.

180 Notes to Pages 14–52

2. This conversation is discussed in O’Connor (1994). 3. The United States, Russia, and South Africa have each taken the lead in rate of incarceration in the last decade. 4. Because the data I collected are exclusively from males, I use the masculine pronoun when referring to prisoners. An obvious extension of this work will be to conduct similar studies in women’s prisons. Women’s incarceration rates have been steadily increasing. Currently women represent 6.5 percent of all prison inmates (Beck and Mumola 1999:6). 5. That educational program continues and is now in its 15th year, though various prison facilities at Lorton are being slowly phased out by Congress, which oversees all of dc’s budgets. 6. One of the first particulars of language I learned in prison work in this institution is that those who are in charge of guarding prisoners are called officers, not guards. It is also the custom at that prison to refer to the incarcerated men as residents, rather than inmates. I found it easier to adopt the word officer than the all too euphemistic word residents, which the inmates themselves do not use. Recently, a class of inmates clarified this further, saying that resident connoted docility whereas inmate connoted a more active participant in the prison culture. 7. Carol Burke (1990) has published a study of women prisoners’ vision narratives in which she notes that seeing visions is a commonly reported occurrence in the women’s institutions in which she interviewed. 8. See my forthcoming article “ ‘If You’re Afraid to Die.’ ” 2. Agency and the Verb Position 1. Portions of this chapter were published in my “Speaking of Crime: ‘I Don’t Know What Made Me Do It’ ” (1995b) and appear here by permission of Sage Publications Ltd. 2. Berman (1995, 1998) discusses Indonesian and Javanese positionings in particular. 3. So subtle is the effect of such a passivizing and distancing phrase that I realized only after this analysis that I, too, was using it—and in highly salient ways. “Ended up” appears in the written questions I had each prisoner read over before starting the spoken interview: “How did you end up at Lorton?” I used the expression during the taping as well. As I think back on the wording of my questionnaire, I realize that I purposely used an indirect style because I was avoiding two things—intrusiveness and limiting answers. As a teacher for six years, I had not asked, “What did you do? What crime did you commit?” for

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I would be eliciting information that was unneeded, intrusive, and distracting for teaching. In my research and data collection I made every effort to ask open-ended questions to establish a more casual kind of discourse, conducive to narrative. I also might have been harboring a naive thought that “ended up” might be the way their incarcerations came about. In future studies I think that I would use “How did you get here?” as a more neutral wording. 4. See also O’Connor (1997), “ ‘You Gotta Be a Man or a Girl’: Constructed Dialogue and Reflexivity in the Discourse of Violence.” 5. John’s shooting is also discussed in my article “Speaking of Crime” (1995b). 3. Pronouns and Agency 1. An earlier version of this chapter was published as my article “ ‘You Could Feel It through the Skin’: Agency and Positioning in Prisoners’ Stabbing Stories” (1994); the chapter appears here by permission of Mouton de Gruyter, a division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. 2. Readers should note that the prison being described does not fit Bentham’s “classic” panopticon style where a guard would see inside all cells from a centrally located interior tower around which radiated several floors of cells with back lighting. Rather, the architecture where this inmate was housed resembles a two-story motel with exterior corridors with bars instead of doors. To see what goes on inside a cell, a guard would have to be in front of the particular cell, or the action would have to be taking place in the corridor, which could be observed from the end of the walkway (the tier) where guards are stationed. 3. See works by Greg Urban (1989) and by Peter Mühlhäusler and Rom Harré (1990), which show that any of the English personal pronouns can index speakers, those spoken to, or those spoken about. Harré (1984), in particular, notes that the personal pronouns do not refer. Rather, they index the speech. Harré states, “I believe the personal pronouns by which persons identify themselves as ‘speakers of the moment’ are a lexical system parallel to the ‘here’ and ‘now’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ of physical space” (61). 4. Edward, of course, has managed to disarm and overpower the assailant. Edward is about six feet tall and weighs 220 pounds, is quite muscular, and would not be readily attacked from the front or without a weapon. His point here is that with his back turned and asleep in a cell somehow unlocked, he (like anyone attacked while asleep) is in a vulnerable position. His claims are not fantastic: in 1996, the

182 Notes to Pages 88–131

Washington Post reported that guards in this prison had allegedly called out “hits” on particular inmates, allowing some inmates to conveniently attack others. 5. We could go further here interpreting pens and knives and stabbings with their sexual counterparts and acts, but I shall leave that particular polysemy to the able reader who has no doubt already gotten there by now. Neither sexuality nor prevention of sexual acts are mere metaphors in prison, as shown in subsequent data in chapter 3. Thanks to Jason Rosenblatt for telling me of this stabbing. 6. This story has been analyzed in the context of how one determines “being a man” in O’Connor (1997). 7. Abbott’s (1991:76) passage (described earlier) certainly makes a case for normalizing or ritualizing the act of stabbing. 8. See, for instance, Tannen (1982), Ong (1982), Chafe (1982), and Heath (1982, 1983). 9. Pronounced as “psysed,” this word means “psyched.” 4. Reflexive Language and Frame Breaks 1. Some parts of this chapter have been published in my article “Speaking of Crime” (1995b) and appear here by permission of Sage Publications Ltd. 2. Marlowe at the end of the 16th century uses metaphysics to connote the occult: “these Metaphysickes of Magicians, And Negromantike books are heauenly” (quoted in oed 387). 3. I have used that disappointment to encourage the speakers to write their life stories, for in the writing they can smooth out the crafting, but they will also have to employ other devices to show the significance of their stories. (See also Prince, 1982, on such tactics for written narratives.) 4. Recall that place-names have also been changed. 5. Lucy (1993b) carries reflexive language further by including the indexical forms (such as “I”), which change value depending upon speakers, and the tense marker “-ed” in English, which indicates “the event in question occurred prior to the present moment of utterance.” He includes proper names “in the pure case” where a proper name “denotes a particular object . . . by indexing the existence of a conventional label for that object.” He also claims that ironic stance signals reflexivity, as do particularly explicit speech descriptions such as “I baptize you John Henry.” Lucy notes, “The reflexivity in such cases is not localized in a single form but rather in the overall design of the utterance” (10). Also included as reflexive are poetic lines, which, by their parallel structures, set up “formal equivalences that

Notes to Pages 131–171 183

tell listeners that certain things are to be compared with one another.” (10–11). Thus, for Lucy, reflexive language forms a guiding function and he concludes that “reflexivity is so pervasive and essential that we can say that language is, by nature, fundamentally reflexive” (11). 6. The street name is omitted rather than changed here. 7. Discussion of this narrative appeared in my “Speaking of Crime” (1995b). 8. Because this clause does not seem to be contextualized within a truly agentive puzzlement, I have not included it in table 1 in chapter 2. 5. Conclusions and Implications 1. Roman has known the interviewer for several years and is thus more likely to discuss his experiences in detail. However, recall, as was noted in the explication of data collection, that there was no direct correlation between length of interviews and depth of narratives with amount of time knowing me as interviewer. Also, quite often interviews had to be stopped arbitrarily when guards needed to do counts or when other incidents required shortening interview times. 2. The story comes from a drama workshop co-taught by Martin Mitchell III and myself in the same maximum security prison. The prompt for the narrative was to describe an event in prison from which the group could devise a scene for enactment (see Mitchell forthcoming). 3. -Bey or -El attached to a surname indicates membership in the Nation of Islam or Moorish Americans, an element central to the original insult that occurred when Malcolm-Bey refused to make a special meal for an inmate to carry to his patron, another inmate in the prison. A full discussion of the larger narrative is included in my 1997 article “ ‘You Gotta Be a Man or a Girl.’ ” 4. For a full discussion of “necessary literacy,” see O’Connor (forthcoming), “ ‘If You’re Afraid to Die.’ ” For more on the National Adult Literacy Survey, see Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, and Kolstad (1993) and Haigler, Harlow, O’Connor, and Campbell, (1994). 5. See also Cole and Maltzman (1969), Wertsch (1985), and, most recently, Lantolf and Appel (1994). 6. For recent data on racial disparities in prisons, see Mauer (1997b). 7. Catching this shift into “you” in my own writing (and deciding to leave it here) further reinforces the very point of wanting readers to enter into my own conclusions.

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Index

References to tables appear in italics. Abbott, Jack Henry, 16, 108, 113, 182 n.7; “how to stab” piece by, 78, 85–86, 87–89, 104, 115 abstract, 32, 33 activism, 159 Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Bruner), 102 African Americans, 4; coding in, 89; constructed dialogue of, 81; displays of language in speech style of, 7; double negatives in speech style of, 106; implication and indirection in speech style of, 150; juxtapositions of opposites in language of, 128; language used by, 7, 8, 168–69; multiple meanings in speech style of, 9; rate of incarceration of, 9, 93, 168; signifying by, 67, 112; terms for, 17–18 agency: and change, 13; claiming, 44, 45, 46–50, 74; in a continuum of responsibility, 39, 40–42, 45, 73; defined, 3, 10, 14, 39, 154; deflecting of, 40, 41, 42–44, 45, 50–57, 58, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 74, 144, 180–81 n.3; developing, 73– 74; and discourse, 5, 153, 169–70; life-assessment remarks in, 46– 47; and meta-talk, 166; moral,

74; passivizing, 57, 58, 68; and positioning, 166; problematizing, 44, 45, 58–64, 68, 73–74; and pronouns, 75, 153, 171, 183 n.7; refining the definition of, 154; and reflexivity, 153, 154, 166; in reporting crimes, 39; shared, 51; shifting, 57–58; site for, 151; strong evaluation of, 65–70; and vagueness, 147; and verbs, 39– 40, 65, 74, 78, 153, 154; weak or strong evaluator in, 43, 47, 72 agent, 3, 13, 39 agentive, 3, 39 Antoine, 124, 124–27, 138 arguments, 168 arrests, 51–53 assaults in prison, 4 Asylums (Goffman), 15 Austin, John, 7, 23 autobiography: and agency, 169–70; effect on interlocutor of, 170– 72; and narrative, 6, 107; past affected by present and future concerns in, 72; of prisoners, 16; as therapy, 10–11; “you” as indicator in, 75–76 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 36, 151 Basso, Keith, 8 Becker, A. L., 22 Bentham, Jeremy, 15–16, 181 n.2 Benveniste, Emile, 77

200 Index

Berman, Laine, 180 n.2 blanks, 7 Boal, Augusto, 179 n.1 Bonheim, Helmut, 77–78, 84 Briggs, Charles, 2, 168 Bruner, Jerome, 22, 23, 107, 165; on the storytelling self, 123; and subjunctifying, 10, 102, 151 Bureau of Justice Statistics, 17, 52, 63 Burke, Carol, 180 n.7 call-response dynamic, 8 capital punishment, 84 Carbonell, Jaime, 122 Cardozo-Freeman, Inez, 16, 28 Carr, David, 116 Chafe, Wallace, 5, 6, 38, 72, 157 child abuse, 144 clichés, 132 coda, 32, 34 Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog (Martin and Sussman), 16 complicating actions, 32, 34 “conative solicitude,” 77 confidentiality, 25, 29–31 conflict talk, 11 Conflict Talk (Grimshaw), 168 con-language, 28 con-lingo, 28 “conning,” 73–74, 83, 161, 163 constructed dialogue, 81, 89, 92–93, 132, 137 conversation, 165 court research, 35 crime, 43–44, 51–53; clearance rate of, 51–53, 55; drop in rates of, 2; habilitation into, 60 Crime Bill of 1994, 160–61 “criminal mind,” 21 critical discourse analysis, 157–58 Critical Inquiry (Gates), 60 Dancy, Jonathon, 49 Daniel, Jack, 8 data, colloection of, 28–29

Davies, Bromwyn, and Rom Harré, 87 Delorme, Eugene P., 16 Descartes, René, 21 DeWaele, J. P., and Rom Harré, 72 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault), 2, 14, 159, 179 n.3 discourse: and agency, 5, 153, 169– 70; analysis of, 158–61, 168; framing of, 3; and rehabilitation, 157, 158–59; self-reflective, 3; systematic, 171; as therapy, 10– 11; and time, 2; and violence, 4, 168 discourse analysis, 5 discourse features: and convincing, 171; and disbelief, 171 discourse markers, 52, 124 disnarrated, 64 distancing: by the author, 180–81 n.3; in orality, 6–7; when speaking of crimes, 13; in writing, 6–7; and “you,” 77 Dong, Arthur, 17 double negative, 7, 106 doubling, 62–63, 112 drama class, 1, 179 n.1 drugs, prisoners and, 31, 32 Edward, 56, 90, 91, 96, 106; and agency, 44, 46–47; stabbing story told by, 78–84, 96, 103–4, 115, 181 n.2, 181–82 n.4 emotions, 97 Erman, B., 99 ethnicity, 8 evaluation, 32, 33–34 Executioner’s Song (Mailer), 84 Fairclough, Norman, 7, 73, 158 Ferrara, Kathleen, 10, 107, 170 “flooding in,” 136 Fludernik, Monika, 77–78 footing, 120 Foucault, Michel, 159, 179 n.3; and

Index 201

imprisonment and prisons, 2, 14– 15, 16, 26, 167 Frame Analysis (Goffman), 136 frame breaks, 6, 172; and agency, 153, 166; defined, 3, 70; distancing in, 7; epistemic, 118, 123, 153; as evaluating and telling intentions, 124–28; and meta-talk, 123–24; and reflexive language, 72, 73, 118–19, 123–24; and selfevaluation, 3, 128–32 frames, 119 friendships, 110 Gaines, Patrice, 16 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 9, 60, 168 ged, 161 gender, 8 Georgetown University, 161 Gergen, Kenneth J., 123 Gilmore, Gary, 84, 86 Goffman, Erving, 21, 76–77, 87, 120, 136; and frames and frame breaks, 70, 119; and total institutions, 3, 15, 16 Grice, Paul, 148 Grimshaw, Allen D., 168, 169 Gumperz, John J., 120, 121 habilitation, 60 Harre, ´ Rom, 21, 68, 71, 181 n.3 Heath, Shirley Brice, 8, 150 Herman, David, 136 Holmes, Janet, 99 Human Agency and Language (Taylor), 43 Hume, 21 “I”: in autobiography, 80; as figure, 78; and passive voice, 76 I-centered discourse, 57, 98 identity, 11; formation of, 20 imprisonment, 16–17; background on, 14–16; failure of, 19, 23; public knowledge about, 159; and race, 9, 17–18; rates of, 2, 17–19, 164

incarceration. See imprisonment indexing: in different languages, 39, 180 n.2; the self and “you,” 77, 78–83, 95–96; and verbs, 39–40 indirect reported speech, 132 inmates: and a changeable self, 21–22; classification of, 160; constructing selves, 153, 158; counseling of, 161; desires to acquire possessions of, 20, 22–23; and growing up, 19–20; ignored by society, 2; interviews with, 24–28; language used by, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 38; and moral agency, 13, 14, 152; prison viewed by, 155–57; as residents, 180 n.6; speaking of being a man, 59; survival stories shared by, 89; and writing life stories, 182 n.3 intentions, 124–26, 154, 166; reflexive commentary on, 70–73 intertextuality, 36, 151 interviews, 29–30; and circumstances for incarcerations, 29– 30, 31–32, 34–35; conditions for, 26–28, 73–74; and confidentiality, 25, 29–31; methodology of, 24–26; narratives in, 32–36; questions asked in, 28–29; social network method in, 25–26; topics included in, 36 In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (Abbott), 16, 78, 84– 86, 88 involvement strategies, 11 irony, 58–64, 65, 73, 182–83 n.5; used by Edward, 81, 82 Iser, Wolfgang, 7, 35, 71, 115 Jackie, 50–51, 57 jails: defined, 19; growth of, 2 James, 78, 90, 91, 94–96, 100 James, William, 21 Japan: rate of incarceration in, 164 Jesse, 25, 34; role models for, 20, 22, 23 John, 66, 138, 156; author assisted

202 Index

John (cont.) by, 25; irony used by, 58–60, 65, 127; problematizing agency by, 68; reflexive commentary of, 70– 72; reflexive frame breaks used by, 124, 127–28; self-evaluation by, 128–29, 148; strong evaluation by, 68–70, 72 Johnstone, Barbara, 22, 90 The Joint (Cardozo-Freeman), 16 journalists, 16 Journey from the Gallows (Oakey), 179 n.1 juxtaposition, 64 Kingston, 49–50, 53–57, 167; frame breaks used by, 136; irony used by, 54, 58, 60, 63–64, 67–68; numbering and listing by, 62–63, 64; passivizing phrasings used by, 57, 58; reflexive frame breaks used by, 124; reflexive guides in presenting the self used by, 132– 34; reflexive language used by, 136, 137, 138; self-evaluation by, 60–62, 63, 64, 65–68, 129–32; shifting to “you,” 134–38 Kitagawa, Chisato, and Adrienne Lehrer, 86–87, 100 Kochman, Tom, 8, 150, 168 Laberge, Suzanne, 101 Laberge, Suzanne, and Gillian Sankoff, 87 Labov, William, 24, 29, 144, 168, 169, 179 n.7; and the abstract of the stabbing, 96–97; and displays of language in African American speaking styles, 7; on speech actions and reactions, 113, 114; terminology of, 32 Labov and Waletsky, 29 language: African American, 4, 7, 8, 9, 60, 128, 150, 168–69; about crime, 3; and culture, 16; displays of, for the audience, 7–8, 60; idiosyncracy and creativity in, 90;

inside the prison, 1; reflexive, 37, 118–19, 135, 138; self shaped by, 11–12, 14, 19, 20, 153; shifts in meaning of, 116; speaker revealed in, 38; use of, 11 Language in the Inner City (Labov), 179 n.7 Levin, Beth, 48 Licensed to Kill (Dong and Rosga), 17 Life Sentences: Rage and Survival behind Bars (Wikberg and Rideau), 16, 22 Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (Linde), 5 Linde, Charlotte, 4, 5, 6, 164–65 linguistics, 169 listing, 59, 62 literacy, 7, 163 Lorton va, 13, 36, 159, 180 n.5 Lucy, John A., 119, 120, 131, 133, 182–85 Mailer, Norman: Abbott’s letters to, 16, 84, 85; positioned by Abbott, 86, 87, 104, 115; wife stabbed by, 87–88 Malcolm-Bey, 162, 183 n.2 n.3 markers, 32, 52 marking, 20, 64; defined, 8, 9 Martin, Dannie M., 16 Martin, Wallace, 10–11 Maurer, David, 28 maximum security, 31 McCabe, Alyssa, 5 McCall, Nathan, 16 McConnel, Patricia, 16 mentoring, 22 meta: defined, 121–22 meta-comments, 37, 81, 128–32 meta-communication. See metatalk meta-language. See meta-talk meta-messages. See meta-talk metaphor, 132 metaphysics, metaphysical, 121–22, 182 n.2

Index 203

meta-talk, 46, 70, 120–24; defined, 121, 122; devices, 126–27; and epistemic self, 123 meta-word. See meta-talk methodology, 24–32 Milroy, Leslie, 25 Mitchell, Martin, 162, 179 n.1, 183 n.2 Mitchell-Kernen, Claudia, 8 Mo, Tony, 13–14, 25, 167 Moorish Americans, 163 Muhlh ¨ ausler, ¨ Peter, and Rom Harré, 39 My Return (Abbott), 88 narrative, 11; and agency, 6, 169– 70; analysis of, 4, 36–37; and autobiography, 6, 57, 75–76, 107; and blanks, 51–52; and cognition, 170; and coherence system, 164– 66; and counseling, 71; and culture, 5, 6; defined, 32; details in, 106; evaluation in, 5, 64, 118; in interviews, 32–36; listener involved in, 5; and the mind, 5–6; and moral agency, 74; multiple functions of, 5; and reflexive speech, 170; reframing, 119; and rehabilitation, 74, 167; second person, 76; and the self, 4, 24, 64; as sense maker, 165; and theme, 71; as therapy, 10–11, 138, 157; and the time of the event, 82; uses of, 5 narrative windows, 6 narrativity, 4, 75, 151 narratological theory, 76 narratologists, 10 National Adult Literacy Survey, 163 Nation of Islam, 183 n.3 negation, 7 negatives, 7, 71, 154 numbering, 62, 64 Oakey, Mary H., 179 n.1 offenders. See inmates Ong, Walter, 6–7

orientation, 33; defined, 32 “panopticon,” 15 parallel lines, 133 Parker, Tony, 17 participant observer, 28 participation framework, 39, 102 passivizing, 57, 58, 68 personal agency, 11; defined, 3, 39, 154 Phelan, James, 76 Pinero, ˜ Miguel, 31 “plaza stage,” 8 plot events, 3 poetry, 133 Polanyi, Livia, 5, 72, 82, 104–5 Polkinghorne, Donald, 21, 22, 116 positioning, 6, 120, 165, 166; defined, 3, 87 Prejean, Sister Helen, 169 Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman), 21 Prince, Gerald, 6, 64, 71, 87; and the difference between narrative and narrativity, 4, 75, 111; on the mental enactment of the audience of narrative, 90–91; on second-person pronouns in literature, 84 prisons: capacity of, 19; community involvement in, 160, 161; defined, 19; and discourse analysis, 159–61; in District of Columbia, 13, 179 n.1; education in, 160– 61; families in, 93; framework of slavery and subjugation in, 9; friendships in, 110; grading, 19; growth of, 2; inmates’ conclusions about, 155–57; noise in, 27; and normalization, 15; researching within, 3; role of, 160; sexuality in, 92, 108–9, 110, 182 n.5; success with, 169; survival stories in, 89; time in, 1–2; types of, 19; violence in, 1, 4, 7, 103, 161–63, 168. See also imprisonment

204 Index

probation, 19 pronouns, 36–37, 86, 153; and agency, 153, 171, 183 n.7; in constructed dialogue, 81; as deictic, 86; and positioning, 6, 57; shifting functions of, 101; speakers indexed by, 81, 181 n.3; vagueness in, 86; “you” in, 75–78 Pronouns and People (Muhlh ¨ ausler ¨ and Harré), 39 Propp, Vladimir, 94

103, 105–6, 107–15, 116; “you know” used by, 99 Roman: future in prison viewed by, 155–57, 183 n.1; shooting story told by, 47–49, 50, 71; stabbing story told by, 78, 90, 91 Rosga, AnnJanetta, 17 “Rules for Ritual Insults” (Labov), 168 Russia: rate of incarceration in, 17, 180 n.3

race, 8, 17–18 rape, 169 recidivism, 19, 21–22, 23, 63, 158, 160 “referential slither,” 77 reflexivity, 155, 182–83 n.5; and agency, 153, 154, 166; and clichés, 132; defined, 123; and frame breaks, 72, 73, 123–24; and images, 132; and information states, 132; and intention, 70–73; and irony, 182–83 n.5; and parallel structure, 133; and presenting the self, 132–34 reframing, 119, 144–45 rehabilitation, 3, 19; and the construction of inmates by others, 158; and discourse analysis, 23– 24, 157, 159–61, 167–68; and narrative, 39, 73, 74, 82–83, 164; and recontextualizing, 107; and reflexive frame breaks, 152; and self-reflexivity, 138, 155; and the Youth Act, 57, 60; and the zpd, 35 repetition, 59, 64 reported speech, 81 residents. See inmates rhetorical theory, 76 Rideau, William, 16, 22 Roland, 78, 120, 123, 127; stabbing story told by, 92–94, 96, 100–103, 105–6, 107–15, 182 n.9; “you” and “I” in evaluative discourse by, 75, 90, 91, 92–94, 96, 100–

Samenow, Samuel, 6, 13, 20, 43–44 sarcasm, 46 Schiffrin, Deborah, 52; on argument, 88, 168; on conversation, 165; on language and culture, 166; and meta-talk, 120, 121, 122; on narrative, 6; and participation frameworks, 87; on “you know,” 99, 111 Scholes, Robert, 6 Scollon, Ron and Suzanne, 8 Searle, John, 7, 84 self: as agentive, 5, 39, 71, 154; as changeable, 21, 23; constructing, 21, 22, 39, 110, 164–66; defined, 21; distanced, 148–49; and incarceration, 16–17; and language, 11–12, 14, 19, 20, 153; reflexive guides in presenting, 132–34; as storyteller, 123 sentences, 31–32 Sentencing Project, 93 Shakur, Assata, 16 Shakur, Sanyika, 16 Short Eyes, 31 signifying, 54, 67, 112; defined, 8, 60; in prison, 9–10; and selfreflection, 64; within a speech event, 8–9 silence toward prisoners, 2 A Sin against the Future (Stern), 169 slavery, 9 Smitherman, Geneva, 8

Index 205

sociolinguistics, 4, 166, 167; interactional, 166 soliloquy, 136 South Africa: rate of incarceration in, 180 n.3 speech: as acts, 7, 179 n.6; everyday, 41–42 speech act theory, 23 stabbing, 182 n.7; in U.S. prisons, 103 stabbing stories, 29, 78; personal pronouns in, 75, 89–90, 91, 95– 96; told by Jack Abbott, 85–86 Stern, Vivian, 169 story: functions of, 82; co-constructions of, 82 storytelling, 8, 104 storyworld, 72, 82 strong evaluation, 43, 47, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70; and Charles Taylor, 69–70 subjunctifying, 10, 102, 151 suicide in prison, 4 surveillance, 15–16 Sussman, Peter Y., 16 “talk therapy,” 73 Tannen, Deborah, 5, 64, 81, 106, 168, 179 n.6 Taylor, Charles, 38, 50, 68, 129; and the weak or strong evaluator, 43, 47, 64, 69, 70, 72 teaching, 30; in prison, 1, 2, 13, 30 Texas: rate of incarceration in, 17 text, 38 theater, 136, 179 n.1 Theater of the Oppressed (Boal), 179 n.1 therapeutic discourse, 73 Therapeutic Ways with Words (Ferrara), 10, 107, 170 Thomas, 35–36 time: in prison, 1 topic-chaining, 8 total institutions, 3, 15, 16, 28 Traugott, Elizabeth, 116 understatement, 58

United States: rate of incarceration in, 17, 164, 180 n.3 van Dijk, Teun, 158, 168 verbs, 6, 37, 48, 50; and agency, 39– 40, 50, 65, 74, 78, 153, 154 videotape, 1 violence, 11, 113; culture of, 163– 64, 168; in prison, 161–62; and status, 113 The Violence of Our Lives (Parker), 17 visions, 27, 180 n.7 voice, 6 Vygotsky, Lev, 3–4, 35, 44, 163, 166–67 Walt, 32–34 Washington dc: rate of incarceration in, 17, 164 Weiner, E. J., and William Labov, 42 Westcott, Malcolm, 10 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 16 Wikberg, Ron, 16, 22 William, 36, 171; assigning blame or cause, 149–51; digressive maneuvers by, 145–48; a distanced self presented by, 148–49; and moral agency, 139–52; reflexive frame breaks used by, 124; reframing by, 144–45 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11 Wodak, Ruth, 158 women: in prison, 93, 180 n.7, 180 n.4 Wood, L. A., and H. Rennie, 169 words: as acts, 7, 179 n.6; shifts in meaning of, 116 “y’know,” 111 “you”: and agency, 154; as cohesion strategy, 106–7; collectivizing, 171; complexities of, 76–78; and “conative solicitude,” 84; in direct and indirect speech, 111– 14; distancing with, 86, 94–96; functions of, 101; and generality,

206 Index

“you” (cont.) 87; indexing the one spoken to, 90; indexing the speaker’s quoted speech, 90, 92–94; as indicator, 75–76; interpersonal and intrapersonal, 78, 103–6, 108, 111, 115–17, 134, 136, 156; involving, 77, 96–98; involving and agentive, 88–89; involving in embedded phrases, 114–15; joined with “I” in evaluative discourse, 100–101; in literature, 76, 84; making experience comprehensible, 107–11; positioning with, 84–88; problematizing with, 83– 84; recontextualizing, 106–7; as

second person, 89; as second person narration, 76; in speculation, 101–3; in stabbing stories, 89–98; in therapeutic discourse “you know,” 89, 98, 99, 105 Young, Katherine, 72, 82 Youth Act, 55, 57, 60, 64 Zone of Proximal Development (zpd), 10, 12, 179 n.4; and agency, 44, 92, 165–66; and children learning language, 3–4; communal, 163–64; and incarceration, 159, 163; and new learning in general, 166–67; and rehabilitation, 35, 160, 168

In the Stages series Volume 1

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The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak,

The Mirror of Ideas

Freedom to Write Edited by Steve MacDonogh in association

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By Warren Motte

Translated by Steven Rendall

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Volume 12

New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fic-

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Speaking of Crime: Narratives of Prisoners

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Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment

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Speaking of Events

Speaking of Values 2

Speaking of Selves

Brian Herbert - Prisoners of Arionn

Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbruck

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