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Narratives of Conversion and Coercion: American Prison Life Writing Since 1945

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Narratives of Conversion and Coercion: American Prison Life Writing Since 1945 NARRATIVES OF CONVERSION AND COERCION: AMERICAN PRISON LIFE WRITING SINCE 1945 by SIMON ROLSTON B.A. (Hons.), The University of Victoria, 2003 M.A., The University of Alberta, 2004 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2010 © Simon Rolston, 2010 Abstract In this dissertation, I consider the relationship between the rhetoric of conversion that informs the American prison system and the pervasive use of the conversion narrative in the life writing of American prisoners. I argue that ever since the first penitentiary opened its gates at the beginning of the nineteenth century, prison reformers have relied on the conversion narrative to redefine the rehabilitative goals of the modern prison. Prison reformers, moreover, have historically deployed a variety of strategies—indeterminate sentencing, the “mark system,” the parole board, and the prison file, for example—to ensure that prisoners articulate their experiences behind bars according to a conversion narrative paradigm. Reflecting the discourse of the prison system, the prison life writing archive is rife with the tropes, subject positions, and narrative structure of conversion, particularly in the post-war period when conversion was reconfigured as “rehabilitation” and prisoners had to define themselves as rehabilitated before they would be released from prison. By exploring how the ideology of the prison is implicated in the life writing of prisoners and ex-prisoners like Jimmy Santiago Baca (A Place to Stand), Jack Henry Abbott (In the Belly of the Beast), and James Carr (Bad), I complicate how writing in prison is typically defined as emancipatory or inherently resistant. However, while some prisoners and ex-prisoners reinscribe the ideology of the American prison system by using the conversion narrative in their life writings, other prisoners use the conversion narrative in ways radically different from those that prison reformers intended. Their creative, frequently subversive deployments of the conversion narrative complicate traditional teleologies of citizenship, question the emancipatory role of prison writing, and reconfigure what can and what cannot be said in auto/biographical discourse. ii Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. iv Introduction: “Do you think that I’ll be different when you’re through?” ........................... 1 Chapter 1: Conversion and the Story of the American Prison ............................................. 19 Conversions in America .................................................................................................................. 28 Conversion: 1776-1870 .................................................................................................................... 34 Reform: 1865-1950 .......................................................................................................................... 44 Rehabilitation: 1945-1980 ............................................................................................................... 53 Conclusion: Prison Writing and the Rehabilitation Narrative ...................................................... 63 Chapter 2: From “Primitive Manhood” to “Humanity”: Rehabilitation, Education, and Citizenship in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to Stand ....................................................... 72 Writing as Counter-Narrative ........................................................................................................ 74 A Place to Stand and the Rehabilitation Narrative ......................................................................... 78 Becoming Human ............................................................................................................................ 86 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 102 Chapter 3: Narratives of Murder: Jack Henry Abbott and In the Belly of the Beast ........ 104 In the Belly of the Beast and the Rehabilitation Narrative ........................................................... 110 Alienation and Indoctrination in the Prison and Prison Writing ................................................ 120 Conclusion: From the Big House to Random House .................................................................... 131 Chapter 4: “Bad Motherfucker”: Lying, Badmen, and Breaking the Rules of Genre in The Autobiography of James Carr ............................................................................................... 135 The Moral Hard Man and the Rehabilitation Narrative ............................................................. 142 The Hard Man and “Lying” ......................................................................................................... 150 Conclusion: Lying and Complicity ............................................................................................... 162 Conclusion: Rehabilitation in an Age of Retribution .......................................................... 167 Notes...................................................................................................................................... 175 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 204 iii Acknowledgements I want to thank Rose Casey for her meticulous editing of this dissertation and for her support and patience while I worked on this project. Many thanks to Dr. Michael Zeitlin, Dr. Susanna Egan, and Dr. Glenn Deer for their professional guidance and for their warm and consistent encouragement over the past five years. Jared Morrow, Moberly Luger, Sean McAlister, Dr. Peter Caster, and the men and women at the Matsqui medium security prison writers‟ workshop provided me with invaluable advice on my work. I want to thank the department of English at the University of British Columbia and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for supporting my research. I am grateful to my parents for taking pride in my work. And, finally, I want to thank Fynn Rolston for his infectious sense of humour. He has kept me smiling over the past three years while I worked on this project. iv Introduction: “Do you think that I’ll be different when you’re through?” On February 4th, 1969, Johnny Cash recorded a live album inside San Quentin, California‟s notorious maximum security prison. At San Quentin was an unprecedented hit for Cash, whose foray a year earlier into California‟s carceral system to record At Folsom Prison had been credited with revitalizing his stalled career. Like At Folsom Prison, At San Quentin foregrounds the enthusiastic, often ribald sounds of the prisoners who were in the audience. Their participation in the production of the recorded text is usually expressed in affirmative shouts and applause. One instance, however, stands out on the recording because the prisoners respond differently to one of Cash‟s lyrics. In the song “San Quentin [#2] [Live],” as it was named on later track listings (Essential Johnny Cash: 1955-1983), Cash addresses the prison from the position of a prisoner. He sings the refrain, “San Quentin, what good do you think you do? Do you think that I‟ll be different when you‟re through?” Immediately, and almost in unison, the San Quentin prisoners shout back a resounding “No!” This unscripted call-and-response between Cash and his imprisoned audience speaks to a particular struggle between prisoners and the ideology of the American prison system, a struggle that I suggest is acted out in American prison life writing. The refrain Cash sings in “San Quentin [#2] [Live]” invokes a concept called the “rehabilitative ideal.” The rehabilitative ideal was a sociological, criminological, and penological model that governed prison mandates from approximately 1945-1980. According to the terms of the rehabilitative ideal, the prison was supposed to rehabilitate prisoners either by means of medical or psychological treatment or by providing them with educational training that might encourage them to behave as rights-and-duties bearing citizens. During the era of the 1 rehabilitative ideal, prison reformers maintained that the “good” that the prison could “do,” to use Cash‟s terms, was to rehabilitate prisoners in order to make them “different.” Thus, Cash‟s lyrical indictment of the prison happens also to address an ideology that greatly influenced how prisoners in 1969 were supposed to experience their incarceration. While “San Quentin #2” speaks to a defining feature of the American prison system because it invokes the rehabilitative ideal, the resounding “no” shouted by the San Quentin prisoners suggests a collective resistance to rehabilitation. The prisoners‟ “no” indicates that their experiences of prison life bear little resemblance to the rehabilitation ideology that they were expected to adopt and adhere to throughout their imprisonment. If, as the prisoners claim, they were unchanged by their incarceration,
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