Prosecuting Prisoners: Criminalization of Incarcerated People in an Era of Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization

Tolman, Arielle Woloshin

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-dye6-aa79

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Prosecuting Prisoners: Criminalization of Incarcerated People in an Era of Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization

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This study is the first to chart the national scope of the criminal prosecution of incarcerated people and to investigate the consequences of this social process. Using an interlocking set of data sources and methods, including interviews, ethnographic observations, and administrative records, I provide answers to some basic questions about the criminalization of imprisoned people in an era of psychiatric deinstitutionalization: how they are prosecuted, how frequently, and with what consequences. I also reveal that certain groups of incarcerated people—namely Black and Latinx people and those with mental illness—are disproportionately affected by these prosecutions. And I explore how extraordinarily harsh conditions, like solitary confinement, may actually play a role in producing the behavior that is subsequently criminalized in court. I argue that the criminal prosecution of imprisoned people helps to provide legitimacy for the punitive excesses of mass incarceration: for its extreme sentences, racial inequities, criminalization of people with mental illness, and harsh conditions of confinement. In effect, these prosecutions put already-criminalized and marginalized individuals on trial, instead of the institutions that help to produce the behavior in question. And the new convictions that result extend defendants’ criminal sentences substantially, directly helping to maintain mass incarceration at its current levels.In so doing, I engage with several core questions of sociological and law and society traditions: How is social inequality reproduced? How does deviance get classified alternatively as a “medical” or “criminal” problem? How and why do total institutions like prisons inevitably produce the very behaviors they ostensibly seek to control? In Chapter 2, I demonstrate how states and prisons go beyond administrative sanctions to use criminal law to manage incarcerated peoples’ noncompliance, with significant social consequences. In Chapter 3, I reveal how the same social processes that leads to the criminalization of people with mental illness in the community play out in the microcosm of the prison. And in Chapter 4, I describe how the criminal prosecution of incarcerated people subjected to long-term solitary confinement helps to legitimize those harsh administrative sanctions. In Chapter 5, I conclude with proposed changes to the criminal-legal system, prisons, and social policy that may help to interrupt this process of criminalization.

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