LAW, CULTURE

AND
THE HUMANITIES
Article

Law, Culture and the Humanities

Incarceration and 6(3) 341–353

© The Author(s) 2010

Imprisonment Reprints and permission: sagepub.

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DOI: 10.1177/1743872110374260
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Keally McBride
Department of Politics, University of San Francisco

Abstract
Incarceration is best understood as an extreme environment which complicates our notions of
human freedom. Incarceration helps us think about freedom because it demands consideration of
the relationship between body and soul, providing yet another testing ground for the longstanding
metaphysical and philosophical question of what makes humans truly free. It also is a remarkable
test case for how much of human experience is socially determined and how much individuals can
create their own reality because prisons try to substitute external administration for self-discipline
entirely. How can we account for resistance to these forms of administration?

Keywords
Incarceration; mind; body; freedom.

“The Dhamma Brothers” is a documentary film that chronicles a ten-day meditation

retreat in Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Bessemer,
Alabama. The image of prisoners practicing Zazen meditation, speaking about the inner
peace they have found through meditation, and also how they have “learned a lot of com-
passion and respect for others” is a stark contrast with my ideas about incarceration.1
Prison meditation programs have been growing rapidly in the last twenty years–not as
quickly as the prison population itself–but it is a trend that is noteworthy nonetheless.
There are now dozens of outreach programs that bring texts on meditation, spiritual
leaders, establish pen pals for inmates to write about meditation and spiritual develop-
ment, and also offer more and more volunteer-led meditation classes in prisons. The

1. The quote is included in an article by Gustav Niebuhr, “Zen on the Prison Grapevine; Support
Network Grows for Inmates’ Buddhist Practice,” The New York Times, May 30, 2001.

Corresponding author:
Keally McBride, Department of Politics, University of San Franncisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco,
CA 94117.
E-mail: kdmcbride@usfca.edu

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342 Law, Culture and the Humanities 6(3)

Prison-Ashram Project began in 1973, and in 1989 Prison Dharma Network became an
umbrella organization for these programs in more than one hundred prisons.2
These instances of meditation fostering self-discovery in prison force me to consider
what has become a lost, even hidden aspect, of the history of incarceration in the United
States. Today most analyses of incarceration focus upon it in materialist terms, and I
include my own research in this group.3 For instance, many people have examined the
economics of prisons including those who make money from prisons; the economic
standing of those who are sent to them; and how incarceration hides unemployment
rates, creates work programs, and provides labor market discipline. Scholars have also
focused upon the techniques of control that are employed inside prisons, and how they
have migrated out of the prisons, a line of inquiry inspired by Foucault’s insights into
incarceration.4 In contrast, only prisoner ministers tend to talk about the souls of those
who are in prison, it’s a risky topic for a leftist academic.
However, I am going to take the risk because it offers some potential rewards. In the
interest of exposing the injustices of current incarceral practices, many scholar-activists
have emphasized how practices of confinement have robbed inmates of their agency,
dignity, and freedom. That incarceration creates a fundamentally new category of human
agency is beyond doubt. Prisoners are not denied the freedom of mere biological exis-
tence, but in virtually every other regard the freedoms inherent to living are denied to
them. But in emphasizing the incapacitation of prisoners, do such accounts replicate the
logic of incarceral institutions? Isn’t one of the main objections that prisons treat inmates
as mere bodies to be housed and maintained with the minimal amount of expense?
Perhaps it is appropriate to consider some acts of rebellion, resistance and freedom that
have occurred within prisons. I do so in this essay not in the interest of arguing that prisons
are not such bad places after all. Rather, I think looking at the experience of incarceration
as encompassing both mind and body allows for a more complex vision of the aims,
failures and realities of incarceration.
I argue incarceration is best understood as an extreme environment which compli-
cates our notions of human freedom. Incarceration helps us think about freedom because
it demands consideration of the relationship between body and soul, providing yet
another testing ground for the longstanding metaphysical and philosophical question of
what makes humans truly free. Are we free if our bodies are unhindered, or are we free
if our mind is free to roam wherever it will? Can one’s mind be free if one’s body is not;

2. For more information on these programs, see Whitney Joiner, “Staring at Death, and Find-
ing Their Bliss,” The New York Times, September 13, 2007 and also The Prison Dharma
Network site.
3. See Chapter Six, “Hitched to the Post: On Prison Labor, Work and Citizenship” in Keally
McBride, Punishment and Political Order (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
4. See for instance William Lyons and Julie Drew, Punishing Schools (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2006) which is a case study of public education. Malcolm Feeley and
Jonathan Simon’s groundbreaking piece, “The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy
of Corrections and Its Implication,” Criminology (1992) laid the foundation for later works
including Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime (2007) and David Garland, The Culture
of Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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McBride 343

must they be related to one another? It also is a remarkable test case for how much of
human experience is socially determined and how much individuals can create their own
reality. Prisons try to substitute external administration for self-discipline entirely. The
prevalence of both small and large acts of resistance to the external and physical admin-
istrations of the prison leads me to reflect on incarceration in different terms in this essay.
Clearly, the body is bound, but oftentimes, the mind is not.
First let me introduce the issue of body and soul. Such an inquiry follows the history
of incarceration in the United States as well. It began largely as a project aimed at recali-
brating the souls of those who had lost their way and refused to live within the social
norms of Philadelphia. It has become an ever more monstrous attempt to administer the
body entirely, as exemplified by super max prisons that confine bodies so completely it
becomes pressing to ask how such practices are more humane than the bloody spectacles
of the scaffold incarceration was intended to replace. Incarceration after all takes aim at
both body and soul; and both minds and bodies have resisted it.
In this essay, I will use the terms ‘‘interiority’’ and ‘‘exteriority,’’ adopting this language
from some sources and applying it to others. By exteriority I mean a person’s orientation
towards the world as defined through an interaction with others. By interiority I am refer-
ring to an ability to construct a sense of self and reality outside of established frameworks
of social categories, experience and interactions. Of course, the prison is a socially estab-
lished framework, but it is designed as a space of removal from the “outside” world. It
creates a position for the inmates, that of deviant. Hence thinking of oneself as anything
other than a prisoner of secondary human status requires resistance to the framework. This
is what I mean by interiority inside a prison: the ability to create and sustain a definition
and sense of self outside of the one offered to you by the very fact of incarceration. Some
prisoners have succumbed to the proffered role–inmate–others have turned this space of
exile into a space of self-definition.
One statement by a disparu from Chile lays out the paradox of interiority and exteri-
ority in incarceration. Incarceration removes a person from the “normal” activities of the
world, but through the process of removal and isolation in some instances the prisoner
actually becomes more self aware. “The reality is that in some way we are nothing. We
have no reference, we are not here, and yet we do exist, with great intensity, and we are
here.” It is this ability of some people to define themselves in opposition to their incar-
ceral experience that interests me. This process of defining one’s reality both in response
to, yet apart from, one’s incarceration is tenuous to be sure: it would be impossible to
firmly distinguish madness and transcendence in this situation as both would fulfill this
task. This essay examines incarceration as an intersection between the forces of mind,
body, freedom, and social administration.

I.  Body and Soul

The term “incarceration” carries a distinctly materialist, corporeal definition. While we
use imprisonment and incarceration interchangeably, perusing the Oxford English
Dictionary suggests that there is a significant differentiation between the two terms:
imprisoning is more frequently used with nonmaterial and noncorporeal entities, such as
“he was imprisoned by his grief” or “her anger had imprisoned her soul” and was used a

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344 Law, Culture and the Humanities 6(3)

full two centuries before incarceration became common. Incarceration has a distinctly
corporeal meaning: “variously used of a strangulated, obstructed or otherwise irreducible
hernia and of a retained placenta.” Today we think about incarceration in terms of locked
up bodies, which is appropriate. Yet the initial impulse behind incarceration in the United
States was to incarcerate the body in the name of liberating the soul. In this essay, I want
to recover this lost element in the analyses and experience of incarceration and ask what
might be gained if we think about imprisoned souls as well as incarcerated bodies.
Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Foucault provide two starting points for thinking
about this relationship. Several commentators have noted that Tocqueville’s observations
of the penitentiaries of Philadelphia and the Auburn system in New Jersey provided the
groundwork for his conception of democratic despotism.5 In Democracy in America,
Tocqueville claimed that democracies developed a new form of despotism that con-
trasted to older forms. “Under the absolute government of a single man, despotism, to
reach the soul, clumsily struck at the body, and the soul escaping from such blows, rose
gloriously above it, but in democratic republics that is not at all how tyranny behaves; it
leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul.”6 Such tendencies were magnified
in the penitentiary, where he saw that reformers were attempting to create virtue amongst
the inmates, to literally remold prisoners into new men and women suitable for demo-
cratic self-government. But outside the penitentiary, Tocqueville saw the same tenden-
cies to limit freedom of thought and originality. This lack of spirit, individuality, or soul,
is clearly what most disturbs Tocqueville about the American experiment. Because there
is no clear oppression of the body, souls do not rise triumphantly above it and assert
themselves in opposition to the established order; in fact through the guise of self-rule,
Americans are more subject to servitude. In his bleakest assessment of Americans he
argues, “They shape their souls beforehand to suit this necessary servitude, and despair-
ing of remaining free, from the bottom of their hearts they already worship the master
who is bound soon to appear.”7 In America, the body is spared at the expense of the soul,
but for Tocqueville the soul is the source of resistance. His views are complex, as he both
accepts and rejects the classical liberal definition of political freedom delivered through
individual rights and limited government. At times he seems to argue that the “freedom”
of the body in the United States is bought at the cost of the soul’s freedom; at others he
seems to point to the idea that our physical freedom is illusory and that we all march
down a road to more and more servitude of both body and spirit.

5. See Thomas Dumm, Democracy and Punishment (especially Chapter “The Woof of Time”)
for a compelling argument about these connections. More recently, see Chapter Twenty, “The
Penitentiary Temptation” in Sheldon Wolin’s Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of
a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Chapter
Four, “Severing the Sanguinary Empire: Punishment and Early American Democratic Ideal-
ism” in Keally McBride, Punishment and Political Order (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2007).
6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer
(New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 255.
7. Ibid. 702.

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McBride 345

Perhaps because he had the advantage of another one hundred and fifty years of
evidence, Foucault dispels with some of the ambiguities in Tocqueville’s analysis of
modern forms of liberalism in his own study of incarceration. “First of all one must set
aside the widely held thesis that power, in our bourgeois, capitalist, societies has denied
the reality of the body in favour of the soul, consciousness, ideality. In fact nothing is
more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power.”8 This statement displays
Foucault’s rejection of the philosophical paradigm separating body and soul that
Tocqueville still entertained to some extent. Second, he is establishing his rejoinder to
Marxian analyses and their emphasis upon ideology–particularly Althusser’s “Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses”–by asserting that a truly materialist philosophy
would take the body as the focus of analysis in order to detail the mechanisms of power.
His studies of sexuality, psychology and, of course, the prison, pioneered an entire genre
of corporeal studies whereby the body is seen as the product of power. The notion that
the body is spared by modern forms of social and political control through mechanisms
such as rights is only a fiction, the disciplines both in and outside of the penitentiary
subject the body to more control than the King’s punishments ever did.
Foucault is contesting the assumed division between body and spirit. But rather than
discard the entire notion of a soul, Foucault argues power creates the soul in relation to
its control of the body. Warren Montag has argued that Foucault bears a surprising resem-
blance to Althusser in this regard: both adopted a Spinozean analysis of the body and
mind as “one and the same individual thing.”9 Both are manifest in the world. “It would
be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it
exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the
functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished…” Spinoza argued liberation
of the body was essential to achieving liberation of the mind. Foucault’s analysis turns
this argument on its head: there is no liberation of the body that accompanies an increasing
administration of the mind. In fact, Foucault argues that the soul is at the mercy of the
body. “The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the
effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings
him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the
body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison
of the body.”10 Our belief that there is a divide between body and soul or mind and body,
leads us to accept increasing regulation and production of our bodies, as desirable and
desiring subjects, as workers, and as “free willing” citizens.
It would seem that incarceration is a control over the body and mind so complete that
the distinction between body and spirit becomes a way of further perpetuating our subjec-
tion to power. Foucault’s project is particularly crucial given the context of liberalism that

  8. Michel Foucault, “Body/Power” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writ-

ings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 57–8.
  9. Althusser provides interesting reflection on his combination of Spinoza’s theory of the body
with Marxist materialism in “The Future Lasts Forever,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2,
Winter 1994, 205–226. See 218–20.
10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 30.

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346 Law, Culture and the Humanities 6(3)

professes total respect for the autonomy of the self, by demonstrating that incarceration
itself is a form of this “respect” which is valorized in contrast to the bodily punishments
that preceded it.11 That incarceration is nonetheless a denial of corporeal freedom means
that these incarcerating elements of society are dismissed as aberrant and/or those who
are subject to these practices are aberrant themselves. This insight that the body and mind
cannot be extricated from one another has laid the foundation for much work on incar-
ceration detailing which bodies are subjected to control, how bodies are administered,
and how the prison crystallizes many of the disciplinary techniques of liberal capitalism.
However, the focus upon corporality, and what has now come to be regarded as biopolitics
is so complete, that the element of soul or spirit has become largely absent from our
discussions of incarceration. We speak about incarceration and imprisonment inter-
changeably. Foucault wanted to correct the idea that the mind or soul, or what can be
called interiority, was separate from exteriority, the body in physical space. But this does
not necessarily mean we should discard the existence of interiority altogether, for instance
claiming that any experience within a prison automatically creates more docile bodies.
The question is how do we take Foucault’s insights and use them to help understand the
complexities of the experience of incarceration in all of its guises?

II. The Spiritualization of Punishment

Interestingly, the initial impulse behind incarceration also assumed that the body and soul
were inextricably connected. Though largely interpreted as the “Republican Machines”
that they quickly became, the origins of the penitentiary can also be traced to Pascal’s
Pensées, in which he described the methods of achieving religious belief. His idea can be
succinctly summarized: mind will follow body. If the body prays, kneels, and goes through
the rituals of belief, belief will surely come. Pascal speaks of this as bringing interiority
and exteriority into harmony with one another. “The external must be joined to the internal
to obtain anything from God, that is to say, we must kneel, pray with the lips, etc., in order
that proud man, who would not submit himself to God, may now be subject to the
creature.” Spirit will follow body–this is the basic contribution of Quakerism to the
penitentiary. Like Ignatius Loyola’s spiritual exercises in which particular words, actions
and rituals for were to produce a new devotion to God over a thirty day regimen, so the
penitentiary was built to force the body into achieving belief, even against its own will.
Michael Meranze’s Laboratories of Virtue describes how the penitentiary was “based
upon spiritual engagement”12 acknowledging the materiality of the soul–and hence its
manipulability through the body–without collapsing the distinction between the two.
Meranze has described the peculiar relationship to the body created by the peniten-
tiaries’ acknowledgement of the materiality of the soul in combination with its continued
valorization.

11. Which is yet another reason that the corporal punishments for specific crimes specified in
Sharia are always pointed out in contrasting liberal and Islamic political orders.
12. Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996), 3.

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McBride 347

Advocates of reformative incarceration, while recognizing the irreducible materiality of the

penal apparatus, insisted that their target was the convicts’ spirit or character. In this way, the
body was both part of the penal process and excluded from it; reformers both acknowledged
and avoided the continuing corporality of the penal process. This denial was not hypocrisy,
however, but its opposite. It was the reformers’ commitment to the growing spiritualization of
punishment that drove them to disavow the corporality of punishment even as their efforts
returned again and again to the body.13

While Meranze claims that this slippage is a form of Freudian displacement, it can also
be understood on its own terms: their target was the soul, but they took the body as their
only way to access it. John Howard, a prison reformer during the same era in England,
also sought to combine “Christian duty with secular institutions to overcome the social
dislocations of the age.”14 Benjamin Rush, the primary mind behind the penitentiary
experiment in Philadelphia was driven by a desire to unite interiority and exteriority,
remarkably similar to Pascal’s description of belief. “Even more radically, however, he
also presumed that it was possible to eliminate any externality to social life. God, he
believed, had inscribed morality within society, nature, and the soul. The beauty of dis-
cipline was that it could incorporate the social totality within itself.”15 The environment
of discipline provided by the penitentiary would help the prisoner start to experience him
or herself inside God’s order once again. Social totality in the outside world would be
achieved through the penitentiary because the prisoner would see their interiority in
relationship to others. There would be no division between interior feelings or thoughts
and the environment around the self. Unity between the two would reign, creating belief
in God and acceptance of one’s role to play in God’s world. Spiritual integrity was the
solution to fractured sociality.
No matter what one thinks of these views, they are truly remarkable for their ambi-
tion and they ask far more of citizens than American political culture has tended to; the
unity between self and world here is reminiscent of Rousseau’s general will. Even
more, this vision of the penitentiary is a convergence of the ambitions of Christianity
and modernity: the imbalance between individual will and social imperatives would be
overcome through the methods of Christian devotion. Through incarceration in a peni-
tentiary, interiority and exteriority are brought into harmony by a realization of God’s
presence both within and in the world. How curious that the spiritual impulse would
provide the technologies of modern discipline, that this spiritualizing mission could be
so detached from the apparatus which it helped to develop. Christian devotion provided
the tools for the disciplines that would make Christianity dispensable in maintaining
political and social order.
The goal of reconstitution was lost with the spiritualizing mission. And as Thomas
Dumm amongst others, has noted, reconstitution was a short lived ambition, as reformers

13. Meranze, 15.

14. Meranze, 140.
15. Meranze, 149. See also Adam Hirsh, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in
Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) and Negley Teeters, The Cradle
of the Penitentiary: The Walnut Street Jail at Philadelphia, 1773–1835, Philadelphia, 1955.

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348 Law, Culture and the Humanities 6(3)

ultimately concluded that controlling the body was enough, and remolding the soul was too
much to expect.16 Soon the medicalization of punishment eclipsed the spiritualization of
it. Bodies would no longer be brought to the realization of harmony between interiority
and exteriority; rather incarceration would remove contagions from the social body.
Curing bodies and souls was not the ultimate goal, restraining them was. There is no need
for self control if the world is created in such a way that order will result no matter
whether individuals cooperate or not. However, a history of the prison demonstrates that
controlling the body is not really enough to create acquiescence, as prisoners continue to
resist bodily control and ever more complete and invasive methods of restraining the
body continue to be created. The image of the incarcerated organ is apt; the exclusive
targeting of the body leads to ever-increasing pressure on the body, but every squeeze on
one place leads to an extension or protrusion elsewhere. There is a breaking point; the
body will be destroyed before it is ever completely controlled.

III.  Incarceration and Interiority

Today, incarceration is not understood as retraining the soul as much as disciplining the
body and also trying to create health for the rest of the social world by removing conta-
gions. Containment, not conversion, is the model. Therefore, it is a historical irony that to
talk about spiritual awakening in prison is a form of counter-hegemony. Enlightenment is
not a prevalent theme in prison writing, nor am I claiming that the experience of incarcera-
tion is not crushing for everyone subjected to it. What then, should be made of the accounts
of spiritual growth and self-discipline? Are these experiences a product of the disciplinary
regime? Or are these experiences a way of resisting the disciplinary regime? I would argue
they are both.
One would expect religious inmates to turn to God in such a situation, and there are
many accounts of faith being strengthened through incarceration. One of the most interest-
ing of these accounts comes from Mohatma Gandhi in an essay, “How to Enjoy Jail.” He
worshipped God in jail, and even called Yeravda Jail his temple–a “mandir”–and wrote a
book called From Yeravda Mandir. But he also wrote about the unique opportunities for
self-improvement that are offered by incarceration. He argued that patience; self-control
and cultivation of independent thought were the best activities for those in jail. He also
says that one must cease to worry about improving the world since there is nothing that
can be accomplished from prison, and improve oneself instead. He talks about prison as a
social death, which then requires the inmate to cease to think of oneself in the world, oth-
erwise succumb to this kind of death. Only by detaching from the rest of the world can the
inmate remain living.

If a dying man has his heart in the world he is unhappy himself and the cause of unhappiness in
others, the same is the case with a prisoner in jail, who should cease to think of the outside
world, for imprisonment means civil death … this prescription of mine is no new discovery.

16. Thomas Dumm, Democracy and Punishment (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).

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McBride 349

Bunyan could not have written Pilgrim’s Progress and Lokamanya Tilak his commentary on
the Gita if in prison they had continued to worry about the outside world.17

To reject the outside world is to refuse to accept one’s exteriority to it. Gandhi takes the
jail as the entire world, and welcomes the opportunity to expand himself within it. He sees
no need to accept exteriority, and instead sees it as the source of suffering for the inmate
and those who love her; just as the dying man who sees himself as exterior to the physical
world since he will soon be leaving it creates suffering for himself and others. Suffering
does not come from jail, but rather one’s exteriority. Benjamin Rush helped to develop the
penitentiary in order to eradicate exteriority in Philadelphia; Gandhi’s perspective echoes
this intent by his own refusal to accept exteriority. Interestingly, for both men, the end of
suffering comes by creating a space completely outside the world, an unworldliness of the
body in order to achieve liberation of the soul.
It is more surprising to find such accounts of personal growth by those who do not
profess religious inclinations. Oscar Wilde’s letter to the man, Lord Alfred Douglas, with
whom his sexual relations had led to his incarceration, is a document that runs more than
one hundred pages. Wilde was placed in prison and sentenced to two years’ hard labor
after Douglas’s father pursued a case against him. His story is almost a perfect case study
for Foucault, combining the regulation of sexuality with the penal apparatus. De Profundis
documents his spiritual searching, though certainly rejects penitence for his crimes as
defined by the state.
The document is heart wrenching to read; at times it seems Wilde is dramatizing his
own comeuppance and writing a fictional piece in which he is a hero more noble than any
other to appear in his works. His wit does appear at various moments, which makes the
rest of the documents seem more sincere. He blames himself for his incarceration he
states, not the younger man, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose oedipal struggles ultimately
subsumed Wilde. The work is a product of two years of struggle, isolation, and reflec-
tion. One of his most provocative insights from his period of incarceration is, “I also had
my illusions. I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy… I found it to be a revolt-
ing and repellant tragedy.”18 Wilde’s plays were comedies in which the audience is able
to play omniscient observer and part of the laughter comes from watching others speak
and act under what the audience knows to be false impressions. In his life, Wilde was the
audience, laughing at those on display around him and his brilliance as a playwright
comes from his ability to display the absurdity of social convention. Only one who does
not see himself as subject to those same conventions could so mirthfully deploy them for
dramatic effect.
Tragedy on the other hand contains a series of revelations about the world and events,
but also about the main character. Events are not driven exclusively by relations between
others, but also by the slow, painful realization of the main character’s flaws and mistakes.
The audience is not held aloft from the actions, but, instead, start to question their own

17. Mohatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work,
and Ideas, ed. Louis Fischer (New York: Vintage, 2002), 237.
18. Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis” in The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, ed. Isobel Murray
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 66.

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350 Law, Culture and the Humanities 6(3)

flaws and character. Aristotle’s Poetics details three aspects of tragedy: the reversal of
fortune, a moment of recognition where one or more of the characters move from
ignorance to knowledge, and finally, the scene of suffering. The main character’s misfor-
tune does not arise from her own flaw, nor can the main character in a tragedy be of
unambiguous character; we do not rue misfortune when it plagues an evil person, and the
misfortune of an angel is shocking without being edifying. Aristotle points out that the
best tragedies feature “a man who is not eminently good and just–yet whose misfortune is
brought about not by vice and depravity, but by some error or frailty.”19 Comedies are
driven by the successive unveiling of reality for those characters in the play, but tragedies
are driven by successive levels of self-understanding by the main character and those in
the audience. When Wilde makes this comment, he reveals that he was moved from a
world of exteriority to one driven by interiority.
Wilde’s De Profundis is a record and a self-accounting of the errors and his own
weaknesses that led to his incarceration. He knew that his relationship with this younger
man was destructive, and that it betrayed both of their better natures. He also admits that
he would never have had this knowledge had he not been incarcerated. It is not weakness
of the body that he signals as his flaw, “Sins of the flesh are nothing … Sins of the soul
alone are shameful.”20 The message he was supposed to inculcate–homosexuality is
forbidden–has clearly been replaced by one more meaningful to Wilde. He has become a
tragic figure, whose moment of realization comes while in prison, and it transforms the
scene of his suffering. “Is it beginning to dawn on you what love is, and what is the
nature of love? It is not too late for you to learn, though to teach it to you I may have had
to go to a convict’s cell.”21 If the point of incarcerating someone for their sexuality was
intended to discipline their body, it is clear that the experience had an effect for Wilde
that could never have been anticipated–nor intentionally created by any prison system.
Through his removal from his social milieu, Wilde gained a new understanding of himself,
he was able to see his actions in the world as if he were a spectator for the first time;
detachment gave him perspective.

IV.  Incarceration and Political Consciousness:

Redefining Freedom

Then there is the matter of political prisoners. I have lined up an impressive shelf of books
in front of me: Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Gramsci’s Prison
Notebooks, Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, Angela Davis’s If They Come in
the Morning, Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Emma Goldman,
Antonio Negri and the originary version, The Trail and Death of Socrates, written on
behalf of a prisoner. Dangerous minds to be sure, but it is impossible to assert that jail
ended up dampening their desire for social change instead of sharpening it. Political pris-
oners present a causal problem; after all, they were in jail precisely because they fell

19. Aristotle, The Poetics, Section XIII.

20. Wilde, 76.
21. Ibid.

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outside of normative political behaviors and beliefs. Prison didn’t cause their political
radicalism, but it certainly did nothing to curb it either. Some of them start to see them-
selves and society in different ways, and more distinctly because of their position on the
outside of society. In fact, some argue that they feel liberated knowing that they are not
complicit in the existence of what is considered normative social and political practices
in any way. These instances are the inverse of Gandhi’s sense of freedom, they find inspi-
ration and self-development by embracing their exteriority.
Plato’s allegory of the cave established the continuing tradition that the best location
for understanding and manipulating a polis is outside of it, and the canon of political
theory presents a long genealogy of those who were on the fringes of respectable society
or recluses. The temptation, as Hannah Arendt has defined it, has been to indulge in an
“inner migration”; once recognizing injustices of the world one common response is to
remove oneself as far as possible by retreating into intellectual life.22 The more this
happens, the more political life is robbed of those who could improve it through engage-
ment. But what is to be said for those who are specifically locked away, and forcibly
removed, rather than chose to become separated? They are robbed of the comforts of an
inner migration and political prisoners become stateless, as they are refused the status of
citizenship in its fullest regard.
But the statelessness of the prisoner is different than the refugee’s. Refugees are
caught between one regime and another, enjoying the full rights of neither. Prisoners
have become entirely subject to one regime without the same level of rights that suppos-
edly limit that state’s power. Incarceration is intended to provide an awesome demonstra-
tion of the technologies of power; remarkably, political prisoners have commented upon
the ultimately weak nature of state control. Huey Newton wrote about the miscalcula-
tions of the state from prison: “The prison cannot have a victory over the prisoner,
because those in charge take the same approach and assume if they have the whole body
in a cell that they have all that makes up a person. In the case of humanity the whole is
much greater than its parts, because the whole includes the body which is measurable
and confineable, and also the ideas which cannot be measured and cannot be confined.”23
Are Newton’s ideas a chimera here; are they illusions that help perpetuate the impris-
onment of his own body? The most exacting reading of Foucault’s statement “the soul is
the prison of the body” would suggest that this is the case. On the other hand, if we think
of biopolitics as an argument that the material and corporeal conditions in which we live
influence our thoughts and ideas, can’t we say that a new awareness of the freedom of
the mind could also result from the incarceration of the body? Many commentators have
struggled with finding the potential for resistance within Foucauldian paradigms of poli-
tics. Here, I want to suggest that another place to pry open new possibilities is within our
understanding of incarceration as the penultimate discipline of mind and body.
Control of the body, as opposed to simply administering death, is indeed an ambitious
goal, and it appears that the state fails in some regard. Thoreau eloquently argued that

22. Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Lessing” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1968).
23. Huey P. Newton, “Prison, Where is Thy Victory?” in Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the
Morning: Voices of Resistance (New York: Third Press, 1971), 51.

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352 Law, Culture and the Humanities 6(3)

jails demonstrate the Icarus-like nature of modern political control. Perhaps because of
their terrible ambition to control the body entirely, their failure is all the more evident.

As I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three foot thick, the door of wood and
iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck
with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and
bones, to be locked up … I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great
waste of stone and mortar.

It can be argued that Thoreau only spent one night in jail, and that his experience is
therefore not emblematic, but others have reported similar responses. For instance,
Dr. Lovemore Madhuku, someone who was tortured, beaten and left for dead in the
bush and imprisoned more than twenty times remarked: “I am not saying I am not
afraid of state force and what its agents can do to me. But I have discovered that they
have no power to subdue me.”24
The accounts from Super Max prisons today, particularly the modes of solitary con-
finement in which prisoners are at times strapped so they cannot touch their own bodies,
denied human contact, and even food which would require implements to eat it shows
that the tightening of control over the body becomes ever more strident. One form of
incarceration is increasingly invasive, allowing prisoners ever smaller and smaller capaci-
ties to exercise self-determination and hence control. Such efforts strain our conception of
what it means to be a human being, they also provoke reflection upon the ability of human
beings to resist such attempts at complete administration. If freedom is defined along the
lines of the body, then incarceration is the antithesis of freedom. But prisoners have
responded by redefining freedom. An anonymous Turkish prisoner reflected,

“I do not believe we’re in iron cages. For freedom is not an absolute concept we try to realize
and suffer as we, perforce, fail, but the perception of our human condition in relation to the
world and the conscious struggle for self-realisation. If there was no restraint, nothing to
change, nothing to be changed, ‘absolute’ freedom, the concept of freedom would have no
meaning. Man can only enjoy his freedom in his choice to change … Freedom is not a spatial
category.”25

If prison as an institution underscores, even produces, the rest of the population’s rela-
tive freedom, it also illuminates the limitations of the notions of freedom that are cur-
rently circulating. It is clear that defining rights according to the body has not provided
any guarantee of freedom, bodily or otherwise. Perhaps remembering that human beings
are not merely bodies can help guide attempts to reconfigure the goal and purpose of
incarceration.

24. Dr. Lovemore Madhuku, political advocate for Constitutional change in Zimbabwe. Qtd. in
Conscience Be My Guide. 169.
25. Conscience, 128.

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McBride 353

Lest my salvaging of this hidden history of spirituality in prison be taken as a sort of

endorsement for the Quaker-inspired penitentiary, I hasten to add that the American
Friends Service Committee has called the experiment of their own making a failure.

“It would be naïve not to acknowledge the blunders that uncritical faith can produce. The
horror that is the American prison system grew out of an eighteenth-century reform by
Pennsylvania Quakers and others against the cruelty and futility of capital and corporal
punishment. This two-hundred year old experiment has failed.”26

The Quakers helped to build environments that they believed would encourage indi-
viduals to develop self-control. What has happened is that the prison environment is
now intended to substitute for self-control. Given this context, any attempt to assert
self-determination goes against the prevailing logic of incarceration. It is not because
meditation itself is revolutionary that the Prison Dharma project defies institutional
control. It is because the goals of the institution are what they are that meditation
becomes subversive.
To conclude, the variety of responses to incarceration only emphasizes the fact that
the desire to institutionalize particular disciplines and create particular subject positions
fails. To say that some people respond to incarceration with a discovery of something
other than the body is not to say that it is an experience that should be endorsed in any
way. As Vincent Ndlovu, a guerilla fighter in Zimbabwe against Mugabe’s regime in the
1980’s observed after his release: “To this day I do not regret my imprisonment as I came
out dependable, confident, motivated, assertive, and personable and attained a good
sense of humour. I could have come out a cabbage.”27

26. American Friends Service Committee. Struggle for Justice (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971), v.
27. Conscience Be My Guide: An Anthology of Prison Writings, ed. Geoffrey Bould (London:
Zed Books, 1991), 176.

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