Dangerous Masculinity: Fatherhood, Race, and Security Inside America's Prisons

Dangerous Masculinity

Critical Issues in Crime and Society

Raymond J. Michalowski, Series Editor

Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students.

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Dangerous Masculinity

Fatherhood, Race, and Security inside America’s Prisons

Anna Curtis

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Curtis, Anna, author.

Title: Dangerous masculinity : fatherhood, race, and security inside America’s prisons / Anna Curtis.

Description: New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [2019] | Series: Critical issues in crime and society | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018058705 | ISBN 9780813598345 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Prisoners—Family relationships—United States. | Fatherhood—United States. | Masculinity—United States.

Classification: LCC HV8886.U5 C87 2019 | DDC 365/.608110973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058705

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2019 by Anna Curtis

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Contents

Introduction: Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Race inside America’s Prisons

Chapter 1. Neoliberal Responsibility and Being There as a Father

Chapter 2. Little Me versus My Princess: Fathers’ Expectations about Gender

Chapter 3. Unruly Boys and Dangerous Men: Security and Masculinity in Prison

Chapter 4. Game Faces and Going Up the Way: Enacting Masculinity in Prison

Conclusion: The Conditions of Possibility

Appendix: Methods and Research Setting

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

About the Author

Read More in the Series

Introduction

Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Race inside America’s Prisons

G was a black man with short salt-and-pepper hair. A member of one of the prison fatherhood groups I observed, he was forty-eight years old at the time of his interview. G stated that his primary motivation for joining the program was to be a better father for his youngest child than he had been for his four older children. During one group meeting, the group facilitator Alice directed the conversation toward ways to reduce the stress of visits for both themselves and their families. Think about the things you want to know ahead of time, she advised. G raised his hand and said setting expectations can be stressful: You might not get to say everything you want and then at the end, you need to prepare to get emotionally distant. He continued, referencing a visit when he and his son had connected, remarking that it was the worst day, watching him walk away. I had tears. I had to . . . He sucked in his belly and pinched his face into a flat expression. I’m a man; I don’t want to be weak. Several other men nodded in agreement. Alice tried to persuade G that crying doesn’t make you weak, but it was difficult to do so. A central tenet of masculinity plays out in most institutional contexts for men: To display weakness is unmanly.¹ This is true for both corrections officers (COs) and prisoners.² Emotional connections to children can open up vulnerabilities that place men at risk within the confines of prison. At the same time, remaining connected to children offers men opportunities for more positive growth while incarcerated, makes it more likely that they will be involved in their children’s lives once they are released, and increases their chances of desisting from further criminal activities.³

Fatherhood offers a valuable lens for examining how prisoners and COs manage life in prison. The often unquestioned, commonsense understanding of what kind of men prisoners are—as a category of people—impacts both security protocols and incarcerated fathers’ access to their children. The organization of a prison reduces the space men have to be parents, and individual prisoners must manage their identities as both men and fathers. This tension is not limited to men in prison; indeed, balancing expectations around fathering with the practices of masculinity is challenging for most men with children. For those in the workplace, being masculine and being a good worker intertwine to both support and undermine men’s fathering practices. For example, being a good provider is closely linked with being a good worker, and for many men, this is the central obligation they must meet as fathers. At the same time, many men express a desire to spend more time nurturing their children. While men today do spend more time with their children as compared to forty years ago, men are still more likely to play with their offspring rather than to deal with the nitty-gritty and more nurturing-oriented details of caring, such as changing diapers and managing doctor appointments.⁴

For incarcerated fathers, on the other hand, it is prison rather than work that mediates men’s access to their families. Prison rules and staff circumscribe phone privileges, access to writing materials, and visits.⁵ Perhaps even more important, however, are the ways in which the penal system shapes men’s gender performances. Incarcerated men must negotiate how they will enact violence and aggression in terms of both the expectations placed upon prisoners by the prison system and staff as well as their own and other prisoners’ responses to these expectations. Additionally, men undergo changes in their relationships with the mothers of their children during incarceration, particularly since women now serve as gatekeepers who control when and how men are in contact with their children. Gatekeeping is an active process in which mothers deny or encourage access to children. This takes on a particular shape in prison, since women have no expectation of either financial or nurturing care from those imprisoned. As a result, imprisoned men’s access to children often hinges on being able to meet the emotional expectations of their children’s mothers.⁶ As the power dynamics between the parents shift, men may find that previously acceptable masculine behaviors are no longer effective. As a result, relationships between men and the mothers of their children often devolve, become hostile, and fall apart. This directly limits how involved men can be in their children’s lives both during incarceration and after they return home.

I focus on a set of questions about how people within the prison system negotiate their expectations about real men and good fathers. In what ways did the fatherhood programs I observed help men be better fathers? How do prisoners negotiate their relationships with their families, coparents, and children? In what ways do these negotiations reflect their understandings of masculinity? How do race, gender, and age inform and create the solutions both prisoners and COs develop to manage relationships with the outside world? How does fatherhood support and challenge the rules of the facility? What can the negotiations around masculinity and fatherhood inside prison tell us about gender inequality, racism, and the ideological underpinnings of security practices?

The Fatherhood Programs at NCI and SY

Between 2007 and 2009, I attended fatherhood groups at two prison facilities—one for adults (over eighteen) and one for youth offenders (ages fourteen to twenty-one)—in a northeastern state. I accessed these programs through a social work–oriented nonprofit agency, Healthy Connections, which ran a number of programs for prisoners and their families all over the state. The adult facility, North Correctional Institution (NCI), and the youth facility, Southeast Youth Correctional Institution (SY), were both high security (level four out of five).⁷ There are two main sources of data for this ethnography: participant observation and life history interviews. I conducted 118 interviews with forty-nine men (147 interview hours total) who participated in one of the two fatherhood programs I observed. I interviewed fathers between two and four times, with the average complete interview lasting three hours. I recorded and transcribed most of these interviews.⁸ Fourteen of the forty-nine fathers were incarcerated at the youth facility. Roughly 40 percent (n = 21) of my interviewees self-identified as black, 30 percent (n = 16) as Latino or Hispanic, 16 percent (n = 8) as white, and the remaining 8 percent (n = 4) provided racial or ethnic identifications that I coded as multiracial. All the fathers at SY were eighteen or nineteen. The average age of the fathers at NCI was thirty-three and ranged from twenty-one to fifty.

I also engaged in 280 hours of participant observation, including the fatherhood group meetings, informal interactions with COs and staff as I entered and exited prison, and the special visits that served as the reward for successfully completing the Healthy Connections programs. Each fatherhood group meeting lasted between thirty and ninety minutes, depending on how long it took the group facilitator to get through security and whether the COs completed the afternoon or evening count in a timely fashion. A total of eighty-two fathers participated in the group during my observation. Most of the men in the group were willing to let me interview them. However, I only ended up being able to interview 60 percent of the men I met in group because I didn’t receive approval to proceed with interviewing until eight months after I began attending fatherhood groups. By then, some of the men who were willing to talk to me had been moved to another facility without warning. In the end, only six men actively refused my request for an interview.

I also observed the men interacting with their children during the special visits, which were roughly two hours long. During the visits, men were allowed an unusually high amount of physical contact with their children. In normal visits, prisoners and visitors were allowed to hug briefly at the start of the visit, then were expected to stay on opposite sides of a table with no physical contact. During the special visits, men could hold their children throughout, sit next to them, hug them at will, and play games that were unavailable during normal visits. The promise of these visits motivated many men to take part in the program. As a participant, I helped set up games and decorations and then spent most of my time walking around, listening, watching, and helping fetch items (such as markers or stickers) for the fathers and their families.

While I did not formally interview COs, entering and exiting a prison takes time. Both the COs and I filled that time with informal interactions that had a powerful impact on my understanding of prison life. In the two and a half years I spent conducting fieldwork, I chatted with more than 130 COs as I signed in, waited in the lobby, waited in traps (a space between two doors as one enters and exits), and as they escorted me down hallways. It was the COs, not the prisoners, who sought to teach me the official rules of the facility. I learned these rules through abrupt and impatient orders, teasing and humorous interactions as I tried to get through the metal detector, and casual conversations as I waited to enter the facility, as well as when COs pointed out things I did that made their jobs more difficult and expressed concerns for my safety. I also had extensive time to observe how COs processed and interacted with visitors in the lobby and in the visiting room and to note the differences between how they responded to a volunteer and to someone visiting a prisoner.

The structure of the fatherhood programs at both facilities was very similar. Both programs placed an emphasis on the importance of communication, were small group settings with roughly four to ten men at a given time, and created opportunities for prisoners to have high-contact visits with their children. The fatherhood groups at both facilities had two potentially positive outcomes for the incarcerated fathers who participated. First, the groups offered men support for their attempts to remain engaged as fathers. Though the two groups had different focuses in terms of content, both aimed to encourage men to believe that they had something to offer their children. Without a doubt, this message was positively received, though many men continued to express doubt about their ability to provide anything of value to their children. The groups also attempted to provide men with advice about how to approach their coparents in new ways that might improve their ability to be fathers to their children. Second, the facilitators of both groups organized special visits that had a much higher level of physical contact between fathers and children than regular visits. The special visits were highly anticipated events, especially at the adult facility. Of course, a combination of problems such as transfers to other facilities and familial tensions made organizing and receiving the special visits difficult.

There were a couple of key differences between the two groups. The same man ran the group at SY the entire time I was there: Jasper, an older black man in his fifties. He’d grown up in the South and had a child at a young age. Jasper’s experiences as a young father were an important aspect of his work with the men in the fatherhood group. He used his own success in maintaining a relationship with his child despite numerous challenges (including geographic distance) as fodder for inspirational speeches about the value of commitment for fathers. While an administrator at the prison had to approve a man’s addition to the group, Jasper had a great deal of control over who was allowed to join. In his own way, Jasper served as a gatekeeper to the resources the group could offer young fathers, and he only wanted men who were serious about becoming better fathers. For Jasper, being a better father meant being a better man. This link between manhood and fatherhood was overt and consistent. Jasper didn’t rely on a particular set of documents for his group; he brought in whatever appealed to him. This meant that it was his perspective that dominated the messaging in the group rather than any particular curriculum. Additionally, the group at SY was ongoing, and as a result, Jasper had relationships with some of the young men that spanned years.

In comparison, a changing roster of women ran the twelve-week fatherhood groups at NCI (which were called cycles by the staff at Healthy Connections). A woman named Alice ran two of the five cycles I observed. When she left Healthy Connections for another job, I observed a cycle where a supervisor trained a new employee, Katelyn, to run the group. Katelyn ran the fourth cycle alone and then she also left for another position. A woman named Star ran the fifth cycle. The group facilitators relied on curricular materials provided by Healthy Connections, and while there was variety in what each cycle covered specifically, there was nonetheless a strong central message that focused on maintaining communication with children. Group facilitators had no control over who joined the group; the volunteer coordinator of the adult prison facility, Baxter, decided who would be in a particular group. Finally, the twelve-week time frame for the group meant that the facilitators often had to rush to get through the material. In theory, the fatherhood program at NCI also included six support group meetings that were supposed to occur after the special visit and help men put into practice the things they learned. These meetings, however, occurred haphazardly, none of the five cycles received all six support group meetings, and there were no specific curricular materials associated with them.

The Prison Setting

I would like to take a moment to present a metaphor of the organization of prison to clarify what I am—and am not—discussing about prison facilities. Imagine a prison as a hard-boiled egg. While reality is messier than a hard-boiled egg, this metaphor allows us to consider the prison as a layered institution. The shell separates the egg from the rest of the world; this is the barbed concertina wire, walls, cameras, and wide-open spaces that literally separate a prison from the community in which it is located. The inside of prison, the yolk, has its own set of rules and social norms, and the interactions that occur there do so out of the public eye. Some scholars call this prison culture, though I am leery of such a term as it obfuscates the links between the prison and the outside world. In the yolk of a prison facility—the cellblocks, the segregation units, the exercise yard—the ties between race and masculinity play out in particular ways. For example, male prisoners still belong to gangs based on racial identity,⁹ and white prisoners are more likely to commit suicide than black or Hispanic prisoners.¹⁰ Racial identity also affects COs’ work experiences.¹¹ I can only allude to these patterns of interactions that emerge out of the sight of outsiders.

Instead, this is a project that focuses on the egg white of prison. These are the portions of the facility where outsiders and insiders meet and mesh. The egg white of the prison is the lobby, the visiting room, and the hallways where volunteers move from the outside to the places where classes occur. These are the places where COs must ratchet up their security protocols to manage people who may be entirely oblivious to the rules that govern life inside the yolk of prison. These are the places where prisoners connect with the world outside of the eggshell and where they sometimes have the opportunity to remind themselves that they are not just prisoners. Visitors, social workers, COs, and prisoners all move through the different layers of the prison, though only COs and other staff can travel through all three at will. The research project presented in this book took place entirely within the egg white.

I would also like to provide a description of the facilities, as many people have only ever seen a prison on television or from a distance. The scale of certain parts of both prisons was enormous. The security fences, twenty feet high with barbed concertina wire, were set within two hundred feet of the main building. The prison buildings were wide rather than tall, and behind the fences, the grounds and structures sprawled for several hundred yards in each direction. NCI housed just over two thousand prisoners and the facility sat in the center of a one-hundred-forty-acre property. SY housed six hundred prisoners and was placed in the center of a seventy-acre property. Both facilities were hard to see from the road, and NCI, in particular, was hidden behind trees and set quite far back from the road. Inside the buildings, the scale of the areas visitors and outsiders could access was similarly large. The waiting room and visiting room were large rectangular rooms designed to fit fifty to sixty people spaced evenly apart. The hallways farther inside the facility, where group sessions took place, had high ceilings and were about twenty feet wide.

The interior-decorating scheme at both facilities was industrial drab, which emphasized monotony and suggested that when it came to prison construction, cheap was always better. The cinderblock walls and concrete floors of the interiors of the buildings were done in gray, salmon-orange, browns that drew from the feces family of colors, white, and light blue. Furniture—the tables and chairs in the visiting rooms and places where the fatherhood groups took place—was plastic or stainless steel and often bolted to the floor or to other furniture. When combined with the overhead fluorescent lighting, the spaces inside the prisons often felt washed out and lifeless. The uniforms also contributed to the feeling of monotony: prisoners wore tan, COs wore navy blue, and people in street clothes stuck out like sore thumbs.

As one might expect, it was quite difficult to move from one point in the prison to another. The inability to move easily contributed to a feeling of claustrophobia despite the high ceilings and wide hallways. Entering the facility involved moving through traps—small hallways that had two or three locked doors. Each door could only open if all the other doors were locked and a CO inside a security station operated the doors. Similarly, the long hallways had gates every twenty feet or so that COs could close in order to limit movement. At SY, if the COs weren’t paying attention or were doing something else, it was possible to end up cooling your heels in the trap for upward of ten minutes. At NCI, volunteers often ended up waiting in the trap as a CO made his way down the hallway to provide us with an escort. Though approved social workers could technically walk down the main hallway inside the facility by themselves, the COs at NCI ignored that particular rule. At SY, the group facilitator and I were more frequently allowed to move around the main hallway unescorted.

Accentuating the feeling of claustrophobia was the fact that one was almost always observed in prison. This, too, was hardly surprising. And yet the cameras, security stations, patrolling COs, signs declaring that your belongings and car were subject to search at any time, and body alarms volunteers wore while inside the main prison facility all contributed to a feeling of being hemmed in. Observation also created a specific kind of security. I was never entirely alone with a prisoner or a CO, and there were times I was grateful that this was the case. However, the knowledge of being observed changes the way people interact with one another. I always had to be mindful of what I was saying or doing and had to assume that other people were doing the same. I was always aware that someone was watching and judging whatever I did (a condition I shared with the COs and the prisoners). It was only during interviews, which occurred in small rooms off the main visiting rooms, that I had any semblance of unobserved interactions with prisoners. I did, however, record most of my interviews. There were no cameras in the interview rooms, as this was where prisoners met with their lawyers. For the same legal reasons, there weren’t any COs in the interview rooms. Instead, the COs were positioned outside the room. At SY, the officers’ desk was across the room and at least thirty feet from the interview room. At NCI, the officers’ desk was just outside the interview room. The doors of the interview rooms at both facilities had long, narrow windows in the doorways.

Despite the intense dedication to routine, life in prison was also unpredictable. Sometimes the prisoners and staff seemed on edge, glaring at one another, and the sounds of the prison seemed louder and more staccato. This was often related to a particular incident within the prison (a fight or a lockdown), the weather (extreme heat or