Under the Penal Gaze: An Empirical Examination of Penal Consciousness Among Prison Inmates

This dissertation develops a new theoretical framework that examines the ways in which prisoners orient to and make meaning of their punishment in order to more fully understand the nature of penality writ large. The framework, which I call penal consciousness, moves beyond the limited, objective view of punishment as legal sanction to a more expansive view of penality that privileges subjectivity and meaning. Through the inductive analysis of 80 in-depth, qualitative interviews with Ohio state prisoners, I investigate the ways in which penality---defined here that which is experienced as punishing or recognized as punishment---is understood by different populations of prisoners in different carceral settings. This design allows me to examine the patterned nature of punishment across populations (male and female prisoners) and settings (traditional indirect and innovative direct supervision carceral environments) while setting the stage for a broadly applicable theoretical framework.;The penal consciousness framework examines punishment along two key dimensions: salience and severity. Through an examination of the level of abstraction at which punishment is experienced, as well as what I call the "punishment gap" between an individual's expectations and experiences of punishment, variation in severity and salience can be better understood. The examination of the interplay between severity and salience reveals four distinct narratives of penal consciousness. Each narrative of penal consciousness is a story that prisoners tell about the meaning and place of punishment in their lives. These narratives differ according to the ways in which prisoners situate their punishment in the larger landscape of their lives, with punishment viewed as part of life, a separate life, suspension of life, or death. By examining punishment as the nexus between the objective and the subjective and locating punishment in prisoners' lives, the penal consciousness framework allows us to map variation in the lived experience of punishment and makes visible the processes by which penality is constructed.