1340401
research-article2025
ASRXXX10.1177/00031224251340401American Sociological ReviewKnight
Contesting the State: Embodied
Threat and the Emergence of
Prisoner Mobilization
American Sociological Review
2025, Vol. 90(4) 658­–689
© The Author(s) 2025
DOI:
10.1177/00031224251340401
https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251340401
journals.sagepub.com/home/asr
David Jonathan Knighta
Abstract
Prior studies cast U.S. imprisonment as politically demobilizing. This article complicates
that proposition by exploring when, and how, threat under penal confinement leads people
to mobilize. Using interviews with currently incarcerated and recently released men across
three states, I show that although imprisonment generally fosters political inaction, collective
mobilization does arise under certain conditions. First, people in prison mobilize in response
to embodied threats—fundamental threats eliciting visceral reactions that signal future harm
(i.e., premature death or permanent incapacitation). Second, to collectively mobilize, a
subpopulation of similarly threatened prisoners must be present and see the threats as a shared
problem. Collective prisoner mobilization is more likely when both conditions are present;
mobilization is unlikely when neither condition is present; and individual political contention
is more likely when conditions are partially present. This range of political responses among
incarcerated people is more dynamic than previously reported. Imprisonment has selective
political effects, mobilizing the most repressed individuals within prison to devise new
strategies to contest their repression.
Keywords
mass imprisonment, mobilization, threat, repression, embodiment
Mass imprisonment is one of the most significant political developments in recent U.S.
history, affecting nearly one in three Black
males born between 1970 and 1984—and millions of others (Roehrkasse and Wildeman
2022; see also Roberts 2004).1 Sociologists
have responded to the rise of mass imprisonment by studying its origins and consequences
as a political institution (Beckett 1997; Goodman, Page, and Phelps 2017; Manza and
Uggen 2006). This body of research focuses
largely on the buildup of the prison state by
political elites (e.g., Campbell and Schoenfeld
2013) and, to a lesser extent, by rank-and-file
agents of the prison state (e.g., Page 2011).
However, little sociological work explores the
political ideas and actions of incarcerated people in the United States (for a rare exception,
see Wright 1973), and prominent studies that
do explore the political experiences of individuals who have been to prison typically cast
imprisonment as politically demobilizing
(e.g., Calavita and Jenness 2015; Lerman and
Weaver 2014; Manza and Uggen 2006).
a
Yale University
Corresponding Author:
David Jonathan Knight, Yale University,
Departments of Sociology and African American
Studies, 493 College Street, New Haven, CT
06511-8933
Email: david.knight@yale.edu
Knight
The extant literature argues that prison
reduces people’s sense of political efficacy,
creates disincentives to political participation,
and imposes barriers to gaining political representation or acquiring politically relevant
information (e.g., prison grievance systems
that limit prisoners’ rights activism within an
intentionally curtailed legal sphere) (Barkow
2019; Calavita and Jenness 2015; Uggen
and Manza 2004:175, 181; White 2022). As
with other forms of carceral contact, moving
through prison “demonstrably restructures
individuals’ understanding of citizenship
and empowerment,” leading Black people,
among others, “to be less likely to engage
in collective action or traditional methods of
political participation” (Lerman and Weaver
2014:137, 198).
The qualitative studies in this literature
are based on either single-state investigations or interviews and surveys with people
about their political behavior post-incarceration (e.g., Calavita and Jenness 2015; Lerman and Weaver 2014; Uggen and Manza
2004). Absent from the literature is research
on prison-based political action that spans
multiple states. These research areas deserve
more attention, considering that incarcerated
people express a “diversity of political views
and concerns,” and these sentiments are most
salient among incarcerated people with “more
pressing security and survival needs” (Uggen
and Manza 2004:193). Moreover, past and
recent cases from across the country show
that people, even in the most incapacitated
prison settings, engage in long-term collective mobilization (Berger and Losier 2018;
Camon 2016; Kurshan 2013; Pelot-Hobbs
2013).2 But under what conditions?
In this article, I take the above observations as a point of departure to complicate the
theoretical narrative that prison is demobilizing. Treating high rates of racialized imprisonment as a case of widespread repression
in the United States,3 I use life history interviews across three states with 100 currently
incarcerated and recently released Black and
Latino men to explore both the circumstances
whereby prisoners become mobilized, as well
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as how prisoners adapt and sustain their political strategies when faced with substantial
barriers. Ultimately, I show that while repressive penal conditions tend to structure political quiescence, significant forms of prisoner
mobilization do arise under conditions affecting specific prisoner subgroups.
First, I find that prisoner mobilization is
more likely to occur in response to embodied
threats—incapacitating circumstances that
generate a visceral reaction (i.e., a deeply felt
physical symptom or emotional response).
Emerging from structural arrangements but
distinct from other types of threat,4 embodied
threats mark the body in fundamental, perceptible ways that are viewed as signals of
future harm. The embodiment of threat (i.e.,
the way threat is perceived on and through
the body) becomes an important process that
drives political action in repressive settings.
Second, I find that collective mobilization is
more likely when a subpopulation of similarly threatened prisoners sees the threat (or
threats) as a shared problem. The structural
context (or situation) then matters because it
shapes how people process and react to a perceived threat, and social organization matters
because it enables people to identify a threat
as commonly felt.
Embodied threats were more likely to be
perceived in adverse situations at the deepest
ends of the penal system: solitary confinement, natural life in prison, placement on
death row, and during personal or systemic
health crises in prison. Besides affecting distinct prisoner subpopulations, these situations
share the potential outcome of either permanent incapacitation or premature death. As my
data show, embodied threats were more likely
to be mobilizing in these situations because
the threats (as perceived and experienced)
tended to overlap, thus producing visceral
reactions that motivated captives to organize despite not having activist backgrounds
or networks. Subsequently, embodied threats
that had a collective dimension—that were
collectively felt and perceived as a shared
problem—often prompted the creation of
prisoner-led organizational structures that
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transformed incarcerated people’s injustice
frames, sense of political efficacy, and capacity to build alliances.
These findings expand lines of sociological inquiry on the politics surrounding mass
imprisonment as well as the micro-level processes whereby threat mobilizes action in
highly repressive settings. First, the findings
uncover a broader field of political contention in the prison state than is shown in
prior studies of prisoner political behavior.
The findings suggest imprisonment is more
politically dynamic and varied in its effects
than previously theorized. Second, the processes detailed here show how, in the case
of U.S. prisoners, the feeling body is a primary medium through which threats are made
politically salient and mobilizing. It is not so
much economic or status-based threats that
motivate action among people in prison, but
threats that have life-and-death stakes and
whose imminence is felt bodily and perceived
consciously. For social movement scholars,
this has implications for understanding how
mobilization occurs among heavily repressed
groups. Despite increasing interest in the role
that threat plays in social movements, the
embodied dimensions of threat (namely, visceral reactions to perceived threat) and how
that experience motivates contention are not
well understood or specified.
Situating The Body In
Prisoner Mobilization
Prisons and Political Repression
Prisons are institutional sites of repression.
Beyond their historical use as tools to suppress gains in Black political representation
and economic power (Eubank and Fresh
2022; Muller 2018), U.S. prisons are designed
to undercut the prospect of political mobilization among targeted populations inside and
outside of prison (Berger and Losier 2018).
For example, mass imprisonment arose from
a state apparatus of countermobilization in
which policing, arrest, and incarceration were
“ramped up” in response to Black urban
American Sociological Review 90(4)
rebellions and radical Black movements of
the 1960s and 1970s (Burton 2023; Hinton 2021; Oliver 2008). During that period,
the federal government redeployed veteran
soldiers, surplus ammunition, surveillance
technologies, and military experiments of
isolating prisoners abroad to wage a “war
on crime” at home through U.S. prisons and
targeted policing (Schrader 2019; see also Go
2023). The migration of these tactics, hardware, and military forces from the defense
arena to the prison state facilitated the reinstitution of solitary confinement in the 1970s
and the rise of supermax prisons in the 1980s.
Present-day prison architecture and prison
management—involving the identification
and removal of potential leaders, and isolation
and segregation of would-be dissenters—
are forms of “covert repression” (Earl 2011)
that have long served as conscious efforts
to curb organized political action (Burton
2023:14). For example, in a widely used
1970s manual, the American Correctional
Association advised prison officials across
the United States that prison rebellions are
not spontaneous riots but “organized, calculated movements of massive resistance supported and assisted by outside groups” that
should be met with tactical, militaristic force
(Burton 2023:14). This policy made counterinsurgency a mainstream feature of prison
management, where prison officials invest
heavily in managing and segregating groups
to suppress rebellion, while also anticipating
how to quickly retake prisons in the event of
an uprising (Burton 2023:14).
Repressive conditions are not equally
imposed in prisons but are highly stratified.
The resurgence of solitary confinement at the
dawn of the mass imprisonment era was used
as retaliation against political organizing—
specifically, “as a tactic for repressing the
organizing power of a rapidly growing prison
population, mostly comprised of younger
black men”—as well as against uprisings
over worsening prison conditions (Cloud
et al. 2023:2). Evidence from Pennsylvania’s
prison system suggests isolation continues
to be a tool imposed especially upon young
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Black men (Pullen-Blasnik, Simes, and Western 2021).
The death penalty is also highly racialized and tied to local politics. In the United
States, the adoption of more severe sentencing policies (including the death penalty) is,
like felon disenfranchisement laws, a method
used in response to racial group threat to
repress the competitive political power of
Black populations (Duxbury 2021; see also
Behrens, Uggen, and Manza 2003). The death
penalty is also related to histories of white
racial repression: U.S. localities with a history of lynching and that are currently experiencing racial group threat deploy the death
penalty at higher rates (Jacobs, Carmichael,
and Kent 2005).
These dynamics underscore how imprisonment is a “political tactic” (Foucault
1977:23). They showcase the role of racial
criminalization (i.e., the attachment of Blackness with criminality) in the various forms
imprisonment takes to “control the lives of
people the state has defined as criminal”
(Muhammad 2011; Wright 1973:22).
Threat and the Feeling Body
Threat is an important mechanism whereby
repression shapes political action (Almeida
2018). For example, structural threats such
as state repression “consistently drive defensive collective action” (Almeida 2019:53).
In Europe in the 1940s, open prisoner revolt
arose in Nazi death camps in response to
genocide (Maher 2010), and in the 1970s,
Irish political prisoners escalated their hunger
strikes in response to increasingly repressive, threatening conditions (O’Hearn 2009).
These cases suggest prisoner mobilization
is more likely when threats are group-specific, because subgroups threatened with targeted repression acquire a “resister’s toolkit”
(skills, knowledge, and networks) through
those experiences (Finkel 2015). These cases
also suggest that collective action is more
likely, even in highly repressive settings,
if threats are perceived as “immediate and
lethal” (Maher 2010:255).
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Yet, the interpretive and affective dimensions of threat are not much explored in the
social movement literature. Rather, threat
is defined through a rational choice model
as “the costs that a social group will incur
from protest, or that it expects to suffer if it
does not take action” (Goldstone and Tilly
2001:183). This definition, which emphasizes
rational calculations in decision-making, could
be strengthened if it more explicitly accounted
for the visceral reactions that are triggered
when faced with a perceived threat (see Fricchione, Ivkovic, and Yeung 2016; Jasper 1998).
For instance, recent descriptions of threat as
“negative conditions that encourage collective
action” (Almeida 2019:53), and as exposure to
“real or perceived harms” that will worsen if no
action is taken (Almeida 2019:7, 53), suggest a
symbolic interactionist approach to threat could
augment the rational choice model. Under this
alternative approach, threat can be understood
as an interactive process of interpretation and
response to external forces that changes people’s perceptions of their circumstances (see
Goldstone and Tilly 2001:193).
I thus use the term perceived threat to
more precisely get at the subjective and interpretive processes that drive people’s threat
responses. Although this social interactionist
understanding of perceived threat is not typical in social movement scholarship (it is more
common in studies of racial group threat,
see Blumer 1958; Bobo 1999; Reichelmann
2021), it is useful for disentangling the general term “threat” into its processual components. In this model, perceived threats emerge
from a process of social interaction between
a person (or group), a new occurrence that
befalls them, and the perceived meaning
given to that occurrence, which leads the
event to be interpreted as threatening (for
background on Blumer’s conceptualization of
threat, see Reichelmann 2021).
It follows, then, that perceived threats
(referred to here as simply “threats”) differ
in terms of their mobilizing potential. This
variation in mobilizing potential likely has to
do with the extent to which threat provokes a
visceral reaction. For example, when a threat
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American Sociological Review 90(4)
Figure 1. COVID-19-Era Prison Protest Actions in the United States by Type, March to June
2020
Note: Locations of prison protest actions were geocoded using the Nominatim open-source geocoding
API. Where necessary, a small amount of random jitter was added to coordinates to prevent markers
from completely overlapping. Protest action types include hunger strikes, uprisings, protests,
disturbances, and work stoppages.
Sources: Based on documented prison protest actions during the first four months of the COVID-19
pandemic collected from Perilous: A Chronicle of Prisoner Unrest across the U.S. and Canada,
November 12, 2020. Data publicly available at https://perilouschronicle.com/2020/11/12/covidprisoner-resistance-first-90-days-full-report/.
is perceived, the “moral shock” often needed
to attribute blame for it is a “visceral bodily
feeling” (Jasper 1998:409). People respond
to this bodily feeling by channeling fear and
anger into political action—“complex emotional processes that few researchers have
described,” but that theoretically may motivate political action when the source of the
threat is human and when the “direct embodiments” of the threat (i.e., the visceral signs
of the threat) can be seen in oneself or others (Jasper 1998:409–10). Specifying threat
in this way is relevant to social movement
scholarship, as it is not well understood how
micro-level threat processes motivate highrisk collective action. If threat is made known
to people through the feeling body (see Russo
2014:68), then the body can be further theorized not only as a means through which to
protest, but also as a means through which to
determine the stakes of political action.
Additionally, abrupt or newly discovered
threats may elicit visceral reactions (“hot
cognition”) that spur political action, whereas
“slowly unfolding, existing threats” may elicit
resignation, denial, or other reactions associated with quiescence, inhibiting the extent to
which problems are recognized as threats in
need of political remedy (Jasper 1998:412).
For instance, high-risk collective action
was most likely to occur aboard eighteenthcentury British navy ships when new, acute
threats (namely, a high percentage of sick
sailors) overlapped with long-standing grievances (Hechter, Pfaff, and Underwood 2016).
Similar patterns are visible in today’s prisons,
such as the wave of prison protest actions
that followed the explosion of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020 (see Figure 1). Longstanding, prison-based threats—referred to as
“pains of imprisonment” (e.g., continuous
surveillance, loss of bodily security) that are
Knight
imposed on prisoners and “carry . . . profound
hurt as a set of threats or attacks . . . against
the very foundation of the prisoner’s person”
(Sykes 1958:68)—generally do not rouse
confrontational activism, but the new threat
of COVID-19 alongside long-standing threats
did generate such action. Qualitative evidence
suggests visceral reactions likely played a
role in both these historical cases (American Prison Writing Archive 2023; Pfaff and
Hechter 2020). Thus, the overlap of new and
long-standing, prison-based threats, which
affect some prisoner subpopulations more
than others (see Ghandnoosh 2022; Resnik
et al. 2016), may elicit visceral reactions that
are conducive to political contention.
In short, threat can be politically motivating because it informs not only rational calculations but also perceptual and emotional
responses. This may help clarify the puzzling
effects of violent state repression—which can
increase or decrease protest (Jasper 2018:39;
Sullivan and Davenport 2017)—by showing
how micro-level responses to threat can shape
mobilization in multiple ways. Although violent state repression often triggers fear and
quiescence through “the urge to avoid pain,”
it may also elicit other visceral, affective
reactions that surpass or transfigure those initial impulses in ways that lead people down
different political paths (Jasper 2018:39).
Carceral Embodiment: From
Subjection to Confrontation
An emphasis on the affective and corporeal
dimensions related to threat likewise moves
the study of carceral embodiment into new terrain by accounting for how visceral reactions
motivate prisoner resistance. Prior research
on the embodiment of incarcerated and criminalized people emphasizes the ways they
internalize institutional forms of violence and
discipline: forces that become inscribed on
the body and made visible to others through
bodily movement (Walker 2022), acts of selfinjury (Cloud et al. 2023), and the perpetuation of violence in interactions with others
(Anderson 1999; Collins 2004; Sabo, Kupers,
663
and London 2001). This scholarly approach,
which depicts embodiment as largely a process of domination, follows a similar line to
much of the sociology of embodiment that
emphasizes how bodies are disciplined and
constructed to reinforce hegemonic power
relations (Bobel and Kwan 2011).
For example, jail prisoners learn via “time
and relentless reminders” to hold a “penal
posture” (i.e., walking with one’s head bowed
inside a red line with one’s fingers interlaced,
learning to “fix” one’s body “without being
told” and when deputies are not around)
(Walker 2022:30). This embodiment of penal
rules of comportment illustrates how individuals become objectified in prison. Time
in prison can manifest in chronic conditions
(“telltale inscriptions”) like high blood pressure, asthma, and cancer, as well as in exposure to disease and psychological trauma
(Moran 2012:566; Smiley 2023). It can also
manifest in how incarcerated people come
to embody the harms they experience. Some
long-term prisoners rationalize the childhood
trauma and past incarceration that mark their
bodies, interpreting these traumas as lessons
in violence, which they then perpetuate in
their dealings with others (Masters 2010).
But the body can also be a medium to both
perceive the effects of power and enact resistance. Under this view, the body is a resource
and site of knowledge from which to pursue
various courses of action. In Discipline and
Punish, Foucault (1977:30) observed that the
prisoner’s body is “bound up” in power relations of not only subjection but also “confrontation.” Thus, prison-based movements
fundamentally concern “the body and material things”: they are movements against “an
entire state of physical misery . . . against
suffocation and overcrowding, . . . hunger,
physical mistreatment . . . isolation. They [are]
revolts, at the level of the body, against the . . .
prison[’s] . . . very materiality as an instrument
and vector of power” (Foucault 1977:30).
And yet, little work specifies or advances
Foucault’s hypothesis. Few studies explore
activists’ embodied experiences or how
embodiment shapes activists’ movements,
664
in prison or otherwise; rather, prior studies
emphasize the protesting body as a tool for
shaping public consumption of political ideas
(Hohle 2009; Russo 2023:203–4; Sasson-Levy
and Rapoport 2003). For example, prisoners launch hunger strikes, a strategic use
of the frailty of their bodies, to expose the
violence of carceral regimes and destabilize
public narratives surrounding the legitimacy
of incarceration (Moran 2015; Yuill 2007).
Here, the body is among the few resources
that prisoners can readily access, becoming
a “modality of resistance” with which to win
concessions and transform incarcerated activists into martyrs (Yuill 2007). These and other
“embodied practices” underscore how activist
prisoners remake their bodies into sites of
resistance rather than allowing them to be
used by the penitentiary to achieve physical
and psychological control (Rhodes 2004:45).
This form of carceral embodiment as
resistance represents the instrumental use of
the body in acts of performative protest, a
practice that focuses on drawing public attention to issues raised by a specific action or
campaign (see Jasper 2018:71–73). But the
body has other political uses. As suggested
above, the body “emit[s] signs” (Foucault
1977:25–26) that may be used in political
decision-making. The emotional dimension
of embodiment is important here because
feelings like pain, fear, panic, and anxiety
are how the intensity of affect registers in the
body (Moran 2015:29). These feelings matter
because they “do things for us” politically,
helping connect bodily experience and cognition (Jasper 2018); they help focus people’s
attention on specific problems in the world
around them (Jasper 2011:292). Consider the
reflex responses of fear and anxiety that people feel when they encounter a novel threat.
People pay closer attention when facing new
threats, switching from “preconscious routines” to “more thoughtful information gathering” (Jasper 2011:292). Feeling, in this
sense, is a way of communicating with ourselves, of providing “rough-and-ready evaluations of what is happening,” and of “alerting
us to what is important” (Jasper 2018:17).
American Sociological Review 90(4)
Visceral feelings alert us to problems,
changes, and threats in our environment and,
in doing so, raise our consciousness around
specific issues in ways that can motivate us
to act politically. This embodied experience
is likely more pronounced in prisons, and
even more so among individuals enduring
long sentences, given the constrictions placed
on prisoners’ bodies—including the psychosomatic “shock” of incarceration, imposed
isolation of long-term imprisonment, sensory deprivation of solitary confinement, and
broader health threats to which prisoners are
exposed—that raise the stakes of political
contention (see, e.g., Camon 2016; Fassin
2017; Simon 2014).
Study Design And
Analytic Approach
Case Selection
I conducted in-depth life history interviews
with 100 African American, Afro-Latino, and
Latino men to document political thought and
action under penal confinement. The interview data include (1) interviews conducted
between fall 2018 and spring 2020 with 46
African American and Afro-Latino men age
18 to 34 who were serving a decade or longer
in Massachusetts’s prisons, and (2) interviews
conducted between summer 2020 and spring
2024 with 54 African American, Afro-Latino,
and Latino men in California and Illinois
who were imprisoned beginning in their teenage and emerging-adult years and who were
released no more than four years after spending a decade or longer in prison.
The focus on Black, Afro-Latino, and
Latino men in this study is appropriate given
the national statistics on long-term imprisonment. In the United States, Black prisoners
comprise 46 percent of the penal population
that has spent at least 10 years in prison
(Ghandnoosh 2022), 55 percent of those with
life without the possibility of parole sentences (Ghandnoosh 2022), and 40 percent of
those on death row between 1976 and 2022
(Ghandnoosh and Barry 2023; Muhammad
Knight
et al. 2022). In California, 69 percent of people who have been imprisoned for 15 years
or longer are Black (34 percent) or Latinx
(35 percent) (California Committee on Revision of the Penal Code 2021; Ghandnoosh
2022). This corresponds with other trends at
the national level: more than two-thirds of
all incarcerated people with life sentences
are Black, Latinx, or other people of color
(Ghandnoosh and Barry 2023). This racialization of long-term and severe prison sentences is important and relevant to this article
because these sentences can be considered
threatening circumstances that expose people—who are disproportionately Black and
Latinx—to additional threatening situations
such as solitary confinement (Pullen-Blasnik
et al. 2021; Resnik et al. 2016).
The three-state data collection approach
strengthens conceptual generalizability,
or the ability to generalize to “abstracted
concepts” (Collins, Neely, and Kahn 2024),
while also investigating one of mass imprisonment’s most durable features—long-term
imprisonment. Although the overall prison
rate is declining in the United States, the
long-term prison population continues to rise
(Sentencing Project 2021). Thus, I selected
the diverse states of Massachusetts, Illinois,
and California to theoretically sample for
the experiences of people enduring long-term
sentences (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Originating as an investigation into coming-of-age
in prison, the study first focused on interviewing incarcerated young men in Massachusetts
because Massachusetts had (and continues
to have) one of the highest proportions of
life-sentenced prisoners in the United States
(Sentencing Project 2021), many of whom
were incarcerated in their youth.
After the COVID-19 pandemic began,
however, I had to shift to remote research
activities. I expanded the project to study the
same processes among men sentenced to long
terms as youth, but this time from the vantage
point of men who were just leaving prison
after a decade or longer inside. Specifically,
I shifted to interviewing recently released
men in Illinois and California because these
665
two states are in different regions of the
United States and have large long-term prison
populations. In 2019, 29 percent of California’s prison population (n = 35,703) and 19
percent of Illinois’s prison population (n =
7,363) had served 10 years or longer (Ghandnoosh 2022). California (the epicenter of
high-security and supermax prison construction in the 1990s) and Illinois (which placed
its entire state prison system on lockdown in
the mid-1990s) exemplify the nation’s turn
to “total incapacitation” (Simon 2014). This
three-state approach allowed me to comparatively study mobilization processes emerging from the interviews, thereby increasing
my confidence in the generalizability of my
observations to the context of long-term
prison sentences.
Across these three states, all interview participants spent the vast majority of their adult
imprisonment in maximum- and mediumsecurity state prisons. This distribution is in
concordance with national statistics—in 2019,
84 percent of the prison population was held
in either a maximum-security (42.3 percent)
or medium-security (41.7 percent) institution
(Bureau of Justice Statistics 2021). This matters politically. Because they were sentenced
to lengthy prison terms, the typical interview
participant spent at least the first major phase
of his imprisonment in maximum-security
prison(s), followed by a second major phase
in medium-security prison(s). Accordingly,
initial forays into prisoner mobilization often
occurred in maximum-security prisons and in
response to conditions (e.g., solitary confinement, natural life in prison) heavily associated with life in such institutions.
Finally, because interviewees were incarcerated at young ages, no one had a history of activism or mobilization before their
imprisonment, and, with one exception, no
one had ties to activists before their imprisonment. Interviewees were not selected because
they were activists or non-activists. Supplementary historical data came from newspapers, original oral histories, memoirs, case
filings, and administrative prison records.
The protocols used for this research received
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institutional review board (IRB) approval,
and the Department of Correction in Massachusetts approved the protocol for the prisonbased interviews.
Recruitment
I secured interview participants by recruiting
in person, getting referrals from reentry service organizations, snowball sampling across
formerly incarcerated networks, and posting
contact information on legal defense mailing lists. Because the U.S. prison system is
deeply racialized, I focused on the experiences of Black and Latino prisoners, and
interviewees had to identify as Black and/or
Latino to qualify. I also focused on the effects
of long-term imprisonment, so interviewees
had to be currently serving or to have recently
served prison terms of 10 years or more
to be eligible. Finally, because the project
originated as a study of coming-of-age in
prison, currently incarcerated men had to be
under the age of 35 to qualify for an interview (recently released interviewees tended
to be older). My position as a Black man in
my early 30s was important for interviewee
recruitment and retention. Ethics and confidentiality procedures were reviewed with
each interviewee, and participants signed a
consent form before the interview.
Currently incarcerated men were recruited
and interviewed at a large, medium-security
men’s prison outside of Boston, Massachusetts. I selected this prison because its population size and security level were similar to
those of many other U.S. prisons (Bureau of
Justice Statistics 2021), and my status as a
volunteer in the prison and relationships with
prisoners and staff facilitated access. Roughly
two-thirds of the facility’s prisoner population was Black and/or Latino, and well over
40 percent had prison sentences of 15 years
or more at the time of the interviews. Face-toface interviews at the prison were conducted
during the evenings in unused classrooms.
Per IRB protocols, no correctional officer was
present during the interviews; the only people present were myself and the incarcerated
American Sociological Review 90(4)
interviewee. This privacy standard was based
on ethical considerations: the one-on-one
interview setting was intended to prevent
interview participants from being overheard,
as sensitive information or critiques of the
system could arise during interview sessions;
to my and other people’s knowledge, cameras
monitored movement in the prison but did not
record sound. The prison also did not play a
role in interviewee identification or recruitment; I managed these aspects of the study.
On a weekly basis, I informed one prison staff
member of which individuals I would be interviewing so they had permission to meet with
me during their prearranged interview time.
I followed similar procedures for recently
released interviewees. Because this research
component was conducted at the height of
the COVID-19 pandemic and research had to
be done remotely, one-on-one interviews with
this subgroup occurred on Zoom, an online
video teleconference platform. Here, too, the
interviewee and I were the only people in
the interview space. Recently released participants were typically in the privacy of their
own residences or own rooms. Since about
half of the recently released interviewees
were in halfway houses, I asked these participants to find a private space outside (often in
the yard or recreational area of the facility),
so they could speak with me on Zoom without being overheard.
Interviews covered various topics, including experiences during imprisonment, attitudes toward civic and political engagement,
political action during prison, and access to
services and programming during imprisonment. Each interview with currently incarcerated men lasted about one hour, and each
interview with recently released men lasted
about two hours. I applied a case logic to
interviewing, treating each interview as a
case and conducting interviews sequentially
with the aid of an interview guide and goal
of saturation; with each interview, I gained
an increasing understanding of my research
questions (Small 2009). I transcribed interviews verbatim. Table 1 presents relevant
information about the interview cases.
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Table 1. Sociodemographic Information and Political Responses among Interview
Participants
Racial/ethnic distribution
African Americana
Afro-Latino/Latino
Geographic location
California (Los Angeles, Oakland-San Francisco,
Sacramento)
Illinois (Chicago)
Massachusetts (Boston)
Educational background
Graduated high school
Did not graduate high school
Received GED or other high school equivalent
Political responses
Collective mobilization (political organizing and legal
activism or political organizing only)
Individual political contention (grievances/legal
activism only)
Non-mobilization/non-engagement (neither organizing
nor grievances/legal activism)
Total
Currently
Incarcerated
Men
Recently
Released
Men
Total
24 (52.2)
22 (47.8)
39 (72.2)
15 (27.8)
63 (63.0)
37 (37.0)
36 (66.7)
36 (36.0)
18 (33.3)
18 (18.0)
46 (46.0)
14 (30.4)
29 (63.0)
26 (56.5)
19 (35.2)
35 (64.8)
32 (59.3)
33 (33.0)
64 (64.0)
58 (58.0)
14 (30.4)
13 (24.1)
27 (27.0)
4 (8.7)
16 (29.6)
20 (20.0)
28 (60.9)
25 (46.3)
53 (53.0)
46 (100.0)
54 (100.0)
100 (100.0)
46 (100.0)
a
Includes a respondent who identified as Black and Asian American.
Note: Data are presented as n (percent).
Analysis Methodology
I took an abductive approach, iterating back
and forth between unexpected patterns in
my data and the existing literature to analyze
and interpret the interview data. Drawing on
grounded theory, abduction is useful for constructing new theory based on surprising and
anomalous data (Timmermans and Tavory
2012). I used a flexible coding approach to
create a comprehensive codebook and typological codes that mapped onto the research
protocol, followed by the creation of inductive codes (Deterding and Waters 2018).
These procedures helped me organize the
data so I could iteratively code based on
specific themes, questions, and mechanisms
of interest. The process resulted in the creation of 215 codes, including 19 codes that
specifically explored political issues such
as “political consciousness,” “political education,” and “political organizing” (for an
example of my coding scheme, see Table 2). I
changed interviewees’ names, provided interviewees’ age ranges rather than exact ages,
and masked other identifiable information to
protect anonymity.
The Absence And
Emergence Of Prisoner
Mobilization
Collective prisoner mobilization was more
likely under two conditions. First, prisoners who mobilized collectively were, by and
large, affected by embodied threats. Second,
collective mobilization usually required a
population of similarly affected people who
understood the threats as a collective problem.
Mobilization of any kind was unlikely when
neither condition was present, but individual
political contention was more likely when
one, but not both, conditions was present.
American Sociological Review 90(4)
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Table 2. Sample Coding Scheme
Typological Index
Code
Inductive Analytic
Code(s); Qualifier(s)
Civic and Political
Engagement in Prison
Political organizing,
civic and political
agency; positive,
collective
“I’m involved in three organizing groups. . . .
I recognize and engage the power of my
voice and agency to address issues in my
community. . . . All action to imagine a socially
just world is political.”
Civic and Political
Engagement in Prison
Political activism, legal
activism, grievances;
individual
“If something [objectionable] happened, I would
write grievances and do whatever . . . but it’s
not like I physically did anything [e.g., civil
disobedience], I just always kept it papered,
kept pushing the paper, pushing the paper.”
Civic and Political
Engagement in Prison
Political organizing;
emerging political
activism; negative
“I am actively engaging in issues that matter and
require community support . . . but I don’t
speak publicly . . . [and] have not found a role
in that capacity [as an activist] yet.”
Civic and Political
Engagement in Prison
Non-engagement,
political efficacy;
negative
“Because I have been incarcerated, I have felt my
voice has not mattered.”
Civic and Political
Engagement in Prison
Non-engagement,
political efficacy;
positive
“I have the heart of an activist, but I’ve never been
in public taking a stand. I’ve never been informed
or tied in with an informed group. . . . I’ve never
organized with a political group or worked in that
environment.”
Example Quote
Source: Author’s data and analysis.
In other words, incarcerated men developed differing “resister’s toolkits” depending
on the conditions they encountered. When
embodied threats were shared and recognized by a group of prisoners, men were
able to develop the capacity to transform
their injustice frames (Gamson 1992), build
their sense of political efficacy, and adapt
their strategies in response to the retaliation
and structural barriers they faced. On the other
hand, prisoners for whom only one condition was
present—who either faced embodied threats that
were not widely shared or who faced threats
that were widely shared but not embodied—
were usually unable to collectively organize.
Instead, these men became experts in individual contentious strategies that sometimes
changed the circumstances for many other
incarcerated people. However, when acting
individually, prisoner activists faced greater
difficulties in sustaining their political efforts.
Below, I detail examples of mobilization
and non-mobilization across three states.
Beyond the narrative of prison as demobilizing, interview participants in this study
varied greatly in their political responses.
Table 1 shows that out of the 100 currently
incarcerated and recently released men who
were interviewed, 27 engaged in collective mobilization, 20 engaged in individual
forms of political contention, and 53 were
non-mobilized and did not engage in political action. I discuss non-mobilization at
several points, but I give special attention
to the nearly half of individual cases that
involve political action, because those cases
have important implications for understanding variation in prison-based contentious
politics.
I also reference cases of collective prisoner
mobilization at the prison level that emerged
across individual interviews. These prisonlevel cases include political efforts (1) by
Illinois death row prisoners to expose police
torture in Chicago and stay their executions;
(2) by Massachusetts prisoners to address
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the health risks of reportedly elevated levels
of contaminants in their water supply; and
(3) by California prisoners to address the
health crisis and perceived neglect of the state
penal system toward prisoners following the
emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The
evidence of a general model of mobilization
across these diverse state contexts and issue
areas lends further support to the conceptual
generalizability of my findings to long-term
prison contexts.
Repression And The
Mobilizing Force Of
Embodied Threat
Embodied threats were important drivers of
collective prisoner mobilization. Every interviewee discussed experiencing repressive
circumstances in prison. Embodied threats,
however, deviated from what can be considered “general prison conditions.” Rather,
these threats were perceived under circumstances that affected distinct prisoner subgroups (e.g., solitary confinement, juvenile/
natural life in prison, high-security prison
contexts that held concentrations of lifesentenced prisoners) or that directly threatened prisoners’ lives (e.g., the death penalty,
or a significant medical illness or systemic
health crisis neglected by the institution).
Subsequently, collective mobilization was
more likely in cases where prisoners reported
overlapping embodied threats (producing visceral reactions that motivated them to act),
whereas mobilization was typically absent in
cases where prisoners did not report overlapping embodied threats.
Circumstances Structuring
Non-mobilization
Repressive penal conditions generally did not
trigger mobilization. Harrowing experiences
with violence and coercion were typical, but
long-term prisoners shared they were less
willing to take the risk of politically confronting the prison system because protesting or
writing a grievance simply introduced new
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risks to men’s well-being without redressing
their current problems.
Warren (late 40s, Los Angeles, released
to a halfway house days before his interview
after 25 years in prison) explained this common decision-making process among nonmobilized interviewees:
There was this one officer [at my prison
last year]. . . . He came to work from 12
midnight to six in the morning. It was like
Vietnam. . . . He would snatch you out your
bunk, strip you out naked, and then ransack
all your property. . . . He’s not looking for
anything. It’s just to humiliate you. . . . Just
to hold that authority over you. . . . So when
you know he’s in the building and you know
he’s around, . . . you could not sleep. . . . So
. . . you’re tired as hell, and [then] they force
you to go to work, or you’re going to get a
write-up. . . . [But if you] write him up, all
that does is cause retaliation. Because the
admin that oversees the complaint will let
him know off the top that he’s been written
up. . . . And that’s just one place. This is
every prison I’ve been to. You have officers
like this that would come in your cell and
snatch you out your bunk and whoop your
ass. . . . And then, if you . . . file a complaint,
it gets worse.
These repressive episodes affected Warren’s
sleep. But Warren did not perceive these
episodes as posing a fundamental threat to
his life or physical health. Instead, Warren
viewed these occurrences as a quotidian
feature of California’s prison system—something to be endured. The status quo was preferable to potentially triggering retaliation by
filing a grievance.
Many incarcerated men also worried that
political action in prison could threaten their
visitation privileges, and thus their ability to
see their loved ones. This was another factor men weighed about the costs and risks
of contention. Because men were separated
from their families and mobilization risked
widening that separation, the desire to maintain communication with one’s family had
the opposite effect on prisoners’ mobilization
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than it has had on people in some other highly
repressive contexts (see, e.g., Soyer 2014).
Desire for contact with family was a disincentive to collective action that “eroded” solidarity by causing people to withdraw from and
lose their commitment to mobilization, even
when that action was seen as important (see
also Goodwin 1997).
For example, Godfrey (early 30s, Boston, a decade into his current incarceration)
named his family as the reason why he was
not politically active in prison: “To me . . .
right now, my family is more important than
the greater cause. . . . I’ll support a greater
cause, but if it comes in between me and
getting out [to my sister and other family],
I can’t sacrifice that for nobody. I’ll pat you
on the back, and I’ll wish you well, . . . but
[no more than that].” When asked to explain
why he made that choice, Godfrey mentioned a few prisoners who were penalized
for their activism. One was transferred to
another facility, and another was purportedly
placed in solitary confinement several times,
banned from prison programs, and prohibited
from placing phone calls during his isolation.
Such retaliation was widely recognized by
other incarcerated men: “Let resisting, organizing, be for a good reason,” said another
non-mobilized prisoner in the facility, “don’t
let it be useless because everyone [who participates] is going to get shipped out.” These
punishments were potentially racialized. As
one California interviewee observed:
I’m a Black man, and talking to other Black
people about collectivizing, especially in my
prison, can get you sent to the hole. . . . You
get caught even with certain books, they
will write you up and put you in the hole.
Like the books by George Jackson, you get
caught with any of that literature, you’re
deemed a threat. You're a revolutionary or
BGF [Black Guerrilla Family] affiliate or
sympathizer, and you’re put in the hole for
investigation.
Sudden, population-wide repression also did
not necessarily provoke political mobilization. The Illinois interviewees are instructive
American Sociological Review 90(4)
in this regard. Incarcerated across Illinois
prisons throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and
2010s, these men recounted the sweeping
change that occurred in the severity of control imposed over Illinois prisoners following the 1996 leak of a controversial tape of
the infamous prisoner Richard Speck “snorting cocaine, engaging in sex, and bragging
about living the good life at Stateville prison”
(Johnson 1996). Embarrassed by the tape,
prison administrators reportedly placed the
entire state prison system on lockdown, transforming the system from an “open” to a
“closed” environment: “It was the Richard
Speck tape, everything changed after that. . . .
When they shut [the prison] down, it was . . .
no more free movement, keeping us locked in
our cells. . . . You in a cell, period” (Lonnie,
mid-40s, Chicago, released a few weeks ago
after three decades in prison).
Responses to this new level of isolation
varied depending on the other threatening
conditions men encountered. Prisoners like
Lonnie—who were in the general population
and did not face the perils of the death penalty, natural life in prison, or a major health
crisis—perceived the new level of isolation
as a source of frustration or alienation but not
as a viscerally felt threat to their lives. Thus,
by increasing the costs of action, repressive
penal conditions generally made people less
likely to mobilize.
Circumstances Structuring Collective
Mobilization
Prisoners’ assessments of the costs and benefits of political contention shifted when
repressive circumstances became more acute
and viscerally felt, that is, when men encountered incapacitating circumstances at the
deepest ends of the penal system. Posing
direct threats of premature death or a permanently incapacitated physical existence, these
circumstances—referred to here as embodied threats—elicited visceral reactions in the
form of deeply felt physical symptoms or
emotional responses that, when they overlapped, made people more likely to politically act. Here, the mobilizing potential of
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embodied threats usually derived not from
one such perceived threat, but from visceral
reactions arising from the co-presence or
overlap of multiple perceived threats affecting a collective of possible discontents. These
conditions explain why some subpopulations
of interviewees who experienced solitary
confinement in prison turned to political contention, whereas others did not. Overlapping
embodied threats were perceived as too great
to go uncontested.
For example, prisoners with natural life
sentences or on death row who were placed
in isolation tended to engage in protest as
an initial response to that isolation. In these
contexts, prisoners had very few resources
other than their bodies, which they used as
vehicles to contest their circumstances (see
Feldman 1991; Yuill 2007). In one instance,
when Illinois prisons went on repressive lockdown, prisoners on death row staged hunger
strikes and obstructed guards from counting
men in the condemned unit. Because these
men also faced the death penalty and had few
contacts besides other men in the condemned
unit, they felt that barriers to interacting and
sharing knowledge with one another could
greatly increase their chances of execution.
Ivan (mid-50s, Chicago, recently released
after three and a half decades of incarceration) explained the collective reasoning of
death row prisoners and their response to the
prison administration at the time:
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as an instrument to highlight the threats they
faced (see Moran 2015:38). Ivan referred to
this as “using my body as a weapon, and taking the prison’s power to do anything over
me because I’m doing it to myself.” Yet, use
of the body as a “protest weapon” (Feldman
1991:179) was also a more confrontational
mode of contestation that men eventually
discontinued because of reprisals.
Hunger strikes and other protest behavior under conditions of isolation were often
men’s first forays into prisoner mobilization, and they typically resulted in some
form of retaliation or penalty. In California,
Vaughn (mid-50s, San Francisco, released a
few months ago after over 25 years of incarceration) described solitary confinement as
a radicalizing experience in part because he
was heavily penalized for his participation
in protests. Vaughn, originally sentenced to
natural life in prison, started to engage in
“serious” political contention when he was
in 23-hours-a-day isolation, where he participated in his first-ever protest demanding
access to showers and better living conditions
in the solitary confinement unit. These protest
activities included work stoppages, refusing
direct orders, and, similar to the men on Illinois’s death row, delaying (or what the prison
called “obstructing an officer’s duties”):
[We would say to the prison administrators]
“Y’all trying to kill us, and you want us to
be quiet waiting to die” [i.e., to not be able
to meet and talk with one another about our
legal situations]. . . . We was like, since y’all
are trying to obstruct us from defending
[ourselves], [we] . . . orchestrated hunger
strikes [involving half the prison unit]. . . .
So it made them go and have a meeting [with
us] and ask, “What do y’all want?” And . . .
they would come and negotiate. [We would
say] “We want to be able to meet.”
We had some [protests] where you board up
[the door to the unit], where you obstruct
the officer from doing count, and those were
just simply because we wanted to shower.
[We’d say,] “It’s been three days [and] we
want a shower. . . . So we’re not going to let
you open the door, and you’re not going to
see us to count us unless you bring a captain
or a warden . . . to talk to us about getting
our showers.” So we had a few of those.
. . . Or we would take over a day room,
we would just refuse to lock up, [in addition to] work strikes. . . . And it was scary
sometimes because . . . they can shoot you.
People get shot.
These protests, particularly hunger strikes,
were a form of resistance in which incarcerated men used the vulnerability of their bodies
According to Vaughn, these protest actions
triggered further repression. In addition to
more time in solitary, Vaughn “got denied
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parole for all the write-ups for protests . . . for
refusing to work.”
This circumstance generated visceral reactions that were telltale features of embodied
threat. Because Vaughn had life without the
possibility of parole, he faced an ongoing
fear (perceived threat) that he was going to
“die in prison” and continue to be drawn into
daily violence until his demise: “It’s like I
was at a heightened stage of anxiety at all
times, worrying about getting stabbed, about
whose gonna get beat up,” Vaughn said. “I
don’t want to be a victim, so I have to be
a victimizer. [Serving] natural life put us
into that kind of survival mode.” Here, the
embodiment of the threat of natural life was
expressed in anxiety over victimization and
in pressures to participate in violence to avoid
victimization.
Solitary confinement, which triggered new
and more acute visceral reactions, raised the
stakes of those concerns: “[Solitary is] nervewracking,” Vaughn said. “You’ve got so many
thoughts in your head. . . . It feels like your
body is eating you, like your body is attacking
itself, because you’re surrounded by cement
. . . you’re in a tomb, and your body—your
senses are spiraling. You don’t get sunlight,
fresh air. . . . So it feels like you’re dying.”
Vaughn explained that he “started having
heart palpitations, my blood pressure, my
heart was racing and fluctuating, so much so
that I had to go through a stress test.” He also
had a person next door to his cell “who would
just scream out the N-word all night long. . . .
It made me worry, ‘Am I gonna go crazy like
him?’”
Feeling how his mind and body were
changing in response to these contexts motivated Vaughn to engage in political action.
In his words, the toll of solitary confinement
on his body and senses motivated his protest
behavior because it produced an “extreme
frustration . . . that makes you want to come
out and be militant . . . makes you angry at the
system. If you weren’t already, it makes you.
And even if you were [angry before], it makes
you more angry.” Subsequently, Vaughn was
moved to engage in prisoner mobilization: “I
American Sociological Review 90(4)
just had to channel the energy after I got out
[of solitary confinement]. . . . That’s when I
went full bore [with activism] . . . and trying
to get out of prison.”
Experiences with retaliation and additional repression pushed interviewees to
revise their approach. Although prisoner
protests could get public attention and occasionally short-term concessions, they more
frequently generated retaliation in the form
of more severe incapacitation. So incarcerated men adapted their political tactics
from visibly confrontational protest, which
resulted in retaliation, to new approaches
that enabled them to achieve greater results
while not triggering further repression
and incapacitation. For example, Vaughn
changed his tactics after being sent to the
Sensitive Needs Yard (a designation given to
people in solitary confinement who are considered members of a Security Threat Group
or who have expressed safety concerns) and
later being denied parole for participating in
a large hunger strike in 2013.
To mitigate the repressive lockdowns
that were enacted by maximum-security and
supermax prisons in response to prisoner
resistance, incarcerated men collectively created prison-approved “self-help” programs—
a strategy for continuing to meet when staff
leadership shut prisons down to suppress prisoner dissent. Following instances of prisoner
resistance, “it was all about getting out of
the oppression of being locked down,” said
Vaughn, who used the word “oppression” to
describe the experience of repressive penal
tactics deployed following instances of open
prisoner dissent. “So we found ways to do that
by . . . developing programs . . . [that] became
not really a [form of] protest, but a way to
lessen the oppression . . . a vehicle to get out
of [the repressive experience of isolation and
incapacitation in response to protest].” Over
time, these programs also served as sites from
which to develop broader political goals and
more organized mobilization efforts.
Responding to state repression, Vaughn
and a critical mass of other “early riser” prisoner activists established a self-help group
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at a state prison north of Oakland in the
early 2010s that held biweekly meetings and
reached out to churches, law schools, and
state legislators to lobby to change the law
for people like them who were serving natural
life sentences (i.e., life without the possibility of parole [LWOP]). To lower the risk of
repression, these men strategically did not use
the body as a tool of confrontational protest,
choosing instead to organize across units to
petition people on the outside:
We [our group] would organize together. We
started by [asking] who are all the LWOPs
in [our prison unit]? . . . [Then] we would
meet once or twice a month, and we would
brainstorm. . . . Who do we reach out to?
. . . Eventually . . . we wrote almost every
senator and assemblyperson. We would put
our stamps together, . . . get envelopes, and
. . . do a draft letter, where we’d make copies . . . and give it to each individual [who
was then assigned to mail the letter to five
legislators].
Rather than use confrontational protest tactics, the group partnered with organizations
like Human Rights Watch on advocacy campaigns that ultimately resulted in the passage
of California Senate Bills 394 and 1437—
reforms that enabled Vaughn and others serving natural life to receive reduced sentences
and, eventually, parole.
That said, encounters with life imprisonment or solitary confinement sometimes had
contrary political effects. For instance, a few
non-mobilized men with life with the possibility of parole (LWP) sentences said the structure of their prison sentences discouraged them
from becoming politically involved, challenging rules, or interacting with activists. One currently incarcerated man with an LWP sentence
explained that he shies away from contentious
politics, because “if I want to get out, I know
that every decision I make can have huge repercussions. Every single one. . . . [Confrontations
with prison administration] are potential disciplinary tickets. . . . And there you go: ticket,
hole, setback. So you have to move so careful.”
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At the same time, mentions of solitary
confinement or other threatening circumstances were generally absent from these nonmobilized respondents’ interviews, which
aligns with the argument that encounters with
overlapping embodied threats generate prisoner
action. Likewise, a few other non-mobilized
men who experienced solitary confinement
described it as neither a threatening circumstance nor one that elicited visceral responses
in them. Rather, these men sought out solitary
as a reprieve from what they perceived as
greater interpersonal violence in the general
population. These discrepant cases underscore
the important role of perception and interpretation in shaping how people respond to threat.
In short, repressive prison conditions
typically do not spark prisoner mobilization;
indeed, they often structure quiescence and
non-mobilization. Political action while incarcerated carries its own set of risks that many
interviewees said were too costly. But that
calculus often changed with men’s visceral
reactions to overlapping circumstances that
could lead to premature death or incapacitation—circumstances that, when felt and perceived as a collective problem, differentiated
prisoner mobilization and non-mobilization.
Prisoners who encountered these sorts of collective embodied threats adapted their political strategies over time to mitigate the risk of
further repression and to align their efforts with
expanding political goals. But it is not often that
embodied threats both overlap and are collectively experienced. Neither condition may be
present, or only one of the two conditions may
be present, thereby producing different political outcomes. I explore these alternatives in the
next section, which shows how the presence
of either one or the other condition resulted in
individual forms of prisoner contention.
Individual Contention
Versus Collective
Mobilization
Incarcerated men tended to engage in individual forms of contentious politics when
674
conditions were partially present—that is,
when one of two conditions was present,
such as when collectively felt threats were
not embodied (i.e., did not trigger a visceral
reaction) or when embodied threats were
not framed or widely understood as collective problems. Understandably, such circumstances affected what kinds of political action
could be carried out. It was generally not
possible to mount or sustain a collective effort
under these circumstances. Instead, men often
specialized in using individual strategies,
namely, the grievance system or other formallegal mechanisms that could be navigated on
one’s own, after frustrated attempts at collective action. This path of individual political
contention stands in contrast to paths of collective mobilization where incarcerated men,
frustrated by the lack of redress gained by
using individualized legal routes, turned to
collective action in hopes that threats would
be addressed if they expanded the scope of
conflict.
Individual-Level Strategies of
Contention
Some incarcerated men faced embodied
threats that were not widely perceived and
discussed as a collective problem. Individual
health concerns provide a clear illustration.
In these situations, prisoners who faced substantial yet inadequately addressed personal
health emergencies engaged in legal mobilization, because a formal grievance process
was required to receive specialized medical
treatment. In such cases, the embodied threat
was deeply, viscerally felt by individuals and
derived from emerging symptoms. But prisoners who faced these threats encountered
obstacles to organizing collectively because
individual illness was generally unknown to
others unless disclosed, making it difficult to
identify with a defined group and thus more
difficult to organize around.
For instance, in California in the early
2000s, Phillip (early 50s, Sacramento-Central Valley, released six months ago after 20
years of incarceration) engaged in individual
American Sociological Review 90(4)
political contention after he was denied
follow-up treatment to fully treat his cancer
and experienced further “significant change”
in his physical and cognitive functioning:
“At the time, the prison wouldn’t give me
[a follow-up procedure or] the proper dosage of [the medicine to manage and regulate
my cancer symptoms],” said Phillip, who
described how the threat of premature death
from cancer was manifesting on his body. “I
was suffering from . . . a bunch of symptoms.
I was always sleepy and tired. I had brain fog,
my hair and nails had got thin, and at the time,
my voice was fucked up [due to the cancer].”
These cancer symptoms viscerally marked
Phillip’s body, signaling to him that his life
was in jeopardy, and motivating him to legally
and politically confront the system: “I was
thinking, these prison officials really want to
kill me. . . . But knowing that, like, gave me
strength. It was almost like a strength, like a
walking stick . . . something I carried with
me.” Phillip’s motivation arose from a sense,
based on what he was learning and perceiving
through his increasingly diminished physical
and mental state, that he would die if his illness remained unaddressed: “For me, it was
an overwhelming sense of, I do not want to
die in prison. That was my goal. I did not
want to die in prison, and that made me want
to just fight, fight, fight the system.”
Thereafter, Phillip used a prison litigation
handbook to learn how to file his first 602
appeal (the form used to file a grievance in
California prisons). Phillip then got the Prison
Law Office involved and was able to get
follow-up treatment for his cancer from a specialist at a nearby medical center. Yet while
the signs of cancer that marked Phillip’s body
and cognition motivated him to act, those
same symptoms made it a struggle to sustain
legal contestation against the system: “I was
very lethargic. I couldn’t focus. It was so hard
to litigate . . . because literally all I wanted to
do was sleep, but I knew I had to fight.”
Nonetheless, Phillip, then in his mid-30s,
became a jailhouse lawyer and prisoners’
health rights activist, learning to use the California prison system’s 602 appeal process
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to pressure the system to respond to his and
others’ health needs. Phillip explained that
“the infancy stages of my activism” began
with learning that other men faced similar
health vulnerabilities, neglect, and coercion.
His activism focused narrowly on navigating
the 602 grievance process:
I started [by] finding out that a lot of my
brothers [other Black men] needed the same
kind of help. . . . So, when I found out I had
a talent for [filing 602 appeals for access to
medical care], there was no limit. I could’ve
done 602s all day. . . . So I started helping
these people . . . started being touched by
. . . the magnitude of it. . . . The prison
was fucking over so many people over
healthcare, and men were dying [speaker’s
emphasis]. I’m talking about in . . . significant numbers. Men were dying. For shit
they shouldn’t’ve had to die for. [Eyes tear
up.] It’s, but for the grace of God, I didn’t
die from cancer.
The connection Phillip made between the
threat of cancer that marked his body and the
health threats that marked the bodies of other
Black men sparked an anger and motivation in him to act politically. Learning about
the scope of these issues was a “watershed
moment”: “It blew me away,” Phillip said,
“and it created an anger within me, like a piss
and vinegar type anger.” Phillip then decided
to translate his knowledge into action, saying
to himself that if the prison system refused
to redress its harms to people’s health, “then
let’s fight . . . [and] I’m gonna fight the best
way I can with these 602s, these writ of
habeas corpuses, as best I can for as long as
I can.”
Phillip did try to collectively organize and
had initial meetings with a few others (i.e.,
he met with other politicized men who also
faced health issues “in the library every day
and strategize[d] and . . . talk[ed] about what
was going on and . . . subscribe[d] to all the
various political papers and [health] newsletters”), but those efforts soon faded, and a
sustained group never materialized. Although
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a number of men perceived embodied threats
having to do with their personal health, these
threats were more difficult to collectively
organize around because people could not as
readily identify with a defined group around
a shared struggle as compared to other subgroups (e.g., lifers, death row prisoners, and
people in solitary confinement). That is, they
could not realize the second condition needed
to launch collective mobilization—seeing the
threat as a shared problem. Without a core
group of supporters in prison, Phillip said
that writing to medical experts and political
organizations became his lifeline: “I write,
they write back. I write back again, and
they’d ask me a little more. . . . It was a quid
pro quo. I would ask for help for this [or that
issue]. Sometimes I got it, sometimes—more
often than not—I didn’t.”
Phillip’s case illustrates the narrow forms
of individual political contention that prisoners used when they confronted embodied
threats but did not have the support of a
defined, mobilized group. Although threat
can be deeply embodied and elicit profoundly
visceral reactions, it is not enough to motivate
collective mobilization if there are barriers
to collectively recognizing shared struggles
and defining a common group, thereby making claims-making more difficult. Embodied threats arising from conditions officially,
publicly marked by the prison (e.g., solitary
confinement, death row) are likely easier to
collectively mobilize around as opposed to
other types of threats that are not (e.g., personal illness).
Likewise, individual strategies of contention arose in response to threats that were
experienced as a collective problem but
that were not embodied, thereby reducing
people’s willingness to engage in collective
action. Consider the state of Illinois’s efforts
beginning in the late 1990s to extract funds
from incarcerated people “for the cost of
incarceration” (Prison Legal News 1998).
This is an example of an economically based
threat affecting the pocketbook, rather than
an embodied threat affecting the mind and
body. Many incarcerated men, particularly at
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Stateville Prison, were affected by these asset
seizures, but few pushed back. At Stateville,
men believed the potential for success was
low, so few rallied behind activists contesting
the state’s seizure of prisoners’ assets.
For example, Dennis (late 60s, Chicago,
released 16 months ago after four decades in
prison) was one of many Stateville prisoners
targeted in the mid-2000s by the state’s strategy to seize several thousand dollars that he
earned through his $2-a-day prison industries
job, even though the state previously took a
percentage of his earnings on similar grounds.
Upon receiving seizure letters, he and other
incarcerated men organized a meeting in the
law library to strategize and try to help one
another. That meeting was filled with frustration and disagreement and ultimately did not
develop into an organized group because, as
Dennis said, “most of the guys didn’t have
any support. . . . The system had froze their
accounts, and they didn’t have money to go
to commissary or anything . . . it was a lot
of pressure being applied [by the administration].” Moreover, according to Dennis,
many of the men whose assets were seized
did not want to deal with the court system. If
they chose to fight the system in court, they
would have had to sift through a great deal
of paperwork, write briefs, find additional
legal representation, do legal research, and
respond to each court motion. In short, other
incarcerated men chose not to challenge the
assets seizure because more pressing threats,
in addition to administrative burdens, would
be imposed if they did.
Thereafter, Dennis chose to fight the state’s
attempt at asset seizure alone and in the face
of other prisoners’ discouragement: “It was a
wide range of responses, most of them negative. . . . A lot of people said, ‘Oh, you’re just
wasting your time.’ . . . Why don’t you go on
and let ’em [the prison system] take that little
bit of money? They’re gonna eventually take
it anyway.’” These responses pushed Dennis
further toward an individualized approach to
political struggle.
Although Dennis ultimately succeeded
in his legal challenge and established that
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the state could not doubly garnish prisoners’ wages, his experience discouraged him
from organizing with others and led him to
keep the scope of his activism constrained to
formal grievances: “When I saw something
that wasn’t right. . . . I would bring it to guys’
attention and tell ’em . . . . ‘You need to file
a grievance and [pause] follow it all the way
through.’” But Dennis did not go much further than that, deciding instead to “do a lot
of initial grievances, but it was up to them
[other prisoners] to follow through with it. . . .
If they didn’t show any interest, I didn’t have
time to try to chase them down.”
In this case, the collective action problem
is not difficulty with collectively recognizing
a threat, but a determination that the repressive costs (e.g., frozen accounts, administrative burdens) outweighed the potential
benefits. The anticipated asset seizures—
collectively felt and recognized as an economic threat—were not embodied, not viscerally felt in or upon the body. Rather, prisoners
worried about their personal accounts being
frozen, preventing them from accessing necessary goods. Thus, this case reveals what
happens when the first mobilization condition
is absent. Because the possibilities for collective action were low, Dennis’s and other similarly situated prisoners’ contentious politics
took on an individualized character.
Affordances of Collective
Mobilization
When incarcerated men encountered embodied threats that were widely experienced
and viewed as a shared concern, they were
able to do more than overcome a collective action problem. They could participate
in group processes whereby prisoners with
few resources could cultivate new cognitive,
relational, and organizational resources that
enabled the creation of more robust organizing campaigns. Prisoners were able to
transform their interpretive resources (e.g.,
injustice frames, sense of political efficacy),
which prefigured innovations in their tactical choices (McAdam 1983) and the kinds of
Knight
relational and organizational resources available to them.
When incarcerated men gained collective
knowledge about the extent of the barriers
they faced if they only used existing avenues
for relief, they revised their tactics by forming
coalitions with groups on the outside, which
expanded both the scope of conflict and their
political horizons. For example, in Illinois in
the mid to late 1990s, incarcerated Black men
on death row units in the Pontiac Correctional
Center shifted their approach to collective
action based on the knowledge they uncovered in a legal study group they organized to
discover why their individual appeals were
consistently unsuccessful. After learning that
many of them had been tortured by police and
wrongfully convicted, these men shifted their
methods from a within-system approach (i.e.,
police complaints, court appeals) to an extrainstitutional approach (i.e., inside-outside
political organizing; see also Kim 2016) in an
effort to stay their executions.
These men collectively organized around
the threat of a death sentence to which they
had visceral reactions. This was a recurring
threat shaped temporally by sentencing law.
As Jerrod (mid-50s, Chicago, released three
months ago after four decades in prison)
explained, execution dates were typically
scheduled 90 days in advance—although an
execution was stayed once an appeal was
filed and so long as the appeal decision was
pending: “But when the next court denies
your appeal, if it is denied, then that court will
set [a new] . . . death date . . . and . . . the clock
starts to tick [again].”
The experience of living on death row
and negotiating the threat of execution had a
visceral, psychosomatic effect on men. Ivan,
for instance, explained it was not the judge’s
words but the guards’ treatment of his body
that brought about the “shocking” realization
of his condemned status and, ultimately, his
submission to that status:
[What] the judge [said] . . . wasn’t shocking . . . him saying, “You’re sentenced to
lethal injection and they’re going to kill you
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on a certain day.” I’m like, “Yeah, get out
of here. That is not real.” But when those
guards came to get me and surrounded me,
I have to tell the truth. My body betrayed
me in the sense that I started to shake
because there was a real consciousness that
something had really changed. . . . I would
never tell my buddies that. . . . But being in
that circle [encircled by guards] and being
told, “Strip, take everything off so that we
can see parts of your body that you have
never seen.” . . . I couldn’t resist. . . . I just
. . . did what I was told. . . . It was the way
[the guards] . . . treated me that made the
reality of that sentence really begin to affect
my senses.
Other psychosomatic manifestations of the
threat of a death sentence included severe
anxiety and depression, insomnia, emotional
numbing, and mental collapse.
Still, the body can be a site of opposition
to, as well as accommodation of, externally
imposed forces (Bobel and Kwan 2011:2; see
also Foucault 1977). This dynamic is illustrated by how Illinois death row prisoners,
including Ivan, began to organize after the
state began executing condemned prisoners
in the mid-1990s (four people were put to
death by lethal injections between March and
November 1995). Jerrod, whose appeal was
rejected around this time, described how this
spate of executions was “motivation enough”
for him to organize: “I didn’t become scared
until they actually started executing people.” Jerrod explained that this period was
so stressful he “could not sleep at all,” and
during those sleepless nights, he began writing letters to legislators and legal and racial
advocacy organizations as a “release” and “as
a way of feeling like I was doing something.
. . . I said to myself, ‘I’m a high school dropout, but I gotta do something,’ and writing
is damn near the only outlet.” That chronic
sleeplessness, the primary mode whereby
Jerrod viscerally perceived and experienced
the threat of execution, became a primary
context wherein Jerrod expressed and translated his fears and anxieties over his death
678
sentence into political writing and, eventually, organizing.
Men on death row, who were experiencing their own psychosomatic responses to the
threat of a death sentence, were also motivated to politically act by witnessing how
others succumbed to the stress of life on death
row. Jerrod described one death row prisoner,
whose cell was next to his, who “was always
sitting in the dark . . . looking at the walls”
and who one day “went into a state of shock
and . . . wasn’t the same no more. You could
see it in his eyes. . . . Eventually, being on
death row just wore him down. He had a
nervous breakdown.” This event unnerved
Jerrod and gave him “more motivation to get
with [organize with] other people” because,
like Vaughn, Jerrod worried he could eventually meet the same fate.
In 1997, Jerrod and over a dozen other
men on death row, who spent 22 hours a
day locked in their cells, convinced prison
administrators to grant them an extra period
to hold a law class that met twice a week in
the recreation room of the condemned unit.
The experience transformed how they understood the torture they endured, as well as their
capacity to create change. To identify weaknesses in their defense cases, these men reenacted their trials using copies of their court
transcripts. Bringing death row prisoners
together in response to the embodied threat of
execution, the exercise was “transformative”
and “stimulated for us [that] . . . we could do
this [contest our death sentences],” said Ivan,
who learned through that exercise how the
confession he signed was coerced and written
by police.
Before the study group convened, many
felt shame and (at the advice of their attorneys) did not disclose their experiences of
torture. During the study group, however, the
men came to collective realizations about the
police torture they endured. Another class
participant recalled, “We sat there [in the
law class], and we’d get them [transcripts],
and we’d say, ‘Damn, the same officers . .
. is [testifying] in a lot of these cases. [This
officer] he beat my ass on this [date]. . . .
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Damn, that’s the same shit he did to me.’”
For this police torture survivor, who said he
previously felt shame and self-blame around
his encounter with torture, the experience of
participating in the trial reenactments and
seeing how police, prosecutors, and judges
orchestrated his trial to secure his conviction transformed his embodied response from
internalized shame to a politicized sense of
condemnation:
It [was] not just me telling [reenacting] my
story. . . . No, it [was] me telling my story
as [the officers who tortured me] . . . cause
I have their testimony. Their testimony. . . .
When you get into these characters, it felt
like I became these characters . . . [and]
you see the lies flowing out of your mouth
as you’re portraying them. You see the lies.
You see the lies. . . . So [I learned that] if
we wanna do something with the system,
you gotta . . . [target] those who you know
is making these laws . . . making their own
laws. [Speaker’s emphases.]
These collective realizations were turning
points in how these men negotiated death row
and framed the injustices they suffered. Not
only did they learn they had been manipulated by police or tortured into confessing to
crimes they did not commit; but in the process of learning about legal proceedings and
pouring over each other’s cases, these men
also learned that many of them had used the
same system-approved avenues of redress,
having made ethics complaints to the FBI and
Chicago Police Department’s Office of Professional Standards, which were disregarded
(Chicago Police Torture Archive 2021).
In contrast to the individualized approach
threatened prisoners took when collective
action attempts failed, the men on Illinois’s
death row transitioned from individually oriented to collectively oriented strategies in
response to the embodied threat of execution:
“We began to realize that as long as we kept
the fight in . . . [the legal] domain, we would
also be executed if things didn’t change,”
some police torture survivors reported (Reeves
Knight
et al. 2019:192). In 1998, after discovering
they had been tortured by police and sentenced to death through coerced confessions
and false witness testimony, the members of
this collective named themselves the Death
Row Ten, with the goal of creating a political
alliance with people on the outside.5 After
sending 10 to 15 letters per week to organizations for most of a year, the Death Row Ten
formed an alliance with the Campaign to End
the Death Penalty (CEDP)—a Chicago-based
death penalty abolitionist group and the only
group that agreed to partner with them.
Like the inside-outside organizing mentioned earlier, the partnership with CEDP
was a turning point for the Death Row Ten.
While the men on death row organized themselves on the inside, CEDP carried out protests, press conferences, petitions, teach-ins,
and court watching—strategies CEDP could
pursue without suffering retaliation like the
Death Row Ten faced (for background, see
Kim 2016). Importantly, the Death Row Ten
and CEDP coordinated “Live from Death
Row” broadcasts, which educated the public
about the death penalty and strengthened the
incarcerated men’s sense of political efficacy
and commitment: “Just to hear, at the time
. . . 300 people cheering, saying your name.
It’s mind-blowing,” said one Death Row Ten
member. “When you hear this, then you’re
like, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to do another one.’”
Ultimately, these efforts pushed the Illinois
governor to enact the first moratorium on
executions in the United States in 2000, and
then, in 2003, to commute 167 death sentences and pardon several members of the
Death Row Ten.
In short, this subsection shows the circumstances under which threat generates
individual political contention as opposed
to collective mobilization. Individual forms
of political contention typically arose in
response to shared threats that were not
embodied or when embodied threats were not
widely understood as collective problems.
Frustrated by failed attempts at collective
organizing, incarcerated men in these circumstances used more individualized avenues
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they could pursue alone. On the other hand,
men who faced embodied threats, which were
experienced collectively and understood as
collective problems, shifted from individualized to collective strategies. Overlapping
embodied threats elicited visceral reactions
that motivated incarcerated men to devise
group processes (e.g., study groups, insideoutside political organizing)—processes that
transformed the interpretive frames whereby
men understood their circumstances. These
group processes served as spaces in which to
build legal knowledge, political efficacy, and
the capacity to recalibrate political tactics and
amplify political outreach.
Continued Encounters
With Threat,
Organizational
Context, And Sustaining
Mobilization Over Time
Finally, continuing to encounter novel embodied threats (viscerally felt, incapacitating
circumstances that were new and different than what was known before) had differential effects over time, revealing that
the threat-related mechanisms that explain
mobilization emergence also affect mobilization persistence and decline. Incarcerated
men who were connected to organizations
often acquired new organizing skills and networks through their efforts to address novel
embodied threats. This organizational context
was crucial because prisoner groups often
initiated partnerships with outside groups
that helped sustain prisoners’ mobilization.
Without an organizational support base, continuing to encounter novel embodied threats
led some incarcerated activists to disengage
and demobilize.
Involvement in Prisoner Groups
over Time
Coordinated action at a Massachusetts prison
shows how the organized response to novel
embodied threats helped prisoners develop
680
political skills and mobilize networks. Danny
(Boston, currently incarcerated) illustrates
this process. Like other interviewees, Danny,
a young man serving a life sentence, first
engaged in coordinated protests when he
was in the hole, dealing with the overlapping
embodied threats of solitary confinement
and natural life in prison. After exiting solitary, Danny was invited by older activists to
become involved in an inside-outside mobilization effort devoted to ending life without parole prison sentences. Danny gained
organizing skills through that network, which
he later tapped into during the mid-2010s in
response to water contamination issues in
his prison that were reportedly causing skin
conditions, stomach illness, and breathing
and vision issues, among other health problems. Because Danny and many others at the
prison had life sentences (thus meeting the
second mobilization condition of the threat
being widely shared and seen as a collective
problem), they feared the effects of the threat
on their long-term health.
Danny explained that the threat he perceived at that time was visceral. He and other
men reported that the water supply turned
brown multiple times a week. In a prisonercreated survey, men across several prison
units reported an array of health concerns
they attributed to elevated levels of toxins
in the water. In one unit, men reported kidney problems, dark skin spots, liver trouble,
and breathing difficulties. In another, men
reported foot fungus, diarrhea, and skin and
eye discoloration. In still other units, captives reported urinary tract infections, rashes,
breakouts, and skin cancer. For Danny, this
health threat was perceived not only through
his own symptoms but also in the nervousness he felt when he would run water to make
coffee, wash his hands, or take a shower.
Josiah, another incarcerated activist serving a
life sentence in the prison, similarly described
his visceral reaction to this threat:
I was always thinking about it [the water].
Like, my food is being cooked in this, I’m
bathing in it. . . . It’s everywhere, it’s in
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everything. . . . That is something that was
constantly in the back of my mind that was
. . . this ever-present source of stress and
fear. And then you’re seeing the guy across
the hall die from cancer, and the guy across
the quad, he died, too. [You’re thinking,]
“Damn, I’m bathing in this water. They’re
preparing my food in it. . . . I thought I
had adapted, and I thought I had some
pretty strong mental stamina.” But [speaking about experiencing a panic attack], my
body and my mind were like, “Nah, man,
we’ll shut this whole thing down if you
don’t get a handle on what’s going on here.”
Thus, in 2017, Danny and other prisoners
began an inside-outside mutual aid organizing effort that coordinated access to bottled
water by “galvanizing . . . people on the outside . . . to get [water bottles] together.”
Although success was mixed, the mutual
aid response made future mobilizations possible by providing opportunities for participants
to develop organizing skills. Danny honed
his skills in coordinating the provision of
basic supplies, becoming the “point person
in [my] unit when it came to [accessing bottled] water.” Danny was tapped to be a liaison
between the organized prisoner groups; after
the groups shifted their focus to legislative
advocacy, he learned how to draft proposed
legislation targeted at reducing life and other
categories of long-term prison sentences. In
short, the organized prisoner response to novel
embodied threats facilitated the sustained
engagement of incarcerated men like Danny.
However, the same novel embodied threats
had a different effect on incarcerated men
who were less embedded in prisoner groups.
Hassan (also a currently incarcerated, lifesentenced prisoner and former prisoner activist) became disengaged and demobilized by
his encounters with an onslaught of novel
embodied threats, similar to Danny. Originally much less involved than Danny in the
organized prisoner community, Hassan said:
I don’t have the energy to indulge in that
[activism] anymore because prison has
Knight
taken a lot out of me. . . . I have . . . watched
people die in prison. . . . When I first got
here, I was so driven . . . and then just seeing
[what incarceration does]. . . . I don’t have
the energy to do that anymore. . . . Somewhere down the line [the motivation] just . . .
got tooken from me.
Hassan named the mental health effects
of life imprisonment, extreme isolation, and
potentially life-threatening illness as affecting his capacity and motivation to organize. This translated into a negative sense of
political efficacy undergirding his political
disengagement:
Hassan: People around here talk about how we
need to struggle, protest around the water
issue. I’m like . . . “You in the joint. The
water ain’t going to change. This whole
thing [organizing for social change] is a
mirage.”
Author: Yeah, and you still think that?
Hassan: I do think that. All the protest and
politics that goes on here . . . that stuff ain’t
real, in my eyes. They [prison guards and
administration] run the joint. Nothing you
could do about it. You could politic all you
want. That stuff ain’t gonna change.
Continuing to face novel embodied threats,
coupled with distance from organized prisoner groups, generated a sense of inefficacy
and, ultimately, disengagement among prisoners like Hassan.
Support of Outside Groups and
Navigating Individual Risk
When facing novel embodied threats, embeddedness in prisoner groups also connected
incarcerated men to potential outside political
partners that helped sustain their mobilization. Without that support, concerns about
individual risk (e.g., retaliation, parole prospects) became especially prominent.
For example, Omar (early 40s, Sacramento-Central Valley, released seven months
ago after over a decade in prison) crafted a
narrow approach to activism at San Quentin
State Prison because he was not embedded
681
in prisoner groups, and it was short-lived
because of his concerns over retaliation and
a looming release date. Dealing with intense,
new prison lockdown procedures during the
COVID-19 pandemic, and crowded in a dorm
with 100 other incarcerated men unable to
socially distance, Omar deeply feared becoming sick and dying. Whereas older men were
isolated in separate cells, younger men like
Omar were packed together in dorms with
hundreds of others. Viscerally, the experience of lockdown under these conditions was
nerve-wracking “because we couldn’t do anything but just sit there all day. I myself was
frantic, my anxiety was up. I was feeling
extremely antsy, being really nervous and not
being able to go anywhere.”
This foreboding—expressed as diagnosed
anxiety and restlessness under conditions of
forced, suspended inactivity—drove Omar to
politically act. Omar collected hundreds of
signatures in May 2020 for a petition that
described “inhumane” and “overcrowded”
conditions that made it difficult to physically
distance at San Quentin. This petition was
Omar’s first explicitly political act, which he
then sent to the local television channel to
air on the evening news. Although this petition required many people’s signatures, Omar
did not draw on connections with political
groups or networks: “I did that [petition] on
my own,” said Omar, who got the petition
signed by posting it above the urinals in his
prison unit. “I just coordinated the petition,
and I got that to the TV reporter. But I never
coordinated anything with anybody [else in
prison].”
Shortly after, San Quentin had the largest
outbreak of COVID-19 of any U.S. prison,
with the number of active COVID-19 cases
soaring from 15 in mid-June 2020 to 1,500 by
the end of the month. Omar quickly became
an activist, speaking to reporters and dialing into press hearings. He also “filed like
maybe 200 different 602s for people through
the course of the pandemic.” But by August
2020, Omar sensed aggression from prison
guards to the point where he began to worry
about his safety. He explained that he was
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nearing his parole date and had a petition
before the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) that could
result in his receiving a lower prison sentence. Due to fear of reprisals, Omar decided
to “step back” his mobilization efforts and
focus on his prospect of release: “I kind of
drew back and didn’t want to do it anymore,”
Omar explained, “[Continued activism] could
complicate things. . . . I felt that my safety
and prospects were in jeopardy, so I took a
step back.”
Omar’s demobilization reveals much about
the contingencies of prisoner activism when
unattached to prisoner groups. Compared to
incarcerated men on death row or with natural life sentences with no clear prospects of
release, Omar faced a conflict between mobilizing for prisoners’ collective well-being or
protecting his individual interests. Once his
prospects for release became tangible, Omar
feared that continued activism would trigger
retaliation and undermine his chances.
Jonah (mid-40s, Oakland, released one
year ago after over a decade in prison), who
was in a crowded dorm and unable to physically distance, had similar visceral reactions
as Omar to the novel embodied threat of
COVID-19 in prison. Jonah also engaged
in contentious politics for the first time in
response to COVID-19 at San Quentin. Jonah
participated in press hearings with Omar, but
was also able to use his preexisting, nonpolitical involvement in arts-based prisoner
groups and ties to people on the outside
to sustain his mobilization and secure early
release. In contrast to Omar, Jonah engaged
various strategies, gained through participation in a prisoner-led media organization, to
coordinate local and national media coverage
about the outbreak and the embodied threats
incarcerated people faced.
Thereafter, an inside-outside coalition
formed to address the COVID-19 outbreak—
with the overarching goal of decarceration,
specifically mass releases. Directed by the
aims of San Quentin prisoners and coordinated by a local racial justice organization,
the coalition eventually grew to roughly 800
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people, just as Omar was discontinuing his
political mobilization. Actions included press
conferences, town halls, demonstrations, and
class-action lawsuits, in addition to the coordinated distribution of personal protective
equipment for those inside and transitional
services for those who were released.
Involvement in this coalition shaped
Jonah’s political engagement in ways different from Omar’s. Jonah, who stayed active in
the coalition even after leaving prison, said
the changes he witnessed in others sustained
his political motivation and commitment:
I could really see the changes . . . materially, in front of me . . . seeing how people
were able to . . . step into their own power,
and . . . seeing people in these different
kinds of roles. Like, I knew them personally and knew we had worked together,
and we had personal relationships together.
But to see them . . . finding their own voice
through this very dire moment was very
transformational for me and . . . made me
feel a strength in my commitments to this
community.
Jonah’s connection to this organized prisoner
group helped sustain his mobilized activity
in the face of potential retaliation. Compared
to Omar, who felt increasingly vulnerable
because of his mobilization, Jonah felt fortified because there was power in numbers:
collective mobilization inspired people to
“overcome those fears [of retaliation]” and
offered “really important learning moments”
for coalition members “about not only the
idea of doing things together but also the
[motivating] energy that you can actually create when that happens.”
The threat-related mechanisms that generated the emergence of prisoner mobilization
also affected the persistence or decline of
mobilization. Although overlapping embodied threats raised the stakes for contentious
political action, continued struggles with
novel embodied threats appeared to have
differential effects on incarcerated men’s
mobilization over time. Men with preexisting
Knight
involvements in prisoner groups and organizational contexts were better situated to not
only sustain their mobilization in response
to new threats, but, in the process, they also
developed new organizing skills and robust
ties with outside allies. This organizational
embeddedness likely has its own feedback
effects by mobilizing, in particular, those
with lengthier prison sentences, who have
more time and capacity to become involved
in prisoner groups and build partnerships
on the outside, thereby further sustaining
their political action. Conversely, prisoners
who were less connected or unconnected to
organizations tended to face greater difficulty
continuing their activism because they did not
have an organized body of people with whom
to strategize a response to threat. Not situated
in an organized collective body, these incarcerated activists struggled on their own with
navigating a succession of novel threatening
circumstances, and some politically withdrew
over time.
Discussion And
Conclusions
Today, sociologists and other social scientists
link mass imprisonment’s rise with a decline
in prisoner mobilization (Berger and Losier
2018; Calavita and Jenness 2015). Between
1980 and the 2000s, the prison population
increased five-fold—with increases in the
prison population drawing especially from
Black communities—and the nation entered
an unprecedented era of prison construction
during which “many . . . new prisons were
designed to limit prisoner contact and ability
to organize, including [through] a dramatic
expansion in the use of solitary confinement”
(Berger and Losier 2018:143). Also curbing
prisoners’ ability to challenge penal conditions in the courts, the mass imprisonment
era is understood as part of a decades-long
“move away from a broad vision of change
and collective benefits [for people in prison]”
(Calavita and Jenness 2015:47).
Yet, while sociological research has
explored the political effects of mass
683
imprisonment from different perspectives, the
micro-level processes whereby threat motivates prisoner mobilization amid repressive
conditions are underexplored. This article
addresses these concerns by offering new
theoretical insights into prisoner mobilization during the mass imprisonment era.
Specifically, I detail the effect of embodied
threats on individual as well as collective
forms of political action among incarcerated
African American, Afro-Latino, and Latino
men. Direct, fundamental, and arising from
institutional arrangements, these threats elicit
visceral reactions in the form of physical
symptoms and emotional responses that are
interpreted as signals of future harm and that,
under certain conditions, increase the likelihood of mobilization.
This article has several findings that hold
across different penal settings and that may
point to broader dynamics among people
incarcerated for long prison terms. First,
extending prior research on U.S. imprisonment as politically demobilizing (for background, see White 2022), I revealed how
imprisonment may lead to varied political
outcomes, including more contentious political action, even as imprisonment forecloses
voting and other authorized forms of political
voice. Namely, I showed how the circulation
of political ideas, influence, and mobilization
in today’s anti-carceral movements is not
unidirectional, flowing from outside supporters or established social movement organizations to people who are currently or formerly
incarcerated. Instead, this circulation is multidirectional, with incarcerated people playing
a critical initiating role.
These patterns suggest not only that the
sociological narrative of a subverted radical
prison movement is incomplete (for background, see Calavita and Jenness 2015), but
also that resistance is not purely oppositional; rather, resistance can include both
opposition and accommodation (Bobel and
Kwan 2011). This observation has relevance
for the sociology of embodiment. In my
data, protest is typically met with increased
state repression, so prisoners who initially
684
protest using their bodies often discontinue
such responses, instead choosing strategies
of creating new organizations and insideoutside organizing networks that allow them
to expand the scope of conflict while also
mitigating risk. Although these approaches
to prisoner organizing may appear less visibly confrontational, they provide incarcerated men with much-needed knowledge,
resources, and levers to effect change (e.g.,
paths out of prison) in settings that curtail
prisoner dissent and political voice. Beyond
the United States, these insights bear on transnational movements working inside-out of
repressive regimes (e.g., exiled dissidents and
rights advocacy organizations that provide
resources to and publicize the experiences of
repressed populations in authoritarian China
[see Chen 2016]).
A second finding is that, at least for the
long-term prison population, the emergence
and shape of prisoner mobilization appear
to be closely related to material conditions
and the reactions those conditions elicit. This
observation makes sense, given the harsher
prison conditions people experience under
mass imprisonment compared to earlier eras
(Berger and Losier 2018; Thompson 2016).
This finding also complicates prior research
on prison “riots” (or rebellions) that conclude
it is “not the physical condition of the inmates
that matters [for mobilization] but their mental state; not their ‘objective’ deprivation (at
least not directly), but their subjective experience of deprivation and grievance . . . [which
is shaped by] a mediating linkage of cognitive
processes” (Useem and Kimball 1991:204;
see also Goldstone and Useem 1999). Rather
than placing objective conditions and subjective processes in opposition, this study
specifies a model whereby certain physical
conditions elicit visceral reactions conducive
to mobilization. That said, this model was
developed based on the experiences of longterm prisoners and may not be as successful
in explaining mobilization in other prison
contexts or in explaining rebellions or other
forms of collective action not featured in
this study. Assuming those scope conditions,
American Sociological Review 90(4)
this study likely supports previous arguments
that different forms of collective action (e.g.,
spontaneous, short-lived actions like rebellions opposed to sustained movements) may
be driven by different social movement processes (see Useem 1985:686).
Third, despite showing that repressive
conditions can motivate prisoners to mobilize, this article also details the high barriers people in prison must surpass to mount
and sustain collective mobilization. As in
other historical contexts (Finkel 2015), fear
and submission are the common responses in
present-day prisons. Most incarcerated men
did not engage in political action because
the perceived costs outweighed the benefits.
Some of those who tried to collectively mobilize ended up using more individual routes
to contest the prison system, largely out of
necessity because they lacked the support
of a defined, mobilized group. Still, other
cases show that even when a threat is shared
and recognized as such by others, it will not
necessarily lead to mobilization. Rather, it
was when incarcerated men faced threats
that were viscerally felt, widely shared, and
seen as a collective problem that their efforts
usually produced collective mobilization.
And even in such circumstances, prisoners’
capacity to sustain their mobilized activity in
response to perceived embodied threats was
shaped by their capacity to tap into preexisting prisoner groups.
These findings offer new insights for
research on mobilization in prisons and other
highly repressive regimes. Prior research has
used historical case studies to examine mobilization in prison settings in response to genocide or other significant repression (Einwohner
2006; Finkel 2015; Maher 2010; O’Hearn
2009). That research investigates ethnic communities under significant threat where collective identity and a sense of linked fate
are already primed. The repression, imprisonment, and targeted state violence to which
these groups are subjected is based largely on
their membership in an ethnic group; they are
punished collectively, and there is widespread
sentiment that the state is targeting them based
Knight
on their group belonging. The mass imprisonment case in the United States differs in some
important ways.
As Angela Davis (2003) and Manning
Marable (2002) observe, the power of the
U.S. prison regime lies partly in its capacity to
cast collective problems and racially unequal
processes in terms of individual wrongdoing,
thereby legitimating the racially concentrated
and racially patterned effects of imprisonment in the United States. The U.S. prison
system “presents itself to the world as a correctional system that is theoretically fair and
essentially color-blind” (Marable 2002:162).
Consequently, prisons remain legitimate in
the eyes of many, if not most, people in the
United States (Enns 2016). Even though prisons confine concentrated numbers of Black
men, for instance, these men do not necessarily enter with a sense of collective identity
with others like them (see, e.g., Walker 2022).
In other words, although groups targeted with
repression often have a sense of group consciousness (Finkel 2015), collective identity
cannot be presumed, especially in contexts
like U.S. prisons that foreground individual
interests and culpability.6
These structural, interpretive, and ideological factors create unique barriers to prisoner mobilization that are not accounted for
in the literature on high-risk collective action.
In this article, we see how imprisonment
structures individual concerns that then pose
obstacles to the formation of the collective
identity necessary for mobilization to occur.
Here, collective responses to threat are rarely
the only option. Rather, individual options
can appear to have greater upsides for one’s
own circumstance, especially given the possibility of retaliation if a prisoner does resist.
Although prisons are congregate settings,
punishments are meted out individually, and
every individual’s prison sentence (even if
they have co-defendants) is specific to their
criminal case. The extent to which imprisoned men form a sense of collectivity is not
merely a byproduct of group-level patterns of
imprisonment; it results from more specific
experiences that must be shared.
685
Finally, the widespread legitimacy of
the prison system and negative framing and
resource deprivation of those who are incarcerated limit the range of potential allies
and supporters available to people in prison
(for reference, see Barkow 2019; Davis
2003). Irish political prisoners, for instance,
were aided by the broad support of outsiders
who saw the state and its prison system as
repressive and illegitimate (O’Hearn 2009).
Incarcerated activists in the United States,
in contrast, are generally seen as criminals
rather than as political prisoners (Berger
2014b; Gottschalk 2015). Consequently, as
the interview data show, people in prison
face significant difficulties forging connections with outside organizations and wouldbe supporters.
It is therefore striking that the greatest
share of prisoner activists and organizers in
the interview data are prisoners who endure
the most severe and isolated penal conditions (e.g., solitary confinement, natural life
in prison, death row). The embodied nature
of the threat helps explain this. When perceived on the body and in prison units among
people who endure similarly threatening circumstances, threats of premature death and
incapacitation can motivate people to mobilize despite the resource deprivations they
face. Over time, these same people (who are
often long-term prisoners) are able to build
political knowledge, skills, and outside networks to better contest the system. This political trajectory resonates with comparative
research in Latin America on how imprisonment produces political activists and collectivities, but I show how the process unfolds
differently when the state maintains relatively
high authority and legitimacy, compared to
nations like Brazil, where criminal groups
exercise political authority and governance
functions in the absence of state oversight
(see Biondi 2016).
In closing, this article explores the processes whereby visceral reactions to perceived threats motivate incarcerated men to
devise new political strategies around the
constraints of the prison state. These issues
American Sociological Review 90(4)
686
warrant further investigation, for example,
concerning jails, women’s incarceration, and
prisons outside the United States, which were
beyond the scope of this article but would
help elaborate a study of mass imprisonment
that more comprehensively accounts for how
power is exercised and transformed in the
prison system. As shown in my interviews,
mass imprisonment does not simply foreclose mobilization but affects how it unfolds
(Berger 2014a).
4.
Acknowledgments
I thank Cathy Cohen, Maricarmen Hernández, Tey
Meadow, David Meyer, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Mary
Pattillo, Mario Small, Diane Vaughan, Robert Vargas,
Andreas Wimmer, Amy Zhou, the Summer Research
Institute of the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice
Network at the University of Maryland, the participants
at the University of Notre Dame Center for the Study
of Social Movement’s Early Career Scholars Conference, the anonymous reviewers, and especially Adam
Reich and Emma Frankham for their feedback on earlier
versions of this paper. I also thank Jack LaViolette for
geocoding support.
Funding
This article is based upon work supported by a National
Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences Grant
(SES-1921205), a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-1144082 and DGE1746045), a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship,
and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions
or recommendations expressed in this article are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Science Foundation or other funders.
ORCID iD
David Jonathan Knight
-2569-8419
https://orcid.org/0009-0006
Notes
1.
2.
3.
Mass imprisonment refers to the historically and
comparatively unrivaled rate of imprisonment in the
United States, as well as the “social concentration
of imprisonment’s effects,” where imprisonment
“ceases to be incarceration of individual offenders
and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole
groups of the population” (Garland 2001:5–6).
Drawing on Tilly (1978:69), I define mobilization
as a collective enterprise: “the process by which
5.
6.
a group goes from being a passive collection of
individuals to an active participant in public life.”
Individuals may attempt but fail to develop their
political activities into sustained, collective telltale
features of mobilization. Instead, they may only
be able to engage in individual acts of contentious
politics, which I refer to as individual political contention.
By repression, I refer to actual or threatened sanctions against an individual or collectivity meant to
increase the cost of collective action or undercut
specific mobilization activities or beliefs understood to challenge state practices or institutions
(Davenport 2007:2; Earl 2011).
Other kinds of threat include status-based threats
(e.g., threats to economic status, citizenship status,
neighborhood status or property values, and racial/
ethnic hierarchies; see Almeida 2019).
The Death Row Ten were part of a group of over
120 African Americans tortured by police detectives under then-commander Jon Burge between
1972 and 1991 (Ralph 2019).
The interview cases in this study show that although
concentrated numbers of Black men experienced
imprisonment, racial and ethnic identity was not
the central basis around which men mobilized.
Rather, they typically mobilized around embodied
threats, which is understandable given that Black
men are more exposed to these threats relative to
others (e.g., they are more likely to receive long
prison sentences, experience solitary confinement,
and be denied parole, see Ghandnoosh and Barry
2023; Pullen-Blasnik et al. 2021; Resnik et al. 2016;
Schwirtz, Winerip, and Gebeloff 2016).
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David Jonathan Knight is an Assistant Professor of
Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University, where he is part of the Justice Collaboratory at
Yale Law School. A political sociologist of the carceral
state, he investigates how communities experience mass
incarceration and mobilize in response to it. His research
has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology,
Annual Review of Criminology, and Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. He currently directs the
Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab (based at
the Incite Institute), which uses archival and survey
methods to explore the politically contested nature of
the prison state.