RT Article
T1 Whitening Black Men: narrative Labour and the Scriptural Economics of Risk and Rehabilitation
JF The British journal of criminology
VO 63
IS 5
SP 1091
OP 1107
A1 Warr, Jason
LA English
YR 2023
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1869015363
AB ‘You know what? You can’t be a "Black Man" in prison.’ Negative impositions of Blackness, grounded in the myths of Black Criminality, shape assessments of risk and rehabilitation within the scriptural economy of the contemporary prison. This creates a rehabilitative colour line that results in specific forms of narrative labour, whereby prisoners attempt to control the recording and interpretation of their Black identities. From Social Relations, to Appearance, to Language Use, more of the life of a Black prisoner is interpreted negatively than other prisoners. This paper explores how Black lifers, are forced to adopt narrative labours that ‘whiten’ their ‘Blackness’ in order to mitigate their perceived risk and navigate the prison’s pathways to release. This article is based on quasi-ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two prison sites between 2011 and 2014 in which more than 120 indeterminately sentenced prisoners were consulted.
NO Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 1105-1107
K1 Prison
K1 Rehabilitation
K1 Blackness
K1 Narrative
K1 narrative labour
K1 Racism
DO 10.1093/bjc/azac066