Imprisonment as an Impurity Ritual

 

To state that imprisonment is restrictive and punitive does not require a theoretical background. To state that imprisonment in its modern form is centered on the body is by contract a matter of debate, but given limited time and patience, we will simply say that, regardless of intention, imprisonment acts on the body. And it is clear that prison acts on the body in a certain fashion: repeated actions with both practical and symbolic meaning carried out by a distinct class of person. A corrections officer inspects a bunk, and in that moment there is both the physical act of searching for contraband as well as the reproduced status of the officer over the inmate, the implication today as in every day that the inmate is under the control of the officer. We can thus interpret the goings-on of prison as a bodily ritual, imposed from the top down, with inmates and officials carrying out its ends. And from that perspective, we turn to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger to untangle the particular nature of that ritual and all its constituent parts—in specific, conditions of filth.

Douglas begins with an understanding of dirt as matter out of place; that is to say, what is considered ‘dirty’ is as such because it is found outside of the order the beholder wants. From there, she describes purity rituals to not be borne of some fear of the filthy or unknown, but rather of a positive, re-ordering of the environment (Douglas 2009:2-3). Dirt is relative and  different across cultures, a point she uses to further a criticism of existing anthropological ideas—such discourse is less relevant to us here. Douglas’s dichotomous categories of pure/clean and impure/polluted are directly related to Durkheim’s sacred and profane, and just as in his Elementary Forms, categories are absolute and produced through ritual (Durkheim 2021:152). Durkheim, however, is emphatic that sacred and profane do not exist in hierarchical distinction, but merely an oppositional one—Douglas is less emphatic about this, allowing the possibility for pollution (still relative) to be understood by a culture to be below, lesser than, cleanness, through association with other social categories (e.g. Douglas 2009:154). The other key idea from Douglas here is her emphasis on the body metaphor—“the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system” (142). When a society places ritual emphasis on the treatment of excretion, for instance, it is most accurate to “see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body” (142). Excretion and its bodily enablers are “dangerous,” microcosmic examples of the vulnerability of what is otherwise bounded, which impels the researcher to look closer at those rituals which attribute to the bodily marginal special import (150). Douglas takes all of the above to intervene against a psychoanalytic anthropology, and to explicate her own vision of bodily ritual. I will apply her ideas to a particular, impurifying, bodily ritual in prison.

The opening chapter of Michael Walker’s Indefinite finds the author arrested, and placed in the Providence Downtown Jail—a pseudonym, of course, and not the jail pictured above. A number of other narrative differences differentiate the picture and Walker’s story, but of central importance is the filth. Note in the picture the condition of the doors, rusty liquid leaking from their only orifices. The floor in front is stained yellow. And, of course, the camera does not see inside, inviting an obvious question. The towel placed below one door answers by half—it, too, is dirty, and there are only so many reasons for plugging the bottom of a door. The guard stares straight and stern, pointedly looking anywhere besides the doors. He, of course, wears clean clothes. He holds himself away from the doors and the dripping and the towel. We see here a particular and deliberate impression of pure and impure, of dirty and clean. One easily understands, moreover, the overlap of dirty/clean with the hierarchy of prison. 

Walker’s narrative confirms. While the central thrust of his work is about the composition of time in prison, the introduction, titled “Palace de Excreta,” deals so closely with bodily ‘dirt’ as to require a reading next to Douglas. As a result of his attempt to assert himself in the bureaucratic process, Walker is placed into a single-occupant holding cell. Ten feet by ten feet. The cell is coated in shit (Walker 2022:5). There is no toilet, no furnishings, no means besides one's own legs to avoid the feces. And Walker is fully cognizant of how the Palace came to be: “A person had made that cell look like that. Other persons allowed and ignored it” (5). Besides the obvious fact of the deliberateness of a single-occupant cell, coated wall-to-wall in excrement, designated tacitly but specifically for those inmates who do not immediately comply with the procedure of prison, Walker soon realizes that his cell and his condition are part and parcel of that procedure. Bureaucrats visit him, and tell him what he needs to do with the flat intonation of someone dealing with regularity. “She told me that if I wanted to get out of the Palace, I would need to tell the doctor who would be visiting me next that I was not suicidal or dangerous anymore. [...] I completed the intake process without further incident. [...] Apparently, the ‘treatment’ had worked, and I was all better” (9; 11). Walker here has been subjected to great cruelty, to be sure. But it is a cruelty that is by all accounts a part of the quotidian goings-on of the prison. He is placed in filth, in excrement, processed by the bowel of the prison, and he is shit out the other side as a compliant inmate. Officials look into his cell only in as much as they are required to, and, just as in the image, “no one was watching” (11). Impurity is imposed in a ritualized fashion onto him, onto his body, his scarred wrists, “feet, knees, and scrotum” a location for the prison to make him a prisoner (6). The Palace de Excreta makes Walker bodily and physically impure because he is socially impure. He stands and sits and weeps in the shit because the prison orders him to do so. He leaves, and another inmate will enter the Palace, to be subjected to the same impurity ritual.

Works Cited

 

Douglas, Mary. 2009. Purity and Danger. London, New York: Routledge.

Durkheim, Émile. 2021. “From The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).” in Sociological Theory in the Classical Era. Los Angeles: Sage. 

Walker, Michael L. 2022. Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Widmer, William. 2017. "The segregation unit at Alabama’s St. Clair Correctional Facility." From nytimes.com. 

        Retrieved April 4, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/us/alabama-prison-violence.html