Communicating Punishment: Cultural Meanings in Dreadful Enclosures

Thomas's goal in Communicating Punishment is to reveal how punishment is experienced in American prisons, in the complex and interconnected nature of prison culture. He focuses on the social processes that engender and maintain prison existence, and examines the difficulties that inmates, guards and administrators have in surviving what have become 'human zoos.' Prisons are analyzed as communication matrices in which there are unique deprivations, violence, prison escapes, prisoners' rights and litigation, and forms of language codes and communication that must be mastered by staff and inmates. His ethnography describes how being a prisoner is more than deprivation of physical and psychological resources, but a total, all-encompassing experience in which the meanings of punishment permeate every space, moment, and interaction. The prisoners' narratives demonstrate how seemingly abnormal behaviors become normal adaptations to an abnormal existence. Thomas shows how prison culture provides both a primary mechanism of punishment as well as the means to resist it. At a time when state and federal prison populations continue to increase, this work is an important source for criminal justice professionals, symbolic interactionists interested in deviance, criminologists, criminal psychologists, and corrections personnel.