Prison Discourse: Language as a Means of Control and Resistance

by Andrea Mayr

With unique and powerful data from within a big city prison, this book clarifies the role that conversational analysis can have within a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. In a detailed linguistic analysis of the language use of prison officers and prisoners involved in a prison based course, the author charts the shifting power relations of control and resistance and situates the findings in a broader sociological analysis of the prison as an institution. The study will interest sociolinguists, discourse analysts, and researchers in communication studies, criminology and counselling.

269 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Kathrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hello, five people in the world interested in critical discourse analysis applied to the prison context! If you're reading this review because the content of this title actually interests you, I probably don't need to recommend the work of James Paul Gee, Norman Fairclough, or certainly Foucault, Michel to you, but they will be indispensable in parsing this dissertation-cum-manuscript. The first part of Mayr's analysis focuses on the discourse of cognitive skills training in a contemporary Scottish prison, centered on the textbooks authored by Ross & Fabiano. I read this section about 300 times. The second half is an analysis of the discourse of officer-inmate interactions, which I skimmed. This study informed my own research on prison hegemony and the posturing of volunteered "educational" organizations in appropriating authority in a discourse of social control. Mayr states, "...language is the principal means by which organizations create a coherent social reality that frames their sense of who they are" (Introduction, p. 6). This is a useful reminder in the study of prisons, institutions that continue to fail in understanding "who they are," and the created identities of voluntary programs that fill the gap in educational programming where budget cuts and lack of coherent purpose in state-supported education leave a wide-open space for imported -- and sometimes very debilitating -- ideologies, imported, of course, through language.