Eric James Stephens, Clemson University
Putting Aside Race... For a Moment
Theorizing Prisons
How does technical and professional communication function in prisons?
"Ethics of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust"
Katz (1992)
"Here, as in most technical writing, I will argue, in most deliberative rhetoric, the focus is on expediency, on technical criteria as a means to an end. But here expediency and the resulting ethos of objectivity, logic, and narrow focus that characterize the most technical writing, are taken to extremes and applies to the mass destruction of human beings. Here, expediency is an ethical end as well" (p. 257).
Discipline and Punish
Foucault (1977)
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. . . . [I]n short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers" (p. 201).
Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude
Cavarero (2016)
"It is rather to think relation itself as originality and constitutive, as an essential dimension of the human, which--far from limiting itself to putting free and autonomous individuals in relation to each other, as the doctrine of the social impact--calls into question our being creatures who are materially vulnerable and, often in greatly unbalanced circumstances, cosigned to one another" (p. 13).
Another Video!
Site of Study: Inmate Handbooks
a traditional rhetorical analysis
"This handbook is designed to serve you as a guide for institutional living by setting forth the major rules, regulations, and policies of the Alabama Department of Corrections. There are rules, such as the laws of the United States or the State of Alabama, which apply to everyone. There are rules for people where they work, and rules for members of the family in which they live. It is important to follow these rules so that we can live and work together without problems and without unnecessary friction. There are rules and regulations for inmates committed to the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections. They are designed to help the inmate population live together as safely and as comfortable as possible."
The Process
Step 1: Gather the Data
Step 2: Index the Data
Quantitative Content Analysis
Natural Language Processing
Identifying Actors (cf. Spinuzzi's Network)
Possible Human-Actors to Emerge: inmates, correctional officers, wardens, external families, internal families
Step 3: Reestablish an Hypothesis
A continuum of discipline: rewards vs. punishments
External measurement tool: recidivism statistics from Bureau of Justice Statistics
Step 4: Develop Coding Schema
Step 5: Train Your Coders
Step 6: Testing Inter-coder Reliability
Step 7: Put Coder Research into the Computer
Step 8: Repeat Steps 5-7 until the Computer Can Do It Better than a Human
Latent Semantic Analysis
Step 9: Look at Your Results
Step 10: Make them Look Beautiful
Gephi, Tableaux
Step 11: Get a Job
Bringing Race back into the Picture
Future Research
Sites of Study
- Correctional Officer Handbooks
- Training Materials for Prison Staff
- Syllabi and Application Materials for Educational Courses
- Legislation for Prisons
Implications
- Local vs. State vs. Federal
- American legislation vs. [insert any country here]
- Public vs. Private
- Correctional Facilities vs. Immigration Detention Centers
Dissertation: How do inmate handbooks, as a TPC genre, seek to enact "corrections"?
Larger Goals: Developing new, open-source tools to re/create ethical big data analysis methodologies.
Driving Question: How can I use these tools to re/discover and disrupt narratives to enact social justice?
(Jones, Moore, & Walton, 2016)
Thank You!
Eric James Stephens, Clemson University, esteph5@clemson.edu
Credits:
Created with images by PublicDomainPictures - "black business computer" • janetmck - "DATA" • Brett Jordan - "Binary" • Unsplash - "books library education" • chrizzel_lu - "road wood nature"