Re-forming the social: Neoliberal voluntarism in the warehouse prison

In 2008, 2.3 million people, or 1 in 100 adults, were incarcerated in the US. Yet, as our reliance on prisons has grown, publicly-sponsored prison rehabilitation has dramatically decreased. Under-studied are the growing number of outside groups that enter prisons to provide educational, therapeutic, religious, art, and self-improvement programs. These groups are part of the tapestry of voluntary activity filling the void left by the dismantled welfare state. Like other projects within this trend, in-prison voluntarism entails bringing members of disparate social groups together and creating new strategies for navigating social divides. But voluntary rehabilitation efforts are also somewhat unique in that they must yield to the rules and technologies of the prison. Using ethnographic and participatory methods, I describe the activities of one such group, Through The Walls (TTW), a program that brings college students into prisons for a semester-long class. In this class, incarcerated and free people engage in "transformative dialogue" about questions like "what are prisons for?" and "why do people commit crime?" Transformation is believed to occur as participants share their emotions, values, and personal experiences. TTW moves participants away from the language and methods of the Prisoner's Rights Movement---which focused on rights, collective action, and legal advocacy---toward a more psychologized understanding of social change through stereotype reduction and the "rehumanization" of insiders. At the same time, TTW prohibits participants from sharing personal information and from having contact outside of the classroom, even after the semester ends. In order to meet the goal of "transformative" dialogue, while upholding the institutional imperative to maintain social distance between the free and incarcerated people, participants are encouraged to perform an 'unbaggaged self---a depoliticized subjectivity that facilitates powerfully-affective stranger intimacy, but precludes collective action. I conclude that TTW reproduces a moralizing and individualizing reconceptualization of 'the social' that is emblematic of neoliberalism at large.