The Prisoner’s Condition

Abstract

In asking what it means for prisoners to perform Shakespeare, there is an underlying assumption that it must mean something other than, or beyond, that which it means for non-incarcerated people. Implicit in the question is the notion that prisoners are somehow different to the general population. These differences could be a result of who prisoners are, as a class of people a priori, that distinguishes them from the general population. This ties in to the notion of a criminal class, a kind of person who commits crime, whose qualities are determined by social conditioning, genetics, or some combination of those. On the other hand, as Heritage has argued (Dekker, 2014), we are all capable of crime, and those who are incarcerated are not intrinsically any different to those who are free. Social conditions contribute to the expression and degree of transgression of our antisocial urges, and how they are treated by society, which ultimately result in whether people are punished by incarceration or not. This chapter focuses on the psychological and social conditions in which prisoners are found while incarcerated, both those that come from their personal history prior to incarceration and those subsequently found within the prison system.