Prison, Material-Organizational Bricolage, and Precarious Frameworks of Normality in an Era of Disruption

Bibliographic Data

ID3756985
AuthorsNoah Mcclain (0000-0002-4285-1546, Santa Clara University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume68
Issue9
Pages1200-1215
Publication date2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Behavioral Scientist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7642 • E-ISSN: 1552-3381
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00027642231155378
OpenAlexW4322500341
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited23

Prison scholars have long noted prisoners' improvisation with materials and resources at hand (or bricolage) in ways that defy the prison regime. Yet longstanding scholarly perspectives which cite such bricolage as evidence for themes like "prison culture" or "resistance" have often distracted scholars from accounting for the specific features of organizational materials and operations that prisoners leverage in their bricolage, and distracted from the rather mundane nature of the practices-like grooming, cleaning, and eating-they thus serve. Drawing from interviews with de-incarcerated persons from a U.S. state prison system, and from documents memorializing the disruption of prison routines during COVID-19 pandemic in that same state, this article investigates the specific resources prisoners enlist in bricolage projects related to making and sharing meals. Those resources, I argue, are the material and organizational products and byproducts of the complex prison undertaking. The practices prisoners achieve are precarious, with low degrees of equifinality-there are only so many ways to accomplish them in contexts of comprehensive restriction. The COVID-19 pandemic threatened those delicate arrangements not only through problems in the acquisition of raw food materials, but also through disrupted institutional routines which offer the resources necessary to coordinate, assemble, and transform those materials into meals. This pattern comes into focus when the "prison food system" is approached as a consumption system like any other, though one which operates in a strictly regulated context with minimal materials and deeply curtailed choice

Bricolage · Context (archaeology) · Criminology · Political science · Prison · Public relations · Sociology · Visual arts · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · History · Homelessness and Social Issues

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