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Prison Masculinities

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This is an excellent collection from a wide range of contributors. As America becomes more and more of a prison nation, prison masculinity is rapidly becoming the model for all masculinity, and understanding it becomes more and more essential not only for gender scholars but for anyone interested in thinking critically about our culture.

Sabo, Kupers and London in their new book Prison Masculinities offer a fresh and probing examination of not only what is wrong with our approach to prisons and prisoners in this country, but the prevailing mentalities and attitudes that actually foster violence both inside and outside prisons. Prison Masculinities offers the reader new insights into historic and current notions of "manhood" and how those notions have dehumanized prisoners and driven the ill-conceived "get tough with criminals" political philosophy that has all but eliminated serious efforts at rehabilitation of inmates. The book is particularly valuable in that it offers a broad range of material from academics, prison reform activists, and inmates who are passionate and brutally honest about this subject. Eminently readable, the content itself is painful to consider, because it chronicles our penchant as a society to revert to harsh measures that don't work because we're more comfortable with vengeance than compassion, because we associate vengeance with "manliness" and compassion with weakness. For those who seek to grapple with why our approach to crime and punishment is a failure, they need look no further than Prison Masculinities.

Many books have been written by, about and for prisoners, but rarely do they have the scope and power of Prison Masculinities. By including poems, essays, and stories from a wide range of individuals involved in the criminal justice system, Kupers, Sabo and London create a dialogue about prisons that examines the often devstating effect of hegemonic notions of manhood. The feminist movement of the 1970's introduced a vocabulary to describe the pitfalls of gender stereotypes in relation to women, in particular, but it also introduced a criticism of normative male gender stereotypes as well. Prison Masculinities incorporates this gender theory, queer theory, and other post-modern thinking to engage the discussion of the effect of "manhood" on inmates before, after, and during their incarceration. The book traces the definition of manhood back to the origin of our country, when masculinity was defined in terms of autonomy and self-control. It then introduces the different incarcations this definition takes in communities where such self-control is often impossible due to poverty, race, and substance abuse. It then follows these men, whose relationship with prevailing notions of masculinity are already fraught with economic and social limitations, into prison, which was created to emasculate and disempower. Prison Masculinities then traces the effects of masculinity on all aspects of inmates' lives, relating it to race, health, sexuality, prison programs, law and male friendships. The book is both thorough and unrelenting. Rarely are so many viewpoints, and opinions gathered in one place to create such a unified voice, all demanding that we undertake a radical re-thinking of our ideas of what it means to be a man, not only for inmates and ex-offenders, but for all men.

Cool as far as it goes, but any book calling itself "Prison Masculinities" that purports to reflect homosexuality, and fails to mention an American artist-genius of prison culture, David Hurles, goes only "skim" deep. As gay-aware as this book is, there should be mention of the pioneering audio-recordings, films, photographs and videos of David Hurles, the sociological artist of cons and ex-cons--and the men who love them. Hurles, even before his work began to appear in print in the "prison masculinity" of "Drummer" magazine in the 1970s, cuts way deeper than theorist Foucault with actual primary material that these editors should have addressed. The French love the declaratory, revealing, documentary work of David Hurles who has lived the life as "Old Reliable Studios" in Los Angeles, picking up the mantle of an earlier icon of cons and excons, Bob Mizer, Athletic Model Guild. Hurles revealed that there is one truth of prison masculinity universally taught: "Gay men are easy marks for ex-cons. There is always money, shelter, and sex." I know a book always has limitations, but apparently not enough research went deep enough in this book (or was politically checked by p.c. censorship)to get at the gay core of what prison masculinities really are in the actual lives of masculine gay men living in gay culture. I would hope that a second edition, or a second volume, could correct this flaw in an otherwise well-intentioned study that could have had valid sales in Gay Studies curricula.