Abstract
Drawing on theoretical scholarship on adaptation and resistance in prisons, I explore the significance and function of innocence—and the acute sense of non-belonging it triggers in the prison setting—in wrongfully-convicted men's responses to imprisonment. Using in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States, I argue that innocence functioned as a double-edged sword for the men as they adapted to their wrongful imprisonment: Innocence represented a social and psychological burden as men adjusted to prison life, but it simultaneously facilitated their resistance to formal and informal penal control. Through a discussion of how the men leveraged their innocence to distance themselves psychologically, socially, and symbolically from the prison world, I highlight how, despite being victims of egregious injustice, wrongfully-convicted men are also agentic resistors of the penal system.
Introduction
As the number of exonerations in the United States has grown in the past few decades, there has been an accompanying “criminal justice revolution” (Garrett, 2020: 246) focused on identifying and remedying wrongful convictions (Norris, 2017; Norris et al., 2020). Scholarship on wrongful convictions has also rapidly grown in recent years, with studies seeking to determine the extent, causes, and consequences of wrongful convictions (Garrett, 2020). A significantly smaller body of research has explored how wrongfully-incarcerated persons experience prison culture (Azizi, 2021; Campbell and Denov, 2004; Grounds, 2004; Jackson et al., 2021), with scholars in this area exploring how the pains of imprisonment are exacerbated by the injustice of wrongful conviction (Campbell and Denov, 2004; Grounds, 2004; Jackson et al., 2021). For instance, Campbell and Denov (2004) discussed how wrongfully-convicted men pursued a range of adaptive strategies to cope with their imprisonment by (for example) withdrawing from prison life, cooperating with (and assisting) other incarcerated men, seeking a sense of belonging in prison, and focusing on their exoneration cases. Grounds (2004) further described the far-reaching psychological consequences that wrongfully-convicted men experienced following their period of imprisonment, concluding that their acute trauma responses render them more similar to war veterans than other prisoners.
Prior research on wrongful imprisonment has focused almost exclusively on how wrongfully-convicted men cope with their imprisonment, highlighting how they navigate the (often aggressive) environment of men's prisons as innocent men (Campbell and Denov, 2004; Grounds, 2004; Jackson et al., 2021). Although this framing rightfully emphasizes the challenges that innocence poses in the prison environment and the extent to which the wrongfully convicted are victims of state harm (Westervelt and Cook, 2010), it elides the ways in which wrongfully-convicted persons consciously and strategically resist (formal and informal) penal control. For example, Grounds (2004) briefly described how several wrongfully-convicted men embraced aggression as a form of self-protection, and Campbell and Denov (2004) noted that the men in their study refused to acknowledge the “criminal” label, but these scholars framed participants’ strategies largely as coping efforts that wrongfully-convicted men cultivated to survive--rather than resist---penal oppression. The exploratory nature of existing research on wrongful imprisonment provides a valuable foundation for a deeper examination of the complex and multifaceted function of innocence in prison—one that moves beyond a primary focus on the coping efforts of the wrongfully convicted. More generally, wrongful convictions research has remained largely siloed, prompting scholars to advocate for pulling this body of work into conversation with the wider field of criminology (Leo, 2017; Naughton, 2014; Norris and Bonventre, 2015). Indeed, Leo (2017) noted that, despite improvements in wrongful convictions research, our sociological understanding of wrongful convictions is not much deeper than it was a decade ago, when he argued that scholarship in this area was “theoretically impoverished” (Leo, 2005: 213) because of its relative disconnection from criminological research.
How does innocence shape wrongfully-convicted men's responses to the formal and informal control to which they are subjected in prison? In this article, I draw on theoretical research in prison sociology to explore the moral, social, and psychological significance of innocence in wrongfully-convicted men's strategies of adaptation and resistance to penal control. Using in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men, I argue that although innocence represented a heavy burden among participants, it also functioned as a resource for resisting formal control (represented by correctional officers) and lateral surveillance (from other incarcerated men) in prison. In discussing how exonerated men navigated prison life, I thus draw attention to these men's capacities as resistors—and not just victims—of the prison system.
Adaptation and resistance in prison
Penological scholarship has demonstrated that prisoners pursue a wide range of adaptive strategies in response to their confinement. For example, combining Merton’s (1938) and Goffman’s (1961) frameworks, Crewe (2009: 153) argued that prisoners adapt to imprisonment by retreating (often through self-isolation); rebelling; conforming to prison regulations; “innovating” (accepting official goals while rejecting the institutional means of attaining those goals); adopting a superficial but “unenthusiastic” conformity (a practice that may be understood as a form of “ritualism”); and/or by manipulating the system. Despite the control that penal regimes assert over prisoners, power relations in the prison environment are neither linear nor static (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001), and prisoners’ adaptive styles are in turn rarely mutually exclusive (Crewe, 2009). The term “resistance” implies that “power is relational rather than absolute,” and in the prison setting, it allows us to explore how incarcerated persons retain their sense of autonomy in an institution that largely strips them of their ability to be self-willed (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001: 504). However, it is imperative to distinguish acts of resistance from agentic behavior that simply reflects individuals’ efforts to cope with prison life. Although resistance and coping exist on the same spectrum, therefore, resistance should not be understood to be just any act of agency (Crewe, 2009).
To avoid diluting the concept of resistance, Ugelvik (2014: 42) advocated for a Foucauldian perspective on power that frames resistance practices as connected to “specific forms of power.” The “power” side of the power/resistance relationship must therefore be clarified, and power and resistance should be seen as “a continuous game in which forces affect each other” (Ugelvik, 2014: 43). The potential for resistance emerges in even the most tightly-regulated prison settings (Rhodes, 2004) and resistance itself is not confined to explicitly confrontational acts; it also emerges through everyday subversive behaviors and through the reassertion of identities distinct from those proffered by the prison (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001; Crewe, 2012; Ugelvik, 2014). Prisoners construct strategies of resistance through, for example, their relationship with constitutive others (such as the criminal justice system and its actors, correctional officers, and other prisoners), by reimagining and recreating the physical spaces that they inhabit, and through food and mealtime practices (Ugelvik, 2014). When collective political action is unavailable, prisoners may even transform their own bodies into sites of resistance (Ugelvik, 2014) through, for example, self-injury (Chamberlen, 2016). The goal of resistance is thus not necessarily to evade control in prison; it may simply reflect prisoners’ attempts to control more on their terms and reassert their identity as something more than a prisoner (Ugelvik, 2014).
Crewe (2009) argued that—as a response to penal power—resistance is not uniform, and that it is influenced by individual prisoners’ unique biographies and values. For instance, in his typology of adaptations to imprisonment, “pragmatists” did not understand or engage in strategic resistance, whereas “players” were more critical of—and actively resistant to—penal power. Strategies of resistance in prison are also influenced by the level of control that prisoners experience. Although resistance has historically emerged in collective, violent, and explosive forms in prisons that emphasize control of prisoners’ bodies, modern-day resistance strategies are more passive, strategic, and covert as prisons increasingly advance a rhetoric of individualism and self-regulation through the use of psychological—rather than physically coercive—power (Crewe, 2009, 2011; Crewe and Ievins, 2021). As prisoner society has become increasingly fragmented, resistance strategies have thus become more individualized and almost invisible (Crewe, 2009).
Ultimately, most prisoners perform neither absolute acquiescence nor outright rebellion, instead vacillating between conformity and everyday forms of resistance (Crewe, 2009)—what Rubin (2015) defined as “friction.” The narratives of the men in my sample did not reveal clear distinctions between individual expressions of subversion (which Rubin calls “friction”) and the (often collective) expressions of grievance based on perceptions of injustice (which Rubin defines as “resistance”). The blurring of the boundaries between friction and resistance in interviews with innocent men is perhaps unsurprising to the extent that even everyday expressions of dissent among these men are tied to a fundamental sense of injustice anchored in their wrongful convictions. Throughout this article, therefore, I define as resistance all those acts—whether collective or individual—aimed at (re)establishing autonomy in the face of control asserted by the formal penal regime as well as other incarcerated men.
It is important to reiterate that, in exploring how wrongfully-convicted men adapt to and resist control in the prison setting, I am concerned both with the top-down power represented by correctional officers (as actors of the penal regime) and the power asserted by other incarcerated men who function as part of the broader system of surveillance and discipline to which the wrongfully-convicted men were subjected. The extensive body of scholarship on men's prison hierarchies (Ievins, 2020; Maguire, 2019; Sykes, 1958) has only recently been explicitly tied to scholarship on resistance in prison cultures (Ievins, 2020). This research has instead historically focused on how formal power in penal regimes aims to control and regulate prisoners. Crewe (2011), for instance, argued that modern-day penal power does not weigh prisoners down from above as it did in earlier decades; instead, it is better understood as a softer, more diffuse experience of “tightness” that seeks to control prisoners’ bodies as well as their minds. As scholars (Ievins, 2020; Kotova and Akerman, 2022) have recently described, however, disciplinary power in prison is also asserted laterally by other incarcerated men who surveil, police, and regulate the behavior of their peers in ways that replicate and reinforce the panopticon functions of the penal regime. Tightness thus operates via the prison community (through “lateral regulation”) as well as through more formal mechanisms of control in prisons (Ievins, 2020).
Embedded in the research on how incarcerated men police and control one another is the general understanding that surveillance within prisoner society is premised on a normative code. Men who snitch and those convicted of sex offenses, for example, are policed by other prisoners because they have been judged as morally inferior (Crewe, 2009; Ievins, 2020; Maguire, 2019; Ugelvik, 2015). Other men are shunned because they are perceived as weak, perhaps because of drug addiction, an inability to cope with their imprisonment, and/or their immaturity (Ugelvik, 2014). Penologists have begun to focus more explicitly on the ethical work in which prisoners engage as a result of their confinement (Crewe et al., 2020; Laursen, 2022; Seeds, 2021) and in response to their social location within prisoner society (Ievins, 2020). In this article, I build on this burgeoning body of work by exploring how innocent men fit within the normative code that shapes prisoner society. I specifically examine the significance of innocence both as a source of social and emotional vulnerability and a resource that wrongfully-convicted men drew on to set themselves apart—and in many cases above—other incarcerated men and the prison world more generally.
Methods
Data for this study were obtained through in-depth, remote interviews with 15 exonerated men over a period of 4 months. Each of these men was wrongfully convicted for a violent offense and served a prison term that ranged from 4 to 30 years. All participants but one 1 were included in the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE, the most comprehensive database documenting U.S. exoneration cases). Six participants identified as White, six as Black, and three as Hispanic. The men were between 27 and 69 years old at the time of the interview, with a median age of 49. Table 1 contains further demographic information on the participants.
Participant information.
The methodological choice to rely on exonerees in this study (rather than, for instance, including men based on self-reported innocence) (Loeffler et al., 2019) has important implications. On one hand, it is possible (albeit unlikely) that exonerated men may not be innocent, and, on the other hand, there are many innocent men who have not been exonerated. The NRE emphasizes “factual innocence” (whereby evidence indicates that a person did not commit the crime for which they were convicted) rather than “legal innocence” (whereby a wrongful conviction is recognized not on the basis of innocence, but on the basis of “procedural errors that negate the fair trial prerequisite of the Constitution”; Zalman et al., 2008: 75) (The National Registry of Exonerations n.d.). Although the NRE is not an exhaustive list of every wrongful conviction—or even of every exoneration (Zalman and Norris, 2021)—borrowing the NRE's emphasis on factual instead of legal innocence was a deliberate choice to ensure (to the extent possible) that the men in this sample were, in fact, innocent.
In making the decision to include only exonerees, however, I have excluded the voices of innocent men who have not been exonerated. Loeffler et al. (2019) made a different methodological choice, evaluating the rate of wrongful convictions using self-reported data from currently-incarcerated persons. Their finding that “prisoners themselves are often very willing to self-report the correctness of their convictions” (Loeffler et al., 2019: 280) underscores the benefits of operationalizing “innocence” in a broader, more inclusive way. The true extent of wrongful convictions remains a “dark figure” (Poveda, 2001; Zalman and Norris, 2021), and as scholars continue to grapple with how we should think about the rate of wrongful convictions (Zalman and Norris, 2021), my use of exonerations as a proxy for innocence in this study is best seen as a methodological compromise in a context in which I (as the researcher) could not independently prove participants’ innocence.
Before beginning recruitment, I obtained institutional approval from my home institution, and I also submitted a research proposal to the Innocence Network 2 Research Review Committee. This committee (which consists of exonerees, exonerees’ family members, and lawyers/staff at the Innocence Network) provided feedback on my research proposal and suggested some minor modifications to the research design before approving the study. Exonerees constitute an exceptionally hard-to-reach population (DeShay, 2021), and recruiting participants for this study proved to be a very difficult task. Recruitment was especially challenging because of the traumas attached to exonerees’ prison experiences, which many exonerees are understandably reluctant to revisit for the purpose of research even if they are willing to discuss other dimensions of their wrongful conviction experiences. In the hopes of being connected with potential participants, I began recruitment by reaching out to individual organizations that support the wrongfully convicted. When this strategy proved unsuccessful, I ultimately recruited participants through a combination of snowball and theoretical sampling. The former strategy was necessary because of the difficulty in reaching exonerated men, and the latter is a key tenet of the grounded theory methodology I employed.
Relying on professional contacts, I directly emailed and (remotely) met with several exonerees. Some of these men participated in the study, whereas others did not themselves participate, but instead connected me with other men who became participants. One participant also forwarded my recruitment flyer to an email listserv of exonerees with his endorsement of the study. It was apparent from initial analyses of early interviews that race and class were important themes in the data, 3 and I therefore deliberately sought exonerees of color to diversify the sample, which up to that point consisted mostly of White, middle- to upper-middle-class men. I reached out to several non-profit exoneree support organizations, and I also relied on the NRE to reach out to exonerees’ lawyers, requesting that they forward my study flyer to their clients. Using this diverse range of recruitment strategies, I ultimately included 15 exonerated men in my final sample, which contains a wide range of perspectives that were shaped by the men's different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, prior incarceration histories, and early life-course experiences.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to minimize geographic restrictions on sampling an already hard-to-reach population, I conducted the interviews on the phone or on Zoom—a password-protected video-conferencing platform—based on participants’ preferences. I emailed participants informed consent forms, which they reviewed, signed, and returned to me before the interview. The interviews lasted approximately 1.5 hours (with some extending over 2.5 hours) and consisted mostly of open-ended questions related to three thematic areas:
Participants’ early life-course years. In addition to asking some basic demographic questions (related to participants’ age, marital status/history, parental status, employment history, etc.), I asked participants about their early familial and peer relationships as well as about the neighborhoods in which they grew up. Participants’ experiences being wrongfully convicted and thereafter wrongfully imprisoned. I devoted the bulk of the interview to this thematic area, asking participants to describe the circumstances of the crime for which they were wrongfully convicted; how they felt when they learned that they were being accused of this crime and when they were convicted; what it was like entering prison following their conviction; and how they responded to the prison environment, especially given their innocence. In this portion of the interview, I also asked participants about their relationships with other incarcerated men, correctional officers, and with their loved ones outside prison during their period of imprisonment. Participants’ release and re-entry experiences. In the final segment of the interview, I asked participants questions about their pathway to release and exoneration, the challenges they faced upon re-entry, and their present-day wellbeing.
Many participants became emotional when revisiting their traumatic prison experiences, but several men remarked that talking about these experiences in the context of a research interview was helpful for them. When participants appeared to be experiencing emotional distress, I offered to pause the interview, skip questions, or complete the interview in another session. None of the participants chose any of these options, but the research process in this study underscores the sensitivity, reflexivity, and compassion that field research with the wrongfully convicted requires (Westervelt and Cook, 2012). Consistent with the guidelines that the Innocence Network Research Review Committee offered me, participants received a $20 e-gift card as a token of my appreciation for their time and willingness to share their difficult stories. To maintain the highest standard of care and respect during data collection, I sent each participant a transcript of their interview and offered them the opportunity to edit it and/or remove any details they did not wish for me to include (even under their pseudonym) in presentations or publications.
4
I employed a grounded theory approach to data analysis (Charmaz, 2014). Although I draw on research on adaptation and resistance in prison to contextualize my findings, the findings themselves emerged through an inductive, iterative process of data collection and analysis that involved the search for reappearing themes in the data until I reached saturation—the point at which continued data collection was unlikely to yield new findings. Using Atlas.ti—a qualitative data analysis software—I first developed initial codes and searched for emerging patterns in codes across interviews through line-by-line coding. At this stage, codes were both descriptive (e.g., “marital status” or “employment history”) and analytic (e.g., “conviction-related stigma” or “resistance to control”). Next, I performed focused coding to develop more abstract categories, and I used analytic memos and visual “concept maps” (Butler-Kisber and Poldma, 2010) to draw connections between codes and categories. Finally, I synthesized the data to develop discrete themes, which form the basis of the findings I describe next.
Findings
In this section, I first describe the psychological and social weight of innocence as participants adapted to the challenges of wrongful imprisonment. Next, I discuss how, despite the burden it represented, innocence also served as a valuable resource on which participants drew to resist penal control as they navigated day-to-day life in men's prisons. In discussing these findings, I reveal how participants relied on their innocence to develop strategies designed to psychologically, socially, and symbolically resist top-down as well as lateral oppression.
The burden of innocence
The social and psychological burden of innocence preceded participants’ actual prison terms, beginning as soon as they were wrongfully convicted. The men described feelings of extreme shock, anger, betrayal, and disbelief at the moment of their wrongful conviction, at which point their trust in the criminal justice system was abruptly and irrevocably destroyed. Alfred (46, Black), for example, stated that being wrongfully convicted was “like being strapped down in front of a train, seeing it's coming, and you can't get away,” and Fred (61, White) recalled the trauma he felt when the jury returned with his guilty verdict: So when the jury came back with a guilty verdict, I actually fainted in court. Yeah, and you know, I felt my knees getting weak, and the next thing I remember is looking up at the ceiling. And they took me to the hospital, and then they had sentencing the next day. (Alfred)
I was just stunned. I was stunned from the day before, and that night I slept in a holding cell with my suit on and a roll of toilet paper as a pillow. It was, I don't know… I didn't sleep much that night; it was just unbelievable. (Fred)
Once imprisoned, a key facet of participants’ adjustment to their wrongful imprisonment involved their decision-making about whether and to whom they should disclose their innocence. Echoing prior research on the prison experiences of the wrongfully convicted (Clow and Ricciardelli, 2016; Jackson et al., 2021), participants described a reluctance to share the fact of their innocence in prison because, in Alexander's (45, Black) words, “in prison everybody always said they’re innocent.” Moving beyond this finding, however, participants’ narratives also revealed more complicated concerns that shaped their reluctance to disclose their innocence in prison. After deeply traumatizing trials, the men had developed an ingrained distrust, and they kept the fact of their innocence largely to themselves to avoid being betrayed and exploited (again). In sharp contrast to the many men in prison who openly claimed to be innocent, the consequences of actually being discovered as innocent made participants withdraw from social life in prison. Tony (45, Hispanic), for instance, was convinced that other men would undermine his case if he shared his innocence story, and he remained mostly isolated to protect himself from the lateral threat posed by these men: You don't really want to tell people about your case, because then there's another person that's going to try to take your case and snitch on you and lie on you. I was real … I didn't trust people after what happened to me. I didn't.
Highlighting the heavy burden of innocence in the hierarchical prisoner society, Alfred (46, Black) expressed a deeper fear that other men would perceive him as weak because he did not actually commit the violent crime for which he was serving time. Alfred was concerned that disclosing his innocence in prison “in itself makes me a pariah in an environment full of piranhas just waiting to look for the weak to devour,” and Benito (52, Hispanic) similarly worried that others would use his innocence against him, viewing him as “soft” and “vulnerable.” These findings reveal how the danger of lateral surveillance loomed large as innocent men worried about the repercussions of being perceived as “outsiders” in prison. Protectively withholding the details of their traumatizing stories meant that the men often had to bear the burden of their innocence in prison alone, resulting in an even sharper sense of isolation. In Alfred's words, “you don't talk about your case with nobody because you’re trying to get out and you don't want to do nothing to mess yourself up, so that's always on you.”
In contemplating how he would survive his life sentence as an innocent man, Simon (49, Black) masked his sense of non-belonging by deliberately misleading others into believing that he had in fact committed the violent crime for which he was convicted. Simon described how, “as sad as that is,” convincing others that he was capable of the violence that he was accused of committing protected him from correctional officers and other incarcerated men alike. Privately clinging to his identity as an innocent man while publicly embracing the image the system had crafted for him allowed Simon to adapt to the formal threats that guards presented (through, for example, write-ups) as well as the informal ones that other incarcerated men presented (through the risk of violence and victimization). Simon's narrative revealed how any moral superiority derived from innocence did not strengthen (and in fact actually threatened) his social location in the prisoner society, which forced him instead to exploit the status he derived from an inverse identity—that of a violent criminal: I would say, “I got a life sentence. What's you writing me up going to do?” (…) And so eventually the guards realized, “Okay, we could write him a conduct report, but he does have a life sentence and he really doesn't care. And so it's to my advantage to just let that slide.” And then the inmates would think, “Man, he has a life sentence; he's never going home. So whatever he does to me, he could do because he's never going home anyway.” So instead of me saying, “I didn't do it, I didn't do it,” I was more so promoting that I have a life sentence and you don't want to mess with me.
Innocence also posed psychological challenges because participants had no choice but to learn how to navigate the prison environment like other prisoners, regardless of their wrongful conviction. Under these circumstances, the men's recognition that they were enduring many of the same pains of imprisonment that other men faced conflicted with their deep sense of non-belonging. To overcome this unique dimension of their imprisonment, participants distinguished their personal struggles to prove their innocence from the shared oppression they experienced alongside other incarcerated men. Samuel (38, Black), for example, said that “police treat you the same” in prison and that he actually felt like he was “one” with other men in prison because they were all experiencing the same penal oppression. Benito (52, Hispanic) voiced a similar sentiment, and he emphasized that carrying himself as if he was no different from others in prison was crucial for surviving his incarceration. Echoing Simon's worry, Benito explained, “You can't have an impression that just because you’re innocent now you’re better than anyone. You can't do that.” The emotional burden of being innocent in prison was thus exacerbated by the pressure that participants felt to manage and suppress the negative emotions generated by their wrongful convictions, no matter how justified these emotions were.
Despite the fact that they were wrongfully convicted, participants experienced a gradual adjustment to prison life like other incarcerated men (Crewe, 2009). Simon (49, Black), for instance, became a devout Muslim while he was incarcerated, and he described eventually coming to accept his situation as “predestined.” It was only after this transition that Simon decided that he no longer wanted to “act the fool,” and he instead started working actively toward overturning his conviction. Simon's initial decision to pretend that he had committed the crime for which he was wrongfully convicted was validated, however, when he discovered the challenges of surviving imprisonment without the use of violence. Fortunately, Simon's reputation as someone unafraid of confrontation protected him even after his “transformation.” And so when some of these younger inmates would hear stories … because I had stopped going by my street name. And then when someone would hear stories about that person and found out that that person would be me, they kind of couldn't believe. And so they would kind of look at me in a different light and be like, “Oh, okay, man, I didn't know that was you.” And so that was the Jihad I was going through. That was my battle because in my mind I was like, “Okay, I’m trying to do this. I’m trying to be a better person.” But also (…) I know my surroundings, I know my environment. So I’m not going to let this person simply just do this to me. And so that was my battle.
In his first 2 years of wrongful imprisonment, Diego (57, Hispanic) struggled to come to terms with the reality of his 15-year sentence, and he vividly recalled this time as a particularly bleak and tumultuous period marked by persistent conflict. Whereas Simon's adjustment to prison accompanied a broader introspective shift, Diego transformed into what Crewe (2009) called a “stoic” when he realized that he may never succeed in proving his innocence, and that he should thus focus on completing his sentence as peacefully as possible: [The correctional officers] would disrespect me out of nowhere. But after a while, they started backing off on me, because I also went to other different prisons, and by that time I was a little more mature, and I didn't walk around with that chip on my shoulder. I pretty much settled in. A stupid appeal was not going to get me out of here. I’m going to have to behave myself and not take the bait when these guys are trying to antagonize me, because I’ve got to … again, my eyes are on the prize in the future, for my children, not getting killed in here fighting guards.
Even as participants adjusted to the pains of wrongful imprisonment, however, they did not relinquish their capacity to resist the top-down oppression they experienced at the hands of correctional officers or the lateral threats they faced from other prisoners. As I describe in the next section, despite the psychological and social burdens imposed by innocence in prison, participants also harnessed their innocence to resist penal control.
Innocence as a resource for resistance
The most visible forms of resistance do not come from men with the most resistant sentiments regarding their imprisonment, but from those men who are least able to control their anger and frustration (Crewe, 2009). As mentioned in the previous section, several men immersed themselves in violence and conflict in instinctive and overt efforts to resist penal power when they were first incarcerated because of their overwhelming sense of resentment and betrayal. Although many men (including those guilty of the crimes for which they are serving time) may respond to conditions of confinement through such violence, the narratives of the men in this study reveal the extent to which their resistance was rooted not in a generalized frustration, but in their sharp sense of injustice. Samuel (38, Black), for example, stated that his aggression was partly driven by the fact that correctional officers perceived him to be no different from other men who were serving life sentences, even though, in his words, “I know I wasn't supposed to be in there.” Steve (45, Black) voiced a similar thought when he explained why his first few years in prison were so tumultuous: “… for the first few years I was pissed off and I had the attitude of, ‘Oh yeah, you guys want to put me in prison for something I didn't do? I got something for you’.” Caught in a persistent cycle of anger, violence, and disciplinary action, participants relentlessly resisted penal control in the most explicit and visceral ways.
These instinctual responses to injustice must be distinguished from the more deliberate and carefully-considered social (public) and psychological (private) resistance strategies that the men developed over time, which were rooted in the fact of their innocence, and which included selective disclosure of that fact in prison. Although most participants noted that discussing their innocence was a futile exercise at best (and a dangerous one at worst), they were willing to disclose their innocence to: (a) resist the everyday stigma that derived from their status as prisoners; and (b) reject the very fact of their confinement.
Participants used selective proclamations of innocence to distance themselves discursively from other prisoners by establishing that they did not “belong” in prison. By explicitly and strategically communicating their innocence, the men drew a symbolic boundary between themselves and other incarcerated men in an effort to resist the dehumanizing stigma that accompanied the “prisoner” label. Selective disclosure of innocence under specific conditions thus offered participants a pathway to protect their self-image as men who did not “belong” in prison—and who therefore should be exempt from the stigma that other prisoners faced. For instance, Diego (57, Hispanic) noted that he rarely shared the fact of his innocence with other men because he wanted to “settle into doing my time.” Immediately thereafter, however, he described an instance in which he directly confronted another prisoner who brought up the sexual offense for which Diego had been wrongfully convicted. Diego's wrongful conviction for a sexual offense made him particularly vulnerable in men's prisons, and when the stigma associated with his conviction was made apparent by the other prisoner, Diego conveyed his innocence as a way of resisting the lateral threat he faced. There was one guy who made a comment once about rapists, and I put him in check real quick. He said something to me to the effect of … Because at that time, Mike Tyson had been charged with that rape case. He goes, “You boxers really like tree jumping.” And “tree jumper” is a negative term for the rapists who jump out of trees. And I go, “I don't appreciate that, man. I already told you. I’m in here for something I didn't do, and I don't appreciate that comment.” And that was it. He never said it again.
Outside the narrow circumstances when confronting stigma from other prisoners and/or correctional officers required disclosure of innocence, participants were willing to discuss their innocence openly only when they had devoted themselves fully to proving their innocence and leaving prison. Surprisingly, despite the injustice of their conviction, an unflinching commitment to proving their innocence was not a stable and consistent feature of participants’ prison experiences. Recall, for instance, that Simon (49, Black) pretended that he had actually committed the violent crime for which he had been incarcerated, and he fiercely concealed the fact of his innocence from correctional officers as well as other incarcerated men. Simon's first few years of imprisonment were defined by violence and conflict, and it was not until he set his mind to being released that he began to share the fact of his innocence. For Simon, disclosure of innocence reflected a transformation in resistance strategies: instead of resisting specific instances of surveillance and control through violence, he dedicated his time and attention to the much broader and more challenging goal of resisting his imprisonment altogether. In his words, “When I started fighting my case, when I started getting into the courts, then I started telling everybody, ‘Man, I didn't do this. I was wrongfully convicted’.”
The excerpts below from Benito (52, Hispanic) and Fred (61, White) exemplify how disclosure of innocence served more than an instrumental function as part of the men's exoneration efforts; it also represented the men's refusal to accept their fate, regardless of the severe risks that doing so entailed or the low likelihood that disclosing their innocence would actually accomplish anything: The thing is, that when you’re innocent, you got to talk too much because as the proverb or adage says, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And so I used the media to my advantage. We talk about fighting. I didn't have to fight with my fists in prison. I fought less with my fists. Thank God I didn't have to get in trouble as much for that. Instead, I used the pen and the communication. And so I would call the media and they will come and start doing my story. (Benito)
And so [the correctional officers] knew I was there every day working on my case and stuff like that. And I would talk to them and I’d joke around with them, and I would tell them, “I’m innocent. I’m down here to fight my case. I’m innocent.” And whether they believe me or not is irrelevant, but I was going to tell [them]. (Fred)
Beyond strategically divulging information about their innocence in prison, participants also privately harnessed their innocence to maintain their grip on their non-prison identities. Power in prison operates most obviously by curtailing prisoners’ autonomy, and Alfred's (46, Black) narrative revealed how innocent men responded to being transformed into “untrustworthy bodies” that physically personified the risk they were perceived to pose (Ugelvik 2014). Alfred leveraged his innocence to resist the everyday regulation of his body and psyche through repeated reminders that he was innocent and therefore different from other men in prison. Even when his resistance resulted in loss of privileges or further punishment, Alfred refused to acquiesce to what he perceived as the penal regime's efforts to “break me down.” Alfred's resistance represented an assertion of the little autonomy he retained in prison, and it served as a powerful reminder to himself of his status as someone whose identity extended beyond—and was superior to—the prisoner label (Ugelvik, 2014). As he succinctly summarized: “I ain't supposed to be here, so you ain't going to do that to me.” He continues to say: for me psychologically, I wasn't finna be the broke-neck guy that always had to look up to this dude in the control booth to ask for toilet paper. (…) But I understood what they was trying to do. I understood that they wanted to create the inferiority in my mindset to always having to look up to someone in a position of authority and control. In other words, to break me down so that you can make me this more timid and passive inmate, as they’re always referencing to. Because after they took the weights out, they then have…They stopped your body from building up, but they realized that the mind of those individuals was building up and so they’re always about breaking that down. I was like, “No, you’re not going to do that to me. I’m not him, I’m not this guy over here, I’m not that guy over there. I’m not supposed to be in here in the first place so you’re not finna treat me like I’m some sort of wounded dog. No, you won't do me like that.”
Much like Alfred refused to acquiesce to what he perceived as correctional officers’ efforts to attack his psyche, Fred (61, White) described repeatedly opening gates in the prison himself despite a rule forbidding prisoners from doing so. Whereas Alfred's actions reflected his resistance to being further degraded by correctional officers when he did not belong in prison in the first place, Fred's insistence on opening the gates himself was his way of steadying his resolve by reminding himself that he would ultimately be vindicated. Touching the gates thus represented Fred's literal refusal to relinquish his bodily autonomy as well as his symbolic refusal to accept his status as a prisoner. Every time Fred touched the gates, his actions reflected his commitment not “to become institutionalized” and his refusal to relinquish his exoneration fight. Like one rule is, you know, there's what they call crash gates, there's gates in the hallway. And when you come to a gate, if it's open, you can walk through it. If it's closed, you wait for the guard to come and open it. Well, oftentimes if the gate was closed, I would open it myself and walk through it. And I was chastised. “You’re not supposed to touch the gate,” [the correctional officers] chastised. “Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” And mentally, I just kept looking forward to, somehow this will end correctly. Somehow the truth will come out. Even though every morning I’d wake up and I’d look at the bars and say, “What the…am I doing here?”
The findings in this study support Campbell and Denov’s (2004) argument that a focus on exoneration efforts helps wrongfully-convicted men survive their prison sentences. Christian (38, White), for example, reported that he did not “want any problems” from other prisoners who were “jealous” because his case had received national media attention. To avoid conflict with these men, Christian coped with his wrongful imprisonment by spending his time quietly focusing on his fight to prove his innocence. As Crewe (2009) argued, however, it is important to draw a distinction between the adjustments that prisoners make to cope with their imprisonment and the resistance strategies they cultivate. Steve (45, Black) illustrates how, beyond serving as a coping strategy, the men's refusal to abandon their efforts to overturn their convictions was tied to their resistance in prison. Steve constantly told himself, “I ain't do shit to nobody” and he described a fierce, uncompromising commitment to getting out of prison and away from other prisoners, whom he described as “crazy motherfuckers.” Steve needed money to fund his relentless exoneration efforts, however, so he flouted prison regulations by selling merchandise in prison to these men. Steve noted that the prison made almost everything that the men did a violation of some sort, and he was unfazed by the fact that selling merchandise as he did was prohibited. Steve's singular focus on proving his innocence thus fueled his resistance to policies that made little sense to him to begin with: I had to put my big boy smile on and fake like everything's all right, but I’m steady getting denied, absolutely denial. Then I’m hustling, I got to hustle in order to get money...You got that penalty on you. You got that punishment on you. That's that pain on you. See, that's why I said when you asked pain, you got to look at the different degrees of the pain. It's like having one pain in your foot that's this deep, another pain in your foot that's that deep, another pain that's that deep. They’re all associated with pain, some just a little bit worser than other ones.
In summary, despite the unique challenges that innocence posed as men struggled to adjust to being in prison, participants also relied on their innocence to push back against the control that accompanied their imprisonment. Publicly, they selectively disclosed their innocence to distinguish themselves from other incarcerated men and to resist threats from these men in prison. Privately, the men drew strength from the fact of their innocence not only to energize their exoneration efforts, but also to maintain a grip on their pre-prison identities, to resist being treated as if they were the same as other prisoners, and to prevent themselves from becoming institutionalized.
Conclusion
I have argued that innocence functioned as both a burdensome source of vulnerability and a resource for resisting top-down and lateral control in the prison environment. As Ugelvik (2014) described, a full understanding of resistance requires an acknowledgment of the specific kinds of power that are being resisted. The findings of this study reveal that participants were as sensitive to the dangers that their innocence posed in the context of lateral surveillance as they were to the importance of preserving their sense of self in the face of formal penal control. These findings suggest a need for continued development of research on both formal and informal sources of power in prison—and on prisoners’ responses to both kinds of power.
The prisoner hierarchy is shaped by moral judgments (Crewe, 2009; Ievins, 2020), but the men in this study did not enjoy any protection on the basis of moral worth derived from innocence; on the contrary, many participants worried that their innocence would expose them to physical risks if it became widely suspected that they were not capable of the violence their convictions would suggest The finding that innocence rendered participants vulnerable in the prison environment in ways that are surprisingly and strikingly similar to prisoners with stigmatized identities (such as those of men convicted of sex offenses) (Ievins, 2020; Maguire, 2019) points to the urgency of continued exploration of the complex relationship between the moral and social dimensions of prison worlds.
Despite participants’ general hesitation in proclaiming their innocence publicly, they selectively disclosed their innocence in specific instances when trying to resist lateral control and in their efforts to reject the fact of their confinement altogether. Further, the men privately relied on their innocence to engage in the self-work required to distance themselves from the prison and its other residents. Although the men's deep sense of non-belonging made their adjustment to prison life particularly difficult, they thus leveraged this same sense of non-belonging to fuel their efforts to prove their innocence, to remind themselves of their moral superiority relative to other men in prison, and to preserve a semblance of their pre-prison identities. These findings highlight that although wrongfully-convicted men are no doubt victims of egregious miscarriages of justice, their capacities as resistors of penal power should not be erased.
Although I limited my sample in this study to exonerated men, future researchers should continue to build on the relatively limited scholarship on the experiences of wrongfully convicted women (Konvisser, 2011, 2015; Ruesink and Marvin, 2005), focusing in particular on how these women respond to prison cultures that are likely to be very different from those that the men in this study encountered. This avenue of research is particularly important if we are to understand more fully the gendered nature of wrongful conviction experiences. Finally, although I deliberately pursued a range of recruitment strategies to include a diversity of perspectives in this study, participants had generally served long prison sentences after being wrongfully convicted of violent crimes, and their wrongful imprisonment experiences may differ from those of men serving shorter sentences. Future researchers may thus explore the possible divergences in adaptive strategies of wrongfully-convicted men serving a wider range of sentences.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Dr Bosworth and the anonymous reviewers at Theoretical Criminology for their helpful feedback, and Kimberly J. Cook, Jeffrey Deskovic, Liz Franklin, Andrew Madrigal, Rafael Madrigal, Maurice Possley, Allison Redlich, Catherine Tan, Sarah Trocchio, and Elizabeth Webster for their help during the early stages of data collection in this study. I am especially grateful to Robert Norris and Alex Sinha for their invaluable input on earlier drafts of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
