Simone Nguyen - America as a Carceral State
Simone is currently preparing to teach English in Madrid for the next year through the NALCAP program. Upon returning home, she will pursue a fellowship in public affairs to gain experience in public policy and local government.
Area of Concentration Courses
Sociology 149P - Sociology of Policing
Sociology 140 -Politics and Social Change
History 100D - Crime, Punishment, and Power in U.S. History
Legal Studies 160 - Punishment, Culture, and Society
Thesis
"We Gotta Find Our Own Again": Discipline, Insight, and Redemption in Parole Narratives of California Lifers
In 2011, a slew of legislative and judicial battles forced California to address its overcrowded prisons, a problem that has plagued the carceral system since California’sintegration into the United States. Parole, a form of conditional release where former lifers serve the rest of their sentence in the community, was seen as a feasible solution for decarceration.
After 2011, more lifers began to be released from prison under this particular status. Discourse about parole often adopts a criminological lens, interrogating the factors that contribute to a “successful” parole measured by low recidivism rates. Crucially, missing from this conversation are narratives of lifers themselves, whose liberation hinges on creating a neat and orderly story of punishment and redemption. This paper draws on oral and written testimonies of former California lifers to interrogate “insight”1—an ambiguous assessment of dangerousness, risk, and responsibility that ultimately distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful parole. “Insight” is a technique of power that requires lifers to reiterate and reproduce American, neoliberal penal objectives, and many internalize these logics in their understandings of parole and incarceration.
However, former lifers also carve out a space of resistance in their parole narratives. Thus, this thesis complicates understandings of “insight” and parole, finding that former lifers are active agents in the construction of their parole experience, both embracing and rejecting state ideals.
