Life after Lockup: Moral Conflict and Subjectivity in the Shadow of the California Penal System

Anna Lynne Jordan

doi:10.7273/000006287

Much scholarly research in the anthropology of morality to date has focused on the examination of culturally relative moral rules, ideologies of right and good, and people’s everyday engagement in ethical practices. But what of the ethical lives of people who have been socially and legally sanctioned as criminal? In its authority to assign blame and inflict punishment, the criminal justice system stands as a proxy for the moral ideologies of US society and serves as perhaps the most socially explicit form of expulsion from normative moral citizenship. This dissertation examines the everyday lives and subjectivities of formerly incarcerated adults who live in Los Angeles, California, as they navigate the numerous, morally charged challenges of (re)entry. In it, I trace the echoes of the criminal legal system, and incarceration in particular, through an analysis of various penal logics as they take shape through hegemonic moral values and scaffold the (un)freedoms and (im)possibilities of ethical life for formerly incarcerated people. I argue these values, endowed with meaning within the confines of the prison, produce profound moral conflicts and deeply felt ambivalences for one’s sense of self, belonging, and future. These conflicts range from the more mundane to the world-disrupting and make stark what is often otherwise opaque in literature on morality—liminal spaces of moral subjectivity that lie somewhere between the deviant and hegemonic, where questions of the right and good are murky or even unanswerable, and where ethical flourishing and progress are thwarted. I liken this to a landscape, in that moral conflict of this kind is expansive; it constitutes an experiential and subjective world located outside the dualism of individual moral success or failure. Utilizing a layered analytical structure and a series of in-depth case studies, I contribute novel insights to theory in the anthropology of morality, particularly that which concerns the relationship between freedom and power. Drawing on critical perspectives in anthropological theory and moral philosophy, I demonstrate that the process of navigating moral conflict reveals qualities of ethical subjectivity that belie typical notions of individual ethical striving. In particular, I suggest that it is within the shadow of power and within conflict where relational ethics, such as the search for recognition beyond judgment, care in intersubjective relations, and belonging amidst dispossession, form the fundamental expressions of ethical life.

Life after Lockup: Moral Conflict and Subjectivity in the Shadow of the California Penal System

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