How Should We Refer to People in Prison?

In response to an earlier post, a friend forwarded me An Open Letter to Our Friends on the Question of Language, an interesting piece from the Center for Nu Leadership on Urban Solutions (a pdf is here.) The letter points out that people often use dehumanizing terms to refer to prisoners—animals, predators, sex offenders, and so on. Those of us hoping for reform in the treatment of incarcerated people, it goes without saying, shouldn’t use these terms.

            The letter’s argument, however, is that the official terminology of the criminal justice system is no better. It asks people to stop using terms like inmates, convicts, prisoners, and felons, as these terms have negative connotations; they “identify us as ‘things’ rather than as people.” In their place, the letter makes a simple request: “[R]efer to us as people. People currently or formerly incarcerated, people on parole, people recently released from prison, people in prison, people with criminal convictions, but people.”

            As controversy last month over references to Chelsea Manning in the mainstream media reminds us, calling people what they ask to be called is a foolproof strategy to not being a jerk and any other strategy can get dicey. However, my first instinct is to question the letter’s instruction. First, of course, there are over two million people in prisons and jails, hundreds of thousands in immigration detention facilities, and many millions more under some form of state supervision. They’re a vast and heterogeneous group; no individual or organization speaks for all, or even most of them. Setting aside the representation issue, I have two other concerns.

            First, as a (wannabe) writer and a (wannabe) lawyer, I feel uneasy about replacing words—with specific meanings and as defined in law—with clunky phrases. For example, whether someone committed a felony or a misdemeanor can have serious ramifications for a person’s access to public housing or a person’s immigration status. This distinction is important because laws and judicial decisions have singled out people who have been convicted of felonies; criticizing those laws and decisions is difficult if referring to the group affected as “felons” is universally out-of-bounds. (Above, I used “people who have been convicted of felonies.” It’s long, clunky, and in the passive tense. The dictionary defines “felon” as “Person who has committed a felony,” which is shorter but inaccurate—think of the exonerees, who were convicted of a felony, but didn’t commit anything.) I agree that calling any individual a “felon” or “prisoner” might be categorically inappropriate, but being unable to refer to groups of prisoners as such makes it challenging to write about them in a succinct and legally accurate way.

            Second, I worry about ceding the field on terms like “prisoner” and “inmate.” The terms may have a negative connotation in much of American culture, but they don’t for me. And I am not alone, or even uncommon. Millions of Americans have family members or close friends in prisons or jails. Many more who don’t have become aware of the pathologies of our criminal justice system. If progressives abandon terms like prisoners, which are straightforward descriptions and also often the appropriate legal terminology, they leave the meaning of the term in the hands of people who have a more demeaning view of incarcerated people.

            As a general matter, I am completely unpersuaded that America has a political correctness problem. In my experience, people claim it does do so based on a misunderstanding of negative reactions to their derogatory statements. After saying something offensive (say, a homophobic slur), they perceive any criticism as reacting not to substance (“Of course you know what I meant!”) but only to form. The criticism thus seems pedantic and a little self-aggrandizing; ‘ok, you’ve memorized the code words to be acceptable to a certain cultural elite, and I haven’t.’

            But the criticism is about content. A homophobic slur doesn’t deserve denunciation because the word was indelicately chosen from a list of options but instead because it betrays a way of thinking that has done a lot of damage to vulnerable people.

            So am I the jerk from the above story in this case? Clinging to language that others find offensive for its utility and defending myself with “but I didn’t mean it like that?” I think I might be but am not sure. I’m going to try to be more conscious of word choice issues and see how I feel as I have more occasions to face the dilemma in practice. Feedback welcome.