Stigma, Citizenship, and the Political Subjectivation of Offenders' Families

A coherent theoretical understanding of stigma has long pervaded the academic imagination, as divergent stigma-concepts have both contextualised and problematised normative frameworks. As an object of criminological evaluation, the consequences of stigmatisation connote a distinctive pattern of marginalisation for offenders and their families--in which penal power is exercised to maintain hierarchies of oppression. Erving Goffman's book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) introduced the formative definition of stigma still widely adopted by social scientists. Yet, as Hinshaw rightly suggests, '[t]here has been an explosive growth of research and theorising about stigma in the decades since Goffman's conceptualisation' (Hinshaw 2009: 25). Criminology, however, has proven hesitant to disrupt settled meanings of stigma--leaving questions as to what stigma is and how it might be weaponised as an extension of the carceral state.

Further to this, a recent disciplinary preoccupation with the 'collateral effects' of mass imprisonment on the families of prisoners (Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999: 121) has rendered visible the role of stigma in constructing a class of citizens deemed responsible for and complicit in their relative's offence. Applying Cooper and Whyte's (2017: 3) analysis of stigma as 'a bureaucratised form of violence' to the contemporary family, this study advocates for an 'inclusive' sociology of punishment that legitimates the prisoner's family as a dynamic participant in criminogenic worldmaking. Furthermore, this thesis introduces a theoretical reconsideration of stigma as a political tool operated by state actors to subjugate marginalised communities by way of criminal legal mechanisms. Adopting Foucault and Rancière's notion of subjectivity as the 'double face of self-making and being made' (Krause and Schramm 2011: 128) --and using the United States as an illustrative case study--I contend that the experiences of prisoners' families can be mapped onto broader arguments around stigma, carceral citizenship, and power, providing the first full-length consideration of the family as an active political subject.