The Proscenium Cage: Critical Case Studies in U.S. Prison Theatr ...

To examine the question at hand obviously requires some comprehension of the prison, particularly its purposes, its customs, its codes, and its social constructions. This in turn requires an examination of prevailing criminological and penological theories, how these theories apply to the reality of prison life and specifically to the artistic process of the theatre. Since these theories are a significant part of shaping the official structure of the prison’s operation, they obviously become necessary in describing how the theatre programs fit into the larger culture. Furthermore, these theories offer suppositions—based on analytical observation—about the psychology, demographics, and lifestyles of criminal perpetrators. These assumptions likewise inform the prison’s operation, and in turn the prison culture. The prison is not only a society within a larger society, it is a society with an overt, specific purpose: the preparation of its inhabitants for re-entry to the mainstream society. Thus, the philosophies and scholarship that guide how this purpose is carried out cannot responsibly be ignored in considering how the theatre operates in the prison setting.

While the concept of rehabilitation as a prime purpose for incarceration has by and large lost currency since the mid-1970s, some vestiges of inmate reformation still haunt the attics of penology. A massive study performed by Douglas Lipton, Robert Martinson, and Judith Wilks, which they published in 1975, proclaimed exasperatedly that “nothing works”—a mantra that American corrections officials have chanted ever since. Previously, rehabilitation had been at the fore of penal administrators’ minds. But as the seventies wore on, and then especially during the 1980s, the mission of mending the inmates’ antisocial attitudes degenerated.

Ironically, this disintegration is seen to have begun as a campaign by prisoners’ rights activists. Starting in California in 1974, reformers argued that indeterminate sentencing practices had led to capricious handing down of different sentences to different convicts for committing identical crimes, depending on circumstances outside the actual criminal offense. The state legislature passed a law in 1976 firming up sentencing to make it more egalitarian but that at the same time made the practices more impersonal.