Can the “psychiatric prisoner” speak?

Abstract

This chapter argues that Convict Criminology has played a major role in posing the necessity to rely on the “first-hand experience” of prisoners for the production of scientific knowledge about the penitentiary. In this sense, giving voice to the convict themselves has been a way to challenge the “hierarchy of credibility” which lies at the core of the prison system, recognizing the legitimacy of discourses which are contrasting with the official ones. With this chapter, I would like to make a step further, reflecting on the differentiation made by the prison staff between plausible and implausible voices within the convict population. In particular, I would like to analyze how psychiatric knowledge in prison works as a dispositive which reconfigures downward the hierarchies of credibility. Inherent to the process of psychiatrization, there is, in fact, a fundamental disqualification of the voice of the patients, which come to be considered as biased by the effects of the pathology: the voice of the “psychiatrized” is thus regarded to be worth only as a symptom, thus deprived of any epistemological and political validity. Using some field notes I collected in different Italian prisons over the last two years, I will try to point out the potential of Convict Criminology in challenging the “epistemic violence” which is involved in prisoners’ psychiatrization: in mixing with other critical knowledges – such as disability studies, in this case – I believe that Convict Criminology may be a powerful tool to re-create an “espace des enonces” which is freed from any ableist assumption: an epistemological space in which the word of the “psychiatric prisoner” returns to be hearable for what it says, depicting a peculiar and situated account of the prison experience.