My Euphemism: How Much Do Words Matter?

I never put much thought into the matter before I went into prison, but since I have come out, I have had to start familiarizing myself with a matte of language I had previously largely ignored: what do you call a person who is or has been in prison? The obvious answer is “his/her/their name,” but such glibness gets us nowhere. After all, the whole point of having nouns for someone who has been through the carceral system is to mark them as such. If we just called people by their names, it would signify that we don’t it doesn’t really transform a person to have been through the justice system, and if that were true, then what would be the point of having a justice system? If I could go back to being just my name, the baggage that the law must necessarily attach to me would be virtually weightless. It would be a world of potentially fresh starts, but that is not the world we have set up for ourselves.

In this blog, it may be a bit a question begging to even raise the matter. After all, my premise is that I were a scarlet letter, and my purpose it to explain the complex ways in which that letter is created, displayed and maintained. For my own part, I’m not especially worried about whether I’m called an offender, a former inmate, an ex-felon, a formerly incarcerated person or a variety of other things; they are all unique threats in the embroidery of the letter. My main point today, however, is that the more important part of the language puzzle at stake here is that there is really no term for a person who has not been to prison. People who goes through the justice system are marked by the very absence of a noun for people who have not made that trip. It shows us that the former are clear abominations while the latter are a unseen norm. Given the voracious appetite of the American prison industrial complex, that unmarked norm is becoming rarer and more valable every year.

So why does this matter? Maybe first we can look at a few examples of how this marked and unmarked language functions to fill our minds with powerful images. I just too a few seconds to look up synonyms and antonyms for the term “felon.” In the synonym category, here are just a few of the terms I found: crook, drug dealer, extortioner, goon, jail bird, recidivist, gangster, hood, rapist, lawbreaker, and thug. When I looked up “criminal,” I found the following synonymous terms (among others): lawbreaker, malefactor, miscreant, and offender. Just a moment’s thought makes it pretty clear that none of these is a friendly term, and that many of them are applied to people who aren’t even convicted of anything. Rather, they can often attach simply by impression, further prejudice, and annihilate reputation. The fact that so many of them are also recialized or ethnicized in contemporary American English is also a factor worth considering, though I’m going to save that for another post.

When I looked up antonyms for “felon” and “criminal,” the result were much sparer but also, in that aparsity, far more instructive. I’ll leave aside the computer-algorithm-generated opposites that make no sense at all and just focus on these still-odd terms I found as the opposite of “felon”: straight line and liberator. The second is the one which gets to me in a seriously ironic way: The never convicted judge and prosecutor who sent me to prison are liberators? I don’t even know how to begin to dismantle such foolishness. I’ll just chalk it up to the fact the good dictionaries and thesauruses are hard to find. When I looked up “criminal,” Merriam-Webster suggested “gangbuster” and “lawman” as “near antonyms,” failing to give a true antonym. It seems all very 1930s Junior G-Man, doesn’t it? Another source suggested the following: right, guiltless, innocent, clean-handed, legal. While there is much to be made of all those words, particularly in the slippage between adjectival and noun forms, it’s guiltless and innocent which really grab my attention.

Perhaps we can take this back to American Puritanism (from which I am, in part descended), but to me guiltlessness and innocence are two of the most problematically fetishized concepts in contemporary America. One aspect of Puritan doctrine, and one of the chief ironies of The Scarlet Letter, is that as far as my good old Protestant ancestors were concerned, none of us were guiltless or innocent. At least not according to a strict reading of the Bible. After all, that whole story in the Gospel According to John, Chapter 8, whether or not it was in the original Gospel itself, has had a pretty good run. Guiltlessness and innocence are not of this world. The general point of Christianity is that only Jesus was sinless, and even that may be more than a bit of a stretch. And yet think about how much of contemporary political discourse today revolves around the creation and maintenance of ideals on innocence. If we can’t find it in ourselves, we seek to project it onto others so we can then have a convoluted, Christlike roleplay of defending or preserving it. We learned all kinds of fucked up things from Dragnet, including that cop shows, which fetishize guilt and crime, also change names to “protect the innocent,” even while producing a discourse of innocence for which the law enforcement system is the savior. What’s also somewhat troubling to be is the way in which innocence has also come to carry with it a sense of ignorance; that is, one is innocent not simply if one is not harmed, but but also because one doesn’t know what is going on. The sense of being unaware now adds to one’s innocence. This is why the people subjected to police violence, for instance, must always be painted as somehow originally deviant. This is why so many victims of sexual assault are represented as sexually knowing by defense attorneys.

Certainly we can all become victims of some crime. But at what point can we be victims and still not have to be swathed in artificial innocent? What would happen if we were to acknowledge that we are all guilty of some things and guiltless of others? Most importantly for this blog, what would happen is criminals and felons served their time and then we back to the great unmarked and unnamed norm? What if we were to have a justice system that didn’t depend on permanently marking the deviant? What if I could just be called by my name? Would you be harmed? Would the nation collapse? The nation just might collapse, but that might make the nation that much better in its rebuild.