Hard Cases: Prison Tattooing as Visual Argument

As I moved through the prison with my cameras, I became fascinated with the tattoos. I saw thousands of them.... A few times, I encountered Justice. She was patterned after the traditional figure, blindfolded and holding her simple scales. I questioned a convict in the gym about his blind Justice, a statuesque figure draped so both full breasts fell free of her gown. "This is as far as it goes," he said, shifting a thirty-pound dumbbell from his right hand to his left and starting to count out a set of slow curls. I asked what he meant. "I mean, man," he grunted, "there is no fucking justice. The bitch's a whore." --Douglas Kent Hall (46) The penitentiary offers an intriguing opportunity to engage the rhetoric of the everyday, to investigate how people make arguments--particularly for specific identities and social selves--in the absence of significant (or even any) face-to-face dialogue. The penitentiary also offers an intriguing opportunity to explore the body's role in visual argumentation. Although visual argument is increasing in popularity and focus among communication scholarship, the role of the body in visual argumentation, particularly the operation of tattooing as visual argument, remains unexplored. Given daily contact with the bodies of others, understanding the ways that bodies argue visually is important to understanding the operations of rhetoric in our lives. Claiming the body as a site for visual argument is not without difficulties and is quite possibly a contentious argument in itself. Scholars traditionally celebrate argument as belonging to the classical public sphere--a wide-reaching construction unhelpful for understanding argumentation as it functions in nonpublic communities. In particular, because the body cannot be fully public (1) and is understood as the antithesis of deliberative discourse, the belief that argument is public axiomatically excludes the body as a site for argumentation. (2) Furthermore, the almost exclusive attention paid to public qualities of argument has obscured the ways in which argument might function in nonpublic but still social settings like the penitentiary. This essay points to some of the ways in which bodies function as argument, operating by way of claims supported by evidence and reasoning. My primary purpose is to explore prison tattooing in men's penitentiaries (3) as visual argumentation. Owing to the limited choices available to prisoners for expression, argumentative or otherwise, prisoners (4) must use nontraditional avenues for social communication. My second purpose is to expand visual argumentation theory by calling on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca to show how argument functions in the unique social construct of the penitentiary. I begin by briefly discussing penitentiary culture. I then turn to visual argumentation and contextualize this body of scholarship within sociological and ethnographic literature on prison tattooing. Lastly, I explore the particular arguments that prison tattooing makes. This analysis is illustrated with prison tattoos (5) and informed by prisoners' narratives, which explain their experiences with incarceration in a way no outsider's perspective ever could. In so doing, this essay addresses the issue of social arguments in nonpublic spheres, coherently explains why tattoos are so predominant in the penitentiary, and lends a public voice to individuals who are denied one. PENITENTIARY CULTURE As panopticon, the penitentiary is an institution that works to exert total control over the lives of those within its system, a mission easily discerned from its physical structure (Goffman 72). Once having been particularized individuals with autonomy and agency, prisoners are faced with becoming indistinguishable members of a group with no freedom to act. Removing personal possessions that designate identity has acute and wide-reaching effects. …