WAITING FOR FREEDOM

I knew Cherry Kool-Aid for almost a year before I witnessed the hearing that would determine her guilt and punishment for the two charges against her. An African American woman in her early 40s, this was Cherry's first time incarcerated in Summerville. She served two previous prison terms in another Sunbelt state—a two-year sentence for burglary and a five-year sentence for possession of meth. I met her in early 2012 during my fieldwork in a county jail, several months before she entered Summerville.Footnote ⁴ Cherry wore her black hair short and presented herself as refined and stylish, describing her luxurious lifestyle and utter distain for the jail's conditions. She was in jail waiting for sentencing on a forgery charge from seven years prior. After more than a decade of drug dealing, illegal activities, various stints in jail, and her two prison terms, Cherry decided to get clean and establish a relationship with her son. “Getting out of prison with all bridges burned”, Cherry explained, left her without support from friends or family. She moved to be near her son and checked herself into a halfway house, another context that regulates daily life. Soon after, she was arrested for the outstanding warrant.

While in jail, Cherry was put on lockdown—confined to one of the jail's two-person cells for twenty-three-hours a day, let out only for a shower and to walk the dayroom alone—for getting into an altercation with an officer. She was soon sentenced to three years of probation and released directly from lockdown. Since she did not have connections with family or friends, I was unable to get contact information for her and did not think I would see her again. I soon ran into her during my fieldwork in Summerville, however. She gave me an air-high five, reminding me to be mindful of the prison's rules against physical contact of any kind. Although she was new to Summerville, Cherry was hyper-aware of the regulation of her activities, deciding in an instant to uphold the rule that I constantly struggled with. She quickly explained that she was in prison because she stopped going to see her probation officer, deciding instead to break the terms of her probation (commonly called ‘violate’) and hopefully serve less time in prison. Probation requires regular meetings, fees, random drug and alcohol testing, limitations on movement, and various forms of surveillance. Cherry took a gamble violating probation. Sentenced to one year in prison and three months on parole, Cherry exclaimed, “It worked out better. Yes it did!”. She later added, “So I won. Again”. Adept at navigating the criminal justice system, Cherry's moves asserted some, albeit limited, control over her continued entanglement with it. While the collateral consequences of a felony conviction will limit her civil rights and freedoms indefinitely, the quickest path to the least amount of state surveillance and the maximum rights available to her was to suspend much of those rights for a time in prison.

Now, in Summerville, Cherry emphasized that this is the hardest time she's been incarcerated. It is made difficult by the change in prison systems from one Sunbelt state to another, which compromises her status as an ‘old timer’, or someone who has spent a long time in prison. While her previous time qualifies her for the valued status, her recent arrival to prison in this state challenges her inclusion in the category. It is made harder still by the distance between the crime and punishment, an old charge suspending the freedom she had actively been trying to build: “This little time is killing me. I'm, I'm stressed out, I want to go home. Because I don't live like this anymore. I hung up my good old scheming boots a long time ago”. Cherry is focused on getting off correctional supervision and gaining the freedom to live her own life and build a relationship with her son. Her pain at this rupture in the freedom she desperately desires is evident in the quote opening this section—after expressing her desire to go home and the tears she sheds at night over being incarcerated, she abruptly ends our conversation, crying as she quickly walks away. Cherry enters her hearing afraid that it may result in a longer prison sentence. She also enters with the skills she has gained over the course of her long prison history, developed through the continual regulation of her activities in multiple institutional contexts, inside and outside of prison. She deploys this skill in the hopes of avoiding her feared outcome.

DISCIPLINARY HEARINGS

Disciplinary hearings play a significant role in prison experiences, determining an individual's guilt and punishment for an alleged rule infraction, and yet they are relatively free from oversight in the United States. The Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 (PLRA), along with the pivotal Supreme Court case Sandin v. Conner (1995), limited prisoners’ right to due process and their ability to access the courts, giving states and institutions almost total control over their disciplinary procedures.Footnote ⁵ These legal shifts inspired highly regulated disciplinary procedures that demonstrate rational, effective punishment while divorcing specific rule violations from set punishments and leaving little recourse for inmates to contest a ruling. Inmates in Summerville are denied access to legal counsel and punishments can vary widely for the same rule infraction.Footnote ⁶ Countless factors can influence the hearing's outcome, including the number of tickets the sergeant must try that day, his opinion of the ticketing officer, the defendant's disciplinary history, and, as we explore here, the defendant's linguistic skill.

Arriving for her hearing, Cherry enters a small, cramped office. The sergeant, a white, middle-aged man with a military buzz cut, is seated behind a wooden desk, imposing in his brown uniform despite his small stature. Cherry sits facing him, her large frame slumping over in her neon orange uniform. I sit awkwardly next to her, obviously out of place in my street clothes holding my recorder. After a brief hesitation to pull up documents, he begins the disciplinary script.

• (2) Cherry's hearingFootnote ⁷

  1  Sergeant: Ok you've got two tickets pending, one ticket for a 25B resisting or

  2             disobeying a verbal or written order, um do you understand that charge?

  3  Cherry:   I don't understand, I don't know which one it is though, is it the    one from

  4             being in the laundry room?

  5  Sergeant:   U:::m, the 25B is for::: (.) laundry room, socialization, yes.

  6  Cherry:   Ok, yeah.

  7  Sergeant:   Uh, the other one's a 10B for disorderly conduct. That ones being, uh,

  8             wrote by Officer Hill. Do you understand that charge?

  9  Cherry:   I do understand that one. But the first one? [Um] mist-, Sergeant     Cooper

  10  Sergeant:           [Ok.]

  11             What do you, what, hold up.

  12  Cherry:   Uh huh.

  13  Sergeant:   What do you don't understand about the charge?

  14  Cherry:   Because we can be inside the laundry [room] till twenty-two     hundred

  15              hours washing.

  16  Sergeant:           [Ok. ]

  17      Ok, hold up. A-, all I need to know right this moment is that you

  18              understand the charge.

  19          Cherry:  Oh surely, [yes, yes, yes].

  20  Sergeant:           [And then ], then I can go on, ok.

  21  Cherry:   Yes.

  22  Sergeant:   Do you need a staff assistant?

  23  Cherry:   Nhn.

  24  Sergeant: Ok.

  25             I'll give you your time here as soon as I get through my process, ok.

  26  Cherry:   Ok. Thank you.

Although the three of us are seated in a cramped office without a judge, lawyers, or other key legal players, Cherry and I are immediately cued into the legal frame. Goffman's (Reference Goffman1974) pivotal work on frames explains that participants provide cues that set the interaction in a culturally recognizable genre—or frame—motivating social norms and expectations. Frames thus provide ‘a sense of what activity is being engaged in, how speakers mean what they say’ (Tannen & Wallat Reference Tannen and Wallat1987:207). Along with frames, participants also must establish their stance, or footing, toward one another (Goffman Reference Goffman1981). ‘A change in footing implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance’ (Reference Goffman1981:128). Frames and footing are interconnected, and both can shift throughout an interaction. A change in footing often breaks, or changes, the frame.

The script encourages the production of the legal frame through uneven turn-taking, legal ritual, and legal language. The sergeant controls the floor, distinguishing the interaction from a casual conversation as he determines when Cherry can speak and limits the content of her talk. He engages in an interactional ritual that indexes a court arraignment, reading the charges against Cherry and requiring her to acknowledge that she understands them. The script relies on Cherry's experience of the legal procedure to construct dialogic relations between it and the hearing, an arraignment thus serving as a ‘shadow conversation’ (Irvine Reference Irvine, Silverstein and Urban1996) setting expectations for the hearing. Cherry, however, has difficulty fulfilling her role. The use of legal language obscures the charges against her— a “25B resisting or disobeying a verbal or written order” does not clearly reflect her activity (talking in the laundry room). After she asks for clarification (lines 3–4), the sergeant answers with the technical term socialization (line 5), rather than shifting his footing to match the conversational language Cherry uses in her question, “being in the laundry room”. The sergeant controls the floor even as Cherry deviates from the script (lines 14–15), refusing her attempts to defend her actions (lines 16–18). He then returns to the script in line 22, asking if she needs a staff assistant, followed by a metapragmatic explanation that he is following a “process” (line 25).Footnote ⁸

The legal frame carries an entrenched set of cultural ideologies. Trials, as societal rituals, ‘depict and thereby validate assumptions about the nature of fact and the authority of law on which the legitimacy of the practice depends. The process, in effect, proves its own premises’ (Cammack Reference Cammack1991:789). Distinguished from daily life through location, time, and interactional norms, trial procedures motivate cultural beliefs about the law to index their fairness and rationality. The legal frame thus obscures the power dynamics of courtroom interactions. As Mertz (Reference Mertz2007) puts it, ‘legal language generates an appearance of neutrality that belies its often deeply skewed institutional workings’ (132). While the hearing lacks many elements of a trial—the setting, the participants, even the legal rights of defendants—the construction of the legal frame indexes a courtroom drama and motivates its associated rationality. The hearing is thus invested with authority and positioned as a ritual that will fairly evaluate Cherry's actions.

The script alone does not determine the frame, however. Frames are partially established through paralinguistic cues—how utterances are said can impact their interpretation (Tannen & Wallat Reference Tannen and Wallat1987). While the script primes the legal frame, the sergeant could challenge it with a sarcastic tone, for instance. His flat tone—lacking animation, variation, or exclamation—matches the legal frame and helps construct it. Mertz (Reference Mertz2007) recognizes a similar tone in law-school classrooms, where students learn to ‘talk like a lawyer’ by minimizing emotion, context, and even their own voice to index the authorial power of legal texts. Cherry emphasizes this tone in a narrative about her hearing later that day. Talking to me and a friend on the yard, she explains the sergeant's seriousness as he tried her first ticket, voicing him in a quick succession of questions, “Are you guilty? Or are you not guilty? Can you read? Guilty!”. While she is not found guilty as her narrative implies, she mocks the bureaucratic framework that, in her telling, totally silences her, emphasizing only the word guilty. Cherry's mocking critique of the flat tone highlights the skewed interactional power dynamics motivated by the legal frame.

In addition to this frame, the sergeant is invested with authority as he holds the floor and indexes a trial ritual, taking on the role of judge and evaluator of Cherry. Lincoln (Reference Lincoln1994) notes that despite its symbolic representation in regalia such as badges and uniforms, authority requires a performative enactment and receptive (often by force) audience. In this case, the sergeant's authority is based on bureaucratic procedure rather than direct domination. He is invested with the power of the institution as he voices the state representative anticipated by the disciplinary script. At the same time, he speaks as a judge without an audience, to a defendant without a right to legal counsel or due process protections. His interactional role is overburdened as he also takes on prosecutor, defender, and jury. The sergeant's markers of disfluency throughout the interaction evidence this unique criminal justice setting. In line 5, he hedges and pauses while he reads over the ticket to answer Cherry's question. This is, in part, a product of the high volume of tickets he hears daily. As the only disciplinary sergeant on a yard of over 1,200 women, he has little ability to prepare for hearings. He reads the woman's ticket, pulls up her disciplinary record on an outdated computer, and reviews that record all during the interaction itself.

Thus far, Cherry's hearing follows the institutional framework closely, demonstrating the hearing's impetus to construct power-laden social roles. However, the sergeant's disfluencies and Cherry's early attempts to defend her actions reveal room for malleability. Research on face-to-face interactions within institutional contexts recognizes the interactional work that constructs seemingly preexisting power dynamics. Ochs & Taylor (Reference Ochs and Taylor1992) argue that the family is formed as a political institution, in part, through dinnertime narratives. The footings established by narrative roles resonate beyond storytelling to (re)inscribe culturally relevant social roles, enacting a generational, and typically gendered, divide between fathers as judges and children as subject to judgment over their everyday activities. Further, ten Have's (Reference ten Have, Boden and Zimmerman1991) analysis of doctor/patient interactions reveals the potential for patients to challenge the traditional interrogation format and promote a conversational style. Both these works recognize the room for resistance within institutional frameworks. While the sergeant's authority is backed not only by bureaucratic procedure but also the threat of violence, severely limiting the possibilities for resistance, Chery's hearing is not totally predetermined. Carefully navigating the interaction within the narrow space for deviations is a necessary skill only developed from previous experience in the criminal justice system.

ANIMATING THE TICKET

As he stated in (1) opening this article, the sergeant has to read the ticket out loud, bound by bureaucratic procedure in his performance of authority. This requirement brings the document into the hearing, creating intertextual relationships between written and spoken genres. Such intertextual relationships are common in courtroom interactions that often rely on various written or recorded texts in the negotiation of truth and legal authority. According to Matoesian, ‘Trial discourse rests on a theory of intertextuality, decontextualizing speech from one speech event and recontextualizing it in a new one, to constitute its evidentiary and epistemological field’ (Reference Matoesian2000:879). These intertextual relationships are often manipulated for strategic aims, motivating ideologies of legal objectivity and the authority of recorded texts to influence the interpretation of truth, thus preserving or constructing uneven power dynamics (Philips Reference Philips1998; Matoesian Reference Matoesian2000; Mertz Reference Mertz2007). These works demonstrate that legal hegemony is, in part, continued and obscured through various intertextual relationships engaged at multiple levels of the legal system.

This section considers the power dynamics encouraged by the verbal animation of the ticket. I interrogate the relationship between talk and text to ask: what does it matter that the ticket is read out loud? I consider the ticket and the hearing as inexorably linked to one another, each investing each other with objectivity through mirrored bureaucratic language. Further, the required reading of the ticket encourages the union between the sergeant and Officer Hill, and collapses distinct moments of discipline. Cherry, however, mobilizes the knowledge gained through her criminal justice experience to prepare a defense. Despite not having access to the ticket, she anticipates its contents and brings with her the institutional rulebook, provided to each inmate upon entry to the yard, and is ready to point out the relevant rules.

After a long pause to look at Cherry's disciplinary history, the sergeant reads the ticket, shown in (3) below.

• (3) Cherry's hearing

  27  Sergeant:  (0:18) I see you've only had one ticket.

  28  Cherry:  Mhm.

  29  Sergeant:  (0:09) Ok, uh on the first ticket?

  30  Cherry:  Yes.

  31  Sergeant:  That was written by Officer Hill.

  32  Cherry:  Yes.

  33  Sergeant:  It states that on January third two thousand thirteen at twenty-one

  34         twenty hours I noticed four inmates gathering in B side laundry

  35         room socializing. When I addressed the group and directed them to

  36         leave the area one inmate left. Inmate Kool-Aid decided to remain

  37         in the laundry room with two other inmates and refused (.) my

  38         verbal directives to leave the laundry room area. I verbally informed

  39         inmate Kool-Aid that she would be receiving a ticket for, uh, for

  40         the violation and this report was written by CO2 Hill. How do you

  41         plead on that guilty, not guilty, [or no plea?]

  42  Cherry:                  [Not guilty!] Can I

  43         say why?

  44  Sergeant:  Ok.

  45  Cherry:  Thank you.

  46  Sergeant:  Why are you saying you're not guilty?

  47  Cherry:  Because we were washing and I wrote him up and gave it to another

  48         sergeant and she said she would give it to you because it didn't

  49         make sense, because in the book it, I tried to show him we can wash

  50         till twenty-two hundred hours. And he didn't wanna hear anything.

  51         And we literally were washing our clothes. Washing, folding,

  52         drying, you know the whole shebang. And I did leave out after I put

  53         my clothes in the washing machine. ((handing the rulebook to the

  54          sergeant)) But I was trying to finish before twenty-two, it's on page

  55         thirteen. Before twenty-two hundred hours, came. Because I had,

  56         he was so angry that I took my clothes out of the dryer wet so he

  57         could stop fussing.

  58        Sergeant:  Ok, there was no ICS going on, there was [no emergency counts

  59         going on, none of that?]

  60  Cherry:        [No there was nothing,

  61         Emergency count] I mean count was over, after it cleared we

  62         went in the laundry room to wash, he said we were congregating, we

  63         can't talk in the laundry room? We were being quiet, he just didn't

  64         want us in there, but I told him we were washing. And I hung my

  65         clothes the end of my, uh, on my chair wet.

  66        Sergeant:  (0:07) Ok on this one I'm gonna dismiss it.

The sergeant continues to fill the role of judge, while also taking on the roles of prosecutor and defender. He reads the ticket, asks for Cherry's plea, encourages and examines her testimony, and, ultimately, decides the case. The disciplinary script creates what Goodwin (Reference Goodwin1980, Reference Goodwin1990) deems a ‘he-said-she-said’ interactional structure by requiring the sergeant accuse Cherry through the words of Officer Hill. While Goodwin explores this structure as a public dispute negotiation without a mediator, in this case the sergeant both accuses and mediates the conflict. Officer Hill's absence, however, constrains Cherry's possibilities for a defense, ‘The appropriate target of a counteraccusation is not the accuser but rather the absent intermediate party; therefore, the argument trajectory of accusation/counteraccusation, which permits both parties the opportunity to accuse one another, does not develop’ (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1980:683). The disciplinary procedure thus enacts the social roles of the institution, granting officers the power to accuse through the ticketing procedure and denying inmates the possibility of a counteraccusation.

Further, the officer's accusation is stylistically invested with authority. Following bureaucratic procedure, it is documented in a ticket written in a report genre that indexes its objectivity. This genre is constructed through the required details of the ticket, including the date and time (given in military time), officer and inmate names, and Cherry's inmate number (removed from the transcript to protect anonymity). In addition, the ticket's language contrasts to colloquial speech, instead using the register of a police report: the officer “addressed”, “directed”, and “verbally informed” the defendants, who “refused… verbal directives”. Anderson (Reference Anderson2016) describes ‘copspeak’ as a recognizable style that ‘is formal and precise-sounding, yet often actually vague. Words such as ‘altercation’ obscure whether there was a verbal argument, fistfight, or fight with weapons’ (29). The ticket similarly leaves out the interactional details, such as the exchanged dialogue, while indexing accuracy through the report genre.

In contrast to the police narratives Anderson describes, however, the ticket is written in first-person, a style Komter (Reference Komter2006a) points out is common in defendant statements. Building on Garfinkle's (Reference Garfinkel1967) recognition that bureaucratic documents are inextricably linked to the contexts they were created in, Komter (Reference Komter2006b) explores the production of such statements in the Netherlands. These documents are typically treated as the defendant's ‘own words’, despite being produced by police during interviews. The dynamics of the interview shape the document in multiple ways. For instance, the police officer's typing is treated as an interactional turn by the defendant, who typically falls silent or clarifies information during the activity. Further, the police-led interview is catered to the production of the document, including necessary information for its future legal uses. This future-orientation is clear in the bureaucratic details included in Cherry's ticket, which anticipate its reading in the disciplinary hearing. Martinez's (Reference Martinez2006) analysis of prosecutors’ reports of defendant interviews in France argues that prosecutors both lead the interview and decide what to include in the resulting document, again assumed to represent the defendant's voluntary statement. She explains, ‘the final written statement inserts the orientations of the judicial system displayed during the hearing into the constructed voice of the suspect’ (Reference Martinez2006:246). The contextual nature of legal documents is often ignored, offering a hidden avenue for the insertion of hegemonic relations. The first-person style of Cherry's ticket appears to represent officer Hill's description of Cherry's rule violation without recognition of the institution's role in shaping the version of events through procedural and linguistic standards.

The authority imbued in the ticket through the report genre is bolstered by its recontextualization into the disciplinary hearing. Starting in line 33, the sergeant reads the document. The maintenance of the ticket's original ‘deictic field’ (Benveniste Reference Benveniste1971)—the contextually situated linguistic shifters such as I, you, here, and there—positions the sergeant's lines as direct reported speech. Direct reported speech—a quote, real or imagined, that is attributed to another speaker as if it was uttered by that speaker—is interactionally significant despite its typical interpretation as an unbiased reporting of the words of another speaker (Voloshinov Reference Voloshinov, Matejka and Titunik1973; Mertz Reference Mertz, Mertz and Parmentier1985; Tannen Reference Tannen1989; Clark & Gerrig Reference Clark and Gerrig1990; Matoesian Reference Matoesian1999, Reference Matoesian2000). Speech cannot move from one context to another unchanged; it is shaped, minimally, by the current speaker and the context it enters. It thus becomes ‘constructed dialogue’ no matter how authentic the reproduction (Tannen Reference Tannen1989). In this case, the reproduction is word-for-word. However, the sergeant's utterances are double-voiced (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Emerson and Holquist1975/1981), containing his voice as much as Officer Hill's. For Bakhtin, ‘these voices are dialogically interrelated, they—as it were—know about each other (just as two exchanges in a dialogue know of each other and are structured in this mutual knowledge of each other); it is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other’ (Reference Bakhtin, Emerson and Holquist1975/1981:324). By continuing the flat, bureaucratic tone, the sergeant invests the ticket with authority as a seemingly neutral legal document and minimizes the perception of his influence on its interpretation. This authority is further amplified through the reporting context, which Voloshinov (Reference Voloshinov, Matejka and Titunik1973) argues necessarily influences the meaning of the quoted speech. The bureaucratic language of the ticket and the hearing mirror one another, allowing the ticket to appear to enter the hearing unchanged and further the construction of the legal frame. Animating the ticket out loud invests the ticket with authority while obscuring this interactional work.

In addition, the hearing maintains and emphasizes the ticket's illocutionary force. Austin's (Reference Austin1962) exploration of speech acts points out the performative nature of language, describing illocutionary acts as those, such as promising or ordering, that have consequences—they are creative acts accomplished through the voicing of the utterance. Direct quotations can emphasize one or more functions of speech acts, often maintaining the illocutionary force as the primary focus of the quotation (Clark & Gerrig Reference Clark and Gerrig1990). The ticket creates an accusation; the required reading of the ticket transfers this illocutionary force to the hearing. Thus, the sergeant's accusation is created through the words of Officer Hill, blurring the boundary between the original speech act and the disciplinary hearing. This blurring is enhanced by the imposition of the ticket's deictic field onto the hearing. As the sergeant utters “I”, the deictic expression points at once to himself as the current speaker and Officer Hill as the author of the document. This promotes ‘leakage’—the inherent danger in direct reported speech that quoted text will be attributed to the current speaker, evident when a speaker apologizes for a quoted obscenity (Hill & Irvine Reference Hill, Irvine, Hill and Irvine1993; Irvine Reference Irvine, Silverstein and Urban1996)—between their voices. Halldorsdottir's (Reference Halldorsdottir2006) exploration of defendant/defense lawyer interactions in England recognizes this potential. When lawyers read police reports to their clients, they shift the deictic expressions to fit the current context, indicating they do not align with the police version of events. In Cherry's hearing, no such distancing effort is attempted, as the original deictic expressions remain and the flat tone prevents distancing that might be accomplished paralinguistically. Officer Hill's voice thus leaks into the sergeant's as they join to create the accusation, strengthening their social role as representatives of Summerville while discouraging deviations between them.

The interactional impacts of the reading of the ticket—the co-construction of the ticket and the hearing as authoritative and the merger of the officers’ voices—minimizes the ‘intertextual gap’ (Briggs & Bauman Reference Briggs and Bauman1992) that is necessarily produced as discourse travels across contexts. ‘Although the creation of this hiatus is unavoidable, its relative suppression or foregrounding has important effects’ (Reference Briggs and Bauman1992:149). By minimizing the gap, the hearing collapses time and unifies moments of discipline. At least three distinct moments are merged together, including the initial interaction between Cherry and Officer Hill, the written report, and the disciplinary hearing. The double-voiced reading of the ticket diminishes the fact that Officer Hill's words have traveled across time and space, forging together a unified front of the institution. The moment of animation thus constructs a panoptical surveillance over everyday activities as the distinct moments and agents of discipline merge as one.

After this linguistic merger, in line 40, the sergeant, without indication, shifts out of direct reported speech, asking for Cherry's plea. She pleads not guilty, and, recognizing the script, asks for permission to give her defense in lines 42–43. While she does not have the ‘crucial form of social power’ (Briggs Reference Briggs1993:419) to recontextualize discourse through the formal ticketing procedure, Cherry is able to grant authority to her verbal defense by drawing on the report genre. She first used this language in lines 14–15 in (2), as she attempted to defend her actions out of turn, claiming they could be in the laundry room until “twenty-two hundred hours”. Her use of formal, military time reemerges in lines 50, 54, and 55 when she is given the floor for her defense. In addition, she brought her own form of written authority, handing the sergeant the rulebook and pointing out the page with rules on laundry in lines 53–54. A strategic defense, these moves also validate the authority of the state to regulate Cherry's mundane daily activities, upholding the rules and even legitimizing the state's language through military time. She defends her actions by highlighting that the officer, not her, deviated from the institution's rules.

This rule-oriented defense is accompanied by another strategy that begins to challenge the legal frame. Cherry emphasizes Officer Hill's unfair treatment, positioning herself as the bigger person in the interaction by explaining that she halted her legitimate laundry activities and hung her wet clothes on her bed. Cherry becomes animated, putting emphasis on the words “finish” (line 54) and “wet” (lines 56 and 65), deviating from the bureaucratic tone matched by both participants thus far in the interaction, save Cherry's early defense in line 14 in (2), where she emphasizes “be”. This line of defense exploits the he-said-she-said format. Although she cannot offer a counteraccusation to Officer Hill, Cherry utilizes the format to position the interaction as a personal conflict between her and the unfair officer, contextualizing the interaction and distancing it from the hearing.

After her defense, the sergeant simultaneously becomes prosecutor and defender in lines 58 and 59, questioning the context for the alleged rule infraction and offering a potential reason for guilt (should there have been a special circumstance requiring Cherry be in her bed area) while also allowing her to refute those circumstances. Finally, the sergeant disagrees with Officer Hill (line 66), creating a small fracture between state representatives and obtaining a dismissal, the only possible outcome with no consequences. Cherry's strategic defense is successful, and she immediately capitalizes on her success to mitigate the contents of the next ticket.

BREAKING FRAME

Charged with disorderly conduct for insulting an officer, Cherry appears acutely aware that if read aloud her insult, documented in the ticket as “you short man with a short man complex”, will carry significant force. Again, she has not read the ticket and thus can only anticipate that some version of her insult is documented. It carries the potential to become an insult from inmate to officer, extended beyond the individual situation and applied to all those occupying the social role. Her situation is exacerbated by the sergeant's own short stature, strengthening the possibility of the insult gaining offensive force in the current interaction. Before the formal reading of the ticket, Cherry begins to mitigate the potential damage.

• (4) Cherry's hearing

  67  Cherry:   Oh, thank you, cause I know the next one I'm in trouble. (0:02)

  68          Thank you Sergeant Cooper.

  69  Sergeant:   Mhm.

  70                (0:20) Ok, sign right there.

  71                That one's yours.

  72  Sergeant:    Ok, now we're to the second ticket.

  73                [This is ] the disorderly conduct ticket written by Officer Desmond.

  74  Cherry:     [Oh man]

  75                I don't want you to read that one out loud.

  76                ((laughs))

  77  Sergeant:    ((laughing)) I have to read it out loud.

  78                Ok.

  79  Cherry:     Oh man.

  80                (0:06) Could you be lenient a little bit please?

  81                (0:05) I did get smart alecy whatever it says.

  82                And I got smart ((laughing)) alecy because

  83  Sergeant:    Ok.

  84  Cherry:     Ok, ok.

  85  Sergeant:    So you don't need a staff assistant for this one?

  86  Cherry:     No.

  87  Sergeant:    Ok, so, on uh January fourth two thousand thirteen approximately

  88           twenty-two hundred hours, I CO2 Desmond advised inmate Kool-

  89          Aid that she needed to lower her voice. She was continually

  90          disruptive in the bay and yelling toward the officers. Uh, I advised

  91          her once again that she needed to lower her voice, and I would issue

  92          a ticket. Inmate Kool-Aid then stated quote unquote you short man

  93          with a short man complex. Uh, among other

  94  Cherry:     ((laughs))

  95  Sergeant:     obscenities lowered, lowered in her voice. I CO2 Desmond advised

  96           inmate Kool-Aid of disciplinary and CO2 Hi- uh Desmond wrote

  97          this report.

  98          [How do you plead] on this one?

  99  Cherry:         [Uh, ok.  ] I'm guilty because I did, because he kept, this,

  100          this officer was telling that officer a lie about this ticket, I said

  101          you're a liar. So he got mad. And I did say that he was being mean.

  102          I said it. I did it. I'm guilty. Please be lenient.

  103  Sergeant:    (0:06) Ok with the guilty plea and the information in the ticket I will

  104          be assessing LOP for fifteen, [fifteen days and] twenty hours loss of

  105  Cherry:             [Oh my god man!] Ok.

  106  Sergeant:    uh, fifteen days of loss of privileges, twenty hours of extra duty.

  107  Cherry:     But no extra days on my time?

  108  Sergeant:    No.

  109  Cherry:     Thank you (?), thank you sir.

Cherry attempts to influence the sergeant's reading of the ticket in lines 67–68, thanking him and preparing him for the more extreme rule infraction. She immediately admits guilt, “I know the next one I'm in trouble”, personalizing the interaction between herself and the sergeant and challenging the legal frame. In lines 74–76, Cherry exclaims that she doesn't want him to read the ticket out loud, followed by laughter. She succeeds in getting the sergeant to break frame, laughing in line 77 and, for the first time in the interaction, deviating from the flat bureaucratic tone and shifting footing. The sergeant's laughter, however brief, pivots from his bureaucratic performance of authority to a more casual, humorous frame. Cherry's mitigating moves are strategic—she wants to soften the insult—and the sergeant's change in alignment is critical to her ability to defend herself.

She utilizes this shift to overstep her role in the interaction and explain her actions before the ticket is read. The sergeant is silent from lines 79–82, as he pauses in preparation of the next ticket. Similar silences from preoccupation are evident in (3) explored above: the sergeant pauses for eighteen seconds (line 27), nine seconds (line 29), and seven seconds (line 66). Like the role of typing in police interviews explored by Komter (Reference Komter2006b), these pauses are interactionally significant. The sergeant holds the floor through these long, ‘pregnant pauses’ (Mendoza-Denton Reference Mendoza-Denton, Hall and Bucholtz1995), filling them with indexical meaning as they indicate that powerful words are to follow. The sergeant's authority and role as judge is amplified as he maintains control over lengthy pauses. Having established his power to initiate and end silences, Cherry oversteps her role in lines 79–82, filling the silence to further mitigate her actions and plea for leniency. This break in frame is brief; the sergeant interrupts her in line 83, abruptly cutting her off in the middle of her utterance with a one-word ok and shifting his footing back to his performance of authority in the legal frame. She responds in line 84 with “ok, ok”, recognizing that she overstepped her role, granting the sergeant authority, and giving control of the floor back to him.

The sergeant continues to read the ticket. In lines 92–93, the insult Cherry has worked to soften appears. The sergeant joins voices with Officer Desmond, who directly reports the speech of Cherry stating, “you short man with a short man complex”. His utterance contains the voices of himself, Officer Desmond, and Cherry, although Cherry's speech is formally marked and bounded. The quote/unquote beginning the line separates Cherry's words from the officer's and, effectively, the sergeant's. In contrast to the minimization of the distinction between officers’ voices, Cherry's voice is recontextualized as an object of scrutiny—it is documented in the ticket as a rule violation and enters the hearing as an accusation. The officers’ voices remain maximally distanced from hers even as the insult is quoted in both their voices.

Cherry pleads guilty and admits to the charge of disorderly conduct. Her defense links her two tickets together, explaining that Officer Desmond was telling a lie about her previous ticket and she called him a liar. Having just received a dismissal for that ticket, Cherry's moves to link the two tickets extends her framing of the altercation as a personal one. She also continues to treat the interaction as a conversation between her and the sergeant, laughing as he reads the ticket (line 94) and asking him to please be lenient (line 102). Although the sergeant shifted footing after the brief rupture, Cherry continues to resist the legal frame and challenge the institutional framework. Ten Have's (Reference ten Have, Boden and Zimmerman1991) exploration of doctor/patient interactions points out normal conversation tactics can be deployed as acts of resistance within an institutional context. For instance, patients can initiate information or hold off a doctor's questions to pivot between an interrogation and a conversational style. These typical interactional moves are covert acts that subtly challenge institutional power dynamics. Similarly, Cherry's moves are ordinary conversational tactics but in this highly regulated interaction they are covert. They are an act of resistance built on her vast institutional knowledge—she navigates the framework almost seamlessly, deviating from its structure, pivoting to a conversational format, breaking the legal frame, and even allowing the sergeant's individuality to appear, without overstepping her interactional role too far. There is, indeed, much risk involved in her moves. Just as she may soften her verdict through personalization, she may harshen it through perceived insubordination or arrogance. The seemingly simple moves indicate her skill and experience in such regulated contexts. She effectively expands the intertextual gap to challenge the constructed authority of the ticket and create distinction between the officers’ voices and the moments of discipline.

Finally, after a six second pregnant pause (line 103), the sergeant gives his verdict: fifteen days loss of privileges (LOP) and twenty hours of extra duty. This is a relatively minor punishment considering the charge and guilty plea. It appears that Cherry's interactional work is at least somewhat successful in minimizing the blow of the insult. Her reactions to the ruling demonstrate the ambiguous nature of her small victory. When the sergeant begins to relay the punishment, she overlaps his speech with “Oh my God man!” but quickly adds “Ok” (line 105). While “Oh my God man!” expresses shock and dismay, her addition of “Ok” recognizes that while the outcome is not ideal, she avoided the potential for much more severe consequences. In line 107, she indicates her fear that the sergeant would add extra time to her sentence, and, after clarifying that this was not the case, she ends the interaction with “thank you sir” (line 109). Cherry's ambiguity reveals the hard limits on her resistance—her covert linguistic skill cannot change her sentence, alleviate the continual regulation of her life, or shift the power dynamics played out in her hearing, always backed by threat of violence. The harsh conditions she endures daily are exacerbated by the constant threat of destabilization. LOP may appear a light punishment, but it nearly reduces Cherry to the conditions of prison entry with limited property and no privileges, reminding her that while she escaped extra time, the time she has is not hers to control. Despite her skillful navigation, she remains at the state's mercy to set the conditions of her confinement.

CHERRY'S NARRATIVE

Cherry's linguistic resistance continues after her hearing as she negotiates the meaning and outcome of the disciplinary interaction on the prison yard. Her retellings of the hearing reveal the role of narrative control in asserting and contesting the hierarchical social roles of the institution. My analysis thus far focused on the disciplinary script's assertion of asymmetrical power dynamics through the legal frame, uneven footings, and the intertextual relationships motivated by the reading of the ticket. In addition, the hearing controls Cherry's ability to define herself through narrative. Ochs & Capps (Reference Ochs and Capps1996) understand narratives as critical to defining one's identity and relationship to social structures. As such, ‘differential control over narrative content, genre, timing, and recipiency is central to the constitution of social hierarchies’ (35). In her hearing, Cherry was forced to defend her interactions with officers to the sergeant within the legal frame. Ochs & Taylor's (Reference Ochs and Taylor1992) exploration of dinnertime narratives, described above, indicates that prompted narratives told for third-party judgement establish uneven footings constructing institutional power dynamics. While Cherry challenges the legal frame and personalizes the narrative, she is still placed in a subordinated social role, forced to defend her previous actions under the scrutiny of the sergeant.

After her hearing, Cherry asserts control over her narrative as she recounts the disciplinary interaction in later conversations with me.Footnote ⁹ I focus on one narrative in which Cherry recontextualizes her insult to construct her identity as a skilled old timer. This recontextualization challenges the authorial power of the ticket, and the hearing, to define Cherry's actions. It is an extension of her hearing that continues the interactional work of negotiating her insult, following Goodwin's (Reference Goodwin1990) observation that the telling and interpretation of narratives can be influenced by larger speech events of which they are a part. She resists institutional power through conversational tactics, downplaying Officer Desmond's authority and the severity of her punishment while bolstering her skill at navigating the system by positioning her insult as something she got away with.

The except below is from the same narrative event in which Cherry mocks the sergeant's flat tone, explored above in (2), voicing his bureaucratic evaluation of her first ticket. Cherry mocks the sergeant's commitment to procedure to illustrate his typical demeanor in disciplinary interactions as cold and unfair. Contrasting this to her second ticket, she positions his leniency as a rare departure, emphasizing her own interactional skill. She continues in (5).

• (5) Cherry's narrative

  1  Cherry:  Right, then the next one, he said well this is what the man said you

  2           said, and I was going to be embarrassed, I said do you have to read it

  3         out loud? He was like “I have to”. He didn't write down the real nasty

  4         stuff I said to him. ((said very quickly))

  5  Author:  He was probably embarrassed. To write it down.

  6  Cherry:   Cause he's a short man. He said she called me a s- man, little man with a

  7         short man complex. ((laughs))

  8  Friend:    That, that bothered him, that's probably why he wrote it down.

  9  Author:   Yeah, that's the one that got him. ((laughs))

  10  Cherry:   It did bother him.

  11  Friend:    ((laughs))

  12  Cherry:   And he gave me, just regular, fifteen days LOP, twenty hours extra duty.

Like her hearing, Cherry's narrative is heteroglossic, containing the voices of her, the sergeant, and Officer Desmond. She animates and frames the relationship between these voices, linguistically constructing a theatrical performance of her hearing and shaping its meaning (Goffman Reference Goffman1974; Goodwin Reference Goodwin1990). In line 1, she calls Officer Desmond “the man”, indirectly voicing the sergeant to challenge the officer's authority through the colloquial addressee term, contrasted to the report genre of the ticket. Like my analysis, Cherry focuses on the sergeant's acknowledgment that he is bound by bureaucratic procedure in his performance of authority, directly voicing his response to her pleas not to read the ticket out loud (line 3). In her explanation, these pleas are a result of the embarrassment she anticipates. She then emphasizes what was not in the ticket, explaining in a quick voice that he didn't write down the “real nasty stuff” she said. In lines 6–7, she gives power to her insult by noting that the officer is a short man and then indirectly quoting Officer Desmond's representation of her insult. She begins to say short man, but repairs herself to replace short with little. This misquote of the ticket highlights the shifting meaning of reported speech as it travels across contexts, indicating Cherry's original insult may have differed from its documentation in the ticket. Either way, the slight shift reclaims control over the insult translating it into Cherry's voice. Cherry's friend and I then co-construct the power of Cherry's insult, in lines 8 and 9, joking that he only wrote down the stature insult because it was the one that really got to him, and laughing as we grant Cherry's insult the power to offend. She agrees in line 10 and emphasizes the “regular” punishment of LOP and extra duty positioning it as less than what she could have gotten for the offense.

Cherry's narrative furthers her slight victory in the hearing to challenge Officer Desmond's authority, reclaims control over her insult, and downplays the severity of her punishment. She positions her outcome as a combination of skill—getting the sergeant to admit he is bound by procedure and breaking his normally cold demeanor—and luck—that the officer did not include the more severe insults. Her friend and I co-construct the narrative to bolster her skills, allowing her to construct her reputation as a skilled old timer adept at navigating the system and essentially getting away with a serious insult to an officer. Her narrative demonstrates resistance through linguistic skill, negotiating her hearing to claim a valued status.