I’ve been called many derogatory names — even “nigger” by immature white kids ridiculing the only Black kid on the school bus — but the labels carceral systems use to brand incarcerated people can sound even worse.
What do I mean by labels? Glad you asked. When I write “labels,” I’m referring to offender, inmate, prisoner, convict, and any other demeaning alias that transforms a caged human being into an evil thing. While such monikers may ring innocuous to most free citizens, those who empathize with the incarcerated understand the offense words can cause.
Labels are an integral part of our social caste because we employ them to denote status. Say your sister called to tell you about her new beau. After hearing about how attractive he is, you might ask, “What does he do for a living?” If he worked as a doctor you would picture him as a clean-cut man of wealth and success. If he worked as a sanitation technician you would envision him as a grimy grease ball of poverty and hardship. A person’s occupation can turn an oooooh into an ewww, but an occupation is still a label, to a degree. Labels categorize people into their proper social place. The incarcerated just happen to be the lowest in the social caste. How society labels us — even so-called politically correct labels — proves it.
During my first prison stint in the late 1990s, prison staff and media labeled us inmates, even though we never used the term ourselves unless we meant to disrespect someone. Older men who had served time in the 1970s and 1980s — my mentors — favored the label convict. For them, “convict” described an upright tough guy who stood on his square. He followed the convict code, a set of unwritten countercultural edicts that defined morals behind bars. Selling drugs was acceptable, snitching was not. Fighting kept order. Convicts wore frequent trips to the hole as a badge of honor because depravity of freedom meant standing up for a cause. The convict code promoted an us against them mentality that kept the incarcerated and their captors at odds. “Inmate” sounded soft. “Convict” projected an identity of strength. Calling a convict an inmate seemed to transmogrify a hardened criminal into a patient in a mental institution.
In many ways, incarcerated people adopted “convict” as a term of endearment similarly to how Black people adopted “nigga.” If convicts call themselves a derogatory term, the word loses its sting, and it can’t be used to hurt them. Even today, men label themselves convict to claim a higher status of toughness in prison. “I’m a convict. I ain’t no damn inmate,” is a popular phrase behind the wall in North Carolina.
K’wada Temoney, a guy I’ve been pulling time with for more than 20 years, prefers the term inmate because “it doesn’t sound as derogatory or hideous as convict.” He added, “But still, man, all those titles have negative connotations to me, especially offender.”
“Offender,” a recent label, popped up about a decade ago. We didn’t know prison officials were calling us that until we started seeing it in official memos.
I remember standing in a crowd, huddled around a pegboard, while reading a new policy when someone said, “What the hell is an offender?” Another guy replied, “They talkin’bout you, dummy.”
To many behind bars offender is the most offensive term of all, for one reason, because it heaps blame for incarceration solely on the individual. Of course most incarcerated people committed crimes to land in prison, but the term offender downplays mitigating factors that contribute to crime, like socioeconomic depravity, a flawed criminal justice system, and implicit racial bias. The term offender declares: you are offensive, you are not a human damaged by a warped social system.
In the summer of 2023, a state prison official gave a speech at the prison where I am housed and labeled us “justice-impacted” people. I raised an eyebrow, thinking: well, ain’t that fancy? The term justice impacted incorporated formerly incarcerated people, probationers, victims, and families of the incarcerated. As a label, justice impacted seems the most politically correct of all.
Personally, derogatory labels don’t bother me. I refuse to identify with them. I’m Phill Smith, no more or less. Yet as a writer I’m faced with a dilemma. Many editors refuse to print dehumanizing language when referring to the incarcerated. I’m prone to employ the term “prisoner” when writing because it indicates a person who is being held against their will. Prison officials don’t like the term prisoner. I understand why. If we are captive prisoners, then they must be our captors. Such a term forces them into an archaic occupation, almost like calling them overseers on a slave plantation. Aside from my personal preference, editors usually change my usage of prisoner to “incarcerated individual,” a sterile alias.
My friend Gary Hayes II prefers incarcerated individual. He explained, “it implies I’m a person who made a mistake but can change. Being called an incarcerated individual says, ‘This is where I am housed right now,’ not who I am as a person. But offender — calling me that implies that I will commit a crime again and again and again. There’s no hope for an offender.”
Although being labeled an inmate doesn’t bother me, I understand why some find it dehumanizing. But we identify with labels all the time, whether we call ourselves liberal, social media influencer, or MMA fighter. We go wrong when we try to live up to the label while losing sight of our sense of self, or we let the label dictate our actions.
As a person living in prison, I’m more concerned with how I’m treated as opposed to what I’m labeled. Where is the political correctness in a prison official respectfully calling me a justice-impacted individual while feeding me cancerous processed meat at every meal, refusing to give me adequate medical care, or forcing me to serve an infinite prison sentence without allowing me to earn my way out through work or good behavior?
Ain’t no justice in that.
So I’d rather prison officials call me a dog and treat me like a human being than vice versa.