2025 Theses Doctoral

Bound Becomings: Essays on Race, Indigeneity, and Life-Making in Prison

Henderson, LeShae

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine how prisons intervene in the lives of incarcerated people. Through analyses of in-depth interviews, archival and legal documents, prison newspapers, and survey data, I explore how incarceration disconnects incarcerated people from their identity and further isolates vulnerable people from social institutions and systems of social support.

The first chapter asks: How is Native Hawaiian identity expressed and navigated in the total institution of Hawaiʻi prisons? Scholars have long argued that prisons strip away identity; but in recent decades, incarcerated Native Hawaiians have found opportunities to connect with their indigeneity behind bars. Drawing on in-depth interviews with people who work or were incarcerated in Hawaiʻi prisons, ethnographic observations, legal documents, and reports from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, I explore how prison administrators and incarcerated people leverage the blurriness of the Native Hawaiian category. Prison administrators rely on Hawaiian culture as a tool to help manage behavior and to promote rehabilitation among incarcerated men and women. Incarcerated men, on the other hand, use ethnoracial markers like language to find community and to engage with their Hawaiian identity in new and meaningful ways. Incarcerated men also frame Hawaiian as a religion to benefit from legal protections that would provide them access to cultural practices. Together, the findings challenge our understanding of racial boundary making processes in prison by revealing how the religious, ethnoracial, and political meanings encompassed by Indigenous categories provide a degree of flexibility that allows prisoners to reclaim—and, in some cases, discover for the first time—Hawaiian identity.

The second chapter takes a long historical perspective to examine the factors that contributed to the emergence of Native Hawaiian identity in prison and how those factors changed over time. A defining feature of incarceration is its consequences for identity and individuality. Some scholars argue that prisoners’ identities are shaped in response to the pains of imprisonment and the conditions of confinement, while others suggest the social roles incarcerated people take on during incarceration are imported into the prison from outside society. Through an analysis of three Hawaiʻi prison newspapers published between 1938-1991 as well as archival administrative documents, I investigate three factors shaping Hawaiian identity over time: 1) the changing organizational structure of punishment; 2) a shifting national socio-political context; and 3) a growing identity-based movement in Hawaiʻi. As penal logics changed over this period, incarcerated people often drew on a broader and national discourse around race, identity, and the struggle against oppression to strategically navigate shifting penal practices and maintain their Hawaiian identity. Identity formation in prison thus plays out under the regulatory constraints of the prison; but prisoners navigate and challenge those boundaries by drawing on external identity frameworks.

Chapter three draws on data from the Boston Reentry Study, a year-long study of 122 men and women leaving Massachusetts state prisons and returning to the Boston area. On average, incarcerated people have higher rates of poor mental and physical health, and histories of childhood trauma than the general population. Through a mixed methods analysis, I consider the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), poor adult health, and incarceration. Analysis of the quantitative data (N=122) indicates that childhood adversity is associated with health problems in adulthood like chronic pain, chronic conditions, and poor mental health; but the strength of this relationship varied by whether the respondent directly experienced or witnessed the traumatic event. The qualitative life history timelines (N=42) contextualize the quantitative findings by revealing two pathways connecting ACEs to poor health and incarceration in adulthood: violence and victimization, and drug use as a coping mechanism. Untreated and undiagnosed mental health conditions emerged as a precursor to both pathways. Prisons step in where the welfare system fails; but prisons lack a meaningful consideration of these early life events and the social structures that result in the high rates of vulnerable people in its care.