Innocence as burden and resource: Adaptation and resistance during wrongful imprisonment
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221112167 |
| Author | Janani Umamaheswar |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
Innocence as burden and
resource: Adaptation and
resistance during wrongful
imprisonment
Janani Umamaheswar
George Mason University, USA
Abstract
Drawing on theoretical scholarship on adaptation and resistance in prisons, I explore the
significance and function of innocence—and the acute sense of non-belonging it triggers
in the prison setting—in wrongfully-convicted men’s responses to imprisonment. Using
in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States,I argue that innocence
functioned as a double-edged sword for the men as they adapted totheir wrongful
imprisonment: Innocence represented a social and psychological burden as men adjusted
to prison life, but it simultaneously facilitated their resistance to formal and informal
penal control. Through a discussion of how the men leveraged their innocence to dis-
tance themselves psychologically, socially, and symbolically from the prison world, I high-
light how, despite being victims of egregious injustice, wrongfully-convicted men are also
agentic resistors of the penal system.
Keywords
wrongful convictions, wrongful imprisonment, prisons, innocence, resistance, adaptation to prison
Introduction
As the number of exonerations in the United States has grown in the past few decades,
there has been an accompanying “criminal justice revolution”(Garrett, 2020: 246)
focused on identifying and remedying wrongful convictions (Norris, 2017; Norris
Corresponding author:
Janani Umamaheswar, Department of Criminology, Law, and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax,
VA 22033, USA.
Email: jumamahe@gmu.edu
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(3) 499–516
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806221112167
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
et al., 2020). Scholarship on wrongful convictions has also rapidly grown in recent years,
with studies seeking to determine the extent, causes, and consequences of wrongful con-
victions (Garrett, 2020). A significantly smaller body of research has explored how
wrongfully-incarcerated persons experience prison culture (Azizi, 2021; Campbell and
Denov, 2004; Grounds, 2004; Jackson et al., 2021), with scholars in this area exploring
how the pains of imprisonment are exacerbated by the injustice of wrongful conviction
(Campbell and Denov, 2004; Grounds, 2004; Jackson et al., 2021). For instance,
Campbell and Denov (2004) discussed how wrongfully-convicted men pursued a
range of adaptive strategies to cope with their imprisonment by (for example) withdraw-
ing from prison life, cooperating with (and assisting) other incarcerated men, seeking a
sense of belonging in prison, and focusing on their exoneration cases. Grounds (2004)
further described the far-reaching psychological consequences that wrongfully-convicted
men experienced following their period of imprisonment, concluding that their acute
trauma responses render them more similar to war veterans than other prisoners.
Prior research on wrongful imprisonment has focused almost exclusively on how
wrongfully-convicted men cope with their imprisonment, highlighting how they navigate
the (often aggressive) environment of men’s prisons as innocent men (Campbell and
Denov, 2004; Grounds, 2004; Jackson et al., 2021). Although this framing rightfully
emphasizes the challenges that innocence poses in the prison environment and the
extent to which the wrongfully convicted are victims of state harm (Westervelt and
Cook, 2010), it elides the ways in which wrongfully-convicted persons consciously
and strategically resist (formal and informal) penal control. For example, Grounds
(2004) briefly described how several wrongfully-convicted men embraced aggression
as a form of self-protection, and Campbell and Denov (2004) noted that the men in
their study refused to acknowledge the “criminal”label, but these scholars framed parti-
cipants’strategies largely as coping efforts that wrongfully-convicted men cultivated to
survive–rather than resist—penal oppression. The exploratory nature of existing research
on wrongful imprisonment provides a valuable foundation for a deeper examination of
the complex and multifaceted function of innocence in prison—one that moves
beyond a primary focus on the coping efforts of the wrongfully convicted. More gener-
ally, wrongful convictions research has remained largely siloed, prompting scholars to
advocate for pulling this body of work into conversation with the wider field of crimin-
ology (Leo, 2017; Naughton, 2014; Norris and Bonventre, 2015). Indeed, Leo (2017)
noted that, despite improvements in wrongful convictions research, our sociological
understanding of wrongful convictions is not much deeper than it was a decade ago,
when he argued that scholarship in this area was “theoretically impoverished”(Leo,
2005: 213) because of its relative disconnection from criminological research.
How does innocence shape wrongfully-convicted men’s responses to the formal and
informal control to which they are subjected in prison? In this article, I draw on theoret-
ical research in prison sociology to explore the moral, social, and psychological signifi-
cance of innocence in wrongfully-convicted men’s strategies of adaptation and resistance
to penal control. Using in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men, I argue that although
innocence represented a heavy burden among participants, it also functioned as a resource
for resisting formal control (represented by correctional officers) and lateral surveillance
(from other incarcerated men) in prison. In discussing how exonerated men navigated
500 Theoretical Criminology 27(3)
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