Skin and Self-Indictment: Prison Tattoos, Race, and Heroin Addiction

In his introduction to Bourdieu's Language and Symbolic Power, John B. Thompson writes, "One of the central ideas of Bourdieu's work [...] is the idea that there are diff erent forms of capital: not only "economic capital' in the strict sense (i.e. material wealth in the form of money, stocks and shares, property, etc.), but also "cultural capital' (i.e. knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications), "symbolic capital' (i.e. accumulated prestige or honour), and so on" (14). [...]the expression, so frequently heard, so consistent with the functioning of punishments, though contrary to the strict theory of penal law, that one is in prison in order to "pay one's debt." African-Americans were [between 1992 and 1993] imprisoned at a rate (1,947 per 100,000) six times greater than whites (306 per 100,000) and more than twenty times the international rate of imprisonment (96 per 100,000), bringing the number of imprisoned African Americans (626,207) to almost half the total number of prisoners in all thirty-six of these nations [in the survey the author cites] combined (1,338,176). Wallace off ers an exemplary image, combining the skull and roses in Infinite Jest: At the height of his obsession this one synthetic-narc-addicted kid came in who refused to be called by anything but his street name, Skull, and lasted only like four days, but who'd been a walking exhibition of high-regret ink-both arms tattooed with spiderwebs at the elbows, on his fishy-white chest a naked lady with the same kind of overlush measurements Ewell remembered from the pinball machines of his Watertown childhood.