Transcarceration: A Constitutive Ethnography of Mentally Ill “Offenders”

Abstract

This article investigates how the language and logic of transcarceration renders mentally ill offenders captives of confinement. Both the conceptual tools of constitutive theory and the ethnographic experiences of the researcher are used. Background on three psychiatrically disordered participants and the social and organizational forces they helped to fashion are presented. The manner in which both agency and structure coproduced the discourse of transcarceration is described. The article concludes by speculating on the implications of the analysis for future research on the confinement of mentally ill offenders.