The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 2012; 38(4) 2.docx

The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 2012; 38(4):
278–285
Copyright © Informa Healthcare USA, Inc.
ISSN: 0095-2990 print / 1097-9891 online
DOI: 10.3109/00952990.2012.668596
Substance Use Disorder Prevalence among Female State Prison
Inmates
Steven L. Proctor, M.A.
Department of Psychology, Louisiana State University, Baton
Rouge, LA, USA
Background: Substance use disorders (SUDs) are
prevalent among female inmates. As the female state
prison population continues to increase, describing
the specific clinical and demographic characteristics
of female prisoners remains of paramount
importance to better define women’s needs in the
state prison system. Objectives: To determine the
prevalence and patterns of current DSM-IV SUDs
and explore whether particular demographic
characteristics are more strongly associated with
specific SUD categories. Methods: Data were derived
from routine clinical assessments of 801 female
inmates incarcerated in the Minnesota Department
of Corrections state prison system. The Substance
Use Disorder Diagnostic Schedule-IV (Hoffmann
NG, Harrison PA. SUDDS-IV: Substance Use
Disorder Diagnostic Schedule-IV. Smithfield, RI:
Evince Clinical Assessments, 1995) was

administered to all inmates as a computer-prompted
interview on admission to the prison. Results: Of the
inmates, 70.0% were dependent on at least one
substance, and 7.9% met criteria for substance
abuse. Alcohol dependence (30.2%) and cocaine
dependence (30.1%) were the two most prevalent
SUDs. The remaining substance dependence
diagnoses that predominated were as follows:
stimulant dependence, 24.1%; marijuana
dependence, 15.6%; and heroin dependence, 9.6%.
Over half (56.9%) were dependent on a substance
other than alcohol. Prevalence of cocaine
dependence [odds ratio (OR) ¼ 2.83, 95%
confidence interval (CI) ¼ 1.92–4.16] was
significantly higher among African Americans,
whereas prevalence of stimulant dependence
(OR ¼ 9.24, 95% CI ¼ 5.40–15.80) was significantly
higher among Caucasians. Prevalence of alcohol
(OR ¼ 2.12, 95% CI ¼ 1.38–3.25) and heroin
(OR ¼ 2.67, 95% CI ¼ 1.50–4.77) dependence was
significantly higher among Native Americans.
Conclusions and Scientific Significance: SUDs in
general, and illicit drug use disorders in particular,
are prevalent among female inmates entering a state
prison system. Membership to a particular ethnic
group may identify a set of inmates at elevated risk
for the presence of substance-specific dependence
diagnoses.
Keywords: prevalence, substance use disorders, inmates, state
prison, women
INTRODUCTION
Overcrowding has become a principal concern for state

prison systems in the United States. Although men consti-
tute over four-fifths of the total correctional population,
there has been a dramatic increase in the number of women
entering the state prison system over the past two decades
(1). In fact, between 1990 and 2009, the total number
of women incarcerated in prison has increased by over
100%. Current estimates of the percentage of women
within the total adult correctional population have also
increased since 1990 (18 vs. 14%, respectively) (1).
High-incarceration rates contribute to incarceration costs
and have the potential to place a disproportionate strain on
correctional officers.
Not only has the total number of women incarcerated in
the state prison system experienced a substantial increase
over the past two decades, but trends in the number of
felony convictions of women are also a cause for concern.
The number of women convicted of a felony has grown
at 2.5 times the rate of increase than that of male offen-
ders (2). Specifically, the considerable growth in the rates
of women convicted of felonies was accounted for by
aggravated assault and drug-related charges related to
drug trafficking and drug possession (2). Thus, given
increases related to both the number and severity of
offenses committed by women, the need to accurately
identify relevant gender-specific issues unique to women
and define women’s clinical needs within the context of a
state prison setting is of paramount importance.
One such variable is the high prevalence of substance
use and substance use disorders (SUDs) among incarcer-
ated women (3–7). A systematic review of the vast SUD
prevalence literature among female inmates on reception
into prison found that estimates of SUD prevalence ranged
Address correspondence to Steven L. Proctor, Department of

Psychology, Louisiana State University, 236 Audubon Hall,
Baton Rouge, LA
70803, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
278
from 10.0% to 23.9% for alcohol abuse and dependence
and from 30.3% to 60.4% for drug abuse and dependence
(8). Although the heterogeneity between the various stu-
dies in terms of SUD prevalence rates for women prison
inmates is quite large, such rates are still much higher than
those found among the general adult population (9).
Extant research has amassed to support the contention
that substance use in general and illicit drug use in parti-
cular are common among female offenders and appear
related to criminal behavior (2,10,11). In fact, findings
from a meta-analysis of the vast criminal recidivism litera-
ture found problematic alcohol or drug use to be a signifi-
cant risk factor for future criminal behavior (11). Although
many predictor variables of criminal recidivism among
offenders have been shown to have gender-neutral effects,
problematic substance use appears to be more strongly
related to criminal behavior for women compared with
men (12). Further, nearly one-third of the female state
prison population is comprised of inmates convicted of
drug-related offenses (13) and approximately half of
women offenders incarcerated in state prisons were under
the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the offense
for which they had been incarcerated (2). Specifically,
illicit drug use at the time of the offense was reported
more often than alcohol use among female inmates, a
finding different from that found among male inmates in
state prisons. Female arrests for drug-related offenses have
also experienced notable increases (14). A survey of state

prison inmates found that more women reported being
under the influence of drugs at the time they committed
the offense for which they were currently incarcerated than
men (15). Thus, illicit drug use and drug use disorders
appear to be unique gender-specific variables among incar-
cerated individuals.
Another noteworthy consideration is that, historically,
the research literature dealing with the prevalence of
SUDs among inmates has offered limited insight into the
prevalence rates specific to women through their exclusive
focus on male inmates (16–18). Additionally, research in
this area is limited due to various methodological limita-
tions, including the tendency to consider all nonalcohol
SUDs as a single drug use disorder category, and/or the
failure to definitively distinguish between diagnoses of
dependence versus abuse (8,19–23). Given substance-
dependent individuals tend to experience poorer prognosis
and treatment outcomes relative to individuals with a sub-
stance abuse diagnosis (24–26), the need to clearly differ-
entiate between diagnoses of dependence versus abuse
remains an important goal if authorities aspire to meet the
unique SUD treatment needs of incarcerated women.
In sum, as the total female state prison population and
trends in felony convictions of women regarding the num-
ber and severity of offenses continue to increase, describ-
ing the characteristics of the changing population of female
state prison inmates is a critical first step in better defining
women’s needs in the state prison system. Further, extant
research has documented that SUDs in general, and drug
use disorders in particular, are highly prevalent among
female state prison inmates, and illicit drug use among
women appears related to offending. Therefore, illicit
drug use disorders and drug use appear to be unique

gender-specific variables among incarcerated individuals.
Although a body of knowledge regarding SUD prevalence
among female inmates is accumulating, to date there
remains limited published research examining specific
drug use disorder prevalence among female state prison
inmates, as well as research addressing the issue of a
pragmatic way of identifying those inmates in need of
additional addictions services.
Thus, this study sought to fill the apparent gaps in the
research literature regarding SUD prevalence among
female inmates through the use of the Substance Use
Disorder Diagnostic Schedule-IV (SUDDS-IV), a struc-
tured diagnostic assessment interview compatible with
DSM-IV (27) criteria, which provides substance abuse
and dependence diagnoses for a variety of specific sub-
stances, to estimate prevalence of alcohol and individual
drug use disorders among female inmates incarcerated in a
state prison setting. Prevalence and patterns of SUDs were
explored in three ways: (1) providing general estimates of
the prevalence of the various SUD categories as assessed
by the SUDDS-IV, (2) exploring the apparent patterns of
multiple SUD diagnoses, and (3) testing whether particular
demographic characteristics were more strongly associated
with the various SUD categories.
METHOD
Participants
Data for this study were derived from routine clinical
assessments of 801 female inmates between the ages of 18
and 58 years (M ¼ 32.8, SD ¼ 8.26) recently incarcerated in
the Minnesota Department of Corrections state prison sys-
tem from 2000 to 2003. Ethnic composition of the total
sample was predominately Caucasian (57.7%), while
African Americans (21.5%) and Native Americans

(13.2%) constituted the largest racial-minority groups. The
balance of the cases was distributed among Hispanics,
Asians, and those inmates who reported “other or multi-
racial” ethnicity. Over three-fourths had never been married
(56.1%) or were divorced (23.0%) and only 12.4% of the
inmates were currently married at the time of incarceration.
Educational attainment tended to be low in that 34.3% had
not completed high school and only 17.8% had received
any vocational or formal education beyond high school. In
terms of employment status, slightly more than half (54.3%)
of the inmates were unemployed. The remainder of the total
sample reported that they were employed either full-time
(32.1%) or part-time (13.6%) prior to incarceration. Nearly
one-fifth (18.5%) of the inmates reported that they worked
as a service worker (e.g., waitress) with laborer/temporary
worker (15.2%) or domestic worker (e.g., housekeeper;
13.1%) being the next largest job designations. Personal
income also tended to be rather low in that 63.2% reported
earning a range of less than $10,000 in the year prior to
incarceration and only 5.4% reported earning more than
$30,000. Slightly less than half (45.1%) of the inmates
reported that they had children living with them in their
SUBSTANCE USE DISORDERS AMONG FEMALE
PRISONERS 279
homes at the time of incarceration. Given an aim of this
study was to examine the associations between ethnicity
and substance dependence for the various substances cov-
ered by the SUDDS-IV, demographic characteristics are
presented separately in Table 1 for all ethnic groups of
sufficient size for making statistical comparisons.
Measures

The SUDDS-IV is a diagnostic assessment interview
designed to provide detailed and thorough coverage of
lifetime and current DSM-IV SUDs. The SUD inquiry of
the SUDDS-IV is comprised of 48 items, which are used to
assess the 7 DSM-IV dependence and 4 abuse criteria, with
multiple items for most of the individual criteria. For
instance, in regard to the DSM-IV dependence criterion 7
(i.e., medical or psychological contraindications to sub-
stance use), the SUDDS-IV includes four items: Have you
ever continued to use alcohol or drugs when you knew you
had a physical illness that might be made worse by alcohol
or drug use?; Have you ever had any medical problems
that you or anyone else thought were related to your
alcohol or drug use?; [Females only] Have you ever
used alcohol or drugs more than you believed you should
when you knew you were pregnant?; and Have you ever
had so much to drink that the next day you could not
remember what you had said or done? All positive
responses to the individual general questions are then
followed up with clarifications as to whether the positive
response refers to alcohol and/or the other specified sub-
stances covered by the SUDDS-IV. Based on the algo-
rithms used for this study, a positive response to any one of
these four individual items for a given substance would
assign this particular dependence criterion as being posi-
tive for that substance.
The SUDDS-IV has been used to assess SUDs among
numerous correctional populations (28–30) and has evi-
denced adequate construct validity (29). Internal consis-
tency reliability estimates for the items comprising the
various substance-specific categories yielded Cronbach’s
alphas ranging from over .90 for the dependence scales to
above .85 for the abuse scales (29). The SUDDS-IV con-
siders the 12 months prior to incarceration for the time

frame utilized in arriving at current SUD diagnoses. This
time frame takes into account that being in a restrictive
environment precludes assigning a formal diagnosis after
incarceration.
Procedure
All inmates were assessed for SUD indications by certified
addictions counselors to identify potential treatment needs
TABLE 1. Demographic characteristics by ethnic group.
Ethnic group
Caucasian African American Native American
N ¼ 462 N ¼ 172 N ¼ 106
Variable % (n) % (n) % (n)
Age (years)
18–24 18.0 (83) 14.0 (24) 25.5 (27)
25–34 36.1 (167) 41.3 (71) 41.5 (44)
35–44 35.5 (164) 40.7 (70) 25.5 (27)
45þ 10.4 (48) 4.1 (7) 7.5 (8)
Marital status
Never married 48.3 (223) 72.1 (124) 63.2 (67)
Married 13.2 (61) 9.9 (17) 11.3 (12)
Divorced 28.8 (133) 13.4 (23) 16.0 (17)
Separated 7.6 (35) 3.5 (6) 7.5 (8)
Widowed 2.2 (10) 1.2 (2) 1.9 (2)
Education
Some high school or less 24.0 (111) 53.5 (92) 39.6 (42)
High school graduate/GED 53.2 (246) 37.2 (64) 46.2 (49)
Vocational/technical 13.2 (61) 6.4 (11) 8.5 (9)
Associate degree 4.3 (20) 2.9 (5) 3.8 (4)

Bachelor’s degree or more 5.1 (24) 0.0 1.9 (2)
Employment status
Unemployed 48.0 (222) 59.8 (103) 73.6 (78)
Full-time 36.1 (167) 29.1 (50) 17.9 (19)
Part-time 15.8 (73) 11.0 (19) 8.5 (9)
Personal income
$10,000 or less 57.1 (264) 67.4 (116) 80.2 (85)
$10,001–20,000 22.3 (103) 20.3 (35) 15.1 (16)
$20,001–30,000 13.4 (62) 8.7 (15) 1.9 (2)
$30,001–40,000 2.8 (13) 2.3 (4) 0.0
$40,001þ 4.3 (20) 1.2 (2) 2.8 (3)
Note: Percentages may not total 100% due to rounding.
280 S. L. PROCTOR
on entering the Minnesota Department of Corrections sys-
tem. Interviews typically were conducted for 35–45 min
depending on the range of positive responses endorsed by
the inmates. Data were derived from the SUDDS-IV,
adapted for correctional applications. It was used as a
computer-prompted interview whereby the clinical staff
asked the questions as they appeared on the screen and
recorded the inmates’ responses on laptop computers. The
computer program exported a de-identified, tab-delimited
text file that was imported into Statistical Package for the
Social Sciences (SPSS, Version 16.0) for Windows (SPSS
Inc., Chicago, IL) to facilitate the generation of quarterly
and annual statistical summaries for the Minnesota
Department of Corrections.
Data Analyses

Data obtained from the SUDDS-IV were entered into
SPSS and analyzed to assess the aims of this study.
Algorithms were used to implement decision rules within
the specific SUD categories to group cases into diagnostic
classification groups. For each substance, the positive
responses for items within each of the seven dependence
and four abuse criteria are considered by the algorithms
used in determining a diagnosis for this study. In accor-
dance with the DSM-IV criteria, a positive finding on one
or more abuse criteria would qualify for an abuse diagnosis
unless there are three or more positive dependence criteria.
In this case, a diagnosis of dependence would be assigned
as the DSM-IV requires that a diagnosis of dependence
supersedes the diagnosis of abuse. Chi-square analyses
were conducted to explore the associations between ethni-
city and substance dependence for the various substances
covered by the SUDDS-IV. In terms of ethnic groups, only
three groups (Caucasian, African American, and Native
American) were of sufficient size for making statistical
comparisons of diagnostic prevalence rates. A cross tabu-
lation involving these three categories was utilized to
ascertain whether particular ethnic groups were more
strongly associated with the various substance-dependence
diagnoses. In addition, separate binary logistic regression
models were fitted to the data to test the hypothesis regard-
ing the relationship between the likelihood that an inmate
would be positive for the various substance dependence
categories assessed by the SUDDS-IV and ethnicity after
adjustment for other covariates, including age, marital
status, educational level, and employment status – all are
relevant variables identified in the literature as risk factors
for the development of SUDs (31–33). A hierarchical
method of data entry was utilized with relevant demo-
graphic variables entered at block 1 and ethnic group
entered at block 2. Goodness-of-fit statistics were exam-
ined to assess the fit of each respective logistic model

against actual outcome (i.e., whether inmates received a
particular substance dependence diagnosis). One inferen-
tial test (i.e., Hosmer–Lemeshow) and two additional
descriptive measures of goodness of fit (i.e., R2 indices
defined by Cox and Snell and Nagelkerke) were utilized to
determine whether the various models fit to the data well.
RESULTS
Over two-thirds (70.0%) of the inmates met DSM-IV
diagnostic criteria for substance dependence for at least
one substance, and an additional 7.9% met criteria for
substance abuse. The prevalence rates for the individual
SUD categories are presented in Table 2. Regarding the
substance dependence diagnoses, alcohol dependence
(30.2%) and cocaine dependence (30.1%) were the two
most prevalent SUDs with almost one-third meeting diag-
nostic criteria for each of these disorders. Stimulant depen-
dence (24.1%) was the next most common SUD, followed
by marijuana dependence (15.6%) and heroin dependence
(9.6%). The remaining substance dependence diagnoses
related to the other substances assessed by the SUDDS-IV
(e.g., sedatives, hallucinogens) accounted for less than
1.0% of the substance-dependent cases.
In particular, non-alcohol SUDs were prevalent among
the total sample as over half (56.9%) were dependent on a
substance other than alcohol. However, some overlap was
noted between alcohol and illicit drug dependence. Of
those inmates who met DSM-IV criteria for alcohol depen-
dence, 64.1% were also dependent on another substance,
and of those dependent on drugs, 30.1% were also depen-
dent on alcohol. Dependence on multiple substances was
also common among the total sample. In fact, of those
inmates who met criteria for substance dependence for at
least one substance, 44.0% were dependent on two or more

substances.
Next, the prevalence rates for the individual substance-
dependence categories were examined by ethnic groups to
determine whether some demographic characteristics were
more strongly associated with individual substance-
dependence categories than others (Table 3). Of particular
interest was the significant association found between
ethnicity and cocaine dependence, X2(2, N ¼ 740) ¼
TABLE 2. Prevalence rates for select substance use disorders.
Diagnostic category Prevalence (%)
Alcohol
Dependence 30.2
Abuse 10.2
Cocaine
Dependence 30.1
Abuse 5.4
Marijuana
Dependence 15.6
Abuse 7.5
Stimulant
Dependence 24.1
Abuse 2.1
Heroin
Dependence 9.6
Abuse 0.9
Note: Substance use disorder prevalence rates specific to
sedatives

and hallucinogens are not included due to low use rates (<1.0%
of
cases).
PRISONERS 281
47.903, p < .001, V ¼ .254. As can be seen in Table 3,
prevalence of cocaine dependence was markedly elevated
for the African American inmates. Over half (50.6%) of the
African Americans met DSM-IV criteria for cocaine
dependence, whereas only 22.3% of the Caucasians and
29.2% of the Native Americans met criteria for cocaine
dependence. Several additional significant associations
were noted between ethnicity and dependence on other
substances, including alcohol [X2(2, N ¼ 740) ¼ 17.640,
p < .001, V ¼ .154], stimulants [X2(2, N ¼ 740) ¼ 94.182,
p < .001, V ¼ .357], and heroin [X2(2, N ¼ 740) ¼ 14.320,
p < .01, V ¼ .139]. Specifically, nearly half (46.2%) of the
Native Americans met DSM-IV criteria for alcohol depen-
dence, compared with only 27.7 and 23.8% of the
Caucasian and African American inmates, respectively.
Significantly more Caucasian inmates met criteria for sti-
mulant dependence (36.8%) than the other two ethnic
groups, and heroin dependence (19.8%) was most
common among Native Americans.
Hierarchical binary logistic regressions were conducted
to further assess the impact of ethnicity on the presence of
specific substance dependence diagnoses after controlling
for age, marital status, educational level, and employment
status (see Table 4). Results revealed that inmates of
African American ethnicity were much more likely to
receive a cocaine-dependence diagnosis [odds ratio

(OR) ¼ 2.83, 95% confidence interval (CI) ¼ 1.92–4.16]
compared with those of Caucasian or Native American
ethnicity even after adjustment for the other relevant
demographic predictor variables, model X2(5) ¼ 81.179,
p < .001, R2 ¼ .10 (Cox and Snell), R2 ¼ .15 (Nagelkerke).
Further, the Hosmer–Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test was
insignificant, X2(8) ¼ 6.840, p > .05, suggesting that the
model was fit to the data well. Inmates of Caucasian
ethnicity were much more likely to receive a stimulant
dependence diagnosis (OR ¼ 9.24, 95% CI ¼ 5.40–
15.80) compared with those of African American or
Native American ethnicity, model X2(5) ¼ 112.614, p <
.001, R2 ¼ .14 (Cox and Snell), R2 ¼ .21 (Nagelkerke).
The Hosmer–Lemeshow test was also insignificant for this
model, X2(8) ¼ 4.007, p > .05. Inmates of Native
American ethnicity were more likely to receive an alcohol
dependence diagnosis (OR ¼ 2.12, 95% CI ¼ 1.38–3.25)
compared with those of African American or Caucasian
ethnicity, model X2(5) ¼ 24.824, p < .001, R2 ¼ .03 (Cox
and Snell), R2 ¼ .05 (Nagelkerke). The Hosmer–
Lemeshow test was insignificant for this model as well,
X2(8) ¼ 7.000, p > .05. Inmates of Native American
ethnicity were also more likely to receive a heroin
dependence diagnosis (OR ¼ 2.67, 95% CI ¼ 1.50–4.77)
compared with those of African American and Caucasian
ethnicity, model X2(5) ¼ 28.652, p < 0.001, R2 ¼ .04 (Cox
and Snell), R2 ¼ .08 (Nagelkerke). The Hosmer–Lemeshow
test was insignificant, X2(8) ¼ 7.775, p > .05. Finally,
inmates of Native American ethnicity were not significantly
more likely to receive a marijuana dependence diagnosis
(OR ¼ 1.22, 95% CI ¼ 0.70–2.11) compared with those of
African American and Caucasian ethnicity, model X2(5) ¼
45.203, p < .001, R2 ¼ .06 (Cox and Snell), R2 ¼ .10
(Nagelkerke). The Hosmer–Lemeshow test approached sig-
nificance, X2(8) ¼ 14.958, p ¼ .06, and if one considers the

respective Wald statistic for this predictor (X2 ¼ 0.49), it
appears that Native American ethnicity (β ¼ 0.20) pro-
vided relatively little individual contribution to marijuana
dependence outcome after adjustment for the other rele-
vant demographic predictor variables.
DISCUSSION
The objectives of this study were to identify and describe
the prevalence and patterns of SUDs among female
inmates entering a state prison system. Several of the
findings warrant further discussion. First, an important
aspect of the results was the high prevalence of SUDs,
with over three-fourths of the total sample meeting DSM-
IV criteria for substance dependence (70.0%) or substance
abuse (7.9%) for one or more substances. Specifically,
alcohol and cocaine dependence were among the most
prevalent substance dependence diagnoses, followed by
stimulant, marijuana, and heroin dependence. Although
the observed SUD prevalence rates appear high, similar
findings have been found among female inmates entering a
state prison system where the reported rate for any SUD
was found to be 60.4%, as well as among a female arrestee
population where 84.8% of women were found to be
dependent on at least one substance (34,35).
Despite the relatively high estimates of SUD prevalence
noted in this study, substance dependence was clearly
more prevalent than substance abuse. This finding may
be due to the fact that abuse, as defined by the DSM-IV, is
TABLE 3. Substance dependence prevalence by ethnicity.
Ethnic group
Dependence category Caucasian (n ¼ 462) (%) African

American (n ¼ 172) (%) Native American (n ¼ 106) (%)
Alcohol** 27.7 23.8 46.2
Marijuana 13.6 15.1 20.8
Cocaine** 22.3 50.6 29.2
Stimulant** 36.8 0.0 17.0
Heroin* 8.0 8.1 19.8
Notes: Only those ethnic groups of sufficient size for making
statistical comparisons of diagnostic prevalence rates were
included.
*p < .01; **p < .001.
282 S. L. PROCTOR
consistently less prevalent than dependence in both incar-
cerated samples and the general adult population, or it may
be a function of the potential bias resulting from dependent
women being more likely to be incarcerated than those
women who exhibit substance use behaviors characteristic
of abuse (8,15). Given the magnitude of the difference in
prevalence between dependent and abuse cases (i.e., abso-
lute difference of ,60%) in this study, the bias argument
seems the more plausible explanation for the observed
findings, which suggests the need for more intensive
clinical services for incarcerated women.
Dependence on multiple substances was also common
among this female state prison sample as nearly half of
those inmates who met DSM-IV criteria for substance
dependence for at least one substance were also dependent
on two or more substances. From a clinical perspective,
when substance dependence indications are detected from
any one of the DSM-IV SUD classes, the odds would
suggest that in approximately one in every two cases,

multiple substance dependence diagnoses will be found
among those female inmates entering a state prison system.
Such findings may inform clinical decision-making and
the need for clinical staff or addictions treatment profes-
sionals to explore the full extent of substance dependence
categories whenever any positive indications are reported
by women. Therefore, positive dependence indications
from any one group of substances should result in a care-
ful, comprehensive examination of all categories of
dependence.
Also noteworthy was the finding that over half (56.9%)
of the total sample was dependent on a substance other
than alcohol. Moreover, of those inmates dependent on
alcohol, a majority were also dependent on another sub-
stance. Thus, while alcohol dependence was among the
most prevalent dependence diagnoses, dependence on
illicit drugs collectively was almost twice as prevalent.
The results replicate the well-documented finding that
illicit drug use and drug use disorders are prevalent
among female state prison inmates (5,7,36). Such findings
suggest that the clinical profiles of female inmates, in terms
of SUDs, are unique and independent from those of men.
Given that the facilities and SUD treatment programs
offered to female inmates are based primarily on models
derived from those designed for male inmates, a call for
gender-specific approaches is warranted in order to accom-
modate the changing needs of incarcerated women. For
instance, the present findings suggest that many women
entering the state prison system may require addictions
treatment services specifically tailored to illicit drug issues.
This finding builds on the extant gender-responsive treat-
ment literature for inmates, which has demonstrated that
women clearly exhibit disparate pathways to crime, addic-

tion, and recovery from those of men (37). Thus, women-
focused therapeutic community treatment programs
should incorporate techniques relevant to the unique beha-
viors and cognitions specific to illicit drug use into existing
conceptual frameworks (e.g., relational theory) when treat-
ing substance-dependent state prison inmates (38).
The data clearly indicate that ethnicity was significantly
associated with specific substance dependence prevalence.
For instance, cocaine dependence appeared particularly
prevalent among African Americans, whereas stimulant
dependence was most common among Caucasians. For
Native Americans, the prevalence of both alcohol and
heroin dependence was significantly higher than the rates
for these disorders among the other ethnic groups. In fact,
findings from logistic regressions revealed that African
Americans were 2.83 times more likely to receive a
cocaine dependence diagnosis and Native Americans
were significantly more likely to receive dependence
TABLE 4. Predictors of specific substance dependence
diagnoses.
95% CI
Predictor variable1 β (SE) Wald’s X2 p OR Lower Upper
Cocaine dependence
African American 1.04 (.20) 28.09 <.000 2.83 1.92 4.16
Constant �1.60 (.37)
Alcohol dependence
Native American 0.75 (.22) 11.68 .001 2.12 1.38 3.25
Constant �.53 (.36)
Heroin dependence

Native American 0.98 (.30) 11.11 .001 2.67 1.50 4.77
Marijuana dependence
Native American 0.20 (.28) 0.49 0.486 1.22 0.70 2.11
Constant 1.04 (.47)
Stimulant dependence
Caucasian 2.22 (.27) 65.97 <.000 9.24 5.40 15.80
Notes: Only those ethnic groups of sufficient size for logistic
regressions were included. OR, odds ratio; CI, confidence
interval.
1For all models, age, marital status, education level, and
employment status were entered as covariates at block 1 with
each ethnic group
predictor variable for the respective substance dependence
diagnosis entered at block 2.
PRISONERS 283
diagnoses relating to alcohol (OR ¼ 2.12, 95% CI ¼ 1.38–
3.25) and heroin (OR ¼ 2.67, 95% CI ¼ 1.50–4.77) than
the other two ethnic groups of interest even after adjust-
ment for the relevant covariates included in the models. Of
particular interest was the finding that inmates of
Caucasian ethnicity were nearly 10 times more likely to
be dependent on stimulants (OR ¼ 9.24, 95% CI ¼ 5.40–
15.80) than inmates of African American or Native
American ethnicity. These findings demonstrate that mem-
bership to a particular ethnic group may identify a set of
inmates at elevated risk for the presence of substance-

specific dependence diagnoses. However, it is important
to note that in terms of the magnitude of the various
associations, only the effect size estimates between the
substance dependence diagnoses related to cocaine and
stimulants revealed moderate associations with ethnicity
(i.e., V > .200). Thus, in terms of the ethnic-minority
groups, African American women may be more likely to
report indications of cocaine dependence, and Native
American women may be more likely to report indications
of alcohol and heroin dependence based on demographic
characteristics alone. These findings are important from a
clinical perspective given certain substance dependence
categories appear particularly prevalent among different
ethnic groups. Such findings may inform the program
structure of addictions treatment services for state prison
systems, particularly urban prisons or prisons that serve
predominately ethnic-minority female populations.
This study also documents the feasibility and practical-
ity of using a brief diagnostic assessment interview to
identify SUDs and related problems on a routine basis for
state prison systems. At the clinical level, the findings
provide support for the clinical utility of the SUDDS-IV
and suggest that a relatively brief structured interview has
the ability to standardize diagnostic assessments by incor-
porating both empirically supported elements and a strong
theoretical basis to symptoms described in the DSM-IV.
Routine clinical administration of the SUDDS-IV may be
of value in organizing assessments, designing treatment
plans, and/or making appropriate treatment program place-
ment decisions within a state prison context. Thus, prac-
tical identification of SUDs with relevant information
supporting the diagnoses appears possible with minimal
time commitment.
The findings from this study should be considered in

light of several limitations, which suggest the need for
further work in this area. First, the total sample was com-
prised exclusively of female inmates, which warrants cau-
tion in the interpretation of the findings for male inmates or
populations not comprised of incarcerated individuals.
Second, the demographic composition of the Minnesota
Department of Corrections female state prison population
is not entirely representative of other state prison systems.
In particular, the ethnic composition of the current sample
appeared to over-represent inmates of Caucasian ethnicity,
and the level of educational attainment for the current
sample was slightly higher than that of nationally repre-
sentative state prison samples of female inmates (2,39).
Thus, one would need to be cautious in extrapolating the
findings for urban state prison settings with predominantly
racial-minority populations or those prisons comprised of
inmates with lower levels of education. Finally, as with
other clinical interview data, the SUDDS-IV relies largely
on self-report. Future research would benefit from a multi-
method, multi-informant approach.
Consistent with previous research, the current findings
confirm and extend knowledge regarding the prevalence
and patterns of SUDs among female inmates entering a
state prison system. The finding that nearly 10 times as
many women met criteria for dependence than for abuse,
coupled with the presence of multiple dependence diag-
noses, suggests that female state prison admissions may
represent a difficult to treat population requiring intensive
and extensive services. If authorities aspire to meet the
unique SUD treatment needs of women in the state prison
system in an effort to reduce recidivism and ultimately
alleviate prison overcrowding, identification and assess-
ment of the prevalence and patterns of SUDs is the first
step in developing effective treatment strategies. Pragmatic

identification of SUDs among female inmates in need of
further assessment and treatment appears possible with
minimal time commitment. Consideration of various
demographic risk factors is also a requisite for these
efforts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to acknowledge Norman G. Hoffmann,
Ph.D., for his assistance in providing feedback on drafts of
this manuscript.
Declaration of Interest
The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is
responsible for the content and writing of this article.
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PRISONERS 285
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Prison Life Writing, African American
Narrative Strategies, and Bad: The
Autobiography of James Carr
Simon Rolston
University of British Columbia
I know that the one writing it would only have to take words
and fling them onto
paper, the forbidden and accursed words, the bloody words, the
words spit out in a
lather, discharged with sperm, the slandered, reprobate words,
the unwritten
words—like the ultimate name of God—the dangerous,
padlocked words, the
words that don’t belong in the dictionary, because if they were
written there, com-
plete and not maimed by ellipses, they would say too quickly
the suffocating misery
of a solitude that is not accepted.
—Jean Genet (21)
In his introduction to George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1971),
Jean Genet spends
a great deal of time talking about the idea of bad language. He
writes that the

“forbidden and accursed words” that speak about prison life are
“not accepted”
outside of the prison in civil society. Genet insists that writing
about prison is
circumscribed by proscriptions and prescriptions that he
represents as a kind of
violence done to an already violent language: “[A]ny writing
that reaches us from
this infernal place should reach us as though mutilated, pruned
of its overly
tumultuous adornments” (21). For the “bloody words” of the
prison to enter
into the discourse of civil society, they have to be “maimed”
and “mutilated,”
“pruned” of their brutality and shocking immediacy.
Writing about Soledad Brother, an epistolary memoir, Genet
specifically
addresses prison life writing. As Genet suggests, prison life
writing has rules
about what kinds of speech and speaking subjects can enter into
official (that
is, published) autobiographical discourse. However, the rules of
prison life writing
can be difficult to identify because they are frequently tacit or
implicit, de facto
rather than de jure. Since the rules of prison life writing are
often hard to spot, they
are best recognized when broken or transgressed. Paul John
Eakin identifies “three
primary transgressions—there may be more—for which self-
narrators have been
called to account” (113) for contravening or transgressing the
implicit or explicit
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regulations of autobiographical discourse: “(1)
misrepresentation of biographical
and historical truth, (2) infringement of the right to privacy, and
(3) failure to
display normative models of personhood” (113-14). Of the three
rules that Eakin
identifies here, the third—“failure to display normative models
of personhood”—
is instructive for understanding how Bad: The Autobiography of
James Carr (1975)
radically breaks the rules of prison life writing, particularly the
genre’s tacit rules
about representations of violence and crime. Prison writers who
have committed
acts of violence or engaged in criminal activity invariably seek
to justify (or at least
to explain) in their autobiographies the violence that they have
perpetrated or the
crimes that they have committed. James Carr, by comparison,
describes murder-
ing, raping, and brutalizing men and women inside and outside
of the prison
without justifying his violence. In fact, he resists providing any

explanation for his
crimes. By exploring Carr’s curious and often outlandish self-
portrait of violent
crime in Bad, this article will unearth the tacit rules of prison
life writing and the
African American autobiographical tradition and interrogate
how working-class
African American folkloric traditions engage a more
mainstream, predominantly
white reading public.
A scene early in Bad illustrates Carr’s approach to the genre of
prison life
writing. Carr describes how, when he was a boy, he stabbed
another boy with a
hunting knife and refused to provide the police with an
explanation for the attack
after he was caught: “They kept trying to discover some kind of
motive. . . . I kept
saying ‘I don’t know,’ while they kept thinking up possible
reasons. It seemed like
they were more nervous than I was thinking up new lines of
questions” (24). Like
Carr’s Bartleby-esque refusal to provide a motive for stabbing
the boy, Bad pro-
vides no moral, ethical, political, or ideological explanation or
justification for its
author’s predatory violence. Instead, Carr boasts about his
violent crimes.
While Carr’s boasting about violence places him at odds with
prison life writ-
ing’s normative models of personhood, it does conform to a
figure that appears in
African American folklore, ballads, blaxploitation films, and
later hip-hop called

the “badman.” Jerry H. Bryant describes the badman as the “bad
nigger” who
“was the white man’s worst dream,” the “out-of-control black
man, the surly
slacker, the belligerent troublemaker, and occasionally the killer
of whites” (2).
Hypermasculine, the badman has historically been available as
an archetype to
men rather than women in the African American community. Of
course, there are
violent, boisterous, or anti-authoritarian women in African
American storytelling,
but such female characters do not have the same purchase on a
legendary bad
identity as their male counterparts. The badman story is
traditionally about a bad
man. Bryant isolates two manifestations of the badman,
however: what historian
Lawrence W. Levine calls the “moral hard man” and what
folklorist Roger D.
Abrahams calls the “hard man.”1 Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver,
and George
Jackson are badman figures, but they constitute “moral hard
men” because
R o l s t o n
1 9 2
they fight against white oppression and align themselves with
social action (3).
Moral hard men “revolt mainly against whites within the white
system,” writes

Bryant (2). Clearly, prison life writing accommodates the figure
of the moral hard
man. The amoral hard man is a different story.
The amoral hard man challenges the white system but also preys
on weaker
members of his own community. According to Bryant, this
figure was
a fierce individualist, a scourge in his own community,
introducing disorder and
arousing fear, disapproval, and alarm as well as a reluctant
admiration. He was
known for his viciousness, and his excesses were material for
stories around a slave-
cabin fire or, later, at the barber shop or pool hall and the
springboard for exag-
gerated tales of boundless priapic feats, triumphs over the devil,
incomparable
cruelties, and a cool style that young studs sought to emulate. In
the black
community, this “bad nigger” was the king of the street corner,
the terror of the
roadside honky-tonk, the superbly self-confident and solitary
operator. (3)
The hard man, as defined by Bryant, is often talked about in
prison life writing;
however, it is rare for male prison autobiographers to speak or
to write as hard
men without including telling qualifications that make the
violent figure of the
hard man palatable for a non-prison readership. Prison
autobiographers’ hard

man performances are typically bracketed as politically
motivated (and thus
constitutive of the moral hard man) or represented as
manifestations of selves
from the past with little in common with the book’s author; in
other words, they
are explained or rationalized, which contrasts with the hard
man’s devil-may-care
braggadocio.
The autobiographical subjects of some of the most well-known
prison life
writings of the past fifty years initially accord with the amoral
hard man but
ultimately undergo some radical transformation whereby their
chaotic violence
is focused or supplemented by theological or political morality:
in the course of
their narratives, the narrator is usually transformed into the
moral hard man. The
Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Sanyika Shakur’s Monster
(1993), and Stanley
Tookie Williams’s Blue Rage, Black Redemption (2004), for
example, employ a
conversion narrative, which allows for a clear demarcation
between past and
present selves, between amoral hard men and moral hard men,
and between
“Detroit Red” and Malcolm X or between “Monster” Kody Scott
and Sanyika
Shakur. The phenomenon of prisoner conversion is not
restricted to testaments of
religious transformation, either. Piri Thomas’s Down These
Mean Streets (1967),
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s The Sixteenth Round (1974), and
Nathan McCall’s

Makes Me Wanna Holler (1994) define prison as a site of
radical, secular self-
transformation that accords with the general paradigm of the
religious conversion
narrative: fall, conversion, and rebirth. These texts all depict
radical transforma-
tions of selfhood as a result of the autobiographer’s
imprisonment, bracketing past
P r i s o n L i f e W r i t i n g s a n d A f r i c a n A m e r i c a n
N a r r a t i v e S t r a t e g i e s
1 9 3
criminality from present authorial identity. Finally, even prison
life writers who
explicitly identify themselves with the amoral hard man or with
hard man-type
violence, such as Cleaver in Soul on Ice (1968) or Jackson in
Soledad Brother,
channel their early, chaotic criminality and violence into
markedly anti-
individualistic forms of revolutionary social uplift.
2
By predominantly taking the
position of the amoral hard man in his autobiography, Carr
radically breaks with
an established tradition in African American prison life
writing—a sometimes
shocking, often troubling, but invariably fascinating decision.
This essay considers how Carr’s Bad brings the amoral hard

man into prison
life writing. Such a subject position reveals much about prison
life that is otherwise
excluded from autobiography, and therefore, consideration of
this problematic
and often disturbing voice is important. Carr and the men who
helped him to write
his autobiography bring the amoral hard man into
autobiographical discourse by
hybridizing autobiography with a genre that circulates in
American prisons called
“lying.” Lying—which does not necessarily denote the
misrepresentation of
facts—has very different rules from autobiography regarding
representations of
violence and crime, and the hard man is one of the central
figures, if not the central
figure, of the genre. Bad thus forms what Caren Kaplan calls an
“outlaw genre”
because it “breaks many of the elite literature’s laws” (120) by
“mixing two
conventionally ‘unmixable’ elements.” Although Kaplan
suggests that outlaw
genres blend “autobiography criticism and autobiography itself”
(119), I suggest
that Carr’s mixture of lying, an oral storytelling mode found in
American prisons
in the 1960s and 1970s, with autobiography, a written
storytelling mode often
associated with “high” cultural formations, likewise breaks
rules of self-narration
and disturbs the common sense of prison life writing and
African American
autobiographical discourse.
Because Carr takes the position of the hard man, much of the

usual pruning
that goes into a prison autobiography—such as mitigating the
autobiographer’s
involvement in acts of violence—is absent from Bad. Carr’s
self-narration as a
hard man contravenes acceptable models of personhood and
uses some of the
“reprobate,” “padlocked,” and censored words, sentences, and
stories that Genet
suggests adequately represent the brutality of prison life—and
presumably, the
brutality of some of the prison’s inhabitants. Claiming this
subject position is
certainly problematic. For example, Carr not only makes light
of raping men and
women but also celebrates such violence, gleefully affirming
violent expressions of
misogyny and homophobia in the process. Moreover, as with
other hard men,
Carr’s remorseless acts of violence risk invigorating stereotypes
of African
American male criminality.
Carr’s proximity to racist stereotypes is even more unexpected
given the book’s
editorial process and the whiteness of the book’s editors. Bad is
an “as-told-to”
autobiography: Carr told anecdotes from his life to two white,
middle-class
R o l s t o n
1 9 4

amanuenses—Dan Hammer and Isaac Cronin. After taping their
conversations,
Hammer and Cronin transcribed the tapes, ultimately turning
Carr’s oral text into
the written narrative.
3
The as-told-to nature of the book raises questions about the
authenticity of Carr’s story. I will accept Carr as the author, but
I will also address
the fraught position of his authorial identity, which is especially
important given
Carr’s capacity to energize racist stereotypes about black
criminality. This text
therefore telescopes but also complicates questions of
authenticity, appropriation,
black speech, and white writing that haunt many African
American autobiogra-
phies, from slave narratives to prison writing. In particular, Bad
registers the
troubled relations of power that crystallize when the hidden
transcript of a work-
ing-class African American folkloric tradition becomes a public
transcript—a
published autobiography that circulates in American culture
with a predominantly
white audience and readership.
4
Before turning to Carr’s autobiography in detail, it is worth
emphasizing that
this paradigm—where the typically suppressed voice of the
African American
hard man is brought into American dominant culture—has deep

and tangled
roots in American culture. Carr’s hard man persona is certainly
exceptional in the
prison life writing genre and the African American
autobiographical canon. Yet
Bad participates in, while also deviating from, a long tradition
of African American
hard men who periodically emerge in American literature, film,
and music, raising
difficult questions about the (dis)placement of African
American expressive tra-
ditions in American culture. Hard men were clearly part of slave
culture, for
example, reappearing in oral stories, writing, and songs. Eugene
D. Genovese
cites a number of first-person reports of antebellum hard men
who fought
whites but also threatened their own communities (625-30).
But antebellum hard men were unlikely autobiographers because
they did not
fit the template that abolitionists sought in their fugitive slave
subjects.5 One
exception was Nat Turner, the leader of the infamous 1831 slave
rebellion that
killed approximately sixty white and at least one hundred black
Southerners,
whose story was recorded by Thomas R. Gray, a lawyer and
slaveholder, and
published that year as a pamphlet titled The Confessions of Nat
Turner. In his
confession, Turner “made no attempt ‘to exculpate himself,’ but
frankly and
without remorse acknowledged his monstrous acts” (Gross and
Bender 494), a
lack of remorse that echoes the hard man in antebellum black

folklore and res-
onates with Carr’s violence. Turner’s story is, however, deeply
suspect. Seymour L.
Gross and Eileen Bender show how Turner’s badman persona in
The Confessions of
Nat Turner deviated from historical records and instead served
Gray’s interest in
depoliticizing Turner’s rebellion by pathologizing what was a
collective, revolu-
tionary project. The role that Gray played in shaping and
defining Turner’s story
has clear resonances with Hammer and Cronin’s involvement in
the production of
Bad (which I will explore later in this article), but Carr’s oral
storytelling was
1 9 5
produced under very different circumstances, and he clearly
shared a political
project with his amanuenses. Moreover, Turner framed his
violent rebellion in
religious terms—he sees himself as a vengeful, apocalyptic
Christ-figure (48)—
which aligns him with later moral hard men, such as Malcolm
X.
Bad’s Carr is also similar to Jim Crow- and Great Migration-era
hard men such
as Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940). In
“How ‘Bigger’ Was

Born” (1940), Wright says that he wanted Native Son to be a
book that “bankers’
daughters” could not “read and weep over”; Thomas’s story
“would be so hard
and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation
of tears” (454).
Similarly, according to Hammer, Bad was written so as not to
“appeal to . . . liberal
allies on the outside” (13). But unlike Thomas, whose violence
is an effect of
broader social forces (a sign of the book’s naturalism), Carr’s
violence is not
represented as an effect of the brutal social constraints of the
ghetto or the
prison. Carr’s hard man persona is therefore without precedent
in American
culture until hip-hop’s mainstreaming of a ghettocentric identity
through gangsta
rap nearly twenty years later.
6
Gangsta hard men like N. W. A., the Geto Boys, The
Notorious B. I. G., and Tupac Shakur take on the hard man
persona, commer-
cializing “unauthorized and humorous stories about poor and
working-class black
rebellion, stylized violence, and lewd sexuality” that rarely had
scratched the
surface of the American mainstream (Quinn 113). As Eithne
Quinn observes,
these hard men “wilfully rebutted ideas of black gentility and
assimilationist
aspiration” in the post-civil rights era (113). Decades before
hip-hop men cele-
brated black transgressive performances of masculinity and

rejected the politics of
respectability of their parent culture, Bad extended hard man
performances into
new, unsettling, and often problematic territory.
James Carr: Jackal Dog
Resisting the psychoanalytic paradigm that often frames
contemporary autobiog-
raphy, Carr chooses not to discuss his early childhood in Bad.
“Fuck, man, it was
just one of those goddamned ghetto childhoods,” he tells
Hammer, one of the
book’s two editors. “You’ve heard a thousand stories like it”
(qtd. in Hammer 12).
Instead, Carr’s story begins with his first encounter with law
enforcement. When
he was nine years old, he burned down his elementary school in
East Los Angeles
to get even with a white boxing instructor who had banned him
from the boxing
ring and the playground for swearing (21). Carr was quickly
caught by the police,
who tricked him into confessing to the arson. Thereafter, Carr’s
story of his
adolescent street life in Los Angeles progresses from crime to
crime—including
arson, violent assault, theft, rape, and gang activity. He
provides virtually no
instance in his narrative where he is free from the purview of
law enforcement,
R o l s t o n
1 9 6

state institutions, or prisons. Even when he is no longer
incarcerated at the end of
the narrative, he is still on parole, a conditional state that he
describes as an
extension of the California carceral system: police and parole
officers “follo[w]
[him] around” and closely monitor his activities (196).
Resonating with Michel
Foucault’s concept of the “carceral continuum” (302-3), the
period of Carr’s life
covered in his book follows a pattern of ever-increasing degrees
of punishment
and containment that invariably lead to an indeterminate
sentence—a sentence
without a fixed term—in the California prison system. As a
result, there is neither
temporal nor spatial location outside of the carceral apparatus in
the book: Carr’s
story and the story of his emergent sense of himself as a self
occur in relation to his
criminalization and life in the prison.
Most of Bad focuses on Carr’s adolescence and young
adulthood from the late
1950s to the early 1970s in California’s sprawling carceral
system. Carr writes that
the first “prison” that “[he] was ever sent to was called
Alexander’s Boys’ Home”;
he was eleven years old (27). When Carr was fourteen years old,
he was incar-
cerated at Paso Robles, a youth detention facility in California’s
Central Valley (40).
Aged sixteen years, he was sent to a youth detention camp near
Yosemite called

Mt. Bullion (55). After participating in the gang rape of another
young prisoner at
Mt. Bullion, Carr was transferred to the Deuel Vocational
Institute in Tracy,
California (58). At Tracy, Carr befriended famed prison writer
and activist
George Jackson,7 and the two young men became members of a
prison gang
called the “Wolf Pack.” Carr’s close friendship with Jackson
gained him a
degree of notoriety inside and outside of the prison. After this
stretch of time
behind bars, Carr was paroled but was soon charged with
robbery and given a
“five-to-life” indeterminate sentence in San Quentin (121).
Several years later, Carr
performed the role of the repentant prisoner in order to dupe the
Adult Authority
Board (California’s parole board) into thinking he was
rehabilitated so that they
would release him, which they ultimately did in 1971.
After Carr’s release, he joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) in
which he served
as Huey P. Newton’s bodyguard and enforcer for a time. In the
short period when
he was outside of prison, Carr, who had earned the nickname
“Jackal Dog,” was
rumored to have been involved in several high-profile murders,
kidnappings, and
prison escape attempts related to his involvement with the BPP
and his close
relationship with Jackson.8 Despite the rumors, Carr was never
charged with any
crimes, except for the charges that were brought against him for
fighting at one of

Jackson’s hearings—hearings that were part of the Soledad
Brothers trials for the
murder of John V. Mills, a guard at Soledad Prison. As a result
of his fight at
Jackson’s hearing, which constituted a violation of his parole,
Carr spent nine
months in the San Francisco County Jail in the Hall of Justice
on Bryant Street.
After Carr was released from County Jail and reinstated on
parole, he teamed up
with Hammer and Cronin, who agreed to help write his life
story. On April 6, 1972,
1 9 7
several days after the first draft of Bad was completed, Carr was
gunned down by
two Panther-affiliated assassins outside of his home.
9
As this brief biography shows, Carr’s life was steeped in the
radical politics of
1960s California, and he was an important albeit disturbing
figure in the BPP and
affiliated African American revolutionary organizations
(including the Soledad
Brothers Defense Committee). He seems to conform to a
characterization of
black masculinity familiar to African American prison
narratives of the post-

war era that approximates the figure of the moral hard man
rather than the
hard man. As I have observed, however, most male prison
autobiographies that
describe an autobiographer’s conversion to a revolutionary
cause—including Soul
on Ice, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Soledad
Brother—imply that the
(hard man) criminality or violence of the narrator’s past has
been supplanted by
more meaningful and also more socially acceptable acts of
(moral hard man)
resistance. Even George Jackson, who argues that the “black
criminal mentality”
and the “black revolutionary mentality” are to some degree
compatible, suggests
in his own life narrative that his criminality was ultimately
supplanted by a
revolutionary ideology (Soledad 40). But Carr does not indicate
that his turn to
a revolutionary ideology domesticates, or at least
decriminalizes, the violent,
predatory gang member and prisoner that he was before his
political conversion.
Rather than pursue the familiar trajectory of the criminal who
becomes a revolu-
tionary, Bad privileges Carr’s criminality, his badness, and his
hard man
predation, despite his involvement in revolutionary
organizations such as the
Panthers. If, as I propose, the amoral hard man rarely takes the
position of the
speaking subject in prison life writing, then how do Carr,
Hammer, and Cronin
modify the generic borders of autobiographical discourse in
order to allow Carr to

take on this figure in his autobiography?
Lying and the “White Envelope”
Auli Ek writes: “Since the experience of being incarcerated is . .
. marginal in that it
is unknown to most readers, autobiographers tend to teach us
how to read
this experience by educating us about prison discourse and
culture” (57). Carr
provides just such a pedagogical moment when he describes
lying:
I was lying back on my bed in there [the prison Adjustment
Center—a form
of solitary confinement] wondering what the cons did to pass
the time, when a
couple of dudes started calling, “Smitty, Smitty, tell us a lie.”
They were
answered by a black dude with a silkysmooth voice, the kind
they put on a big-
town jazz station. Smitty began a monologue about fucking a
chick. . . . Smitty
could lie.
“Smitty, we know you’re lying! Don’t just sit there and lie like
that.” The dudes
encouraged him by using a little negative psychology on him. . .
. He described each
R o l s t o n
1 9 8

thrust, each move. By the time he was ready, I was rooting for
him to come, along
with everyone else. When he did, I damned near joined him. It
was that real.
Every night Smitty would get called on and lie. One night it
would be Iwo Jima and
Japs, the next about the biggest coke deal in history. . . . The
dude had imagination.
He might have made it big on the stage if he’d ever made it
back to the streets.
(89-90)
By describing lying as a prison storytelling practice, Carr
teaches Hammer and
Cronin how to receive and help to generate his story. In his
introduction to Bad,
Hammer discusses how the three men used lying as a way to
produce the taped
interviews that Hammer and Cronin would later shape into
Carr’s autobiography:
“Isaac and I would move Jimmy along the way other cons used
to inspire the
‘liars,’ the cons who helped everyone pass the time by weaving
incredible tales. The
more fantastic the story, the more the listeners ride the
storyteller with ‘Hey,
Champ, that’s a loada shit,’ which makes the raconteur go even
further into it”
(16). Although this dialogic practice is discussed in Hammer’s
introduction, it goes
unmentioned in the body of Carr’s story (unlike Cleaver’s and
Jackson’s autobiog-
raphies, for example, whose epistolary forms register the
prison-enforced dialogue
of letter writing). Evidence of Hammer and Cronin’s complicity

in producing the
narrative is thus partially obscured. Bad is predominantly
governed by Carr’s
univocal, autobiographical “I,” which implies that the book’s
“autobiographical
pact” is solely between the reader and Carr, whose face graces
the book’s cover and
who is listed as the sole author.
Yet lying demonstrates that Hammer and Cronin’s influence is
substantial. As
Hammer suggests, the two men “move Jimmy along” and
“inspire” his story-
telling. Hammer and Cronin’s absence as possible co-
storytellers in the narrative is
problematic because it is quite possible that their conscious or
unconscious
cultural expectations (of Carr, prisoners, or black criminality,
for example),
along with Carr’s expectations of his two middle-class white
readers’ desires,
inform how Carr tells his life story, influencing the shape of his
narrative—
what he passes over and what he selects for inclusion. Added to
the unspoken
(and perhaps even unknown) prejudices, cultural expectations,
and interpellations
that likely occurred among these men, the editorial process
further problematizes
the notion that Bad can be read simply as Carr’s story.
Given the controversial nature of Carr’s hard man persona and
its potential
realization of what Katheryn K. Russell has called the
stereotype of the
“criminalblackman” (3), it is important to raise questions about

the authenticity
or appropriation of Carr’s voice and the scope and reach of the
book’s white
editors, even if those questions ultimately remain largely
unanswered. In order to
address these concerns, one could ask whether Bad deviates
from other historical
source material, which it does; the absence of any real
discussion of Carr’s
involvement in the BPP is an interesting lacuna, for example.10
But as Leigh
1 9 9
Gilmore and Peaches Henry have shown, there can be a distinct
difference between
historical truth-telling and emotional truth in an autobiography:
an autobiography
need not, and in many cases should not, conform to its historical
referent.
11
Trauma narratives, for example, often represent what Deborah
Posel calls the
“personal truth” of a traumatic experience (qtd. in Moss 100n6),
which might
deviate radically from the hard facts of the traumatizing event.
Even if Carr’s story
loosely corresponds to his characterization in histories of the
era, it is hard to tell

whether Bad constitutes an “authentic” account of how Carr
experienced incidents
in his life, especially given his penchant for embellishment and
glaring omissions.
To further assess the authenticity of Carr’s voice in the
published autobiography,
one could also compare the book with the materials culled
during the oral produc-
tion of the text, including the tape recordings of Carr, Hammer,
and Cronin’s
conversations. I have only heard approximately ninety minutes
of their taped
discussions (on a promotional tape, The View from the End of
the World: Live
Interviews of Life in Prison with James Carr [1975], that Cronin
mailed to me), yet
the taped stories seem to conform to those in the book. For
example, Carr’s taped
story about taking over Soledad Prison’s D-wing matches (often
verbatim) the
same story in Bad (102-6). This suggests a degree of parity
between oral and
written texts, at least on this single tape. But can such an
approach differentiate
among Carr, Hammer, and Cronin, given the fundamentally
collaborative nature
of Carr’s oral stories?
In order to analyze the reach of Hammer and Cronin’s editorial
work, more-
over, one could compare the book’s “paratext”—“the epigraphs,
dedications,
prefaces, and other bookish elements” (McCoy 156)—to its
central narrative,
which Gross and Bender do quite effectively in their analysis of
The Confessions

of Nat Turner. As Beth A. McCoy suggests, the paratext
functions “as a zone
transacting ever-changing modes of white domination and of
resistance to that
domination” in narratives “emerging from the African American
freedom
struggle” (156). Bad’s paratext is reminiscent of slave
narratives that were coau-
thored, transcribed, or edited by whites, such as The
Confessions of Nat Turner or
the narratives of Henry Box Brown or Harriet A. Jacobs. Slave
narratives typically
include authenticating documents written by whites before and
after the narrative,
what John Sekora has called the “white envelope” (482). As
mentioned, Bad is
similarly enveloped by white writing: the introduction is written
by a white man,
Hammer, and the afterword is written by a white woman, Betsy
Carr, who is James
Carr’s widow. (Additionally, in the recent AK Press edition, the
foreword is written
by Cronin and the new afterword by BM Blob.)
Bad’s paratext, particularly Hammer’s introduction, is
potentially revealing.
For one thing, Hammer mentions in his introduction that he and
Cronin were very
aware of the generic conventions of prison life writing—a genre
that, he says, was
invariably concerned with “proving that the prisoner was an
innocent victim of
R o l s t o n
2 0 0

social injustice” (13). Hammer and Cronin, who were heavily
influenced by the
Situationist International,
12
define the genre of prison life writing in a way that
loosely fits what the Situationists called détournement.
According to Guy Debord
and Gil J. Wolman, détournement is a “parodistic metho[d]”
(15) that clashes
“head-on with all social and legal conventions” (18). Carr’s
hard man persona,
which eschews any explanation for his violence, is perhaps a
form of détournement
that deliberately distorts prison life writing’s generic
conventions, indicating that
lying also served Hammer and Cronin’s political (and
Situationist-inspired) goals.
Moreover, while there is a clear distinction between Hammer’s
introduction
and most of Carr’s narrative, the same cannot be said for Carr’s
conclusion, the
last chapter of the book attributed to James Carr (preceding
Betsy Carr’s after-
word). In the conclusion, there is a distinct change in tone and
content from the
rest of Carr’s narrative. Bad shifts from stories that are largely
anecdotal and
episodic—in fact, with the exception of the conclusion, all of
Carr’s narrative, both
before and during his prison life, is picaresque—to reflective

and theoretical
narrative. Carr’s authorial voice also changes. His rhetoric
suddenly becomes
explicitly political: he discusses questions of ideology, political
theory, and the
Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. He even uses footnotes
(192). In fact, Carr’s
conclusion has more in common with Hammer’s introduction
than the rest of the
narrative. For example, some of the motifs employed in
Hammer’s introduction
are also used in Carr’s conclusion, although they do not appear
elsewhere in the
text. There is also repetition of the image of the African
American prisoner-as-
victim in both the introduction (13) and conclusion (192), and a
shared emphasis
on the genre of prison writing in both sections—“prison
writing” (13) and “every
con writer” (192). These overlaps between Hammer’s
introduction and Carr’s
conclusion point to a stronger editorial influence in the
conclusion—or at least
to a more collaborative relationship on the paratextual framing
of Carr’s otherwise
picaresque hard man stories. This is not to claim that Carr was
incapable of
discussing political theory, analyzing prison life writing, or
deconstructing the
popular image of the prisoner. However, the conclusion
suggests a break, rather
than a continuity, with the narrative, and its tone is more in line
with Hammer’s
introduction than the rest of Carr’s storytelling. Does this mean
that Hammer and
Cronin took a more active role in producing Carr’s conclusion,

possibly because
Carr was murdered before the book was completely finished?
Does Carr’s auto-
biography reflect the man and his stories as they were recorded
on tape, or does
the book reflect the interests of its editors? Could we infer that
the conclusion was
largely written by the book’s editors rather than its declared
author?
Yet such questions may imply that there is some identifiably
authentic African
American subject at the core of Carr’s autobiography whose
voice can be discon-
nected from the two white men who helped to tell his story. The
question of an
authentic voice in Bad is worth considering, yet it may not be a
question that can
2 0 1
be answered with certainty because of the inherent slipperiness
of lying as a
narrative strategy. The linguistic trope of lying is heavily
invested in subverting,
playing with, or blurring the line between authentic and
inauthentic, truth and
fiction, and fact and colorful elaboration. Such inconclusiveness
is productive,
however, because it stages how hard men emerge out of a black
working-class

expressive tradition and white desires, imaginings, and
expectations. For example,
post-civil rights gangsta hard men, like their antebellum hard
man progenitors,
articulated black fears and fantasies, but they were responding
to white restric-
tions, desires, and anxieties, too. Gangsta rappers could thus be
seen as “dupes” of
“white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” according to bell
hooks, and spokesmen
for “the anger of young, black disenchanted folk,” according to
McCall (qtd. in
Quinn 150). Like Carr, whose story emerges within the
constraints of whiteness
but who also uses a black rhetorical strategy that allows him to
articulate a black
folkloric tradition, hard men cannot be uncoupled from the
dominant culture that
helps give them meaning. If anything, Bad highlights the
complicity of whiteness
in the production of the African American hard man—a
complicity that is worth
keeping in focus.
Lying and the Hard Man
Carr takes the position of the hard man by drawing on an
African American
working-class folk tradition, but his autobiographical persona is
also the product
of European American desires, imaginings, and expectations
because, as lying
suggests, Carr’s two white amanuenses are complicit in his
narrative at a gen-
erative level. While keeping these concerns in mind, I want to
explore how lying

interrupts what Eakin calls autobiography’s “rules” (113).
Lying brings Carr’s
story into discourse: lying among the three men is recorded on
the tapes before
the tapes are transcribed into an edited written text that
eventually becomes the
published memoir. As a result, the generic borders of Carr’s
autobiography are
reshaped according to a storytelling mode that circulates in
prison. As its name
suggests, lying allows for transgressive speech acts, what Eakin
calls the
“misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth.” It also
provides discur-
sive space for rule-breaking “models of personhood” that
circulate widely in
prison but are absent in prison life writing.
Lying emerges out of a rhetorical tradition beyond the prison
situated in wider
African American “speech communities” that have historically
reconfigured bio-
graphical and historical truth in storytelling to subvert a
dominant and threatening
white culture, to share sensitive information, or to articulate
registers of truth that
exceed factual records (Gates xviiii).
13
For example, in her autobiography Dust
Tracks on a Road (1942), Zora Neale Hurston describes how
men in her rural
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2 0 2
hometown would conduct “lying sessions”: competitive
storytelling that blended
community stories with individual memory, rumor, and cultural
folklore. The
lying sessions were social texts providing meaning to a
localized community in
ways that factual texts could not. Lying sessions had an element
of subversion to
them as well: a topic that was difficult, problematic, or
dangerous to mention in
public was brought into discourse through subterfuge and
blended with myth,
cultural history, rumor, the artifice of the storyteller, and the
participation of the
listeners who “strai[n] against each other” in telling their
stories (47). 14
Lying and lying sessions are variants of an African American
rhetorical tactic
called “signifyin(g).”
15
The meaning of signifyin(g) is often opaque to those out-
side of the specific speech community in which the story is told
and to which the
story often refers. Therefore, outsiders often presume
signifyin(g) to be mean-
ingless or unimportant wordplay. H. Rap Brown’s description of
signifyin(g)
registers the genre’s feigned insignificance: “I used to hang out
in the bars just

to hear the old men ‘talking shit’” (208). But “talking shit,”
which may suggest
wasteful or unimportant speech, a kind of language detritus, has
great individual,
cultural, and social importance. Brown’s old men, the men in
Hurston’s commu-
nity, and prisoners such as Smitty employ storytelling modes
that are forms of
linguistic subterfuge, covert and resistant texts whose meaning
is indiscernible to
those who are not members of the group or speech community.
These storytellers
also use modes of untruth—lies, talking shit, and lying
sessions—as ways of
telling truths that may not be accessible within traditional or
dominant modes of
speech. Further, their method often destabilizes the dominant
vocabulary by
deploying it in a radically altered fashion. For example, Carr,
Hammer, and
Cronin braid lying with a more dominant generic mode:
autobiography.
Storytelling practices that blend fact with fiction and myth with
history and
biography are certainly useful in prison or on parole, where
stories, particularly
autobiographical stories about past criminal activity, can have
legal (and other)
consequences for an imprisoned or paroled storyteller. Framing
Bad within lying
perhaps provided Carr with the discursive space to talk about
crimes that he might
not have shared if he had used a genre that made stronger truth-
claims. However,
Bad does not blur the boundaries of truth in order to hide Carr’s

crimes. Instead,
as I have suggested, the book adamantly asserts Carr’s
criminality, constituting a
radically different relationship to discourses of truth and power
than has been
suggested in studies of autobiography and prison life writing.
Most analyses of prison life writing argue that autobiography
qualifies or con-
tests how the discourses of the law and the prison have
constituted prison writers
as criminals. For example, Ioan Davies argues that prisoners’
autobiographical
writings are “anti-texts” because they can provide the prisoner
or ex-prisoner with
an alternative forum for truth-telling to the courtroom (85-114).
In this formula-
tion, autobiography becomes what Gilmore calls an “alternative
hearing” (145).
2 0 3
Or, as Deena Rymhs asserts, autobiography allows prisoners and
ex-prisoners “to
respond to the law’s authority over their public and personal
identities”; by
managing their texts in this way, “these writers manoeuvre
around some of the
constraints that the law places on self-representation” (14).
Carr, though, does not
“manoeuvre around” the “constraints that the law places on self-

representation”
so much as he uses them to articulate subversive forms of self-
representation.
Rather than contesting the subject position of criminal ascribed
to him by the law,
the police, and the prison, Carr embodies it, uses it, and
expands and aggrandizes
its signifying power.
Bad exaggerates rather than hides, qualifies, or contests Carr’s
criminality
because the book adheres to the generic rules of lying, which
provide space for
a different relationship to criminality than is commonly
available in prison life
writing. To understand the rules of lying, I turn to a form of
signifyin(g) called the
“toast.” Bryant describes the toast as “a narrative poem, usually
cast in a sort of
pre-rap rhythm, designed for oral delivery by a single performer
to an informal or
casual audience of other street people, usually young men” (89).
Toasts, which are
often called lies, were important textual formations in American
prisons in the
1960s and 1970s when Carr was imprisoned.16 In fact, Carr’s
description of lying
seems to be a prose variant of the toast. Unlike prison life
writing, the toast boasts
about the speaker’s involvement in criminal activity and
exaggerates his capacity
for violence and ruthless brutality. Unlike prison life writers,
toast storytellers not
only talk about hard men, they talk as hard men who are central
figures of the
genre. Because Carr, Hammer, and Cronin reconfigure Carr’s

as-told-to autobiog-
raphy in terms of lying, a prose form of toasting, Carr can also
talk as a hard man,
articulating aspects of prison life otherwise excluded from the
genre of prison life
writing.
Consider, for example, how Carr’s descriptions of rape resonate
with the lying/
toasting genre and accord with stories of the classic hard man,
Stagolee.
Stagolee—also known as Stagger Lee, Stackolee, or Stackalee
in some versions
of the toast—is the archetypal badman, first emerging in
African American post-
bellum badman ballads, precursors to the toast. Toasts that
narrate variations on
the old Stagolee story follow plot lines that are similar to their
ballad predecessors:
Stagolee is thrown out of his house by his wife; he wades
through mud to a local
bar called the “Bucket of Blood”; in a fit of fury, he murders
the bartender, has
rough sex—in some cases forced sex—with a prostitute, and
shoots dead an
adversary named Billy Lyon (also called Billy Lions, Billy
Dilly, Ben Lee, and Benny
Long in variants of the story). Some versions of the toast end
with Billy’s death
(Wepman, Newman, and Binderman 135-36), while other
versions find Stagolee
before a judge, charged with Billy Lyon’s murder (B. Jackson
51-52). One version
even concludes with Stagolee in Hell after he is murdered by
Billy’s mother,
fighting the devil and having sex with the devil’s minions (B.

Jackson 54-55).
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2 0 4
Violent misogyny and rape play central roles in the poetics of
badman figures
like Stagolee, providing a generic context for Carr’s rape
stories. In one version of
Stagolee (here called Stackolee), for example, “Stack” has
violent, forced sex with a
prostitute after murdering the Bucket of Blood’s bartender:
“Now me and this
broad we started to tussle / and I drove twelve inches a dick
through her ass before
she could move a muscle” (B. Jackson 47). In another version,
when Stagolee is in
Hell, he rapes a woman “bent over shovelin’ coal” (B. Jackson
55). Stagolee’s
violent sexuality and misogyny are the norm in toasts, where
badmen define their
masculinity against and through the bodies of women. Bryant
points out that sex
for the toast badman “is empty of erotic pleasure”: “The point is
to establish
dominance, to overwhelm, to display a total lack of sensitivity
or affection. As in
the old badman ballads, the penis is employed as a weapon”
(91). In the badman
toasts, sex is bereft of desire and is usually an expression of
power, dominance,
and control.

Similarly, throughout Bad, sexuality is an extension of other
expressions of
violence and domination in Carr’s phallocratic street and prison
life. For example,
Carr regularly boasts about his involvement in gang rapes—
described as “running
a train”—that always take the most vulnerable women as objects
of exchange.
This masculine economy privileges men who can arrange a rape
for their friends.
Early in the narrative, Carr describes gang-raping women with a
street gang called
the Farmers. Their strategy involves finding some “sharp-
looking chick” at a party
and convincing her to leave with one of the gang members,
ostensibly to “go to the
store”: “When she got outside and into one of the Buicks, the
next thing she knew
she was all the way over in hell—in the middle of Watts with a
squad of Buicks
behind her. We’d take her down to our clubhouse and strip her
down; then we’d all
fuck her; as many as twenty guys in a train” (37-38).
McCall describes the dynamic of the gang rape by relating his
involvement in
and witnessing of gang rapes in the small, predominantly
African American
community called Cavalier Manor in Portsmouth, Virginia,
where he grew up:
“Different groups of guys set up their own trains. Although
everybody knew it
could lead to trouble with the law, I think few guys thought of it
as rape. It was
viewed as a social thing among hanging partners, like passing a
joint. The dude

who set up the train got pats on the back. He was considered a
real player whose
rap game was strong” (44). According to McCall, then, running
a train was
understood by its participants as a form of homosocial bonding
(“a social thing
among hanging partners”) that affirmed alliances between men
and staged violent
performances of masculinity over and through the bodies of
young black
women—women who are violently effaced in the homosocial
exchange. As
McCall indicates, rape was one way to define oneself as “a real
player whose
rap game was strong,” much as violent misogyny reinforces the
badman’s mascu-
line toughness.
2 0 5
However, while McCall’s autobiography psychologizes gang
rape in his commu-
nity and explains how he was caught up in behavior that he
eventually rejects, Carr
never identifies rape as something worthy of regret, registering
the degree to which
his use of lying stretches the rules of autobiographical
discourse. Carr frames gang
rape as part of the “crazy” “routine” of street life, illustrating
his point by comparing
gang rape with a slapstick story about stealing cakes from a

bakery (38). Bad thus
flattens otherwise horrifying experiences of sexual violence into
an almost
ethics-free discourse that draws little distinction between rape
and petty theft.
As McCall demonstrates, prison life writing makes room for
discussions of
heterosexual rape; by contrast, there is little space within the
genre for male
autobiographers to describe their involvement in same-sex rape
or prison
rape.
17
Ek argues that while some prisoners’ autobiographies are told
from the
position of the rape victim—T. J. Parsell’s Fish (2006), for
example—most
describe prison rape from the position of the “disinterested
observer.”
However, none describes rape in prison from the position of the
perpetrator,
despite the overwhelming number of rapes that occur in
American prisons
(66). Ek’s observation suggests that the prison rapist is what
Eakin describes as
a proscribed model of personhood in autobiography.
Although the genre of prison life writing keeps the male prison
rapist at the
margins of discourse because his violence is taboo, the genres
of lying and toasting
enable the prison rapist to be a speaking subject because they
frame same-sex rape

according to very different ethical boundaries, defining male
rape exclusively as a
sign of masculine power. For example, in another version of
Stagolee, this time
recited in 1967 by “Big Stick,” an African American prisoner at
New York’s
Auburn Prison, Stagolee rapes his adversary, Billy Dilly. First,
he threatens to
“fuck Billy Dilly in his / motherfucking ass” if he encounters
him. Then, when
Stagolee is finally confronted by Billy, Stagolee attacks, rapes,
and murders him.
He tells Billy,
“. . . you’d better get down on
your knees and slobber my head,
‘Cause if you don’t, you’re sure to be dead.”
Billy Dilly dropped down and slobbered on his head,
But Stag filled him full of lead. (Qtd. in Wepman, Newman, and
Binderman 137)
Sex is indistinguishable from murder in this stanza: Stagolee’s
penis and gun blur;
Stagolee “fill[s] him full of lead” rather than semen. Stagolee’s
sexual violence in
this version of the poem is directed at another man, bearing the
traces of the
sexually homogeneous carceral space in which the toast was
recited. The rape
victim’s sex in this Stagolee toast is of little significance
because sexuality in the
hard man’s world is bereft of desire and only serves to
demonstrate and enhance
the potency of the hard man rapist.
R o l s t o n

2 0 6
By framing his autobiography in terms of lying, Carr breaks
prison life writing’s
proscriptive formula for depictions of prison rape and
identifies—even cele-
brates—himself as a prison rapist. For example, Carr describes
how he and his
gang repeatedly rape a new prisoner (a “kid”) named Abernathy,
whose victim-
hood is representative of the other victims of sexual violence in
the book and in
prisons when Carr was incarcerated.
18
After being gang-raped in the shower,
Abernathy has a psychological breakdown. He “never came out
of his cell
again, and gradually went out of his head. He never saw a soul.
. . . Pretty soon
he was shitting on the floor and pissing in his pants. The shrink
examined him and
had him shipped off to Atascadero [State Hospital]” (64).
Abernathy is a figure of
some pathos, but once again, Carr never expresses regret for his
violence. Carr’s
descriptions of rape also follow the narratological format of
lying as a genre in their
carnivalesque treatment of sexual violence, as is conveyed in
the brutal but jocular
terms that Carr uses to narrate his actions. Thus, Carr frames
gang-raping a “cute

young kid” as a sadistic, humorous anecdote, for example,
where the punchline is
that Carr and the other two assailants are caught because they
all contract the same
venereal disease as a result of the attack (122). Likewise, Carr
boasts about gang-
raping a “cute white kid” with a group of young African
American men at a prison
camp near Yosemite. He describes raping the white kid as
though it were a prank
and follows it with a putatively comedic police chase through
the woods, where
Carr and the other rapists run amok “like Keystone Kops”
(57).19 Lying’s violent
and sadistic but bawdy humor provides a framework for Carr to
speak about
raping men because the genre’s humor resists acknowledging
the pain of the
victim, focusing instead on the priapic exploits of the hard man
rapist.
Carr’s use of cute to modify “young kid” and “white kid”
signals how his
narrative deviates from the lie/toast genre by defining the hard
man’s homosexu-
ality in terms of desire and not simply as an expression of
power and dominance.
In fact, throughout the autobiography, Carr alludes to desiring
young men that he
calls “homos.” When he first arrives at California Men’s Colony
East, for example,
Carr sees “a procession of beautiful-looking boys [that] hurried
across the yard
and filed by me as if I was a judge in some fantastic beauty
contest.” He ogles their
“tight short-shorts, teased hair, make-up, perfume” and “get[s]

right into the
swing of things, introducing [him]self and handing out
compliments.” Although
Carr’s interest in men radically breaks with the hard man’s
sexual code and
conventional representations of African American masculinity
in the 1960s and
1970s, the autobiography also reinscribes homophobic,
patriarchal, and misogy-
nistic mores. Carr insists that the “homos” are to be referred to
as “she,” partially
effacing his homosexual desire by framing it in heterosexual
terms (161). While
the men that he desires occupy a liminal space between
masculinity and feminin-
ity, their gender roles reproduce and exaggerate the
subordination of women in
American society, normalizing imbalances in male-female
power relations by
2 0 7
reproducing them in the prison. Finally, befitting his hard man
image, Carr always
represents sex with men as forced sex—sex that might involve
desire but that is
ultimately brutal domination.
Carr’s hard man persona is undoubtedly problematic. Beyond
his brutal
misogyny and predatory violence, his frank descriptions of

prison rape potentially
reify the stereotype of the “black beast rapist,” which at one
time was held up in
the Southern states as a justification for lynching black men
(Rhodes 33). James
Baldwin, discussing Wright’s Bigger Thomas, calls this figure
“that fantasy
Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro;
that fantastic and
fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell
beneath the lash”
(34). This “fearful image” of the violent African American male
has significant
cultural currency in representations of African American
prisoners. As John M.
Sloop demonstrates, one of the dominant images of African
American prisoners
during the period from 1969 to 1975—when Carr was
imprisoned and when Bad
was published—was of a nihilistically violent man: “[H]e is
violent for the sake of
violence alone. This prisoner is a rapist, a liar, a spoiler of
white youth. Rather than
struggling against a racist culture in order to preserve his
heritage, he is repre-
sented as following his nature, behaving in ways that defy
transformation and thus
demand restraint” (16). Historically, the stereotype of the
violent black male has
been crucial to sustaining different modes of “restraint” on
black bodies: “Free
blacks were often characterized as degraded, vicious, and
depraved, supporting the
rationale that blacks must be contained within the institution of
slavery” (Rhodes
32). Dorothy E. Roberts likewise argues that legal decisions

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