What Do They Call You?

"Hey bro, what do they call you?" I first heard this odd question my first day in prison. I was tempted to ask the question, "who are 'they'?" or to sarcastically respond, "Oh, they call me all kinds of things..." Nevertheless, I was quickly learning that when you live in a culture not your own, it's wise to begin to understand the language and customs. It just struck me as odd that people who have been stripped of their entire lives would willingly be stripped of their identities too, identifying themselves instead by what other people call them.

Prison officials give incarcerated people number identifiers, called "prison numbers," that are unique to each person. Like product codes, it makes prisoners, and all that relates to them, easier to track. To be fair, corrections officers don't often refer to us by our prison numbers, although back when our prison numbers were painted on our clothing they would. "Hey! 739416! Come over here for a shakedown!" Now, since the officers no longer have painted numbers to refer to, we are called "you in the blue coat and orange hat!" or "you with your pants sagging!" or some other visual identifier. But to many officers, we're still just a number. 

In a society that is, in some ways, hyper-sensitive about how we label people, it is a sociological anomaly that incarcerated people are somehow exempt from the anti-labeling campaign of the post-modernists. It is socially acceptable to negatively label prisoners with names like "convict" or "ex-con," "felon," "sex-offender," "murderer," "thief," and other negative identifiers. Somehow, if someone commits a crime, it makes it socially acceptable to use that crime, the worst decision of their lives, to forever identify them. Somehow, more than 250 years after Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, society still approves of using negative labels to shame people. But only certain people--like incarcerated people. 

This brings me back to how incarcerated people label themselves. Some of these names follow a person to prison from the streets. I've heard names that tell where someone is from: Eastside, Benton Harbor, New York, Mac (for Mac Ave in Detroit), Flint, Jacktown, and many others. Others, like Nut, Joe Dirt, Mo Mo, Big D, Preacher, and more, usually have stories behind them. Maybe they are childhood or neighborhood nicknames, or they might be religious nicknames or names given within prison (like "Professor," as I've been called). But some nicknames are clearly related to a person's criminal history (or the reputation they want to have). I've heard people call themselves Murder, Killer, Shank (a prison knife), Pimp, AK (for the gun), and others. Occasionally, people actually use their real first names, but others get angry when someone uses their first name, insisting, "Don't use my government name!"

Within the last few years, I've taken to asking people what their name is rather than what people call them. Sometimes I'm given their real first name, and other times I'm given a nickname. It's important to me that people see themselves for who they are, not for what they've done in the past or the image they feel they need to project. Some incarcerated people aren't ready to see themselves for who they are or for their future potential. Instead, they too are stuck in a pattern of negative labeling, of themselves and others, and they aren't used to people seeing them as people and respecting them for their humanity. Maybe calling an incarcerated person by his first name doesn't seem like a significant thing, but it reminds us that we are human. It reminds us that we are not a number, or where we're from. It reminds us that we belong to someone (where we got our name), and that we are still humans with potential that goes beyond the sum of our worst choices.