Interview with David Thompson

The narrative has its own momentum

David’s writing spot at a library in Rio. Photo by David C. Thompson.

Rima and Hallie spoke with David C. Thompson, an anthropologist and prison researcher based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. David holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a participant in our 2022 dissertation-to-book workshop.

Hallie Wells: Your book examines mass incarceration in Brazil, where more than 650,000 people were imprisoned as of 2024 – the majority young Black people from favelas¹ who are confined in male-designated units. You focus on the concept and practice of “resocialization” – can you talk about what it signifies and how it’s enacted in this context? How did you come to focus on resocialization, especially when most of your interlocutors said it “doesn’t exist”?

David Thompson: “Resocialization” is very close to what in English-speaking contexts would just be called “criminal rehabilitation.” It’s basically the same project of reforming people who have been convicted of a criminal charge, and the idea of building a law-abiding life afterwards. At the same time, it’s so slippery, and the reason I started following it was because it turned into a kind of mirage when I started doing research in Rio. People would talk about it all the time, tangentially or just in conversations with me and each other, but as soon as I turned to ask them about resocialization directly, or what it was, I would get that response – that it doesn’t exist. So it was this object that somehow you couldn’t look at directly, but was still all around.

I remember as an early PhD student that one of my professors gave the advice of: Deliberately forget what your object means. Stop trying to define what resocialization is, and then see what it does. What happens, what gets organized around it? That was really helpful to me – not feeling pressure to be like, resocialization is this, but rather, what does it do? What happens in its name? That was much more useful, because so much has been written about rehabilitation and resocialization in criminology and sociology, and so much is about what works, and so much of that is tied to comparing rates of recidivism among people who’ve left prison. That’s so narrow, and doesn’t correspond to what I was seeing re-socialization doing in my research.

In fieldwork, I would get the response that [resocialization] doesn’t exist. But then, in the next sentence, they would talk about how it should exist, how it shouldn’t exist… So as I write in the Introduction, the non-existence of resocialization is something that needs to be explored. If this person says that resocialization doesn’t exist, you can’t stop there, because they’re not saying that this concept is useless, or this concept has no impact on the world. What they’re saying is that Rio’s prisons don’t properly reform people, and they should. And even that desire -- If only we had properly functioning prisons, and a properly functioning prison is a prison that resocializes, everything would be better, and that’s the thing that we should be striving for… Even when people say it doesn’t exist, that in itself is resocialization having an impact. It’s moving things, it’s shaping people’s perspectives.

One really striking moment at the very beginning of fieldwork was when I first met a man who’d recently been released from prison. We were talking, and [he very strongly said] “Prison has done me nothing but harm.” Then two minutes later, in the same conversation, “The only reason I was able to change is because I was in prison.” These contradictions rub up against each other, even in the same conversation, in the same breath. I was trying to follow those contradictions, see where resocialization takes people or doesn’t, how it holds people in specific places, even if it’s always anticipating this future for them.

HW: You do that so nicely in the epilogue, where you don’t tie it up in a positive framing. You end with, Here’s two stories, and I’m going to leave them here for the reader to make sense of.

DT: I’m glad you liked that, because I agonized over that for a long time. Part of it is, to be honest, that I’m really bad at writing conclusions. I hate them, it’s the hardest part of writing for me. But specifically for this book, part of what I follow when I’m following resocialization is this redemptive impulse that’s not just about prisons – it saturates a lot of our world, and specifically saturates anthropology and social sciences. So if I ended the book with this turn to hope, which a lot of books do – and I’m not necessarily criticizing them for it, but… Aren’t I just falling back into the very thing that I’ve been trying to dissect and problematize? And if not that, then how do you conclude a book? It is such a strong urge, and I see it everywhere now. But given that I’ve shown how perverse that [redemptive impulse] is in the context of my fieldwork, I think that the epilogue is also a provocation for anthropology. I think we should stop using redemption as a proxy for justice. Those are two separate things, and I think that anthropology, and social science, and liberalism, conflate the two. But if justice isn’t redemption, then what? The book doesn’t really answer that, but I hope that the end of the book leaves people with the same question that I have: If we can’t fall back on this idea of redemption, then what do we do?

Rima Praspaliauskiene: I was fascinated by your chapter on Project Life [a volunteer program to promote “health and citizenship” among incarcerated people], that the biggest critics of Project Life are the volunteers. You start your Intro with a letter from Diogo [a Project Life participant]. I was curious how that letter correspondence happened, and if you could tell us a little bit more about the genre of letter writing, and as an ethnographic method.

DT: It was Diogo who started this, literally when we [first] met. He said, “Give me your address, I want to write you a letter.” And that’s the letter that opens the book. It went on for about two years, that letter correspondence, sending and receiving one letter every month [or so]. It wasn’t the only way we interacted – I was in that prison a lot. I saw him basically every time I was there. But it was a different way of talking to him. It was a way to give him time to write about his own reflections and philosophize. It gave him an opportunity to talk to me and be part of this research project in a different way. A lot of the tools that social sciences use are very similar to the tools used by police and courts and prisons – specifically interviews and life histories. Even when I was trying not to replicate these kinds of interrogations, that still came up, because people had been trained, that’s what they understood what an interview was and does. They were so used to receiving certain kinds of questions that they anticipated them and answered them before I even asked. Letters let us step outside those expectations.

I was very aware, and I think Diogo was also aware, that there’s a whole tradition of writing letters from prison – George Jackson, Malcolm X, Gramsci, Saint Paul… I found a translation of some of Malcolm X’s letters, and I sent them to Diogo, and he read them, and then I got another letter, and he quoted them back to me. We were participating in this very long tradition of prison letter writing.

I thought it was nice to open the book with me being addressed as the author – it’s not my words that are opening this, but his. Part of it is also honoring Diogo as a writer, because it wasn’t just the letters – he wrote books, he wrote to other people, I’m certainly not the only person he was writing letters to. To put that part of him into the book was important to me.

HW: What was the process like for you of turning your dissertation into a book?

DT: You both were there at the start of this process with the [dissertation-to-book writing workshop]. That was extremely helpful for me, in terms of getting over initial anxieties about the process. Writing is just a very lonely thing to do most of the time, so anything you can do to make it less lonely is so wonderful.

I know there are people who almost do a complete rewrite [from the dissertation to the book], or who really change the structure. The structure of [my] book is almost the same as the structure of the dissertation. It’s the same chapters, it’s the same order. When I finished the dissertation, I was very happy with what I’d done. Looking back, though, it seems clear to me that I’d only half-figured out what I wanted to say. A lot of the transformation of the dissertation into the book was working through what I wanted to say, with less interference from the pressure to prove that I’m a well-trained scholar.

One thing I learned is that the path I took to a certain conclusion is not necessarily the same path I want to take the reader on. They don’t have to go through every single step in my argument, because my reasoning was weird and circuitous. I can actually make it simpler for them, and that’s one of the purposes of a book, to simplify this process of [getting to the arguments you’re making]. That meant that the book as a whole is now significantly shorter than the dissertation, like 30,000 words shorter. I wanted to make sure that what remained was really important. And for me, a lot of that is to make sure that there’s a really strong narrative.

There’s nothing from my Introduction of the book that comes from the dissertation. It took me a very long time to figure out how to start the book. Then one day, I just sat down and started with Diogo’s letter. That was the point where I [thought] this could actually be not just a book but maybe a good book. The narrative has its own momentum, and if I just followed that, then I could make the points that I wanted to make along the way.

I find responding to reviewers extremely intimidating, and very hard, because it’s this weird mix of Don’t touch my baby, but also, I just assumed that these people are the experts, and everything they say is valid. Pretty much everything they said was super helpful and eventually made the book a lot better. But trying to figure out a way to respond to them and still keep the book my book took a long time. It was something that I was very scared of, and the only way that I could do it was to write a list, and divide it into the easy, quick fixes and the big structural changes, and just start with the easiest stuff and build up my confidence as I went along to be able to touch the big issues.

RP: How has your writing practice shifted from writing dissertation to the book project, and what does your writing practice look like these days?

DT: When I started writing the dissertation I really started looking around and seeing how other people write, and reading interviews about how people write, and desperately searching for a clear method – like, if I just follow this method, then everything will be fine. It was helpful in the sense of learning how other people write, and learning that there is no one proper way to write. But the one constant, and the one thing that I can absolutely agree with, is that writing is just a habit. Every day is not feasible for me at some points of my life, and not feasible for a lot of people, but just finding a way to make it a regular activity, whatever that means. When I’ve written for the past month, then writing today is nothing, it’s fine. When I’ve stopped for a month and I start again, it’s this Herculean task.

Part of the writing process of this book was also me learning to be like, I don’t need a system. I can be stopping and starting, and not be the best and most disciplined writer, and as long as something’s getting done, it’s getting done. That’s something that I would go back and tell Dissertation Mode David. Everything is progress in one way or another. And you’re also finding out, every time you sit down to write, how you write, what kind of a writer you are. I’m a disorganized writer. I will continue to try to be slightly more organized, but I will still be disorganized, and I will still write. That kind of assurance was part of the biggest thing about how my writing practice has changed.

When I sit down to write, I don’t feel like I’m a good writer. I feel like I’m just making it up as I go along. I have those moments where I sit down and I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know how I’ve gotten anything done in the past. Like, the person who wrote those articles in the past, that’s not me. Maybe it’ll get better, but I also have to figure out how to have that feeling and also keep writing. Maybe the answer is writing without confidence. I don’t know. To not know if this is gonna be anything, and just do it anyway. And then trust that it might not be the thing that I’m aiming for, but it’ll be something.

First drafts are generally really grueling for me, but that’s the most important part, because I generally start something not knowing what I’m trying to say, and then work through it. The second draft part is my favorite part of writing. By the time I finish the first draft, I have a much clearer idea of what it is that I’m trying to say. The second draft, where it all seems to come together, is really gratifying. That doesn’t mean that it’s finished in the second draft. Often there’s a third, fourth, fifth, n number of drafts. But the second draft is to me the good part of writing, when I’m not dealing with a blank page, and I still don’t have to worry about reviewer comments or tiny little tweaks. That’s when I have a vision of what I’m trying to do, and what I can do. That feels like the most creative part of it.

One thing I do, and this is also my second draft thing, for articles especially – I will print out the document, start a new document on my computer, and type everything out again. That’s a way of forcing myself to ask, for every single sentence: Is this the way that I want to say this? Rather than negative screening, where you figure out what shouldn’t be there and try to fix that, it’s a positive screening: What part of this do I actually want to go into the second draft?

RP: David, do you feel that you can write what you like? What does that mean, or look like for you?

DT: The book, and the articles [I’ve written], I [wrote] them being aware of – this needs to be packaged as a more or less self-enclosed thing that has a hook, that will have a specific reader in mind, that more or less sticks to conventions of academic writing. At the same time, I think everything that I’ve written, I’ve been able to include stuff that is important to me. And [...] the thing that you might like about the book is not necessarily the thing that I will like about the book. In everything I write, I can find something in it that’s gratifying and fulfilling for me, even if it’s not the same thing that the reader [finds fulfilling].

When I wrote the dissertation, and even when I started writing the book, so much of this was approaching the book as a tool to get a job, and to get tenure. As I kept writing and doing these revisions… I haven’t gotten a tenure track job yet, there’s a very good possibility that that won’t happen for me, so one of my reactions to this was, Okay, why am I writing this book then? This can’t be a tool to get a job, because then if I don’t get a job, then this whole thing is a failure. In the Project Life chapter… I volunteered for Project Life, and I talk about this workshop we did, and it turns into a critique of that workshop, and of us. But the first draft was not as self-reflexive and critical, because I was trying to maintain this professional self-image where I was the good anthropologist. Whereas now, if I let go of that even a little bit, and just be a little bit more honest, and be like, Oh no, I was fully participating in this workshop that was kind of fucked-up in what we were trying to achieve, and that only became clear to me afterwards. To be able to say that [in the book]... I don’t think I’ve completely abandoned all of these academic pressures, but I let myself feel a little less constrained by them. And that made the book a different book, and hopefully a better book. It’s definitely a better book for me, in terms of what I wanted the book to be.

1. Favelas are informal, generally impoverished neighborhoods in Brazil’s cities.