Article ‘‘You Have to Cut it off at the Knee’’: Dangerous Masculinity and Security inside a Men’s Prison

This article focuses on the prison as a gendered organization and examines the consequences for treating the male prisoner as the generic prisoner. In order to simplify security protocols and manage outsiders, prison staff and correctional officers use a ‘‘commonsense’ ’ approach that draws on long-standing and structu-rally embedded assumptions about the uncontrollable masculinity of minority men. In a ‘‘postracial’ ’ and ‘‘color-blind’ ’ modern America, however, the assumption that prisoners are hyperviolent, hypersexual, and dangerously masculine is applied to all prisoners regardless of race. Drawing on two-and-a-half years of ethnographic field-work inside a high-security prison, this article discusses the ways that the assumed dangerous masculinity of prisoners facilitates security protocols and isolates male prisoners from their children and families. Keywords gendered organization, hegemonic masculinity, incarcerated fathers, prison Prison is an institution in which masculinity is (re)constructed, undermined and (re)affirmed. In this sense, it bears a resemblance to other institutions in which mas-culinity comes to be defined, such as schools (Hasbrook and Harris 1999; Ferguso