| Summary: | This article aims to analyze how prison police achieve the goal of rehabilitating prisoners, i.e., prisoner education, by using the staged prison discourse, particularly prison police discourse (hereafter PPD) from the perspective of ecolinguistics. Crime is the social phenomenon and disservice action which may directly or indirectly bring about detrimental effects to the parts concerned. Rehabilitating prisoners by using PPD is an efficient way to help decrease the detrimental effects of crime and rehabilitation is an essential part of state governance and social administration. The rehabilitation processes of eighteen prison policemen using PPD at Q prison in Y province of southwestern China have been recorded and transcribed for a generic analysis from an ecological perspective. The results reveal that PPD, as a special type of institutional discourse, is the main media for prisoners’ rehabilitation and characterized with generic features and functions. The ecolinguistic perspective for the generic analysis of PPD offers criteria to evaluate its usefulness, especially for rehabilitating prisoners: (1) PPD that construes favorable ecology for prisoners’ mental and behavioral restoration is ecolinguistically labelled as the constructive discourse to be advocated because the prisoners can be efficiently rehabilitated by making use of this kind of PPD; (2) PPD that damages the ecology for the prisoners’ rehabilitation is ecolinguistically labelled as the destructive discourse to be rejected because it brings ill influence on prisoners’ rehabilitation; and (3) PPD that neither construes nor damages the ecology for prisoners’ rehabilitation is ecolinguistically labelled as the ambivalent discourse to be modified into a constructive one with the help of discursive strategies.
|
|---|
