Abstract: The prisoner discourse is a social variety used by prisoners to express their marginal lives. The prisoner's marginalized individual identity is constructed by using such discursive means as vocatives and personal pronouns, and discursive strategies like swearing, discursive power, evidentiality, discursive empowerment, and collectivization. An empirical study of the discursive construction of the prisoner's marginalized identity from the perspective of individualization helps us to understand the prisoner's discourse patterns and living conditions, which can throw some light on their rehabilitation and thus help them to return to the mainstream society more easily upon their releases.

Key words: prisoner discourse, marginalized identities, discursive construction, individualization, socialization