Good evening everybody it’s my name is m lner I’m the director of The Institute of criminology and it’s my great pleasure here to welcome you all friends colleagues um visitors um and to see so many of you uh coming to this inaugural lecture um given by P BR good colleague a great
Citizen of the Institute a great academic and a fantastic thinker and I’m sure we will all enjoy this talk and the subsequent discussion um I’m going to hand over to Allison now who will give who’s been as as all of you will know for many many
Years a great colleague um and and and of of of Ben and of The Institute and she will give an introduction um of the background of of Ben’s work thank you thank you Manuel and um I’m not going to say a great deal uh I just want to say a
Few very few words uh some of them personal since you all know Ben and his credentials he came to the institute on a Newton trust post-doctoral Fellowship in 2001 learn his prisons research craft in Wellen the then governor of Wellen is here in the AUD somewhere we’re delighted to see
Peter and uh he’s gone from strength to strength ever since um those of you who know my office know I keep absolutely everything and you’ll be surprised to know I can usually find things I managed to find yesterday the original letter that Ben wrote to me from
Ethic I read it him yesterday show yday the only I wanted to draw to your attention because I just thought it was so self reflexively insightful was that he ends it by saying before my PhD I received a double first in social and political sciences from Robertson College Cambridge a distinction in my
MSC sociology from London School of Economics I am a diligent and thorough researcher interested in empirical work informed by Theory how true is that so that’s just lovely to revisit um so anyway uh he’s been a gift he’s been a gift to me he’s been a gift to the prisons
Research Center and to The Institute since he settled into his stride I almost wanted to plot a figure with two axes like heavy light to articulate his strengths and style and he’d be in the best quadrant of course and very high on all sorts of things that matter like depth intelligence sensitivity
Professionalism and Leadership on the MST and on complex research projects it’s a joy to work with him as an outstanding colleague I really couldn’t asked for a better scholarly companion this evening we celebrate his professorship which he was awarded in 2019 just before the pandemic so tonight’s lecture and reception are
Fitting marks of both that achievement and our return to the world of real world connection apart from all those who are online who we also wish were here and we welcome from afar so then we’re all looking forward to what you have to say to us tonight and
Uh to the socializing afterwards over to you thank you very much thanks for reading out a letter that made me seem like a massive shower um thank that was very nice um felt a bit like a eulogy the irony is I want to start as
Though it’s a wedding because I in a way I want to start by thanking everyone for being here um it is really really nice to see an audience of that sort of spans many different areas of my life so family and friends and colleagues and both former
And current students um and at the risk of really making it sound like a wedding speech I particularly want to thank um those people that have traveled a long way to be here thank you very much um what I want to do today and I’m I’m very conscious of the
Different levels of prior knowledge about prisons among you is talk through how with a number of colleagues I’ve developed a framework for describing what I’ll be calling the texture of imprisonment um and talking about what I think that framework delivers um I came to the institute in
2001 I’ve been a PhD student at the University of essics I was supervised wonderfully by Sha Nixon who is here um and I was rived by aan carabine when I consulted him about a prison idea that had been stewing in my mind to contact Alison which I did and that proved very
Sage advice and in those early years Alison and I spent a lot of time in her car traveling to conferences and to prisons and talks and things like that and the conversations that we had on route about prisons and the craft of researching them constituted a kind of advanced apprenticeship and the themes
Of those discussions the the moral social and human complexities of imprisonment and the connections between them provide the central thread for what I plan to discuss this afternoon so as Allison said my first project was a 10-month ethnographic study of a medium security Men’s prison hmp Welling the governor Peter Bennett like many
Governors since was generous enough to grant me access and because as I said so modestly in my letter I was a a thorough and diligent student I had read I’d read as much PR literature as I could find before I went which meant that I had expected to encounter more hostility
Than I found between prisoners and prison officers and there was some of course but not the seething antipathy or thick dividing line that I had anticipated so men in Welling BR who had been in the system for some time described a shift in the nature of penal power from something they characterized
As hard and authoritarian to a form that was softer with more give one of these men was Jason Ward who’s also here today Jason’s now associate professor of criminology at the University of Nottingham he has given me permission to out his pseudonym and he expressed it as follows he said
You don’t exist right up against the authoritarian wall you exist somewhere away from it and there is a buffer zone in between back in the day the system was pure Authority there was no given it so you did get the very us them division which has been eroded over the years to
A certain degree that Shield has been removed slightly from your everyday contact with the prison and although these changes seemed Progressive often they were described with a tone of ambivalence there was less animosity and more Humanity in the system prisoners said but Power felt less predictable and more
Opaque as Tommy saids in the past you could ask for something and you knew the answer the answer was always no there were no delusions no dangling carrots say if you do this you’ll be rewarded at the end of it but every time you do get closer they move the
Goalposts and other men described the ways that with regard to What mattered to them most which was their progression through the prison system towards Freedom they were regulated less by the officers with whom they had daily contact than by more abstract and Anonymous forms of power so for those
Who were serving inter terminate sentences that meant the people involved in assessing their risk and writing their reports about them and these were practices that rendered them in ways that they often disputed because they felt partial or distorted but which they had to address in order to get out and
That required them to adopt a kind of Avatar that was intelligible to the system even if it didn’t correspond with their self-image so what was written down officially the file represented a distinctive mode of power which was highly adhesive and often deferred in its effects it was also experienced as
Sly and unmanly compared to the more direct Authority of the past so Jacob here says they don’t use the stick no more they use the pen you get me once the pen is written down something that can be there alive and Billy says the power of the pen rules it rules the
Prison it’s a slightly mixed metaphor they stab you in the back with a keyboard for prisoners on determinate sentences incentive and early release schemes likewise pushed key decisions away from the wings and made Power harder to influence prisoners often commented that staff were not in your
Face or on your back but they were very much in control Power was everywhere but nowhere like a spiders we without a spider it didn’t so much weigh down on prisoners as wrap them up and require them to self-regulate and many complained that it was no longer
Sufficient to just be obedient so to just stay out of trouble instead they had to actively demonstrate a form of engaged compliance so George said before you just did your time and got out there was nothing required of you except to go to work whereas now it’s down to the slight
Slightest little thing that should be it’s all tidy like there’s a notice out there don’t fill a bucket from the hot water tap or you get a strike you get three strikes you’re knock down alone you might lose your TV or a couple of visits right down to the slightest
Different thing it’s all monitored it’s all tied in to your future or as Matt said you used to just be left to your own devices it was less comfortable but you had more freedom you didn’t have these courses and all that as long as you didn’t give them no bother they’
Just move you through the system many years earlier David DS and Roy King had Advanced the concepts of the death and weight of imprisonment death the idea of being consumed by the prison referred to the degree of security and control and the level of isolation from the outside
World mainly in terms of contact with people and agencies from the community but also distance from release weight was about the feeling of the sentence bearing down one prisoners so being a burden on their shoulders and was principally shaped by how staff used their Authority um as well as things
Like um conditions rights and privileges access to work and education and so on and I felt that what was being described to me was something distinctive um it was a form of power that was intrusive because it encouraged prisoners to reconstruct themselves as different kinds of people it was the demanding
Because it required them to actively and visibly engage with their sentence and it was all encompassing because it demanded Perpetual monitoring of personal contact of conduct it was not depth or weight tightness and while the primary focus of this these forms of power was the prisoners cognition and selfhood it also
Had implications for prisoner social dynamics relationships with prisoners could constitute a form of risk so as pet says you’re judged by The Company You Keep many prisoners therefore police who they associated with they circumscribed their loyalties and they were careful not to appear too influential within the prisoner
Community so many social actions were no longer worth the risk of losing privileges or generating negative comments on the file so max said years ago you wouldn’t care too Hoots about what you said in front of who if you got beat with someone now and you’re on standard or enhanced those are privilege
Levels you don’t want to lose that it does make you think a bit so I’m going to return to PL this later for now I will to turn to the concept of weight in 2007 Susie hly CLA mlan Allison and I embarked on a comparative study of public and private sector
Prisons and to assess their moral quality we used the measuring the quality of prism life survey which Allison and Helen Arnold had developed by interviewing start from prisoners about what matters in prisons and then transforming what they said into a set of measurable statements and dimensions these matters things like respect
Fairness personal development safety were the aspects of prison life that conventional indicators and performance data struggled to capture but which reflected the moral and relational texture of prison life so the everyday humanity and inhumanity that flow through the ways that officers in particular exercise their Authority and
Use their discretion and I’m not going to go through these quotes but as we see here being greeted with courtesy when unlocked being given Sage advice in a time of Crisis being treated with concerns so in this first qu being given a pillow that you’re entitled to were
Things that communicated moral worth in ways that were existentially significant the quality of the five private prisons in our study varied enormously some were very good good somewh not very good but in a kind of collective thought experiment we realized that were we to be deposited on
A wing in any of the prisons in our study we would know very quickly whether they were public or private because of a kind of lightess in the field of the environment the the most significant aspect of lightness so lightness in the private sector was anchored in an orientation among private sector
Custodial officers that was as you see in the left hand side here um more Humane less cynical and punitive than we found in the public sector where as you see here on the right hand side attitudes were in our terms heavier so we were we were left with a puzzle
Intuitively lightess seems like a good thing but if all of the prisons if all of the private prisons in our study were light we had to account for the fact that some were rated very poorly by prisoners themselves so as we wrote at the time it’s a mistake to
Equate likeness with quality if the environment is L aair or dangerously underp policed light can mean unburdens some and easier to bear but it can also mean insubstantial or deficient these are characteristics that are undesirable in prisons so the solution was to supplement this axis light to heavy with
Add an additional one absent to present an absence presence referred to the availability of officers the depth and quality of their engagement with prisoners their ability and willingness to police the Environ and their confidence and competence in using Authority and prisoners in the private prison said that star would generally
Nice people but that this represented a narrow form of respect respectful treatment required that officers inhabited their Authority took prisoners needs seriously and protected them from their own weak weakness of Will and in this respect prisoners were sophisticated evaluators of the flaws both in their environments and in
Themselves noting that the absence of authority was not good um you know that Mayhem was not a good thing that the lack of authority was troubling for them and that it made it hard to be good combining these axes helps us um not only to to describe characteristic
Qualities of public sector prisons and private sector prisons so at the time public sector prisons were heavy presents private sector ones were light absent but also and we were building here on prisons from the problem of order by Richard Spar Tony botton and will Haye it helps us think through the
Ways that different configurations of of um of authority different forms of weight produce different effects and so supported by survey data we were able to shown that the quadrant could be ranked in terms of the degree of legitimacy that prisoners conferred on them the least legitimate was Heavy absent this
Was where power was imposed oppressively but without the kind of Engagement that provided prisoners with protection the Holy Grail we said was Light present the bottom right quadrant and in those prisons control was achieved interpersonally or relationally I.E through star prisoner interactions and engagement and what we came to call
Dynamic Authority meant start knowing their prisoners so their moods and preoccupations and using their discretion accordingly as with titness there were implications for prisoner social dynamics so where staff Authority was absent or deficient other prisoners filled the gaps and just to give a brief illustration here um this was reflected
In responses to statements like this prison is run by prisoners rather than D and also in this prison there’s a real kicking order between prisoners with as we’ll see a much higher proportion of prisoners agreeing that’s a bad thing in the prisons where sta power was absent okay third
Depth um I suggested earlier that depth is defined in relation to security and control so constraints on movement searching practices and so on and that aligns it with the way that the England and Wales prison system is organized so prisoners are categorized according to the risk that they would pose should
They escape and the likelihood they might try to do so and then they’re held in conditions designed to minimize those risks that definition of depth is rather narrow and I’ve argued that it’s more helpful to think of death as the distance or polarity between the prison and the outside world with distance
Having a meaning that’s almost literal but also somewhat metaphorical and to put this in another way depth is always relative to some sense of a surface and that adds huge complexity both to to how it’s experienced and I want to give three examples of that the first is from Thomas ugic and
Darina Dam’s analysis of kinger prison in Norway Ker’s minimum security Wing was surrounded by a low fence um and it and it granted prisoners regular opportunities to sample life outside through forms of temporary release so in that sense it was objectively shallow but for the foreign National prisoners who were held there
The surface was not always the freedom waiting just beyond the Prison Walls but loved ones far away in other countries with whom contact was very difficult regardless of what we might call the objective shallowness of K finger ugc and Dam a say many prisoners felt as if they were buried deep beneath
The surface far away from a life in another country that just carried on without meanwhile for the men whose loved ones now resided in Norway releas meant um being deported and there and thereby distance from the world that mattered most to them second example is from um a Rader research program which
I’ve tried to summarize here the compound study comparing policymaking and prisoner experiences in England and Wales and Norway which I conducted between 2014 and 2019 with Alice irings Julie laon Christian Mand and Anna SCH so you get a brief sense of it here for the for the deep end substudy at the
Bottom I interview in England and Wales I interviewed men being held in super secure units so these were men considered too difficult or dangerous to be held on normal Wings in high security prisons so they were held in conditions that were objectively about as deep as
It gets so no movement off the wing um and in some units basically no contact with other prisoners and very high levels of Staff escort and these men used a striking range of metaphors to describe their circumstances so as you might expect some use the terminology of burial asphixiation or abandonment so Jason
Said you start to feel like suffocating you feel claustrophobic I’m starting to feel like the walls are closing in on me others though describe their conditions in terms of sanctuary or Transcendence and they and in doing so they disputed or inverted the poles of Liberty and constraint Z metaphysically I’m not here
Physically I am but metaphysically I’m not it’s no different from being outside my walls are smaller than yours but you still have walls you just can’t see them and Carl said so Carl sort presented I guess a similar interpretation of the limit points of his confinement he said
Freedom is vast it’s your perception I’m free here interestingly too most men in these units describe having reasonably good access to the outside world several felt more cut off from the rest of the prison system than from the community itself so air here says you’ve got your phone and
The TV and radio but it’s prison politics that you miss another described um going to his prison segregation unit for dental treatment as the equivalent of going to EA indicating that it was the membrane between normal and extreme conditions rather than the boundary of the prison wall that felt most Salient to
Him and in fact for many of these men having such extreme sentence lengths meant that the outside world felt completely immaterial so Liam said the outside world is kind of irrelevant to me are the in my 60s before I have any real chance of getting out and Nick said
Nothing exists for me outside these walls the only thing that applies to me is custody people outside have become not relevant to me any anymore my third example comes from a longitudinal study of men and women serving long life sentences from an early age this was conducted with Susie
Holly and Serena Wright in two phases since 2013 prisoners serving short sentences tend to describe prisons as not real or to use O’s term a non-place non-place into spaces like airports or shopping centers where our presence is transient and where we have little investment in creating meaningful relationships among our participants
Coming to terms with the sentence um requires a shift from seeing the prison as a non-place somewhere unreal and the outside world is real to the opposite so initially despite being in high security in other words deep conditions the outside world still felt Vivid and tangible because they remained
Well connected to people and networks in the community community in contast when they describ their prison experience they use metaphors of hibernation or of life being frozen time or all hold 10 years later the passage of time meant that despite being in conditions that were less controlled and secure so
Less deep their relationship with the world outside had become more distant and they felt more embedded in the prison system so memories had faded relationships had dwindled and then had come to realize that psychological survival required them to suppress thoughts about life beyond their current circumstances
So Justin says to get through I had to make prison my world I distanced myself from everybody on the outside and just embraced what was around me to quote Hudson there’s nothing there he means outside my family feels real in the prison that’s about it everything else
Out there doesn’t mean anything to me another participant had by the time of the second interview read our Publications and he reflected to me on the idea of death he said he said the extent to which the initial phase of imprisonment felt disorientating related to the height of the plunge or plummet
Said if you think about the depth of imprisonment the plummet the transition from life outside to life in prison is going to depend on your life history and your previous traas so some people have gone from a low point in their life whether that’s addiction being in an
Abusive relationship or a sense of marginalization or disr disenfranchisement he goes on I had opportunities in life as I was growing up so I wasn’t burdened by a lot of those problems or traumas and so for me the fall has been has felt significant because it feels like I’ve lost a great
Deal so I was argued that the depth of imprisonment in my situation is greater or feels greater as a result and even if that analysis I think is is questionable it is true that prisoners with histories chronic drug histories or or female prisoners who in the community have been
Coercively controlled by men often use metaphors of imprisonment to describe their lives in the community and they portray their time prison as less restrictive sometimes almost liberating in comparison so to quote so cat here says is talking about says my ex was a bit of a stalker when I’m in jail I’m
Free of him ree says when you’re on drugs you’re not locked in a jail but it just runs your life it controls you in here I’m locked up but drug don’t control me anymore I feel quite free so what of these examples shown first I think deck has a number of
Dimensions that are not always aligned with each other that’s partly in the sense as king M dut demonstrated that low security prisons um might have tighter might have more um searching practices more restrictive searching practices thanal higher security but I think there’s also something more subjective here so this is stretching a
Metaphor to Breaking Point um like a scuba diver a prisoner can be close to land but submerged deep below the surface or they might be swimming just under the surface but in Open Water many miles from land so I’m using the idea of surface being contact with the world
Outside and land meaning Freedom second matters of time and place are highly relevant to How Deeply murdered one can feel the amount of time already spent in prison the amount left before release and also the prisoner’s sense of where the essence of their life is located and
What kind of future awaits them third the experience of death is mediated by prior life experiences so so the extent to which imprisonment feels oppressive or restrictive is shaped by what prisoners feel distanced from and the degree to which their life outside felt unconfined and unrestricted and fourth while it’s it’s
Possible to describe some features of death objectively this doesn’t necessarily correspond with with how it’s subjectively felt not least because people bring to their on their situation forms of reflexive engagement that help them make sense of and sometimes cognitively transform their circumstances and I want to dwell on
This a bit because historically prison sociology has been more concerned with social dynamics than prisoners interior existence so the prison Landings have been SE as where the action is and that and comparatively less attention has been paid to the ways that prisoners reflect on their circumstances um what they’re thinking
About when they’re alone in their cells and that includes the offense itself the thing it is that they have done so in our study of prisoners serving life sentences it was impossible to understand how are participants experienced and engaged with their sentence without understanding their feelings about having been involved in
Or convicted of murder so for those who were not maintaining innocence the implications of contributing to someone else’s death were profound and that led initially to deep forms of denial and later produced prolonged forms of existential reflection about moral selfhood and culpability so Kelvin says it’s just so
Painful for me I couldn’t just bear to say yeah I did it because obviously that night it wasn’t just the one person that died it it was it felt of me died as well and typically despite having been given life bending long prison terms our participants found it much harder to
Come to terms um with their offense than with the sentence so to put that another way what consumed them most was not the prison but to use Susie Holly’s term the moral weight of murder and these weren’t just internal preoccupations feelings of Shame also shaped people’s behaviors with interest
How they spent their time who they chose to mix with and so on so this is Nathaniel who said that he would never come to terms with the murder he had committed and explained that his use of the gym was a way of trying to prevent himself being flooded with thoughts
About it so he says I’ve never come to terms with it and I don’t think I’ll ever come to servs with it and I asked how much time do you spend thinking about the offense he said well I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder so mostly all the time that’s why I scrub
My cell out five times a day I go down the gym throw the weights around as much as I can just try anything to take my mind off it I tie myself out then when I hit my pillow I’m not thinking about it I’m out cold godone and so attempts at sense making
Self-reconstruction and Redemption also drove a very common commitment to forms of faith and education but also to particular modes of E ethical practice so mud here says I made a vow to myself but I’m going to sort my life out and I dedicated myself to religious learning
And it’s turned my life around the way I do that is to look on my errors mistakes and try to make amends I think my spirituality helped me soften that blow to accept what I’d done was wrong so faith in education provided explanation um hooks for change ways of
Understanding one’s place in the world in one of the other substudies in the comparative project between England and Wales and Norway we focused on men convicted of sexual offenses and again moral Dynamics were very significant for such men as um my colleague Alice irings has shown the Fe of imprison was defined
In all kinds of ways by what these men had been convicted of and how their moral status was reflected back to them so often they felt profound shame they felt scorned by prison officers whose relationships with them were permeated by disapproval and mistrust and they felt stained by being around other men
Whose crimes disgusted them and this produced a kind of avoidant and neurotic social World pervaded by moral judgment like a Hall of Mirrors with prisoners this is to quote from our article looking at themselves looking at others and looking at others looking at them shanil are sometimes referred to as
Self-conscious emotions evoked by self-reflection and self-evaluation but in the context of Criminal Justice the nature of these feelings is is very obviously shaked by an ongoing dialogue between what people feel about what they’ve done and how the prison system communicates to them about their moral status and culpability and that to
Varies between prisons and prison systems in terms of things like the demands that are made and the forms of support that are offered regarding how prisoners consider matters relating to their offending and this has led me and Alice iens to reconsider the concept of tightness so so initially um my
Assumption was that being kind of gripped by the institution was oppressively um invasive and unwanted but recent work has made it much more obvious to me that being UNG gripped is also undesirable if it means being forsaken so many prisoners genuinely won’t help with things like substance misuse problems or anger issues or
Sexual drives that they PA and repress and they welcome rather than resent intrusive institutional efforts to reconstruct who they are and their moral conduct so to quote Frank I recognize the need to change because even when I was doing the thing I was doing I didn’t
Want to do them I didn’t want to be the person that I was other people’s reasoning is More instrumental they they just know that they have to do courses if they want to move through the system whether they truly want to or not but whichever the case it’s not undesirable to be gripped
And monitored but to be UNG gripped and unnoticed and the most advanced representation of this comes from Toy Story now this is the bit where the technology is going to have to work here we go the claw sector 12 who’s in charge here Claw is our Master claw chooses who will
Go and who will stay that’s him saying this is ludicrous not I hope a comment on my analysis I have been chosen farewell my friends I go on to a better place gotcha thank you to Joe ashore forting that out um so Alice and I therefore offered a new reading of
Tightness noting that prison systems can be loose or LAX as well as tight when the risk bureaucracy is inconsistent or inefficient when it’s impossible to access interventions or Specialists for example because courses simply aren’t available in the prison that you’re in where there’s too little rather than too
Much attention paid to offense related issues or where the prisoners problems are deemed irresolvable or ineligible for intervention there’s something particularly egregious I think about a prison system that is demanding yet deficient that’s this bottom right qu what I would call I think synthetic Rehabilitation so you must reduce your
Risk in order to progress but we aren’t able to help you do that and in effect you’ll be penalized for that there’s something alienating to about being misrecognized or to draw on Fergus McNeil’s idea of the Mal Opticon being seen badly and being seen only as
Bad so prisons in this quadrant demand a great deal from prisoners and as in my initial formulation of tightness they impose labels and classifications that prisoners might dispute because they see people mainly through a lens of risk so this comes close to what rman calls authoritarian Rehabilitation others have called
Coercive Correctional ISM but it is less illegitimate at least if resources are in place that allow prisoners to address those risks whether it’s more or less legitimate than containment so being neglected or abandoned when crying out forms of intervention and support might depend on a prisoner’s preference for
Positive or negative forms of Liberty so the value attached either to being left alone or to being given opportunities for self-realization grow other forms of grip might be embraced and are felt to be more legitimate where they entail some form of recognition so where prisoners feel that the authorities are engaging
Properly with their needs and aspirations and are supporting their personal development so this is closest to what lman calls humanistic Rehabilitation and others have more recently called things like assist desistance I wonder if it’s the opposite of the Mal Opticon so being seen well and being regarded as good the bom
Opticon look up the right in word so this is the overall framework um I’m not going to say anything more really about breath that’s the impact or shadow of the sentence beyond the point of custody because that remains the least developed part so far but we’re
Working on it the hangover seems to be that seems to be the metaphor we want to use for that um instead I want to move on to the second part of this lecture which is the matter of what all of this amounts to and what I mean by this term
Texture I think the term is act because just as a strip of satin or sandpaper has certain textural properties based on its material composition it also has a sensory quality um it implies the term texture therefore implies both a set of objective characteristics but also a more subjective sense of how those characteristics
Fit and this focus on the feel of imprisonment is very deliberate during our comparative pinology study we sort advice from um from a colleague on the translation of our interview questions from English to Norwegian this was a Danish colleague who expressed surprise that so many of our questions asked participants how
They felt she also said she thought that mode of questioning was a bit too personal for a Nordic sample that’s another but that form of questioning reflects a commitment in my work and in the work of the prison research center to a humanistic or person centered social science and to representing
People as Elijah Anderson puts it in a way that without undue abstraction or sentimentality is faithful to their understanding of themselves Alison drawing on George Elliot calls this authentic description so getting as close as possible to capturing real human feelings and experience and the inner state of others and I think as
Well as that the human and moral dimensions of imprisonment and so I think this should involve probing and taking seriously the ways that people engage in forms of reflection and deliberation about who they are and what they’ve done and the circumstances that confront them and the courses of action they choose within the
Limitations of these contexts this is what Margaret Archer calls the internal conversation that mediates structure and agency others referred to it as ultimate people’s ultimate concerns and ground projects so the preoccupations that provide people with meaning and which Drive their actions I think the more objective dimension of texture is useful both
Descriptively and comparatively and in that respect the framework that I’m offering provides a vocabulary for delineating the different aspects of penal power that I’ve line so far and here it helps contribute to a growing body of work that take issue with the claim made by Gran sites in the
Society of captives a kind of the foundational text I think of prison sociology that custodial institutions share basic similarities that override variations of time place and purpose a number of schols have argued recently that it’s true that prisons share some inherent qualities in that they deprive people of
Liberty and limit their mobility and so on but at least as striking is the Staggering variation that exists between prisons in terms of things like their moral quality their forms of governance and Order and the degree to which prisoners are regulated and their Community marked by cohesion and
Solidarity so again to quote ug canamer the differences between a huge us supermax prison and a much smaller low security Norwegian institution are so many and run so deep that could question if it makes sense to refer to them by the same term the question then is how these
Institutions differ and the coordinates that help us character their qualities and here I think the language of depth weight tightness and breadth provides a kind of conceptual scaffolding and I want to use the example of open prisons to briefly demonstrate this point and to highlight how texture alerts us to both objective
And subjective elements of imprisonment though I’m not CL climing that those elements are easily or cleanly separable open prison are low security establishments without significant perimeter or internal security their objectives include helping prisoners decompress from closed conditions and assisting them in their reintegration into the community so typically they
Offer quite a lot of autonomy and they allow many prisoners to leave each day to do things like work in the community but prisoners often describe these environments as hazardous demanding and insecure low starting levels and an environment that offers conditional trust mean that the authority of officers is not
Overbearing and the environment is only lightly policed but Power flows through other means mainly through risk assessment and monitoring which determine decisions about temporary and permanent release and meanwhile the absence of normal security features alongside the threat of being returned to closed conditions should they slip up requires that prisoners self-regulate
Much more than they have to in more secure and controlled establishments where control is done much more by the institution so in the language of the framework we can probably describe these establishments as shallow in the sense that they’re permeable freedom is relatively near they are light absent that quadrant but they are
Tight and qualitative account of open prisons suggest that these establishments produce a distinctive set of pains and difficulties so Victor Shamus for example has detailed what he calls the Pains of Freedom a set of frustrations caused by being almost but not quite free so in a kind of lional
Position between contrasting worlds but still subject to a good deal of power in our study of life sentence prisoners early in their sentence our participants talks about open imprisonment not just as the final stage of their sentence but as a kind of end point so the point at which they were in
Effect free so Harris said when I go to CD that’s open conditions i c that as being home however once they were there they often came to see this as a false St the most difficult part point of the sentence so Harold who was well over tariff and was in an open prison
Described it as a gilded Budgy cage and explained what he called the torment of open condition so he said by Christ this is the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through cat D it’s all I can do not to just get shipped out and back to close conditions and I very nearly did that
Myself I said look I can’t put up with this anymore I’m sick of chasing the carrot and Serena asked him but said but you’re so close he said I’m not I am not and that’s the torment it is torture you can’t see the bars but I can now Victor shamus’s conclusion about
Such matters is that even exceptional degrees of Liberty are never unpraised through the optic of Humane or inhumane conditions arguably produces a flattening one-dimensional gaze the task of prison Scholars might better be understood as studying how penal power punitive power varies in kind rather than degree how the nature of pain
Imposition varies quality and I agree more or less with what I’ve highlighted in red because I think simple evaluative conclusions about whether prisons are good or bad or whether some are preferable to others are quite difficult possible but difficult and that’s partly because prisons can be good or bad in
Different ways so a prison might for example be extremely restrictive but at the same time have quite genial and professional star prisoner relationships it’s also because overall judgments are not straightforward terms like good and bad are a bit too reductive so is a prison that is run by prisoners rather
Than staff but which allows extensive extended family visits and unregulated movement as is found in some Latin American countries so kind of absent but shallow so is that better than one that’s safer but more restricted present but deep is loose containment preferable to tight Correctional ISM so at the very
Least I think terms like depth weight and tightness offer an alternative terminology I’m only parly persuaded by second half of this clim that the pains or experience of imprisonment are therefore incommensurable that they are very difficult to compare across prisons or across jurisdictions and I think the second contribution of the framework is
Therefore precisely its potential to enable comparative analyses of imprisonment however imperfect and to bridge a divide between macr level accounts of punishment and micr level studies of everyday prison life so so Nica Lai has said micro level studies which are normally really detailed accounts of single institutions are rather inhospitable to
Comparative approaches because their focus is very local and very particular conversely a limitation of macro studies so the kinds of studies that are looking at Broad Trends in things like punitiveness or are comparing different kinds of penal systems is there tendency to rely on metrics like imprisonment
Rates or indicators like cell size or levels of overcrowding or inputs like length of St training or hours of purposeful activity and those measures are really useful and important but for researchers like me and lots of other people in this room and online because our heads are mainly
Inside prisons looking out rather than outside looking in it seems really obvious that that these sorts of measures only get us so far in capturing the nature and experience of imprisonment or levels of M mild and severity it it’s perfectly possible after all that a country could lock up
Relatively few people so it’s imprisonment rate rate might be low but in really punitive or harsh conditions so the framework that I’ve elaborated might help bridge these approaches because it allows us to classify prisms along a range of Dimensions that Focus Less on official inputs or practices and
More on the textual qualities that those inputs and practices produce one further point before I’m going to illustrate that studies of the effects of imprisonment have for many years been dominated by pes’s account of the Pains of imprisonment so s SES this the deprivation of Liberty goods and services heterosexual relations autonomy and
Security in a recent article Kevin hagy and Sandra bueras have argued that as Scholars have applied this concept to an expanding range of domained groups and practices is become so extended as to become dulled and diluted because the same term ends up being applied to aspects of prison life that to quote
Them fall somewhere on a Continuum of excruciating traumatic uncomfortable unwelcome embarrassing and inconvenient these are really important distinctions so that might range from sexual abuse to things that are more like administrative hassles or even practices that look ostensibly Progressive like opportunities to undertake work in the community and hag
And breras are not I think arguing that studying such matters is redundant but that the language of pain is unhelpful because it compresses everything into a single category and they say few studies seek to differentiate between the relative significance or painfulness of these pains leaving them what they call
An unranked Mass everything’s as painful as everything else I think an alternative way of saying this is that sci’s account does not cover all all of the Pains of imprisonment that not all prison experiences are equally painful and that not all of them are best described as pains in recent projects the life
Project and the comparative project we’ve given out surveys which ask prisoners to assess the severity of a range of problems that they might encounter and that does enable us to compare both between different kinds of pains and also different prisoner subgroups so here slide is just designed
To show you different ways in which we’ve been able to assess this so these are the five problems the five problems rated as most severe by a range of groups as you’ll see um along the top Road and what I hope the color coding shows you is the extent to which
Problems like missing somebody feeling that your life is being wasted missing social life worrying about people outside feeling that you’ve let down your family and friends feature across these groups as there’s a huge amount of consistency here and that in itself is obviously quite instructive so what feels painful seems pretty invariant across
These groups and across these jurisdictions here we’re just looking at open and closed prisons in England and Wales in Norway and again we see really striking regularity same the same um same issues this just shows similar data here we’ve organized it by categories of pains or problems
Um and problems were what this shows is that problems were felt most acutely firstly en closed prisons in England and Wales that’s the blue line then closed prisons in Norway that’s orange then open prisons in England and Wales in Gray and then open prisons in Norway in
Yellow that’s sort of what we would expect firstly it’s telling us that there is one thing it’s telling us is that there is variation in the severity or intensity of these pains or problems as I say in the direction you might EXP respect but there’s little variation in
Terms of the substance the nature of those things or problems so to quote chrisan molan Julie laon aner and Simon LL that contrary to the qualitative literature which I briefly mentioned that just that documents the specific pains experienced by prison prisoners in open prisons there is literally in our
Survey data that supports the idea that open prisons produce a distinct set of pains but they are very careful to suggest that this does not you know they don’t suggest that this refutes existing work documenting the Pains of Freedom rather they say should encourage further research that’s what we always say as
Well as methodological debate one issue then I think is that exploring pains and problems is too limied so data of this kind I’m showing you that slide again actually tells us very little about what imprisonment is actually like or how it varies or at least it doesn’t tell us as much as we
Might think and it risks giving a false impression of institutional and experiential similarity and that is partly because these problems are not if you look at them about institutional treatment they are about existential feelings internal to the prisoner so sorrow and self- reproach or they’re about matters that are external to the
Prison so people and life out there even if these matters are very similar anyone that has been into prisons in these sorts of countries or different sorts of prisms knows that there is a real difference in feel between prisons holding these different kinds of populations so while I must I
Sort of realized I kept say I saw some articles that said that I that my framework was about the Pains of imprisonment and I was really cross and then I realized that’s what I had this article but I think texture is a much more productive concept because it
Suggests a much more sort of differentiated um Topography of experience so quickly to return to open and closed crystas in England and Wales and Norway here I’m just showing I’m trying to simplify the data a bit I’m just showing the percentage of prisoners agreeing or strongly agreeing with a
Selection of statements that we develop to try to operationalize these Dimensions um including death weight tightness and bread the the surve was imperfect it was just a first attempt um but not unproductive I think certainly the data give us a much stronger sense of what I would call the
Kind of textural consistency of these prms and I’ll admit to a bit cherry picking so I am sort of illustrating a points here but that the attempt is to is to sort of support the case I’m making around the ideas that I have set out so first this is just two items from
The weight Dimension so second one is start from this prison think the prisoners are morally beneath them the first one is where we see some particularly striking um differences in response of so I feel cared about most of the time in this prison 76% agreeing in open prisons in Norway 47% in closed
Prisons in Norway compared to 29% in closed prisons in England and Wales 35% in open prisons in England of and I think this is indicative of different philosophies of practice and different philosophies of personhood in the two jurisdictions we also find really substantial differences in relation to statement this this statement drugs
Cause a lot of problems between prisoners in here so almost three times as many prisoners agreeing in prisons in England and Wales as closed prisons in Norway so that is just a really different kind of world to be held in if we look at items from depth we we
Find higher levels of agreement in England and Wales than Norway for the item I have no control over my day-to-day life in here so that seems consistent with Norway’s commitment to the normality principle that’s the idea that life in prison should resemble life in the community as much as it’s
Possible findings for I feel cut off from the outside world in here and you can’t quite read this bottom one I feel a long way from Freedom are much less d and I think that points to some of the subjective elements of depth that I have discussed so in particular despite being in
Shallow conditions open prison so close to release and often spending time in the community really quite a high proportion of prisoners in the open prisons in both England and Wales and Norway felt distanced uh both from the community and from their own liberty here after concluded a few items
From the tightness Dimension and it’s really clear that prisoners in Norway feel less gripped than those in England and Wales and that reflects a much greater preoccupation in England and Welles with risk the other thing to notice is that there’s so little difference between closed and open prisons in England and
Wales in fact for one of the statements here in this prison you have to walk on eggshells a higher proportion agree in the open prisons than the closed prisons all of this gets us further in terms of Discerning the properties of these prisons and representing them
Faithfully so what it’s like to be in them to be addressed by them as a human and moral agent just click on this and um and how this differs between prisons and jurisdictions and these differences really matter so Esther van hinan has demonstrated using this data set that
The dimensions of depth weight and tightness explain variance in punishment and degradation and as we see here for some items these differences in feelings of the degree to which the experience is painful is feels harmful and is humiliating very really substantially and I think this analysis helps us reconcile disparities between
Previous studies of open imprisonment because it seems to me that it can be true that the pains and problems of being in open conditions are are less acute than those enclosed and the open prisons can be described as objectively lighter and shallower but it can also be true that experienced subjectively this sentence
Phase feels particularly challenging because it’s inconsistent with prior expectations because you’re tantalizing the close to freedom but you’re not free in places because the environment is lacking in moral sympathy and because people are ripped by fears about return to posed conditions or anxieties about the kind of life that awaits them when they’re
Released so I just go to I want to finish by very briefly suggesting some next steps of prison sociology that I think this work suggests in itself the first I think is to expand outwards towards a macrology that not only describes how the texture of imprisonment
Varies but is also explanatory so why do some jurisdictions have prison systems that are consistently less deep or less tight than others the second is to develop a clearer sense of wide texture matters and I I think there’s considerable scope here to revive a set of rather dormant questions about what determines prison
The shape and nature of prison social life and culture so in our comparative study for example we were struck by some of the similarities between the flow of power in prisons holding women and prisons holding men convicted of sexual offenses and this I think was based on assumptions about gender and risk and
Particular modes of moral regulation and It produced quite similar Dynamics within the prisoner Community where power flows through information and lateral regulation so prisoners being monitored almost as much by each other as by the institution and I think these sorts of matters deserve serious and systematic tension third we should ask how
Different forms of texture contribute to Penal legitimacy and illegitimacy or to alienation and damage or to remorse and repair so in her recent analysis of high security prisons Allison has demonstrated that degrees of anger among prisoners levels of ethnic and religious integration between them and the extremity of individual Faith identities
Are shaped by how prisoners are addressed as moral agents and it’s account it’s an account that by pulling together the interplay between the normative the social and the human dimensions of prison life presents an important blueprint for further research the best prison researchers I think are attuned to that interplay and
I do feel extremely lucky to have worked in a prison research center and with many colleagues who are sensitized to those things and therefore make the rather difficult and delicate task of prison research so much more manageable that includes the people I’ve mentioned today and many others Beyond it
Including lots of people in this room and online today so I’m enormously grateful as well to the broader academic and administrative staff here at the Institute and also to the outstanding PhD and master students who I’ve taught and learned from over the years thank you
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Thank you, Ben … wonderful overview and details, very thought-provoking, extremely useful framework and analyses. Thank you for your long and dedicated work in this area.