Ben Crewe

Depth, weight, tightness: Revisiting the pains of imprisonment

The ‘pains of imprisonment’ have been a longstanding concern within prison sociology. This article revisits the topic, suggesting that modern penal practices have created some new burdens and frustrations that differ from other pains in their causes, nature and effects. It notes that the pains of imprisonment can be divided up conceptually, and to some degree historically, into those deriving from the inherent features of incarceration, those resulting from deliberate abuses and derelictions of duty, and those that are consequences of systemic policies and institutional practices. Having described the latter in detail – focusing on the pains of indeterminacy, the pains of psychological assessment and the pains of self-government, the article explains the relevance of the concept of ‘tightness’, as well as ‘depth’ and ‘weight’, to the contemporary prison experience.

Soft power in prison: Implications for staff–prisoner relationships, liberty and legitimacy

As penal power has been transformed in recent years, so too have relationships between prisoners and staff. This article discusses how these relationships are forged by the terms of ‘neo-paternalism’, focusing in particular on what is labelled ‘soft power’. It describes some of the impediments that hinder the development of closer relationships between prisoners and uniformed staff. It explores the implications of soft power for the prison’s interior legitimacy, and discusses soft power in relation to the culture of uniformed staff.

Prisoner society in the era of hard drugs

A telling indication of the decline of ethnographic prison sociology is the paucity of research on drugs and their influence on the prisoner social world. Based on long-term fieldwork in a medium-security English prison, this article argues that the key components of prisoner social life are deeply imprinted by the presence and prevalence of hard drugs in and around the penal estate. After outlining the appeal of heroin to prisoners, and the terms of the prison drugs economy, the article shows how heroin restructures status and social relations in prison in a number of ways. First, users are stigmatized, particularly when their consumption has consequences that violate established codes of inmate behaviour. Second, heroin grants considerable power to those prisoners who deal it within prison, although this power is not necessarily equivalent to respect. Third, heroin transforms the terms of affiliation that exist when drugs are scarce. Meanwhile, for those prisoners whose lives prior to incarceration have been dominated by drug addiction, the experience of incarceration has a number of distinctive qualities.

Staff culture, use of authority and prisoner quality of life in public and private sector prisons

Drawing on data collected in five private sector and two public sector prisons, this article highlights the complex relationship between prison staff culture and prisoner quality of life. Specifically, it explores the link between the attitudes of prison staff and their behaviour, particularly in terms of their use of authority, and seeks to explain the somewhat paradoxical finding that those prisons rated most positively by prisoners were those in which staff were least positive about their own working lives and most negative in their views of prisoners. The article highlights the importance of experience and competence, as well as attitudes, in determining how authority is exercised and experienced in prison. It also draws attention to the different kinds of staff cultures that exist both between and within the public and private sectors.

Male prisoners’ orientations towards female officers in an English prison

Drawing on material collected as part of a semi-ethnographic study of an English training prison for men, this article describes the orientations of male prisoners towards female prison officers. A number of attitudes and orientations are outlined, some of which privilege the significance of femaleness over professional identity and practices (for example through discourses of sexualization and chivalry), while others focus primarily on the officer role and professional practices and treatment. The article suggests that prisoner life experiences and the nature of imprisonment are significant influences on the relationships between male prisoners and female officers, and that the high emotional charge that characterizes many of these relationships reflects a complex set of issues around incarceration, masculine self-identity, power and desire.

Respect in prisons: Prisoners’ experiences of respect in public and private sector prisons

Interpretations of ‘respect’ in prison have tended to be narrow, focusing on courteous and considerate staff–prisoner relationships. In a recent study, we found that respect was defined by prisoners not just in terms of interpersonal relationships but also ‘getting things done’ (what might be called ‘organizational respect’). We expected prisoners in the study, which compared quality of life in public and private sector prisons, to rate private prisons well in terms of respect, due to previous research findings and the history and self-declared values of the companies who run them. The findings from the study revealed a more complex picture. There was mixed support for previous claims that the private sector offers a more courteous prison environment than the public sector, and, among the matched prisons in our study, the public sector establishments were better than the private sector prisons at ‘getting things done’: a distinct component of respect in prison, according to prisoners. These differences influenced prisoners’ evaluations of the ‘respectfulness’ of their treatment in each sector.

Emotion regulation among male prisoners

Prior research consistently documents that prisons are emotionally fraught places where successful adaptation depends, in part, on prisoners’ abilities to calibrate their emotional expressions and display strategies. Yet these accounts have largely overlooked theoretical insights from the psychological literature on emotion which can develop our understanding of exactly how and why prisoners regulate their emotions. By combining Gross and Thompson’s component model of emotion regulation with recent interview data (N = 16) from a medium security men’s prison (HMP Moorland), this research draws three conclusions. First, prisoners manage emotion by attending to different components of the emotion model (i.e. through situation selection, attention deployment and response strategies). Second, attempts to regulate emotion are often hampered by the unique challenges of close confinement and prison rules. Finally, emotion management may be influenced by both ‘hedonistic’ and ‘utilitarian’ goals: the latter may explain situations where prisoners harness ‘negative’ emotions (such as anger and fear) to achieve long-term aims such as health and social conformity. The implications of this research are twofold: it offers a way beyond dramaturgical models of prison life, while also offering suggestions which could promote the emotional health of prisoners.

Work, Intimacy and Prisoner Masculinities

Given the boom in studies interrogating prisoner masculinities in the last two decades or so, it can no longer be said that prisoners’ gender identities have been neglected in academic research or, specifically, that the ‘maleness’ of male prisoners is hidden, invisible or unquestioned. Yet the tendency noted by Joe Sim, writing during the first wave of research on prison masculinities, for themes of domination to be ‘emphasised at the expense of contradiction, challenge and change’ (1994: 111) has endured. The focus of much research into prisoner masculinities has been troublingly narrow, concentrating on their most spectacular and stereotypical manifestations. The result is that most portrayals of men in prison present a relatively reductive picture of aggression, emotional coldness and machismo (see, e.g., Sabo et al. 2001). Whether or not such accounts were accurate in the closing decades of the previous century, subsequent changes in the broader socio-economic climate, in the nature of imprisonment and, therefore, in cultures and practices of masculinity mean that the continuing use of a terminology of ‘hypermasculinity’ is increasingly questionable. Drawing on two separate pieces of primary prison research, this chapter seeks to explore prison masculinities as they apply to the spheres of work and intimacy, in ways that highlight the complexity and diversity of male prisoners’ identities.

Quality, Professionalism and the Distribution of Power in Public and Private Sector Prisons

Based on the findings from a detailed study of five private and two public sector prisons in England and Wales, this chapter discusses the relative quality, professionalism and balance of power of public versus private sector prisons. Two private sector prisons appeared at the lowest end of a quality spectrum, and two at the highest end, complicating any simplistic argument that ‘private is better’. Drawing on well-validated measures of the moral and social climate of prisons, clear strengths and weaknesses were found in each sector. In particular, there were variations in the professional use of authority by staff. These differences were found even in the highest-performing private sector prisons. Distinctive power distributions, cultures and experience levels in each sector generated different types of penal order, leading to different outcomes. The evaluation, and its developmental methodology, helps to clarify our understanding of, and thinking about, prison life, quality and the effects of different forms of imprisonment. The findings suggest that some public sector strengths are overlooked in contemporary policymaking and that these strengths are at risk of being eroded as public sector prisons are remodelled as larger, cheaper and more streamlined institutions.