Eamonn Carrabine

Reassessing Resistance Race, Gender and Sexuality in Prison

The relationship between power and resistance behind prison walls has long animated sociological discussions of imprisonment. In this article we advance a fresh understanding of resistance that recognizes the multi-faceted dimensions of prisoner agency while acknowledging the dangers in simply valorizing the strategies of the confined to subvert penal power. For us the importance of resistance is that it makes explicit the connections between everyday actions and broader inequalities. Nevertheless we identify three limitations in conventional characterizations of resistance. First it is understood as a privileged quality in the human spirit. Second, is the assumption that those who do not challenge authority accept the legitimacy of the institution. Third is the equation of resistance with rudimentary political action. Though drawing on our empirical research conducted in male and female prisons in the UK we refine the concept to overcome these limitations. In particular we indicate how social identities mediate prisoner agency and are crucially implicated in acts of contestation. Our more general ambition is to place at the centre of prison sociology the still marginalized issues of gender, race and sexuality.

Consuming the car: anticipation, use and meaning in contemporary youth culture

Drawing on evidence from a recently conducted study of the everyday lives of young people in Manchester, UK, this article considers the place of cars in contemporary youth culture. The article acknowledges the recent beginnings of sociological and social science discussion of cars but concurs with the view that this topic has been much neglected. More specifically the study of young people and personal mobility has been constrained by approaches that emphasise the problematic nature of this phenomena or locate it within a theory of subculture. Taking its cue from recent studies of consumption, this paper offers an alternative theorisation. Refinement of the work on television consumption by Roger Silverstone leads to a discussion of more affluent young peoples relationships to cars under three heads: anticipation, use and meaning. It is suggested that car use must be seen in the framework of sociability and networks and that it also critically and suggestively mediates ordinary consumption with imaginative possibilities.

Images of torture: Culture, politics and power

The digital recording of torture at Abu Ghraib has left pictures which are likely to be the defining images of the war in Iraq. This paper is an attempt to understand the images and why so many critics sought to locate the origins of the cruelty in US popular culture. Internet pornography, reality television and campus humiliation rituals are among the sources said to have inspired the brutality. While such explanations are more than plausible, they ignore the much longer history of violent representation that figures in the European classical art tradition, which all too frequently has justified imperial ambition, colonial conquest, and belief in racial superiority, while eroticizing bodies in pain. In the rush to situate the images well within the terms of a lowly popular culture a fuller understanding of their visual power is lost, as is their place in the cultural politics of torture more generally. The paper begins by outlining influential understandings of photography and atrocity images, before considering the differing explanations of the abuse. In taking a cue from recent scholarship in ‘trauma studies’, the argument is that human suffering should not be reduced to a set of aesthetic concerns, but is fundamentally bound up with the politics of testimony and memory — issues that have been pursued in some of the images produced after Abu Ghraib and which are discussed in the final section of the paper.

Seeing things: Violence, voyeurism and the camera

In increasingly mediatized cultures it is essential that criminologists develop more sophisticated understandings of the power of images and this article offers such an approach. It begins by setting out some of the relationships between photography and criminology as they have evolved over time to enable a richer understanding of how the modern criminal subject is constructed and how archival practices have a significant bearing on how meanings are organized. The second section develops these arguments by focusing on the controversies generated by four images that are among the most astonishing documents to have survived Auschwitz, providing visual evidence of the ‘crime of crimes’. In the final section the distinctive problems posed whenever images of horrific events are re-presented in artistic contexts are confronted in an effort to build a more critically engaged visual criminology.

Gender and Prison Organisation: Some Comments on Masculinities and Prison Management

The paper explores the significance of some contemporary writing on masculinities to the management of male prisons. It argues that the incorporation of gender into discussions of imprisonment is an important development, but that there has been a tendency to focus on prisoners rather than prisons as organisations. Drawing on work which has emphasised the gendered nature of contemporary organisation structure and struggles, the paper examines interactions around masculinity in ‘routine’and ‘exceptional’types of prison management. The discussion of the routine leads, inter alia, to an examination of the place of the body in struggles over control. The consideration of the exceptional points to the significance of the processual constitution of masculine identity. The emphasis on contestation and constitution is reiterated in the conclusion which connects the approach developed to some contemporary research on female prisons.

Picture this: Criminology, image and narrative

This paper addresses the extent to which the ‘narrative turn’ in criminology can help inform how images should be read and interpreted. It begins by setting out structuralist analyses of narrative, before discussing an influential art historical approach to iconography and then turns to a substantive analysis of medieval penal imaginaries. Here the argument is that the images of extreme violence did not exactly reflect the realities of medieval life, rather they helped to dramatize them. The implications of this anthropological point are explored in the final section where the relationships between art, discourse and narrative are set out in further detail.

Punishment in the frame: Rethinking the history and sociology of art

Images of punishment have featured prominently in Western art and this article explores what might be learnt from studying such pictures of suffering. It seeks to develop an approach to the visual that avoids both the essentialism of art history and the reductionism of sociology by offering a rethinking of the relationships between the two. It begins by setting out the current state of the sociology of art, before discussing ‘new’ art histories that are inspired by social analysis. It then concentrates on how images of punishment have featured in Western art. This substantive material provides a rich resource to understand the force of representation and offers an opportunity to develop an aesthetic sociology that avoids some of the problems identified in the article. The approach developed in the second part is one that seeks to elaborate an aesthetic sociology that combines a historical sensitivity to images with the analytical concerns of social science. It strives to extend the art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings toward more sociological interpretations of visual analysis.

Changing Fortunes: Criminology and the Sociological Condition

Criminology and its relationships with sociology are today at a crossroads, and this article explores the changing fortunes of each as they have evolved over the last 50 years. The separation has occurred as criminology has successfully established itself as an independent subject with an impressive ability to attract students, scholars and research grants. Some see the striking expansion of criminology and move away from the basic disciplines as an indication of success and impressive achievement, while others are more sceptical and highlight the costs such isolation brings. The article examines the consequences of these changes, then it focuses on the fates of some of the key concepts in sociological criminology, before concluding that social theory can be a unifying force, capable of reinvigorating the ties between the two disciplines.

Reading a “Titian”: Visual Methods and the Limits of Interpretation

ABSTRACT Contemporary criminology is witnessing something of a “visual turn” and as researchers develop their methods of enquiry it is clear that interdisciplinary scholarship will play a key role in shaping inventive approaches in it. In this article, I discuss some of the different ways art historians have “read” images and the multiple connections they have forged to understand an artwork, before turning to how these approaches have been mobilized in a single example: Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, which dates from the 1570s, and is among the most disturbing images in the entire history of art.

Iconic Power, Dark Tourism, and the Spectacle of Suffering

In this chapter I explore some of the ethical questions posed by dark tourism and the spectacle of suffering, via two examples. One is of Ai Weiwei’s temporary exhibition on Alcatraz, which juxtaposes extraordinary conceptual art installations in one of the major sites of prison tourism, to explore the relationships between art and activism in carceral space. The second is the display of genocidal evidence at both the Khmer Rouge “security centre” code-named S-21, which was a former high school in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and the “Killing Fields” of Choeung Ek, ten miles east of the capital, where prisoners were taken to be executed. Recognizing that dark tourism involves a “fluid spectrum of intensity” (Stone 2006: 146), the museum experience is nevertheless central to it where representations of death, disaster, or atrocity are displayed for an uneasy mix of education, commerce, and memorialization purposes. At the lighter end of the scale are those sites loosely associated with violence and trauma, examples of which would include the London Dungeon or the proposed Dracula theme park in Romania, which are “firmly entertainment focussed and commercialized,” while toward the middle of the range and combining “education and entertainment” are prison tourist sites, whereas the “darkest” places (such as Holocaust museums) are locations that “can invoke sombre reflection, grief, sorrow, shock and horror” (Barton and Brown 2015: 238).