Richard Sparks

Is there life after imprisonment? How elderly men talk about imprisonment and release

Based on findings from a two-year study in four UK prisons, this article discusses the prison experiences and release expectations of male prisoners aged 65 and above. In terms of the prison experience, we argue that elderly men in prison often have enormous difficulties simply coping with the prison regime. In addition, most have certain painful pre-occupations, including a fear of dying in prison, the loss of familial contact, the loss of a ‘protector’ role, the loss of a respectable (non-prisoner) identity and the loss of a coherent and satisfactory life narrative. In terms of release, we argue that elderly men in prison often experience significant release and resettlement fears. Many recognize that not only are they vulnerable to assault when released (this applies particularly to those convicted of sexual offences) they also have ‘nothing to go out to’ and too little time left to ‘start over’. Using prisoners’ own accounts, we examine how elderly men in prison think about their lives during and after imprisonment.

Penal Austerity: The Doctrine of Less Eligibility Reborn?

This chapter raises certain arguments and historical analogies which may assist in taking a few preliminary sightings of some distinctive features of the current British penal landscape. I hope to show that some of the present developments, which initially appear rather particular and ‘of the moment’, interestingly bear comparison with much earlier ideas and events. That comparison may suggest, at least in outline, a way of conceptualizing and responding to the contemporary scene.

For an Historical Sociology of Crime Policy in England and Wales since 1968

This essay proposes an approach to understanding changes in political responses to crime in England and Wales over the last third of the twentieth century and developments in criminological knowledge over the same period. To explore the association between these in some empirical detail, we argue, would provide a historical–sociological understanding that is currently lacking, notwithstanding Garlands significant intervention in The Culture of Control. We take issue with some aspects of Garlands account, on both methodological and substantive grounds, and delineate certain distinctions between his ‘history of the present’ and the historically situated hermeneutics that we favour. The latter, we suggest, can be more attentive to particular political and intellectual struggles that have had a formative bearing on the current field and, as such, offer new perspectives on the position of crime and punishment in contemporary political culture.

Out of the `Digger' The Warrior's Honour and the Guilty Observer

Inside prisons, situations of intractable conflict between certain prisoners and correctional authorities arise. The choices available to either party in escaping the sometimes desperate consequences of these battles are usually severely limited. One effect, desire for which is usually disclaimed by the authorities, can be the creation of a yet deeper level of incarceration for the most recalcitrant. Recalling fieldwork experiences in Scotland in the early 1990s, this article describes both this situation and a notable attempt to discover a route out of it. That route lay through the Barlinnie Special Unit, once one of the most internationally celebrated penal innovations of its day. However, the fieldwork immediately preceded, and was marginally and unintentionally implicated in, a decision to close the Special Unit. The article attempts, first and foremost, to recover what was once special about the Special Unit and, second, to discuss the factors and conditions surrounding its elimination. The latter include the uneasy question of the researchers own involvement and the uses made of aspects of the research by the authorities and the media. While affirming that field research in prisons is unavoidably important, it sounds a note of caution concerning the terms under which it is undertaken.

Learning, Rehabilitation and the Arts in Prisons: A Scottish Case Study.

Abstract This article investigates the role of the arts in enabling prisoners to engage with learning and improve their literacy, and the impact this has on their rehabilitation and desistance from crime. It draws on data collected from prisoners who participated in arts interventions in three different Scottish prisons. It argues that participating in the arts projects built an active learning culture and encouraged the improvement of verbal and written literacy skills through the use of positive pedagogical approaches. In addition participants learned to work together more effectively, developed self-confidence and were more trusting and supportive because they were working together on intensive projects that they had co-devised. For many prisoners participation in the arts projects constructively challenged and disrupted the negative identities that they had internalised. Their public successes in performances before audiences of significant others opened up new personal and social identities (as artists or performers) that helped them to begin to envision an alternative self that in turn motivated them towards future desistance from crime.

Ideologies and crime: political ideas and the dynamics of crime control

This article assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neoliberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a ‘contest’ between tactics and technique. In contrast, we establish a political framework for theorising crime and its control. This framework calls for close interpretive analysis of the ways in which disputes about the crime question are always in part contests between different political ideologies and the meaning and significance of their defining concepts. By revisiting penal developments of recent several decades with these questions in mind, one can get closer to the heart of what is at stake when crime is being discussed and acquire a better sense of why crime and its control are legitimately the subject of politics.

Landscapes of Protection: the Past, Present and Futures of Policing in an English Town

In his latest reflections on our times Zygmunt Bauman (1997) depicts modernity as an epoch in which a good deal of freedom was sacrificed in the name of collectively guaranteed order and security; an era of reliability where people were able (albeit, for many, within severely circumscribed limits) to forge secure identities, plan ahead and hope for the better. According to Bauman, these days have gone. In the post- (or late-) modern age people live under conditions of over-whelming and self-perpetuating uncertainty, such that: No jobs are guaranteed, no positions are foolproof, no skills are of lasting utility, experience and know-how turn into liability as soon as they become assets, seductive careers all too often prove to be suicide tracks … Livelihood, social position, acknowledgement of usefulness and entitlement to self-dignity may all vanish together, overnight and without notice. (ibid. 23)

Wacquant and Civic Sociology: 'Formative Intentions' and Formative Experiences

Our contribution to the now rather expansive activity of welcoming, critiquing, and otherwise discussing Loïc Wacquant’s new books is devoted to exploring the conception of sociology’s ‘civic’ roles that he says animates and underpins them. For this reason, we will focus here in particular on the afterword to Prisons of Poverty (which itself is called ‘A civic sociology of neo-liberal penality’) (Wacquant, 2009b). Given that this is the argument with which we primarily wish to engage, we will shortly devote a moment or two to summarising the position. Like many people, we think there is reason to be grateful that a sociologist of Wacquant’s stature has chosen to devote a substantial portion of his career to analysing the new penal politics. We believe that this has contributed significantly to our understanding of the issues and to the seriousness with which wider social scientific and public discourse now have to treat ‘criminological’ questions. As far as space permits here, we will go on to say a few words about what this means for sociological and criminological work as agents of democratic deliberation and reflection. This happens to be the very problem that has occupied our attention recently (Loader and Sparks, 2010), just as it does, in one way or another, most people who think seriously about these issues at all. We will then go on to argue in favour of a certain conception of the civic roles of social science. This emphasises the connections between what we call an ‘academic formative intention’, on the one hand, and a commitment to the enhancement of democratic deliberation on matters of common concern, on the other. Our argument, in brief, is that the public value of sociology or criminology, in this case as applied to questions of punishment and social control, is most coherently and convincingly described as that of contributing to a better politics of crime and its regulation – or what we call ‘democratic under-labouring’ (we say a little more about this curious term below; for a fuller exposition, see Loader and Sparks, 2010: Ch. 5). We think this is in many respects very

New voices from the ship of fools A critical commentary on the renaissance of 'permissiveness' as a political issue

Conventional ‘left’ accounts of ‘Thatcherism’ have stressed the authoritarian nature of its political rhetoric. This paper suggests that convergences between the ‘new’ conservatism and more fundamentalist moral positions, meeting on the ground of obscenity and violence in the media, are a relatively recent development, associated with renewed strategic concentration on the question of law and order. Indeed, the libertarian right, in adhering to a utilitarian laissez-faire understanding of private pleasures, has presided over a positive proliferation of erotic and other gratifications. We argue that in the United Kingdom the authentic constituency of the ‘moral right’ is an increasingly socially marginal one, rendered progressively more so by the rapid development of technologies of communication and entertainment.

Criminology, History of

The history of criminology is examined comparatively for four countries or regions: the United States, Latin America, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom. Each case history considers a common set of analytic dimensions: origin and takeoff (time, discipline, political context); changing shapes (themes, theoretical orientations, data); changing organization (associations, journals, position in universities, government and nonprofit institutes); and the political-economic environment of criminology. Commonalities across national and regional developments and particularities of each region speak to the conditions of criminology. Globalization is at work, partly under US guidance, but academic exports are challenged and adapted to nation-level political, ideological, and institutional contexts.