Thomas Ugelvik

The Hidden Food: Mealtime Resistance and Identity Work in a Norwegian Prison

How can prisoners’ blatant aversion for the official prison food be understood? And what can we make of the various covert practices of illegal or semi-legal alternative food making that goes on behind closed cell doors? Are prisoners picky and difficult people, or is the food truly as horrible as they claim? Or could this best be understood on levels other than that of individual taste? The article will argue that prisoners experience the official prison food as a continuation of the more general attacks on their identity that imprisonment entails, denying them status as a person with competence and agency and forcefully removing them from family, friends and positioning them on the margins of the larger community outside. The daily meals thus serve as painful bodily manifestations of the power the institution holds over the individual. As Foucault reminds us, however, power may be conceptualized as a fluctuating relationship of forces, not a property of powerful groups or individuals. In such a perspective, the prison food also works as arena for prisoner identity work through practices of hidden resistance.

Prisoners and their victims: Techniques of neutralization, techniques of the self

‘Denial of the victim’ is one of the five classic techniques described by Sykes and Matza in their seminal work on techniques of neutralization. Based on ethnographic field work in a Norwegian remand prison, this article explores this particular technique as it is employed by prisoners in their narratives about how they came to be imprisoned. I will argue that this particular technique of neutralization, understood by Sykes and Matza as part of the etiology of crime, might fruitfully be re-conceptualized as a Foucauldian technique of the self tailored to the specific context of the prison. As both moral space and rehabilitation technology, a prison positions its prisoners as ‘immoral others’ who should confess and repent. This ascription of low morality may in fact be seen as one of the pains of imprisonment. Given this, victims represent problems for prisoners, as ‘having’ a victim equals being someone who has hurt another. I will show the narrative strategies prisoners employ when they reconstruct themselves as moral subjects in relation to their victims.

Prison Ethnography as Lived Experience: Notes from the Diaries of a Beginner Let Loose in Oslo Prison

This article reflects on my own experiences as a prison researcher and my position within the cultural web of the prison society. From the first minute of the first day of fieldwork, I entered into perpetual negotiations about my position in the prison and my proper place in the ever-present struggle between (various factions of) prisoners and officers. Entering a prison as a researcher is both scary and exciting. How would I be greeted? Would I be accepted? Where would I fit in? What is the correct degree of closeness and distance between a researcher and the researched in such an environment? How can one best relate to and balance the very different positions that are being ascribed to you, such as “suspicious stranger,” “responsible professional,” “unwanted intruder,” and “trusted confidant”? With excerpts from my fieldnotes, I reveal my own thoughts and feelings about entering the prison for the first time, struggling to fit in and, finally, settling in to the field while remaining alert to the potential minefields surrounding me. I also describe my responses to the performative expectations of masculinity that made me “legible” and to some extent “legitimate” in the eyes of prisoners and prison staff.

Paternal Pains of Imprisonment: Incarcerated Fathers, Ethnic Minority Masculinity, and Resistance Narratives

According to official statistics, about half of the male prisoners in Norwegian prisons are fathers. At the same time, just over three prisoners in 10 are foreign nationals. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Norwegian remand prison, this article will discuss some of the problems imprisoned ethnic minority fathers are facing, and detail some of the solutions they employ. I will focus particularly on two narrative problem-solving strategies. One is the promotion of parental values based on a strong (paternalistic) version of the pater familias combined with narratives about the sorry state of Norwegian parenting. The other is a form of symbolic resistance through narratives about violent revenge taken on responsible state agents. Finally, I will show how the imprisoned ethnic minority fathers reposition themselves as both real men and good fathers in the process.

The past, present, and future of narrative criminology: A review and an invitation

As J.W. Ironmonger’s 2012 novel The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder opens, the protagonist Max is lying face up, dead, on his own front room dining table. On his 21st birthday, Max decided to lock himself in his apartment, curtains drawn, to systematically map his entire brain’s contents for his thesis work in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. The project was supposed to last three years. Three decades later, his fifty-one year old body is surrounded by his life’s work: Shelves filled with 1600 books and folders, including 358 volumes of autobiographical monologue painstakingly recorded on note paper and bound in red leather (the so-called ‘narrative volumes’). His ‘Catalogue’ also includes shelves after shelves of grey A4 lever-arch files (the ‘day logs’) recording experiences that strictly speaking should not have happened. When a leaky pipe, a blown light bulb or a heavy thunderstorm interrupted the project, Max had to record it for the sake of completion. This everyday “mess” should have been “controlled away” to leave Max’s 21-year-old brain pure and pristine and untainted by ongoing events. Unfortunately, life had a habit of intruding on his ongoing storytelling project with new events, making the task never-ending. Max’s life was spent trying to tell his own life’s story without actually living it. Death has now made his catalogue complete. The story has ended. Or has it? What is the end of a story, and where does it begin? The sharing of stories is an important part of the human condition. People seem to have a fundamental drive to tell and listen to them. We use them to communicate and reproduce ingroup solidarity. They may provoke strong emotions. They may be simultaneously entertaining and educational; it is no coincidence that we tell children stories to help them understand and explore a chaotic world. One reason is that storytelling is a basic device for creating, providing and assigning meaning. Stories are good at making simple what is complicated. At the same time, some of the complexity is retained because stories by their very nature are ambiguous and openended. They are an important resource in everyday life and in times of celebration and difficulty; crucial for the way we live, and for the organisation of society. Even our very identity and sense of self is narratively constructed. We make sense of ourselves and our relationships with others by sharing stories and through our individual on-going inner narrative. Stories are, simply put, at the core of what makes us who and what we are. Narrative criminology refers to the study of the role the telling and sharing of stories play in committing, upholding and effecting desistance from crime and other harmful acts. It is hard to say when the story of narrative criminology began. It is, perhaps, one of those stories that have several beginnings. One very early beginning can be traced back to ancient Athens. In Poetics, Aristotle (2013), the grandfather of all narrative analysis, laid out the founding principles of modern-day narratology. Aristotle studied the characteristics of a successful 663558 CMC0010.1177/1741659016663558Crime, Media, Culture research-article2016

Immigration Control in Ultima Thule: Detention and Exclusion, Norwegian Style

The Aliens Holding Centre at Trandum, about 40 minutes north of Norway’s capital city of Oslo, is the country’s only closed immigration detention centre. Although detainees are held there as a result of having violated the Immigration Act and not the Penal Code, and whilst their detention is meant to facilitate deportation and not as punishment, Trandum’s Centre looks and feels exactly like a conventional prison in a variety of ways. The aim of this article is to introduce the Aliens Holding Centre at Trandum as part of a wider Norwegian (and thus European) immigration control regime, as well as detailing information about the centre in itself, drawing to this end on publicly available reports by the Norwegian Parliamentary Ombudsman for Public Administration, the Independent Council in charge of monitoring operations at Trandum’s Centre, and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Techniques of Legitimation: The Narrative Construction of Legitimacy Among Immigration Detention Officers

In many countries, immigrating detention is a controversial issue. Immigration detention centres are frequently seen as concrete symbols of the most problematic side of state immigration control. Immigration detention is often seen as illegitimate by external (immigration law activists) and internal (detainees) critics. Detention centres, in short, frequently operate with a significant legitimacy deficit. This deficit creates problems for detention centre officers who want to feel good about themselves and the work they do. The professional role of the immigration detention officer can be personally challenging and emotionally demanding. Detention centre officers need to address the legitimacy deficit and somehow reconstruct themselves and the institution they work in as legitimate. This paper describes the narrative self-legitimation work that goes on when detention centre officers at the Police Aliens Holding Centre at Trandum, Norway share stories over lunch or a cup of coffee.

The Bellman and the Prison Officer: Customer Care in Imperfect Panopticons

The purpose of this chapter is to compare and contrast these two different kinds of professional gazes; that of the hotel bellman and that of the prison officer. The point of comparison is often to be able to show something new about the things compared. Introducing a new contrast agent may make something already known appear in a new light. By comparing the two, I am not saying that hotel employees in every way are very similar to prison officers, nor that hotels and prisons generally have very much in common. What I want to do, rather, is to put the professional prison guard gaze analytically to use in order to say something new about the host gaze employed in hotel lobbies around the world. At the same time, and equally interesting, the bellman gaze thus analyzed cannot help but return the favor and reflect back on and comment on the prison officers and their optics and practices of power. The two different kinds of gazes compared will thus be put to work as each others’ mirrors, hopefully giving novel insights on both sides as a result. More precisely, I am going to show that both professions, although radically different in many ways, have in common a way of seeing which tries to balance professional customer care with specific control duties. I want to show that these different kinds of gazes have in common a dual optic partly focused on the needs of others, partly on the potential problems and dangers these others represent.

Prison spaces and beyond: the potential of ethnographic zoom

The ideas featured in this brief article were presented under the title ’Prison Spaces’ at the Prison Ethnography Symposium. This broad, inclusive title was partly the result of Ugelvik’s resistance to the idea of presenting the Norwegian prison as one exotic, exceptional specimen amongst others, in a format resembling the butterfly collector’s or botanist’s proud display of his/her rare discoveries. The tension between on the one hand displaying and revealing prisons which have rarely been subject to empirical study (in their own terms) and on the other fearing and resisting engulfment by the dominant (AngloAmerican) framing of prison studies is one familiar to founding members of the Global Prisons Research Network. This tension is likely to continue to haunt us until the non-Western/non-Anglo-American prison becomes better recognised both for itself and for the contribution it might make to critical scholarship more broadly. To date members of the Network have sought to illuminate prisons in parts of the world formerly considered unreachable by prison scholars (either because they were too dangerous or too ’underdeveloped’ to meaningfully study) and to do so from, as it were, the inside, that is to say via ethnography or more accurately via quasi-ethnography. In the two pieces below a glimpse is given of how ethnography can allow the curious and studious scholar both to zoom in on local political and cultural versions of incarceration and to zoom out bringing the nuances of confinement into focus and capturing global spectres of social control. Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, whose ethnographic work has focussed on India (see Bandyopadhyay 2010), problematises totalising tendencies, arguing that ethnography produces a view (based on fragments) which complicates readings of prison spaces. Thomas Ugelvik takes the prison as a place of mobility control, where state power is exerted, as his point of departure to discuss two problematic ideas; firstly the romanticisation of mobility and movement in the global arena and secondly the idea that the power of the nation-state is waning. Both scholars hint at the potential of prison ethnographies to elucidate much more than simply prison life and encourage us to experiment with the zoom function of the ethnographic optic.

A Difference That Makes a Difference? Reflexivity and Researcher Effects in an All-Foreign Prison

Today, researchers are expected to spend considerable energy describing and discussing their own social positions and personas in the field for at least two reasons: First, researchers always observe the field from a specific point of view. Their perspective is structured by their own social position and biography and is thus unique. Second, the people in the field react differently to the presence of different researchers. The field persona of the researcher is expected to impact the data she or he is able to produce. For these reasons, critically discussing one’s own field experiences is seen as an important part of the qualitative research process. This article will discuss the second part of this argument. Based on the experiences of two different researchers in the same field site, we ask whether it is true that different researchers necessarily produce different data. We conclude that in this case, at least, the differences between the two researchers did not seem to make much of a difference.