Yvonne Jewkes

Autoethnography and Emotion as Intellectual Resources Doing Prison Research Differently

In contrast to many other social sciences, criminology has largely resisted the notion that qualitative inquiry has autoethnographic dimensions and remained quiet on the subject of the emotional investment required of ethnographic fieldworkers studying stigmatized and/or vulnerable “others” in settings where differential indices of power, authority, vulnerability, and despair are felt more keenly than most. Emotion appears in criminology in discussions about public sentiments, populist punitiveness, and the emotional motivations behind offending but rarely features as a lens through which one might better understand the process of doing research. This article examines the state of the field, discusses the work of a small minority of ethnographers who acknowledge the emotional content of prison studies, and tells the story of a personal research encounter that changed the author’s methodological and theoretical orientation. It argues that a more frank acknowledgment of the convergence of subject-object roles does not necessarily threaten the validity of social science, or at least, “it is a threat with a corresponding gain.”

Men Behind Bars “Doing” Masculinity as an Adaptation to Imprisonment

This article, which is part of a wider ethnographic study of constructions of self in the mediated world of men’s prisons, explores “manliness” as the prison coping strategy par excellence. That masculinity is likely to become more extreme in men’s prisons is unsurprising, but the origins and nature of the “hypermasculine” culture and the precise means by which hierarchies of domination are created and maintained have yet to be thoroughly explored. Indeed, although men constitute the vast majority of prisoners worldwide, most studies treat the gender of their subjects as incidental and assume that in men’s prisons, the normal rules of patriarchy do not apply. However, as this article demonstrates, the notion of patriarchy, although in need of refinement, is not irrelevant to the predominantly male environment, and it is now widely accepted that men can be its victims as well as its perpetrators.

Handbook on prisons

This chapter examines the manner in which various countries have sought to accommodate the differing needs of Indigenous prisoners. It outlines the Native American religious practices and ceremonies allowed in US prisons and some of the struggles associated with exercising religious freedoms. The chapter discusses the partnerships forged between US correctional agencies and American Indian agencies to allow prisoners to serve time on reservations. Australian experiences have been vastly different and the chapter outlines the various approaches including the construction of a prison to meet the needs of Aboriginal prisoners in West Kimberley. It also outlines the establishment of the first prison in Greenland to respond to the needs of the Kalaallit peoples. Under the 1953 Danish Constitution, Greenland was incorporated into Denmark as a county and strategies for assimilation were imposed. Many Kalaallit children grew up in boarding schools in Denmark, often losing their language and cultural ties to Greenland.

The Use of Media in Constructing Identities in the Masculine Environment of Men's Prisons

This article explores the importance of media forms and content within a unique context: the prison. Although — in common with other studies of media use among prisoners — it is inspired by the uses and gratifications tradition, this study refines and develops the approach, synthesizing it with Giddenss theory of structuration and Bourdieus notion of habitus in order to understand not only patterns of media consumption in prisons, but also to gain insight into the relationship between media, identity and power. Structuration theory is viewed as an important counter to the prison deprivation literature, the central tenet of which is that imprisonment is an inherently painful and dehumanizing experience during which the prisoner suffers a series of deprivations that fundamentally weaken his or her sense of identity. While this study supports the view that prisons are essentially mortifying environments, it nevertheless endorses Giddenss belief that subordinates are never entirely powerless even in the most bounded of locales. Indeed, this article presents evidence to show that the mass media provide a key source of empowerment for the confined, offering a range of material from which they can create new identities or maintain pre-existing identities, explore their inner selves, form subgroups based on collective fanship, and find autonomy and self-respect in otherwise humiliating and disidentifying circumstances.

The haunting spectacle of crystal meth: A media-created mythology?

For over a decade the media have been reporting in alarmist tones that ‘crystal meth is coming’ to the UK. Using clichéd discourse (‘crazed’, ‘epidemic’, ‘horror’, etc.) and visual images of deformed and disfigured faces, the meanings attached to the drug are clear: crystal meth creates dangerous ‘others’. Yet an identifiable crystal meth problem has hitherto failed to materialise, and press reporting of the issue appears to constitute an exemplary case of what Stuart Hall has described as a double movement within ideological discourse: a movement towards propaganda and a movement towards myth. This article examines how the threat of ‘ice’, as it is commonly known, has been symbolically, aesthetically and textually constructed in the British media, and how this representation has created its own hyper-reality, influencing political debate, drug policy and public reaction. The analysis places particular emphasis on the importance of visual images as a sensory expression of cultural meaning, an aspect of media representation that has too often been theoretically and pragmatically neglected within mainstream criminology.

Architectures of incarceration: The spatial pains of imprisonment:

This article considers the contribution that physical environment makes to the pains of imprisonment. Synthesizing concepts and theories from critical organization studies with those that have informed criminological studies of prison design and the lived experience of imprisonment, the article discusses the ways in which the architecture and aesthetics of penal environments might be better understood with reference to the restricted economies of space found in industrial and bureaucratic organizations. It is argued that a grasp of the limits historically placed on the subjective growth of individual workers (workspaces frequently being characterized as ‘iron cages’ or ‘psychic prisons’) can enhance our understanding of the physical and psychological confinement of those in custody. Moreover, critical organization studies can inform emerging debates about what future prisons should look like and alert us to the potential fallacy in assuming that ‘modern’ equates to ‘better’. While clean, humane and safe environments are unquestionably desirable for both prisoners and prison staff, and considerations such as natural daylight, access to outside space and aesthetic stimuli are increasingly being incorporated into penal environments around the world, this article will critically interrogate the value of such initiatives arguing that they may, in fact, represent a new and potentially more insidious form of control that bring their own distinctive ‘pains’.

Policing the filth: The problems of investigating online child pornography in England and Wales

This article explores the difficulties facing the police in England and Wales in their attempts to combat the trade in abusive images of children on the Internet. It discusses the problems that hamper investigations into computer-mediated child pornography in the context of the history and composition of the police service, its decentralised and ‘local’ character, its lack of adequate government funding, its internal culture which many regard as resistant to technological innovation, and the consequent problems associated with officer training and expertise. The article will argue that the polices deficiencies in these areas are further frustrated by their difficulty in securing convictions when the few offenders who are prosecuted face trial.

It’s the image that matters: Style, substance and critical scholarship

Much has happened at Crime, Media, Culture since our last editorial at the beginning of Volume 2. As we launch Volume 3, we can report that CMC has recently been awarded a major international publishing prize and has continued, we hope, to promote the best in critical scholarship at the intersections of crime, media and culture. As is to be expected after two years, our Associate and International Editorial Boards have undergone some restructuring. While the changes to the latter are too numerous to list in detail here, we would like to extend our sincerest thanks to all the Editorial Board members who have worked with us over the past two volumes, and to offer a warm welcome to those new members who have come on board. It is also a pleasure to welcome Katja Franko Aas, Mark Hamm, Maggy Lee, Meda Chesney-Lind and Russell Smith as Associate Editors, and to confi rm that Alexandra Campbell and Majid Yar have joined us as Review Editors. In addition, we have created a new editorial position – Visual Arts Editor – which will be fi lled by Cecile Van de Voorde. Refl ecting our scholarly interest in the visual, we believe this new role will further cement CMC’s distinctive and innovative approach to visual issues. In this context it is the visual, and its signifi cance for explorations of crime, media and culture, that we wish to address briefl y in this editorial. Today, the visual constitutes perhaps the central medium through which the meanings and emotions of crime are captured and conveyed to audiences. Indeed, we would suggest that it is the visual that increasingly shapes our engagement with, and understanding of, key issues of crime, control and social order. The proliferation of news and entertainment media has generated growing competition for audience attention, a sort of infl ationary spiral of shock and enticement. Producing a visually arresting product which can ‘feed the mind and move the heart’, as Rupert Murdoch (2006) recently put it, has become one of the major challenges for media practitioners seeking to maintain their commercial buoyancy. In the midst of rapidly developing production technologies across a 24/7 mediascape, and multiplying screens and surfaces, the visual becomes paramount. However, while there is no escaping the ‘politics of representation’ (Hall, 1993), a scholarly engagement

Much ado about nothing? Representations and realities of online soliciting of children

Abstract This paper is concerned with where the publics ideas come from about online risks to children and young people. Combining perspectives from criminology, sociology and media studies, it will be argued that as a culture we are confused about childhood and hold on to highly ambiguous ideas about children and sexuality. Further, despite the medias inclination to present adult attraction to children as a uniquely “modern” phenomenon, conflicting notions of childhood have always underpinned social and legal norms and were particularly salient in Victorian society. More recently, at precisely the same time as individuals have retreated from public spheres to the “security” of domestic and privatized spaces, we have seen the emergence of one of the most feared phenomena of the age: the online sexual abuse of children.

Reconstructing the sexual abuse of children: ‘cyber-paeds’, panic and power

In recent years there have been several culturo-criminal discursive shifts, which have oriented political and public concerns away from ‘real world’ sex crimes against children and the people most likely to commit them. These include the construction of the dangerous stranger as the primary threat to children; the widespread use of the terms ‘paedophile’ and ‘child pornography’ in the common lexicon and the placing of both the paedophile and pornography in virtual rather than real space. Such discourses not only fail to protect children, but may even work to fetishize youth and youthful bodies colluding with the widespread commercial sexualization of children. In the ‘cyber-paed’ the news media have created the monster of our age and orchestrated what some criminologists might term a moral panic about both ‘cyber’ and ‘paeds’. This has occurred in a culture that, simultaneous with the castigation and outrage of the ‘cyber-paed’, routinely sexually objectifies children and infantilizes women to sell products, or pleasure as product; a culture that also largely ignores the evidence that most sexual crime against children happens in families. This article explores the contradictions and deflections inherent in contemporary constructions of sexuality and childhood and assesses the panic about paedophiles in cyber-space.