How the everyday use of force produces unequal security

Maintaining order and control within prisons has become an increasingly key priority for HM Prison Service. Indeed, maintaining adequate staffing levels, preventing assaults, and stopping disorder are axiomatic to sustaining a functioning prison system. The chief purpose of this paper is to analyse the 'problem of order' (Bottom, Sparks and Hay 1996) from both a theoretical and practical perspective. The paper critically analyses key texts in this area, as well as specifically discussing the 'problem of order' in relation to prison riots, and the contrasting policies employed by public and private sector prisons.

Social Justice, 2017

This special issue highlights the growth of ethnographic examinations of legal/penal governance across multiple disciplines, emphasizing the possibilities and potential blind spots of ethnography as a methodology for studying penality. By analyzing phenomena as varied as pre-trial incarceration, parole and reentry, female incarceration, immigrant detention, and mental health courts, these articles help us explore commonalities and differences across penal practices, the diffusion of penality throughout society, and its entanglements with other sociocultural, political and economic forces. - Social Justice, Vol. 44(1).

Social & Legal Studies, 2018

This article offers one of the first analyses of the current and ongoing crisis affecting English and Welsh prisons and of recent proposals for prison reform. The article pits the impression of novelty surrounding the current framework of incarceration against the notion promoted by critical scholarship that the nexus between crisis and reform is not new. Building on this debate, we deploy an original theoretical perspective, grounded on the concept of hostile solidarity, to argue that the promise of prison reform is an essential aspect of the utility ascribed to punishment, which allows the prison to be perpetually preserved and seen as unquestionably necessary, even when in crisis. The article concludes by suggesting that our emotional attachment and contemporary reliance on punishment, and its manifestation in the perpetuation and expansion of institutions like the prison, are ultimately self-defeating and self-propelling.

This paper explores how sociological research helps us to understand prisons in contemporary societies. Although numerous studies exist which investigate prisons, and others which analyse the experience of imprisonment, there are few which examine the role of sociological research in this field. Through critically analysing a number of key texts in this area of criminology, this paper attempts to articulate the role sociological research plays in bringing attention to imprisonment in contemporary society.

Worldwide Journal of Multi-disciplinary Studies , 2019

A number of distinct ideas fall under the rubric of 'the problem of order'. It is, therefore, difficult to speak of a cohesive conceptual framework. However, one facet which is axiomatic to the problem of order in prison is a concern with maintaining appropriate levels of control. The organizing principle of this paper is to articulate what this problem means in contemporary prisons, and which policies best militate against disorder manifesting itself within prison. I will begin by deconstructing the problem of order as a theoretical concept. I shall argue that it is difficult to present a singular, theoretical perspective: 'the problem of order' refers to various aspects of prison governance, ranging from a focus on achieving legitimacy, to a concern with controlling prisoner defiance. I further intend to show how these various perspectives shape prison policies. I will then go on to illustrate the problem of order in relation to a specific manifestation of disorder: the prison riot. I shall argue that collective violence offers the clearest illustration of prison disorder. Moreover, official responses to such riots are indicative of the varying control policies implemented to resolve the problem of order in prison. Finally, I aim to illustrate how order is best accomplished through maintaining an appropriate 'weight' of imprisonment. I intend to illustrate the widening chasm between methods used to maintain order in private and public prisons. Further, I will argue that order is best accomplished when prisons deploy control policies within a situational framework.

County Jail, the largest detention facility in the 'Free World', to give a ground-level sense of how the entry portal of the US detention system operates by way of prelude to this special issue on the ethnography of the prison. A survey of the recent sociology and anthropology of carceral institutions shows that field studies depicting the everyday world of inmates in America have gone into eclipse just when they were most needed on both scientific and political grounds following the turn toward the penal management of poverty and the correlative return of the prison to the forefront of the societal scene. Accordingly, this issue seeks to reinvigorate and to internationalize the ethnography of the carceral universe understood both as a microcosm endowed with its own material and symbolic tropism and as vector of social forces, political nexi, and cultural processes that traverse its walls. Field researchers need to worry less about 'interrupting the terms of the debate' about the prison and more about getting inside and around penal facilities to carry out intensive, close-up observation of the myriad relations they contain and support. This article discusses the obstacles to such research, including questions of access and funding, the professional organization of academe, the lowly social and therefore scientific status of the object of investigation, and the (mis)use of the military metaphor of 'collateral damage'. It concludes by suggesting that getting 'in and out of the belly of the beast' offers a unique vantage point from which to contribute to the comparative ethnography of the state in the age of triumphant neoliberalism.

Prisons should help prisoners rather than just punish them.-John Howard, 1726-1790 When we speak about crime , we often focus on preventing it rather than looking at the source of the social problem. People who commit crime against women might be hailing from backgrounds that are crime-prone, where women are not respected equally, where the family unit has disintegrated. Parallel this with studies that show that a vast majority of prisoners across India return to a life of crime upon release from prison. There is therefore a constant cycle between the committers of crime and society, and it doesn't end when they are put in prison. More often than not, prisons are breeding grounds for further crimes, for resentment. By creating an unhealthy prison environment, we are therefore cultivating more crime, which in turn is brought to society sooner or later because many released prisoners are not able to reintegrate into the society. To put an end to this vicious cycle, it is very important to understand the potential of education in the prison environment in preventing crime, at the source. We, as a society, seldom question the causes and the reasons of crime and criminality but react to it all the time on the basis of what's popular rather than what's right. There is a direct correlation between criminality, the social circumstances of people and the education as well as poverty. It's generally people from the lower socioeconomic classes that end up in prison. High rates of unemployment and poverty drive people to commit petty crimes, at the same time also making it more difficult for them to deal with the legal system. Once we look at the statistics and the evidence, we need to ask if there are there ways that we can reduce the number of people committing crime? And if we can say yes to that we will automatically reduce the number of victims and it's far better to prevent people from being victims of criminality rather than responding to it. Instead of seeing prisons as a revolving door of punishment, we can see it as an on-ramp of opportunity so that our communities can be renewed all over the country. Education can be a wonderful opportunity for exploring and discovering. It is transormative and reinventing. We need to change the prison paradigm and for that we first need to clear the misconception that we have about crime and incarceration. You see, we think that crime is the problem but the truth is they are actually just a symptom warning us of a problem in our society. We see that in the disproportionality of our justice system, the failings of our educational system and our socioeconomic inequalities. Many crimes are merely a symptom of these problems and trying to solve them to mass incarceration is not the cure. Sure it might give us a solution temporarily, but it is not going to fix the problem, which is the society. The lack of education is at the heart of the many problems that lead to prison; and it is believed that the lack of education contributes to incarceration and recidivism. If there is a direct correlation between them : Why don't we turn prisons into schools? This way we can address the symptom which is crime, and at the same time address what many would call the heart of the problem : Lack of education. We need to cutivate the prison into a place of learning, a place where prisoners can work with the community to give back in a real way. The whole purpose of punishment should be to teach and educate the prisoners so that they make different choices. Prisons are supposed to be teaching a lesson, educating so that these men and women make better choices in the future, but somehow we become so fixated on the punishment part that we miss the whole point. Prisons should be able to cultivate the positive aspirations of these people. First thing we need to do is open them up to the public. Let the community see the actions that prisons are making towards atonement and the steps institutions are making to facilitate and hold prisoners accountable. After all, it's our community that's at the heart of our society. It's where these prisoners were raised, where they committed their crimes and where they will eventually be released. These communities have as much right, responsibility and duty to be a part of this process as the correctional staff. Custody levels should be replaced with grade levels; where the higher the grade level achieved to the completion of educational programmes further the access for reintegration, allowing the prisoners to use what they have learned in the prison to earn back their place in the society. By doing this we could take the general public's lack of information, the growing communal fear regarding the prisoner's release and transform them to a graduation, an acceptance back into the society, supported by the community's knowledge of a prisoners's personal progress. Just like to grow a tree, it's not enough to just sow the seeds in the ground; we need to fertilize it, we need to till the soil, water it and if the environment is not conducive to producing the type of plants we want,we make a greehouse.

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2016

Addressing the dynamics of interpersonal violence, institutionalised abuses and prisoner isolation, this article consolidates critical analyses as challenges to the essentially liberal constructions and interpretations of prisoner agency and penal reformism. Grounded in long-term research with women in prison in the North of Ireland, it connects embedded, punitive responses that undermine women prisoners’ self-esteem and mental health to the brutalising manifestations of formal and informal punishments, including lockdowns and isolation. It argues that critical social research into penal policy and prison regimes has a moral duty, an ethical obligation and a political responsibility to investigate abuses of power, seek out the ‘view from below’. Challenging the revisionism implicit within the ‘healthy prison’ discourse, it argues for alternatives to prison as the foundation of decarceration and abolition.

The British Journal of Criminology, 2020

Surviving prison has always involved ‘action’ and game playing. Higher stakes—‘life-trashing sentences’, the fear and risk of radicalization, increased incidences of homicide and labyrinth routes out—have compounded the experience of struggle: to be heard, for dignity, against exposure to violent injustice, and for release; the wrestling of ‘the self’ against a bleak and unyielding bureaucracy. In this article, we revisit McDermott and King’s Mind Games: Where the Action is in Prison showing how long-term prisoners are exposed to unregulated, unfathomable forms of power and action, and how long-term imprisonment feels increasingly like being ‘abandoned by humanity.’