Not Looking Hard Enough: Masculinity, Emotion, and Prison Research

In her recent article on autoethnography and emotion in prison research, Jewkes suggests that “most prison studies remain surprisingly ungendered texts,” and that—on the whole—the scholars who have written about the emotional dimensions of prison research have been women. This article explores both of these claims. First, it draws attention to areas of prison research in which male researchers have been relatively reflexive about matters of emotion and masculinity, while also highlighting the way that some of the emotional dimensions of prison research can be identified even within the classic studies of prison sociology. Second, it suggests that one of the most striking omissions from most studies of men’s imprisonment is the analysis of “homosocial relations” between men—relations defined by flows of masculine intimacy that are submerged or expressed indirectly. Third, it describes some of the author’s experiences as a man undertaking research with imprisoned men, highlighting the degree to which entwined discourses of masculinity and class shaped the research process.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage at http://qix.sagepub.com/content/20/4/426.abstract?rss=1

‘Nobody’s better than you, nobody’s worse than you’: Moral community among prisoners convicted of sexual offences

Sex offenders constitute a significant proportion of the prison population – in England and Wales, almost one in six prisoners has been convicted of a sexual offence – and yet they barely feature in sociological studies of prison life. This article is based on research conducted in a medium security English prison which only accommodated sex offenders. It argues that if we are to understand prisoners’ experiences of imprisonment and identity management, it is necessary to explore their horizontal relationships with other prisoners. Prisoners experienced their convictions as an assault on their moral character, resenting attempts to define them as ‘sex offenders’. Following Sykes, we argue that prisoners attempted to form an accepting and equal moral community in order to mitigate the pain of this moral exclusion and to enable the development of a convivial atmosphere. However, these attempts were limited by imprisonment’s structural limitations on trust and prisoners’ imported negative feelings about sex offenders. This suggests that sex offenders may have more complex feelings towards their own moral exclusion than is suggested by their attempts to resist their own stigmatisation. This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/146247451560380

Staff-prisoner relationships, staff professionalism, and the use of authority in public- and private-sector prisons

Prison privatization has generally been associated with developments in neoliberal punishment. However, relatively little is known about the specific impact of privatization on the daily life of prisoners, including areas that are particularly salient not just to debates about neoliberal penality, but the wider reconfiguration of public service provision and frontline work. Drawing on a study of values, practices, and quality of life in five private‐sector and two public‐sector prisons in England and Wales, this article seeks to compare and explain three key domains of prison culture and quality: relationships between frontline staff and prisoners, levels of staff professionalism (or jailcraft), and prisoners' experience of state authority. The study identifies some of the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of the public and private prison sectors, particularly in relation to staff professionalism and its impact on the prisoner experience. These findings have relevance beyond the sphere of prisons and punishment.This is the final version. It was first published by Wiley at onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsi.12093/abstrac

The Gendered Pains of Life Imprisonment

As many scholars have noted, women remain peripheral in most analyses of the practices and effects of imprisonment. This article aims to redress this pattern by comparing the problems of long-term confinement as experienced by male and female prisoners, and then detailing the most significant and distinctive problems reported by the latter. It begins by reporting data that illustrate that the women report an acutely more painful experience than their male counterparts. It then focuses on the issues that were of particular salience to the women: loss of contact with family members; power, autonomy and control; psychological well-being and mental health; and matters of trust, privacy and intimacy. The article concludes that understanding how women experience long sentences is not possible without grasping the multiplicity of abuse that the great majority have experienced in the community, or without recognizing their emotional commitments and biographies.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J007935/1) and the Isaac Newton Trust

'It's like a Sentence before the Sentence' - Exploring the Pains and Possibilities of Waiting for Imprisonment

AbstractThis article explores the implications of the ‘imprisonment queue’ in Norway. Based on interview data (N = 200), we show that while interviewees waiting to serve their sentences enjoy certain benefits such as being able to prepare for or negotiate the terms of their imprisonment, they also suffer from uncertainty and powerlessness. The suspension of their lives while they wait hinders them in pursuing their ground projects, things that really matter to them. This peculiar phenomenon has not received attention from prison scholars generally, as well as scholars writing on Nordic Exceptionalism specifically. This article addresses that gap and poses questions about the relative mildness of the short Norwegian sentences, and more broadly, about what constitutes punishment.</jats:p

Making Sense of 'Joint Enterprise' for Murder: Legal Legitimacy or Instrumental Acquiescence?

AbstractThe legal doctrine of ‘joint enterprise’ has been heavily criticized for lacking legitimacy, primarily linked to distributive (in)justice. This paper draws on the narratives of ‘joint enterprise prisoners’ serving long life sentences for murder to address such concerns and extend the discussion to questions of ‘legal legitimacy’. Prisoners who were early in their sentences explicitly rejected the legal legitimacy of joint enterprise, while those at a later stage reported ‘accepting’ their conviction and demonstrated ‘consent’ by engaging with their sentence. We argue that rather than representing normative acceptance of the legal legitimacy of joint enterprise over time, this acceptance is a form of instrumental acquiescence associated with ‘dull compulsion’ ‘coping acceptance’ and personal meaning making.Isaac Newton Trus

The emotional geography of prison life

Accounts of prison life consistently describe a culture of mutual mistrust, fear, aggression and barely submerged violence. Often too, they explain how prisoners adapt to this environment—in men’s prisons, at least—by putting on emotional ‘masks’ or ‘fronts’ of masculine bravado which hide their vulnerabilities and deter the aggression of their peers. This article does not contest the truth of such descriptions, but argues that they provide a partial account of the prison’s emotional world. Most importantly, for current purposes, they fail to describe the way in which prisons have a distinctive kind of emotional geography, with zones in which certain kinds of emotional feelings and displays are more or less acceptable. In this article, we argue that these ‘emotion zones’, which cannot be characterized either as ‘frontstage’ or ‘backstage’ domains, enable the display of a wider range of feelings than elsewhere in the prison. Their existence represents a challenge to depictions of prisons as environments that are unwaveringly sterile, unfailingly aggressive or emotionally undifferentiated. This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage at http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/18/1/56

Kinetic Sensitivity of a New Lumbo-Pelvic Model to Variation in Segment Parameter Input

This study aimed to assess variability in lumbo-pelvic forces and moments during a dynamic high-impact activity (cricket fast bowling) when calculated using different body segment parameters (BSPs). The first three BSPs were estimated using methods where the trunk was divided into segments according to nonspinal anatomical landmarks. The final approach defined segment boundaries according to vertebral level. Three-dimensional motion analysis data from nine male cricketers’ bowling trials were processed using the four BSPs. A repeated-measures analysis of variance revealed no significant effect on peak lumbo-pelvic forces. However, the segmentation approach based on vertebral level resulted in significantly larger peak flexion and lateral flexion moments than the other BSP data sets. This has implications for comparisons between studies using different BSP parameters. Further, given that a method defined with reference to vertebral level more closely corresponds with relevant anatomical structures, this approach may more accurately reflect lumbar moments

Re-examining the Problems of Long-term Imprisonment

Drawing on an amended version of a survey employed in three previous studies, this article reports the problems experienced by 294 male prisoners serving very long life sentences received when aged 25 or under. The broad findings are consistent with previous work, including few differences being found between the problems experienced as most and least severe by prisoners at different sentence stages. By grouping the problems into conceptual dimensions, and by drawing on interviews conducted with 126 male prisoners, we seek to provide a more nuanced analysis of this pattern. We argue that, while earlier scholars concluded that the effects of long-term confinement were not ‘cumulative’ and ‘deleterious’, adaptation to long-term imprisonment has a deep and profound impact on the prisoner, so that the process of coping leads to fundamental changes in the self, which go far beyond the attitudinal.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J007935/1)

Swimming with the Tide: Adapting to Long-Term Imprisonment

© 2016 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Given the increasing number of prisoners serving life sentences in England and Wales, and the increasing average length of these sentences, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the experiences and effects of such sanctions. This article describes how prisoners serving very long sentences from an early age adapt over time to their circumstances. In particular, it focuses on the transition between the early and subsequent stages of such sentences, specifically, the ways that these prisoners adapt to the sentence, manage time, come to terms with their offense, shift their conception of control, make their sentence constructive, and find wider meaning in and from their predicament. Our argument is that most prisoners demonstrate a shift from a form of agency that is reactive to one that is productive, as they learn to “swim with”, rather than against, the tide of their situation