Abstract
This is one of the more difficult book reviews I have ever been asked to write. To explain why, I have to be personal. As a researcher, inspector and expert court report advisor in extradition cases I have spent a good part of the last half century visiting prisons, talking to prisoners and describing prison conditions throughout the world from Australia to the Americas, from the Far East to South Africa, from the Indian sub-continent to Scandinavia. Never has it occurred to me to ignore what my tongue, hands, nose and ears, as well as my eyes, were telling me. How could it? No one who, 20 years ago, visited the main cell block in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s old colonial prison where, in intense heat and humidity, up to a dozen prisoners were packed like standing corpses into cells measuring 8 by 10 feet and forced to post, for want of cell sanitation, their faeces through their cell flap to fall into the central corridor, could fail to notice or forget the stench of sweat, faeces, urine and exhausted despair. Nor, it seems to me, is it possible to ignore the distress in the voice of a remand prisoner who has been kept in isolation for months in a well IKEA-furnished, triple-glazed Swedish remand cell: the silence is oppressively palpable.
These sensory impressions have been shared by fellow researchers and inspectors with whom I have worked. So my first reaction to a book suggesting that ‘penality has an inherent sensory component’, as if this constituted a major revelation, jarred. During the years of ‘slopping out’ and ‘triple-celling’, prison inspectors repeatedly asked their audiences to imagine what it might be like going to a hotel to be told that one had to share one’s room, with a bucket but no lavatory, 23 hours a day, possibly for months, with two complete strangers? Was that not an appeal for understanding based on all the senses? Or, during the years of Prison Officer Association hegemony, did anyone not understand what the slashed officer’s uniform cap peak and the casual turning back of the jacket lapel to reveal the National Front badge meant for black prisoners? Or not appreciate the thoughts of accused or proven sex offenders wondering what the morning would bring on hearing in the night the shouts of ‘nonce’ and the hammering on pipes from neighbouring cells?
Like Alison Liebling in her introduction, I am well disposed to the editors’ ‘sensory project’. But I am not persuaded by the editors’ claim that the sensory dimension has been distortedly lacking in the criminological and criminal justice literature hitherto. Indeed, the fact that the editors’ brief introductory essay is able to pray in aid no fewer than 58 sources suggests otherwise. Further, I note that Eamonn Carrabine, who contributes a concluding ‘Afterword’ approvingly draws on the work of George Simmel (died 1916), Erving Goffman (1950s and ’60s) and Terence and Pauline Morris’ Pentonville (1961), arguably the first serious sociological study of an English prison. None of these analysts left their several senses behind either.
If attention to ‘sensorial features of detention, deprivation, control and power’ is scarcely new, certainly not anything one could describe as a breakthrough, what is? The editors’ hope is that their contributors will ‘find a “language” free of ‘the limitations of the ‘scientific language we have been inculcated into using’ (p xxix) which is why, they explain, they ‘prohibited’ the use of ‘visuals’ to give ‘primacy to the embodied haptic, sonic, spatial. temporal, visceral–modes of phenomenological immersion and immediacy’ (pp xxvii-xxix), foregrounding the ‘sensorium’. I understand that aspiration. But I am mystified by the claim on the back cover, namely that the collection of essays ‘challenges . . . what criminology is and should be: more accurately reflecting the post-disciplinary nature of the field’. Post-disciplinary? What does that imply? Is the new criminology to be without discipline? And is that which we perceive other than by sight not also susceptible to scientific analysis?
What insights has this broadened agenda liberated? The essays, all by ‘immersive’ students in their field the editors assure, are mostly about prisons in the United Kingdom, United States, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Japan, to which essays on Swedish courtrooms, a Danish immigration detention centre, UK probation offices and a hostel have been added.. Most essays, though not all, are the product of prolonged fieldwork, though one or two are notes derived from what is little more than well informed penal tourism which is not without value if only to demonstrate that prisons and prison regimes, for example, take radically different forms dependent on their cultural settings.
Yvonne Jewkes and Alison Young, for example, record their impressions from a brief group tour of Kyoto Prison: the rigorously enforced silence; the factory-like workshops in which prisoners must look only at the task in which they are engaged; the ‘rather ridiculous’ gait (p 186) that prisoners are required to adopt when moving between locations; the uniform dormitory cells devoid of personal effects. Had they been allowed to see the remand prisoners–which, since they do not mention them I suspect they were not–they would also have seen prisoners sitting, unmoving, cross-legged on the floor of their single cells–and thereby made a connection with the 99.9% conviction rate which elsewhere they record (p179).
By contrast Julienne Weegels paints a rich picture of the self-regulated mayhem and different form of secrecy characterising a Nicaraguan prison in which the prison compounds are alive with prisoner-run and regulated commercial enterprises with custodial staff largely relegated to perimeter security, which includes checking the produce being sent in every day by families and commercial suppliers for the prisoner economy. Here, the comfort of one’s sleeping quarters, if one is lucky enough to have a sleeping quarter, demonstrates one’s status in the prisoner community and a variant of omerta reigns. Here, all the senses are almost assaulted but are muted: everyone understands that which their senses are telling them is rendered ‘unspeakable, un-seeable and un-heard’ (p. 103) by the violence that enforces both staff and prisoner power relations.
The quality of the essays varies hugely. Carla Reeves’ ‘use of her body’ (as opposed to what–her mind?) as a ‘research tool’, thereby making sense of issues in a probation hostel not ‘understood by most, if any people when considering place or space’ seemed pretentious. Likewise Lisa Flowers’ preoccupation with ‘rumbling stomachs’ in a Swedish courtroom seemed banal not least given her lack of attention to such questions as whether all parties could hear and understand the proceedings which, as she is repeatedly keen to emphasise, emphasise application of the law sine ira et studio (p. 173). By contrast Daina Stanley’s account of end-of-life care in a Maine prison is a superbly sensitive account of the punishment of a terminally ill prisoner (suspected of attempting to bring contraband into the prison) being placed in solitary confinement in a barren cell without a window, periodically shackled and strip searched, but then, near to death, receiving sensitive hospice medical care to sustain physical life but, at the same time, deprived of the bodily contact of others, ‘a callous denial of his personhood and humanity’, a form of death-in-life or social death (p. 64). I was struck by the parallel here with the death watch before executions to ensure the condemned did not ‘cheat the hangman’.
In conclusion, Bethany Schmidt and Andrew Jefferson’s observations on grossly overcrowded prison dormitories in Tunisia correctly emphasise, with regard to ‘the sensual pains of overcrowding’, that ‘overcrowding ‘cannot be understood only as a quantitative category’ (p. 182). They provide valuable descriptions of prisoner techniques for countering the loss of personal autonomy which living in environments devoid of privacy impose. But herein lies the false dichotomy represented by the editors’ disciplinary claims. If we are to banish inhumanity within institutions of penal control then the qualitative consequences of life lived in intolerable conditions have to be reduced to standards recognisable by the authorities and courts. Thus, to take the practice of such bodies as the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) or the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, neither of which figure in this collection, defining overcrowding in terms of square metres per person minima is not to deny all manner of sensory pains. It is necessarily to try and encapsulate them for regulatory purposes as in, for example, the work of Liebling, Hulley, and Crewe (2021) on measuring the quality of prison life and the body of CPT (2021) standards for the treatment of prisoners.