Abstract
Sensory Penalities is an interesting, intellectually enriching but troubling read. With more than 14 chapters, it is not possible to present all the arguments of each chapter and so this review focuses its attention on its main aim – to develop a sensory penality.
The range of topics covered is almost overwhelming. Several focus on prison, understandably given the fact that many of the contributors are known for their work in prison studies. The specific topics range from the soundscapes within prison to sensory overload and underload, prison reform, aesthetics, and the sense of being trapped. There is no one single country – the contributors discuss prisons from all over the world and from some unexpected places such as Southern Ethiopia, Dominican Republic, Tunisia and Nicaragua. I learned a lot about the similarities and differences between prisons in fundamentally different regimes from these chapters. Other chapters provide interesting reflections about other ‘spaces’ of criminal justice: probation and music, bail hostels and Swedish court rooms. This is all by way of suggesting that one pleasing aspect of the book is precisely the sheer range of topics covered. This is a book unlike many others. It is not presenting a new topic: it is presenting a new subfield of criminology with an attendant new methodology for investigation. To put it bluntly, sensory penalities is not a topic. What is being proposed here is something a researcher ‘does’.
Across all these carceral worlds (i.e. locations of punishment in terms of geographic location, prison or community sanctions and the depth and richness of social experience), the reader is introduced to the methodology of sensory penalities and specifically how each of the authors understood what it is that they were doing when they were exploring sensory penality. Herrity makes a fabulous case for a soundscape (i.e. the actual sounds and rhythms of the prison) and then, having made that case, shows how the concept can be deployed differently between prison and pub. Along the way, she also shows the reader how we can ‘hear’ not just the existence of prison order but its maintenance, or its disruption. Warr interrogates a short vignette that provides a breathless rendition of being stuck in a cell during a fire (as it happens *not* in a prison). He then works from each of the plot moments (the walls suddenly seeming oh so very real or the dawning realisation of being alone and powerless, to the sheer fear of being trapped and about to die) out to prisons, asking how this relates to what is already known about the experience of incarceration. Collison Scott and McNeill’s chapter takes a different direction. They reflect on a project they undertook on probation supervision and make the case that music (in this instance) has the potential to evoke context in a way that little else does and to create, for the reader / listener, a sense of ‘solidarity’ with supervisees.
Of the four methodology chapters, it was Stanley’s chapter on touch in the context of death and dying in prison that stopped me in my tracks. I returned to this chapter several times because it seemed to sum up something tremendously important, human, authentic and yet utterly inhumane about prisons. It is the story of Daniel (an ill prisoner) receiving end-of-life care in an American prison in the United States. The first part of the chapter is a clinical, pared-down and brutalist description of Daniel’s disciplinary segregation (a euphemism for being held in isolation without the stimulation of conversation, books to read or other people) as a punishment for supposedly bringing contraband into prison. This is juxtaposed with a thicker and lengthier description of the paradoxical conviviality and human warmth – often expressed in touch – of his last days. Daniel died in prison surrounded by (if my count was correct) five people, all of whom had been there since the first moments of his final hours, holding him metaphorically and literally. The writing is beautiful and deeply disturbing.
As a collection of chapters, there is unevenness. Some of the chapters are more traditionally academic in that they contain more exposition, whereas others are written in the tradition of thick ethnography or anthropology. For example, the chapter on bodies in Swedish courts is written more as somewhere between an academic chapter and a non-fiction story, emphasising the mutedness of the background sounds in courts: the near-silence of waiting rooms through to the tick-tocking of a clock. Yet, into this soundscape we hear bodies that refuse the sombreness of the courts – people laughing, bodies that interrupt with the sound of hunger, defendants blowing their noses.
Some of the chapters are very short – such as Smoyer’s seven-page chapter entitled ‘The Everything Else’. Others are longer, such as the 17 pages of Jewkes’ and Young’s sensory and aesthetic reflections on Japanese prisons. The reader learns from Jewkes and Young about Japanese prisons, in particular Kyoto prison, and how an ‘atmosphere’ is aesthetically produced by, for instance, ‘weaponizing weather’ (like failure to provide heat in cold conditions) to create almost inhumanely cold conditions.
For me, the editors and all contributors bring their respective topics to life in a way that often does not happen through more traditional academic descriptions. The book makes you feel what punishment feels like. It is thought-provoking and sad but a good read. It is difficult to summarise the arguments provided precisely because the book is about how things feel, sound, smell and taste, but I am left asking three questions. First, does it add something new? I am not sure. Paying attention to the senses when thinking about social control is commendable, but second-wave feminism had also (broadly) opened the door to an exploration of the senses and embodiment in relation to social control; for example, radical feminist studies from the late 1980s which focused on the viscerality of sexual violence, Susan Bordo’s (2004) work on eating disorders, Susie Orbach’s (2016) and Louise McNay’s (2013) disciplines of body, and so on. All of these were explored in the name of describing the social control of women, and second-wave feminism even had a role in breaking away from the constraints of what were then known as ‘traditional’ academic tools, witnessing feminist epistemology challenge the rules of traditional social sciences (Stanley and Wise, 2002).
The second question I asked myself was does the cry to involve ‘the sensory’ make sense? After the last three decades, there have been profound socio-cultural changes in the domain of sex and sexuality. The emphasis on embodiment, on sensing as a methodological tool, and the drive to break free from the discipline of academia has led to some strange places. Just before writing this review, the journal Qualitative Research retracted an article it had previously published. The article was an appeal to use masturbation as an ethnographic method in the social sciences. This episode prompted the following thoughts: if we accept that embodied physical senses are a valuable tool in the (criminological) ethnographic methodological toolbox and that a focus on the physical / sensory experiences of the researchers can open new realms and ways of thinking, then why not include the sexual? The answer is obvious. Because it also opens the door for a descent into ‘the obscene’ – for where bodies, sensory perception and ‘the senses’ are concerned, there remains, as ever there did, social rules and taboos separating ‘the permissible’ from ‘the obscene’.
Where does this observation leave Sensory Penalities? Clearly, there are limits to the exploration of the senses in punishment even if the contributors, in their enthusiasm for exploring what the senses offer, fail to recognise potential limits. On one level, and as this book demonstrates, attention to the senses gives us richness, but, I wonder if the claim is a touch overblown. Would the contributors or editors opine that *all* senses or *all* sensory experiences in the realm of punishment are worthy of study? Where does this leave the question of the sensual and sexual?
The last question I asked myself after reading Sensory Penalities was does attention to the sensory explain or account for (in the sociological sense) the experiences described. I am not convinced that it does. The book is rich with description, necessarily so as that is one of the aims of a (specifically) sensory penality. It is less helpful in explaining why prisons and their regimes take the shape and forms that they do at this moment in history. This is not an irrelevant question to ask of the book: the description of the quiet, cold, harsh bare aesthetic of Japanese prisons does rather beg the question of difference between these prisons and the ‘famously high-spec prisoner accommodation at Halden’ [which] ‘could not be more different’ (p. 187) or any of the other prisons described in the book. Yet, the book provides no answers or even a route towards an analysis beyond an appeal to a teleology (for each prison) and an account that is attentive to the sensory dimension and so we return to the beginning. Sensory Penalities is an empassioned appeal to pay attention to the sensory dimension in the penal realm. That being so, it remains a rich, ethnographic source of what are, in effect, different ‘carceral worlds’ (p. 233), rather than an interrogation into the necessary and contingent conditions of existence of those worlds. It might not explain a lot, but it is definitely worth reading nevertheless.