The absent-presence of the offence in prisons in Norway and England & Wales

Introduction

There should be someone who meets people and asks them ‘Why do you feel that you are here’? (Petter, EE2, NO ¹ ).

Based on qualitative interviews with prisoners in England & Wales and Norway, we conceptualise the offence as an absent-presence in prisons. The offence has a presence because it is something that all sentenced prisoners have in common: they are in prison because a court has found them guilty of committing an offence. ² While people in prison may try to hide the precise nature of their offence, they cannot hide from the fact that they are convicted. The offence is hyper-visible – people in prison know that other people's presence in the prison is due to an (alleged) offence – but it is also strangely absent because it is often not talked about or addressed directly during imprisonment. The aim of this article is to describe the absent-presence of the offence, and to explore how it affects men and women serving typical ³ prison sentences in England & Wales and Norway.

Petter's experience suggests that meaningful communication about the offence does not always occur during imprisonment. In fact, previous research suggests that many people in prison receive little guidance in thinking about their crime and their punishment and are not often engaged by staff in discussions of moral issues (Schinkel, 2014a, 2014b). This absence of engagement with the offence can be interpreted as an expression of forgiveness and a way for prison staff to show that people in their custody are more than the sum of their wrongdoings. Furthermore, not addressing the offence during imprisonment can also be a way for staff to acknowledge that people in prison may simply have no desire to talk about their convictions. On the other hand, not addressing the offence can be experienced as confusing and paradoxical: a prison sentence communicates responsibility and blame for wrongdoing, but why then are conversations about these transgressions largely non-existent? For Petter, and other interviewees in our study, this represented a moral question: how can punishment make sense if it does not foster a greater understanding of why one acted wrongly?

To date, it has mostly been researchers of long-term imprisonment who have shown interest in the relationship between ethical selfhood and the offence (see Crewe et al., 2020; Jarman, 2020; Leer-Salvesen, 1991; Seeds, 2021). Marguerite Schinkel (2014a, b) published an original study on how long-term prisoners (with sentences exceeding four years) in Scottish prisons assess and ascribe meaning to their sentences. Schinkel found little evidence that prisoners engaged with their sentence on a moral level and much less that they received a clear moral message from their jailers (Schinkel, 2014b: 592–594). Interestingly, most of Schinkel's interviewees only discussed their offence, their sentence, and questions of morality during cognitive behavioural courses in the prison. In the context of life imprisonment for murder, Jarman (2024) shows how some offences are shameful because they are difficult to explain. Jarman analyses how long-term prisoners’ moral self-reflection is intrinsically tied to the offence, and the ways in which they can integrate it into their self-understanding. In a related study on long-term imprisonment, Hulley (2023) argues that people convicted of murder try to make sense of the offence by engaging in a ‘normal’ process of moral reflection (Maruna and Copes, 2005) and use conventional and culturally specific social constructions of the concept of murder. Hulley shows that a ‘light’ moral weight attributed to murder was particularly common among men convicted of urban street violence against other young men on the basis that perpetrating violence was seen as the morally right thing to do in the circumstances (Fiske and Rai, 2015). In a different era and context, members of the IRA in the 1990s saw their imprisonment as a ‘badge of honor’ appearing ‘proud, unbroken, and defiant when released’ (O’Donnell, 2023: 48). For these men, imprisonment was merely an extension of their real-world activities, and they would argue that their actions were political rather than criminal. Although these prisoners’ relationship with their punishment clearly had moral roots and consequences, these did not centre around sentiments of shame and guilt (O’Donnell, 2023: 48).

The above scholarship has advanced our understanding of how people serving longer prison sentences engaged with the offences they are convicted of. However, most people in prison serve relatively short sentences for less serious offences: the average sentence length in England & Wales was 18.6 months in 2021 (Prison Reform Trust, 2023), and approximately 14.5 months in Norway in 2020 (Kriminalomsorgen, 2021: 36). In Norway, 60% of prison sentences in 2021 were six months or less (Kriminalomsorgen, 2022), while almost two in five people sent to prison in England in 2022 were sentenced to under six months (Prison Reform Trust, 2023). To explore the meaning and significance of the offence for people with ‘typical’ carceral journeys (see Ievins, 2023b: 2–3), we draw on interviews with short-term prisoners. Our data derive from a large, comparative project on penal policymaking and prisoners’ experiences in which we interviewed people in prison in England & Wales and Norway (see more below).

We analyse our findings from two different perspectives, the first of which is anchored in contemporary scholarship within moral anthropology and prison studies (e.g. Ievins, 2023a; Seeds, 2021; Zigon, 2007), foregrounding the concepts of shame, guilt and moral reflection to understand why conversations about the offence are often either absent, awkward or franchised out (e.g. to psychologists) during imprisonment. This does not mean that all prisoners feel guilty: Some outright reject their convictions and stigmatising labels. What it does mean, however, is that people in prisons have diverse and complex relationships with the offences they have been convicted of, thus requiring a theoretical framework that allows us to understand very different ethical projects. The scholarship of ‘everyday ethics’ enables us to examine the narratives of prisoners who were primarily concerned with the everyday grind of prison and ‘getting on with it’ rather than engaging in conversations about their offence, as well as those of prisoners immersed in thoughts about guilt and remorse. Anthropologist Webb Keane's concept of ethical affordances is useful. Borrowing from Mead (1962), Keane (2017: 27–28) uses a chair as a metaphor to explain the concept. A chair invites you to sit, but it is possible to use it in other ways (to stand on, as a table, to prop a door open, etc.) – the chair therefore holds potentiality rather than determinism. We extend this to frame imprisonment as an ‘ethical affordance’ since it ‘wakes up the moral imagination’ (Liebling, this volume) understood in a broad sense as prompting ethical self-reflection, conversations, actions, as well as moral failure, and – to some extent – allowing people to ‘get on with it’.

The other axis of our analysis is anchored in recent sociological attempts to understand ‘Nothing’ – the things, actions and behaviours that are not said and done, and their significance (Scott, 2018). The absence of the offence in encounters between prisoners and prison staff will be explored through this scholarship, because, as Scott (2018: 11) argues, ‘things that are not actually there can nevertheless be perceived, imagined or remembered’. The offence can be understood as one such ‘thing’, which does not necessarily disappear despite its absence in prisoner-staff interactions. As Ievins (2023b) has found, some people in prison even try to treat the entirety of their time and stay in prison as a ‘nothing’, to prevent imprisonment from destroying their ‘real’ lives on the outside. However, Ievins finds that this adaptational strategy is mostly unsuccessful, as people experience that time in prison, however short and uneventful, is ‘something’ that inescapably impacts and troubles people in their post-release lives. Inspired by Ievins’ (2023b) work, but taking the offence as our object of analysis, we interrogate when and how the offence is a ‘something’ as opposed to a ‘nothing’ in everyday prison life.

Anthropology of ethics and the sociology of ‘nothing’

We are inspired by scholarship on the ‘everyday’ experience of moral and ethical life and aim to contribute to the growing literature which describes prison life and punishment through a moral lens (see Liebling, this volume; Ievins, 2023a, 2023b; Williams, 2018). Moral anthropology offers a fruitful lens for understanding the habitual activities and everyday social relations – things as simple as conversations among prisoners and their jailers – which make up ‘ordinary’ ethics (Keane, 2017), and for unpacking how men and women in prisons make sense of the crime they have been convicted of and the resulting moral communication from the state. Examples of such conversations feature in Ievins’ (2023a) work on prisons as morally communicative institutions because discussions about offences were at the heart of the rehabilitative strategy in the prison she studied. However, these stories were partly shaped by institutional distortions, and the moral conversation produced a painful and damaging form of shame, thus creating confusion rather than clarification (Ievins, 2023a). Self-reflection, shame, and guilt in relation to an offence is partly about being seen by yourself and others as a particular type of person. That said, we do not imply that experiencing shame or guilt is always bad (or indeed that they are the same emotions). Echoing moral philosopher Krista Thomason ⁴ , we argue that a person ‘feels shame when some aspect of her identity becomes prominent or revealed in a shameful moment and that she feels that this thing defines her as a whole’ (Thomason, 2015: 11). If we recall Petter's frustration expressed at beginning of the article, he questioned whether his offence defined him as a person, which felt shameful to him. Guilt, shame and remorse are not negative emotions per se, but ‘precisely the sort of feelings we expect from people who hold themselves responsible for doing something wrong’ (Thomason, 2016: 116). Rather than treating shame and guilt as ‘normative’ emotions (inherently good or bad), we can study them empirically: How does the institutional context of imprisonment shape such emotions, and with what effects?

Ievins (2023a) conducted her work in a prison where men convicted of sex offences were incarcerated, and it is likely that the offence had a particular presence here due to the moral condemnation of such crimes. However, Ievins’ insistence on placing the offence at the centre of her analysis is both original and inspiring because it allows us to understand all the ways in which the offence shapes a prison sentence, and the myriad ways it affects prisoners’ moral reflections upon themselves and others. In contrast to the centrality of the offence in Ievins’ work, we found a peculiar dialectic between the absence and the presence of the offence in our data. By analysing the offence as an absent-presence in prisons in Norway and England & Wales, we draw on moral anthropology because this scholarship allows us to bring questions surrounding ethical self-reflection to the forefront of our analysis.

Another analytical framework is useful in understanding how something that is mainly present in its absence holds significance. Susie Scott (2018) identifies the focus of the sociology of ‘nothing’ as the opposite of the ‘action’ that social science often zooms in on; the non-actions, the things not said, and the routes not travelled. Just as not-doing is doing, absences are present. For example, a once-present object can disappear from the realm of the socially ‘real’ whilst remaining personally significant – this is precisely what can happen during imprisonment; the offence becomes publicly absent, but oftentimes remains personally present. We draw on Scott's work to analyse how nothing can be interpreted as meaningful social interaction in order to study the actions that people do not do, the things they do not say, and the social consequences thereof. People ‘act by not acting’ (Loy, 1985 in Scott, 2018) when, for example, they do not explicitly address offences in prison.

From Scott's (2018) perspective, social interaction is shaped by two criteria: firstly, social interaction is meaningful to the actor; secondly, it is oriented towards others – social objects such as people, institutions, or discourses. This combination is relevant for our purposes since the absent-presence of the offence in prisons is not only important to the actors – the prisoners themselves – but is also oriented towards staff, the prison as an institution and the criminal justice system more broadly. Importantly, Scott distinguishes between nothing that is produced by acts of omission (non-decisions) and nothing which comes from acts of commission (decisions not to). The first occurs when we fail to act, or passively neglect action by default rather than conscious intention; this can include ‘inactions’ such as not pursuing a religious faith or not developing intimate relationships. The importance of these acts of omission is that they are undertaken by actors who do not feel strongly inclined towards one option and so are drawn towards another. Understanding systemic silencing of the offence as a repeated act of omission holds potential for explaining the absent-presence of the offence as a result of many different factors (such as care, indifference, professional identities, etc.) which are not due to deliberate actions. The latter, acts of commission, happen when we actively choose to avoid doing or being something; a rejection of a normatively expected action. Understanding the absent-presence of the offence in prison as an act of commission would imply that the silencing of the offence is deliberate.

Understanding the offence as a ‘nothing’ or a ‘non-action’ enables us to grasp the subtleties in interactions between staff and prisoners; what do a glance, a wry smile or simply silence mean in the context of the role the offence plays during imprisonment? More importantly, paying attention to when the offence is revealed and concealed allows us to analyse how the absent-presence of the offence shapes the prison as a particular kind of moral space, and what the consequences of this are for prisoners’ ethical self-development. We are interested in the myriad ways this absent-presence affect prisoners, and we explore how this plays out in two countries with different penal philosophies and practices. Some prisoners in our study sought to engage in ethical self-reflection about the meaning of the offence during their imprisonment, while others preferred to ‘get on with it’ and simply see their sentence through. For the latter group, the absent-presence of the offence seemed to have less serious and perhaps even positive consequences, while the former group felt frustration in relation to this duality. The basis for this frustration, as we detail in the analysis which follows, lies in the contrast between the hard ‘moral labour’ ⁵ that some interviewees engaged in, and the absence of meaningful dialogue about the offence.

Methodology

Both authors of this article were involved in a comparative study ⁶ of penal policymaking and prisoner experiences in England & Wales and Norway. It included three prison-based mixed-methods sub-studies: A longitudinal study of entry into and release from prison; semi-ethnographic studies conducted in prisons where men convicted of sexual offences and women prisoners were held; and a study of the ‘deepest’ parts of the prison system in each country. Fieldwork was undertaken between 2016 and 2019, comprising 1082 quantitative surveys completed by prisoners in England & Wales and Norway, alongside 728 in-depth qualitative interviews. One of the central goals of the research project was to engage with ongoing debates about the relative quality and humanity of prisons systems in countries with different political economies: inclusionary, welfare-oriented and social-democratic (Norway); and exclusionary and neo-liberal (England & Wales).

For this article, we draw on 452 interviews conducted in 13 different prisons in England & Wales and Norway included in the longitudinal sub-study, in which most research participants were serving relatively short sentences or held on remand. Overall, we interviewed 271 prisoners in England & Wales and 181 prisoners in Norway. The combined number of interviews across the two countries at each interview stage was as follows: Phase 1 (entry): 156, phase 2 (pre-release): 200, phase 3 (post-release): 96 (see also Laursen, 2022). Our interviewees’ socio-demographic backgrounds matched those of persons receiving shorter sentences in general in both jurisdictions (see Revold, 2015 for Norway; and Prison Reform Trust, 2023 for England & Wales). Most prisoners in our sample were serving sentences of less than two years, and 53% had been in prison before – almost half of our sample (42.3%) had been imprisoned between two to five times previously, and close to a quarter of our sample (24.4%) had been in prison more than 10 times prior to their interview.

Our analysis is informed by our ethnographic presence in the prisons, including experiences like ‘hanging out’ in the prison wings, chatting with staff members, and observing entry and release, but we draw primarily on our interview data in this article. All interviews were conducted in small, private rooms off the prison wings, lasted between 1 and 3 h, and were transcribed and the Norwegian interviews were translated. The interviews were coded thematically drawing on a theoretical framework entailing the ‘depth, weight, tightness and breadth’ of imprisonment (see Crewe, 2011). All interviews were coded by the authors and other members of the research project using NVivo software. We compared coding strategies regularly to assess intercoder reliability and held weekly meetings to discuss emerging themes more generally. We draw on two codes for this article, namely ‘Thoughts about the offence’ and ‘Conversations about the offence’, which entail all interview excerpts covering reflections on the meaning of the offence, the nature of the conversations interviewees were or were not having whilst they were imprisoned, and moral reflections on what their offence meant in relation to their personhood. Previous studies have explored how the offence shapes prisoner hierarchies through analyses of how prisoners draw symbolic boundaries between people based on moral evaluations of different types of crimes (e.g. Ievins, 2023a; Ugelvik, 2015). In our analysis, we chose to concentrate on the lesser-explored terrain of how the offence manifests in staff-prisoner interactions, as well as in people's individual ethical self-reflections.

The absence of the offence in staff-prisoner interactions

Our interviewees entered prison after what many described as a confusing and exhausting process through the criminal justice system and, for many in our Norwegian sample, a long wait in the ‘prison queue’ (see Laursen et al., 2020) before their sentence began. For many interviewees, going through the arrest, remand and court process sent a stark moral message about their wrongdoing. However, it was not always clear how this moral message fit into their self-understandings in a broader sense, and scholars have found that the court message can often be confusing and disorienting (Johansen and Laursen, 2023; Schinkel, 2014a, 2014b; Schliehe and Jeffrey, 2022). Many interviewees were therefore surprised to experience that staff showed little interest in talking to them about their offence when they arrived in prison:

And do you have any kind of conversations here with staff or, I don't know, any groups about talking about…

Several interviewees across the two jurisdictions similarly just said ‘no’ when we asked whether they had had any conversations with staff about the offence. According to our interviewees, staff do not feel responsible for initiating a dialogue with prisoners about the offence that led to their conviction. This silence became a symbol of a more general laxity in communication with prisoners, as in the case of Agnes who had not been given an induction to the prison and its routines when she first arrived:

Have you talked to anyone about the things concerning the offences or concerning moral questions or concerning questions about guilt and shame? Have you had that kind of conversations with anyone, with members of staff in the prison whilst you’ve been here?

In her ethnography of a prison where men convicted of sexual offenses were incarcerated, Ievins argues that the ‘occupational morality’ of staff directs them to ‘focus on achieving the smooth running of the prison […] and should not see themselves as active participants in a morally communicative ritual’ (2023a: 105). Similarly, the absent-presence of the offence in the prisons we studied was also interpreted as a consequence of staff members’ overwhelming workloads and their orientation towards the everyday grind of prison life. However, some respondents also interpreted the staff's lack of interest in the offence and prisoners’ moral labour as indifference (‘they don’t care’, Kirk, EE2, EW). According to our interviewees, staff members were more interested in the very legitimate goals of getting prisoners into work or education and keeping them safe and fed, rather than engaging in diffuse moral reflections on guilt and redemption. This attention paid to the practical and pragmatic constraints of everyday prison life points to the type of social action that Scott (2018) categorises as ‘omission’ – the ‘non-decisions’ (2018: 10) that ensure that the offence is both present (hyper-visible) and absent (not addressed). This leaves a largely empty moral space which people sometimes ignore, or either succeed or fail to fill.

The rehabilitative regime in England & Wales is primarily oriented towards managing future threat rather than redressing past wrongdoing (Ievins, 2023a). The pervasive influence of risk assessment in the country's prisons, and its tight coupling with rehabilitative strategies (Warr, 2020), is one of the ways in which the offence has a presence in everyday life. The offence is the raw material informing risk classifications, and thus shapes the way in which people in prison are treated in the present and might expect to be managed in the future. Norway, on the other hand, has a broad and penal-welfarist form of rehabilitation anchored in legal rights and continued access to work and education, which translates into relatively positive relationships between staff and prisoners (Ievins and Mjåland, 2021; Mjåland and Ugelvik forthcoming; Mjåland and Laursen, 2021). Although others have argued that staff culture is more interventionist in the Norwegian prison service, and that prison officers are encouraged to address offending behaviour with prisoners (Liebling et al., 2021), the absence of the offence in staff-prisoner interactions – manifest in the lack of talks, conversation, and dialogue – was a key theme in the interviews in prisons in both national contexts. In fact, despite better staffing levels and evaluations of staff-prisoner relationships that are generally more positive (Crewe et al., 2022; Martens and Crewe, 2024), very few of our Norwegian interviewees reported having had meaningful conversations with staff about their offence or their offending (see also Mjåland, 2022). Thus, the offence can be seen to have had a similar ‘absent-presence’ in prisons in two jurisdictions with very different penal policies, practices, and resources.

In both jurisdictions, the main exceptions to the silencing of the offence were prisoners who reported having had conversations about their wrongdoings with more specialised staff members, such as chaplains or psychologists. These may have been meaningful, private conversations that either had consoling or therapeutic value, or more structured conversations about the offence in various cognitive behavioural programmes. While it felt rewarding for some interviewees to attend such programmes, the majority of respondents had sentences which were too short to allow them to participate or had not committed the ‘right’ type of offence to qualify for such a course (or were ineligible for other reasons). ⁷ Henning, a man we interviewed in a low-security prison where he had previously served more than 10 sentences for violent offences, stated that he had never received an offer to follow an anger management course, nor had he had conversations with other prison staff about the episodes of violence he experienced. He thought that this was a serious shortcoming:

I know I have aggression problems. This time I got eight months, but they could have given me a sentence of four months in prison and four months of treatment, if they really cared about us. Let's not just sit here in this shitty room and watch Donald Duck, and then be released again without having a proper conversation with a single person (Henning, EE2, NO).

Shame, guilt and the offence

But it's more about the crime than the punishment. The prison thing I can put behind me and it's not really much of a factor, it's what led to that (Adam, EE1, EW).

The ethical dimensions of our lives inhere in our actions and our reflections (Laidlaw, 2010) – the offence crept under Eivind's skin and shaped the sort of person he could imagine himself becoming in the future. Similarly, Petter found it very frustrating that he did not have anyone to talk to about his offence during his imprisonment because he was deeply affected by shame and remorse regarding its sexual nature. He was fundamentally in doubt as to whether the act he was convicted of was due to situational conditions and poor judgment, or whether it was a warning that he had sexually deviant preferences. Although he stated that he had a large and resourceful family and a solid group of friends surrounding him, he felt a pressing need to talk to someone outside of this sphere. There was neither interest in nor the opportunity to have such conversations in the low-security prison where he served his sentence, and he gave this account when we interviewed him three months post-release:

I got to prison and felt completely terrible and then it only got worse. Both because I didn’t feel that the staff valued my safety, didn’t trust many people in there, and I didn’t feel that I got any follow-up at all. […] you [interviewer] were the only person who asked me anything. That is completely sick in the head. Because talking to you, it helped in a way. It gave me an outlet for the things that I was thinking about, other than writing things down every day, which is what I had been doing. But not having anyone to talk to in prison … (Petter, EE3, NO).

It was not only people convicted of serious offences who wanted to speak to someone about them. Minor offences often have less obvious victims, but the series of disruptions and stresses of life transitions engendered by short-term imprisonment can wear people down, and while each singular offence might be minor, the sheer number taken together can generate significant guilt (Laursen, 2022). We found that it was precisely this accumulated guilt from a high number of ‘minor’ offences which preoccupied many short-term offenders. Joey (EE3, EW), for example, felt ashamed for ‘every one of them, especially the burglaries’. Austin reported similar thoughts about his drug-related offending (‘stealing and burglaries if you like, all drug related unfortunately’), that had resulted in nearly 30 prison sentences:

And how do you feel about the offence now that you’re in here?

Getting on with it

For many interviewees, the (institutional) silence around the offence was unproblematic, even desirable, because they had either already come to terms with the offence and its implications for their personhood or did not wish to have these types of conversations with prison staff. Rasmus, who served a short prison sentence for his part in a violent fight with his friend in public, put it bluntly: ‘Convicted is convicted. I should have thought about this in advance. It's consequences of actions. Simple as that’. Silencing the offence could also be interpreted as an expression of forgiveness and a way for officers to show the men and women in their custody that they were defined by more than their wrongdoings. Adam, who was remanded in a high-security Norwegian prison charged with illegal alcohol smuggling, had not had any in-depth conversations with staff but experienced that officers reacted with a specific facial expression when he told them about the offence he was charged with – “I don’t know if they break out into a small smile, if that's right to say” – and he interpreted this as a subtle sign of moral inclusion. Although the officers didn’t say anything, they still communicated to Adam that what he had done was not that bad.

Norwegian prisons, especially the large number of open prisons, have mainly egalitarian and pragmatic cultures, which not only shapes relationships between prisoners but also those between staff and prisoners (see Mjåland and Laursen, 2021). This means that people who live and work in these institutions often try to find ways to remain as equal and as friendly as possible. Norwegian prisons are ‘offence-blind’ (Friestad et al., 2023) – there are no designated prisons for people convicted of specific offences – and staff are expected to police bullying and exploitation based on people's offences. In open prisons, where people have a lot of freedoms and privileges to lose if they break prison rules and are sent back to high-security establishments, harassment and abuse of prisoners convicted of offences with low moral status is risky behaviour. This created both a less strict hierarchy among prisoners and a distinct moral space in the prisons, where a person's moral judgements about their peers’ offences might matter at the personal level, yet cannot be shown to matter publicly. While some interviewees found this frustrating, many also valued that what people had done did not have a massive impact on everyday prison interactions – pretending that the offence did not matter made life easier. This impacted how prisoners experienced their relationships with officers. While officers were generally seen as friendly, prisoners did not necessarily experience that they were interested in helping to solve the puzzle of fitting the offence into a life narrative:

There's nothing. You come here the first day, they go through your stuff […], and then they say, ‘This is jail, here's your room. There is the kitchen, there is the toilet. Show up for work tomorrow at 8. See you later (Petter, EE2, NO).

Some of our interviewees emphasised that the absence of conversations and dialogue about the offence in staff-prisoner relationships should be seen in the context of staff culture and everyday prison routines. Tora and Astrid, who had been released from the same prison and whom we interviewed both separately and together, shared an example of this:

Have you had any conversations with officers or others who work in the prison about these things? What your punishment means to you? Or what you did?

This ambivalence is captured succinctly in the interview with Øyvind (EE1, NO), a Norwegian interviewee who had waited in the ‘prison queue’ for several years before he could begin serving his sentence. He raised a paradox, which was echoed across our sample generally: While he was awaiting his imprisonment, his thoughts were preoccupied with the offence and its broader meaning in his life. He therefore had trouble comprehending that the offence was then ‘swept to the side’ when he entered the prison and became ‘something you don’t talk about in here’. One interpretation of Øyvind's claim is that a kind of unspoken agreement had developed in many prisons that the offence should not be a central topic of conversation, either between prisoners or in the relationship between prisoners and staff. Others also emphasised that the social dynamics of the prison simply made it difficult to have meaningful, trust-based conversations with officers about the crime: ‘there really is no environment for this’ (Theodor, EE2, NO). In England & Wales, conditions were often so poor, unstable, and fraught that they seemed to overshadow any positive initiatives the prison and its staff might introduce to facilitate conversations about the offence. Despite having already been imprisoned for several years, our interviewee Arthur (EE2, EW) had only just recently had a conversation with a staff member about his offence:

I saw a doctor, and she just said to me, “What are you in prison for?” That's the first time I’ve actually sat down with someone and actually spoken about what happened.

Conclusion

In the epilogue to this volume, Alison Liebling writes that ‘[i]t is one of the tragedies of the prison as an institution of punishment that its moral effects are assumed rather than empirically studied’. This article has aimed to contribute to the growing literature which studies precisely this – the moral effects of punishments. We found that the offence had an absent-presence in the prisons in our study. It was present in the sense that all our interviewees were either convicted of or charged with an offence – this is the one thing that people in prison have in common. The offence was also present in some of the conversations interviewees had with more specialised prison staff, such as chaplains, doctors or psychologists in therapeutic sessions or group-based cognitive behavioural programmes, in conversations or gossip among officers in the privacy of their offices, and in conversations between prisoners. As it has been suggested in prior work on prison culture, the offence also has a significant presence in the moral distinctions that people make to create social hierarchies and distinguish themselves from others (e.g. Ievins, 2023a; Ugelvik, 2015). However, the main theme of this article has been the many ways in which the offence is concealed and silenced in everyday prison life. In the prisons we studied, the offence was both everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and, to borrow Scott (2018) and Brekhus’ (1998) terminology, both ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’. More specifically, we found that the offence was absent in staff-prisoner interactions: very few of our interviewees reported that they had talked meaningfully with staff about their offence(s).

Intriguingly, this finding was consistent across the prisons included in our study (though with some within-prison variation where specific wings adopted a more therapeutic approach), and in prisons in both England & Wales and Norway. We found austere, unpredictable, and unstable prisons in England & Wales, characterised by narrow and limited forms of intervention as well as inadequate civilising and humane arenas such as education programmes, workplaces, and recreational facilities (Crewe et al., 2022; Martens and Crewe, 2024). In Norway, we found more benign practices of treating people humanely and giving them space for personal development in a relational manner. The fact that the offence had a similar absence in staff-prisoner interactions in both countries, despite the substantial differences in penal practice and prison standards, suggests that we should look beyond national penal contexts when trying to make sense of our findings.

Prisoners saw lack of staff, time, opportunity, interest, and trust, as well as officers’ tendency toward ‘here-and-now’ orientation, as part of the reason why ‘offence-talk’ did not take place. These observations point to the absence of the offence resulting from acts of omission rather than ‘conscious intention’ (Scott, 2018: 5). In a related way, for those prisoners who struggled with guilt and shame, not initiating conversations about the offence worked to bypass the pain that would come with it – what Scott calls unconscious ‘inaction inertia’ (Scott, 2018: 10). Similarly, not talking about the offence with staff may unconsciously serve to uphold a kind of ‘ethical status quo’ – if one does not discuss one's wrongdoing, it is easier to feel morally equal (or superior) in the balance of everyday prison life. This logic may apply to officers too: omitting to ask people in prison how they feel about the offence may make their work relationally easier and less morally demanding (see Ievins, 2023a). For both officers and prisoners alike, a fragile moral equilibrium might be easier to maintain if the offence is not addressed.

To what extent is the absence of the offence a result of active decisions not to address wrongdoing? Some of our interviewees in England & Wales interpreted the concealment of the offence as deliberate neglect on the part of members of staff – as something symptomatic of prison services that ‘don’t care’ (Kirk, EW). It is certain that institutions of coercive confinement and their staff shape people's moral projects. In theory, staff are well placed to realise the potentiality of imprisonment as an ‘ethical affordance’ (Keane, 2017: 28) by inviting people to reflect on why they find themselves in prison. Since we did not interview prison staff, it is difficult to explore issues of intentionality directly. However, it is possible to discuss the absence of the offence in relation to broader penal strategies, and the prison officer role. It might, for instance, be that prison staff do not address people's offences during imprisonment because of an appreciation of the division of labour between the court and the prison, where the former is backward-looking (the offence) and the latter is oriented towards the present and the future (see Fredwall, 2017). It is also possible that prison staff do not identify with a professional role in which discussing people's offending behaviour forms part of their tasks and responsibilities – either because of (lack of) competence or because it conflicts with other aspects of their work, such as establishing the right boundaries in staff-prisoner relationships (Liebling et al., 2012). At a more systemic level, the absence of the offence in staff-prisoner interactions can illustrate a penal strategy wherein the state is reluctant to intervene in people's moral and ethical spheres: it can legitimately punish people through imprisonment for moral and legal wrongs, but while in prison, the state leaves an open, fragmented, and ambiguous moral space for prisoners to fill.

‘How do we experience the things we do not do?’, asks Scott (2018: 6). For many of our interviewees, the non-addressing of the offence during imprisonment was not considered to be a problem. Some had thought and talked a lot about the offence before, during and after appearing in court, while others had a very settled understanding of why they ended up in prison and what they had to do to prevent it from happening again. Some also questioned the legitimacy of their convictions and felt that they had little or no responsibility for the actions that they had been found guilty of having committed. However, for those prisoners troubled by shame and guilt, the non-addressing of the offence was more problematic. They tried to come to terms with what they had done, or to make sense of why they had acted in the way that they did and were frustrated by the fact that they had to do this reflecting on their own and in institutions which offered very little sense of direction in terms of what moral labour to pursue. The types of moral concerns that some of our interviewees were preoccupied with did not match those of the institution, where following rules was more important than living ‘right’. In other words, some of our interviewees were engaged in morally deep labour but did so within the confines of institutions with shallower concerns.

Returning to the chair example, Keane argues that ‘[a]ffordances are properties of the chair vis-à-vis a particular human activity’ (2017: 28). Like the chair, imprisonment invites certain forms of actions but does not impose them. ‘This quality of potentiality’, Keane (ibid.) continues, ‘is a necessary consideration in any empirical approach to ethics’. Avoiding or refusing to talk about one's offence should therefore not be seen as an absence of ethical orientation or self-reflection among the men and women in our study. On the contrary, most of our interviewees reflected on moral questions, and many were engaged in ethically anchored ‘ground projects’ (Mattingly, 2013). Imprisonment, understood as an ethical affordance, may not offer many direct invitations to discuss the offence with members of staff, but the people we interviewed invested time and effort in many other diverse forms of moral labour. However, being preoccupied with moral scrutiny and self-reflection in a context where the offence had such a distinct absent-presence was a source of frustration and confusion, and, ultimately, made it harder for people to infuse meaning into their punishment.

The absent-presence of the offence raises key questions about what imprisonment is and how it relates to wrongdoing. It highlights how the prison represents a distinct moral universe, where people are deprived of their liberty for having been found guilty of acting wrongly, but where moral conversations about these wrongdoings rarely occur, thus creating a disconnect between the moral experience of the institution and the capacities of prisoners to make meaningful changes in their lives. The absence of conversations about this offence does not necessarily reduce the need that people have for ethical self-reflection – for making sense of why they acted in the way that they did and what that tells them about who they are. Our main argument in this article is that this ethical self-reflection is, for the most part, a non-assisted project which feels unproblematic and even desirable for some prisoners, while others struggle to make sense of their imprisonment if it does not address the reason why they are serving a sentence in the first place. Prisons are distinct moral universes in which the absent-presence of the offence shapes the experience of imprisonment in significant, yet varied, ways.