Abstract
Prisons, Punishment and the Pursuit of Security proposes on page one that it will address “three interconnected problems”: (1) the tendency in the author’s view for the simple existence of the prison to obscure other social problems and conceal its own failings as an institution; (2) the contemporary pursuit of greater levels of human security through means that are typically repressive and violent; and (3) the persistence of the belief that some humans can be incorrigibly and unalterably evil. Generally the author believes that the intersection of these three tendencies impedes our ability to develop rational and humane criminal justice policies. Deborah Drake is a lecturer in criminology at the Open University, UK, an open admission online learning and research university that is among the largest universities by student enrollment in the world. While she writes primarily about prison policies, prison conditions, and security arrangements in the United Kingdom, her text makes clear that she believes her analysis, in principle, applies to the United States and many other nations as well.
The author’s argument with respect to the three over-arching tendencies she identifies can be succinctly summarized. First, Drake argues that the mainstream functional justifications for prison (public safety, on the one hand, and rehabilitative efforts/deterrence on the other) obscure the actual purposes of housing a “surplus” population of poor people out of our way, diverting our attention from the greater harms caused by other entities (the state, capitalism, white collar businessmen/criminals); stigmatizing those we place in prison; and empowering those who operate the state apparatus at our expense. Drake explains the role that state-issued ideology plays in supporting the illusion of prison as an effective response to crime when, in her view, there is little definitive evidence that prisons make society safer or rehabilitate/deter offenders.
Second, Drake argues that the state has long held an interest in security measures because in various historical epochs the state has needed to use its security apparatus to control and subdue its own people. Since 9/11, the justification for increased security measures at the expense of individual liberties has become easier to make—so that the security state has achieved dominance in the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries in the world. While much of the focus has been on terrorists “out there,” Drake argues that one effect of the fear-mongering that drives our criminal justice system generally is to entrench the prison—and especially the maximum security prison—as our default answer to any perceived threat to society, however small and undocumented.
Third, Drake believes that these tendencies (plus the nature of class society which creates substantial social distance between regular citizens and those who end up spending part of their lives in one of our finer penal institutions) lead many people to believe that those who commit a bad act are, themselves, irredeemably bad. Drake believes, like Hannah Arendt’s musings on Eichmann suggest, that most evil is done by people who uncritically never make up their minds to do either evil or good but rather act unthinkingly and thereby permit evil to occur. Drake believes that it is the critical criminologists’ job to puncture the myths that surround our criminal justice system, the nation-state’s adoption of increased security as the solution to every social problem, and prisons. Once this is accomplished, presumably, the nation state and its security apparatus will “wither away” in the face of enlightened analysis.
Drake’s analytical effort is supported, rather oddly at one level, by fieldwork conducted at five long-term maximum security prisons in England in 2005–09: HMP Frankland, HMP Full Sutton, HMP Long Lortin, HMP Wakefield, and HMP Whitemoor. Drake reports she conducted 450 hours of observation in these prisons; produced 350 typed pages of field notes; secured 105 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with prison staff (civilians, officers and governors); and conducted 204 semi-structured interviews with prisoners. She also administered the Measured Quality of Life survey to samples of both staff and prisoners. Unfortunately, for the amount of time, effort, and data involved in her fieldwork, too little of this trove makes its way into her book. Moreover, the arguments put forth regarding Drake’s three principal propositions are at such a high level of abstraction that the insights she may have gained from her fieldwork seem to have only modest utility in advancing her overall thesis. She does glean a number of comments from her prisoner interviews which suggest that “all they [meaning staff] think about is security” but this seems like a rather paltry yield from the investment in hours, observations, and interviews described above.
For the most part Drake spends too much time addressing, or at least nominally citing, every prior commentator on prisons or nationstate security arrangements, very much in the manner of a de rigueur dissertation literature review. In doing so, she does not persuasively connect these sections to either her primary thesis or her prison fieldwork. The result is a book where too much is addressed and that which should be addressed is sometimes left too little connected, thereby derailing her effort to make her points effectively. This produces a meandering analysis that obscures, rather than reveals, many of the small but important contributions her book has to offer. These tendencies are exacerbated, unfortunately, by many instances of poor sentence construction and clunky writing generally. The retention of many idiosyncrasies of English usage in the American edition (“whilst” used seemingly on every other page), and the incorporation of such verb killers as “essentialise” and “problematise” along with near-constant descent into passive voice, also make the volume less effective than it otherwise could be.
One of Drake’s modest contributions is an historical summary of the two “eras” that maximum security dispersal prisons in England experienced: from 1968–94 and since 1995. Very briefly the first era was characterized by the neo-liberal goal to maintain somewhat humane conditions within English maximum security prisons by supporting rehabilitation efforts and minimizing repressive policies. This policy was pursued because very few prisoners in the United Kingdom are actually serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. (Drake says the number is about 30.) This means, of course, that most of the 2,900 prisoners in long-term maximum security English prisons have a reasonable chance of returning to society, whether sooner or later.
Problems arose, however, because an open, liberal approach to operating prisons can, under the wrong conditions and wrong management, lead to disorder and highly publicized security events. The particular events that sparked off the transition from the first era to the second were an escape by six out of the ten prisoners housed in HMP Whitemoor’s Special Security Unit on September 9, 1994 followed rather quickly in the public’s mind by the escape of three prisoners from Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight on January 3, 1995. These events, compounded by an increasing law-and-order climate comparable to that developing in the United States and opportunistic politics led to an increasingly repressive, security-minded regime within the U.K. Prison Service. The same climate, incited further by the events of 9/11, led to the enhanced security nation state Drake is writing about today.
Drake’s conclusion to her book is, regrettably, among the least satisfying chapters she offers. She observes, quite correctly, that “there has been difficulty in translating the critiques of critical criminology into practical, moral or political directives” (p. 165). Unfortunately, she does not offer much in the way of a better proposal than those that have gone before. In effect, Drake suggests a principle of “do no harm” by minimizing the pains of imprisonment. Yet she offers no real world proposal that has any likelihood of getting prison officials, politicians and the public to embrace such an agenda—unless they simply see it as in their own interest as a short term sap to maintain control.