Abstract
Prisons, Punishment and the Pursuit of Security is the second title – and the first monograph – to be published as part of the Palgrave Macmillan Critical Criminological Perspectives series, fittingly co-edited by its author. Extending over eight chapters, Drake’s book presents a historically-situated, theoretically-informed, policy-relevant and empirically-grounded critical analysis of prisons in general and maximum-security prisons in particular. It makes an important and welcome contribution to a burgeoning research literature that combines to critique the corrosive and counter-productive practices of imprisonment during a period of penal excess.
Following Garland’s (2001a: 5) analysis of ‘mass imprisonment’, Miller’s (2001: 158) notion of ‘carceral hyperinflation’ and Simon’s (2000: 285) conceptualization of ‘hyper-incarceration’ – whereby a ‘society of captives’ (Simon, 2000: 285) occupies the ‘new iron cage’ (Garland, 2001b: 197) – Drake observes that ‘there are 10.1 million human beings living in custodial settings … [and] the number of people imprisoned is growing on five continents’ (p. 1). This she characterizes as ‘a growing global hegemony of imprisonment that reinforces the symbolic functions of prisons and taken-for-granted assumptions about their use’ (p. 13).
Chapter 1 aims to ‘demythologise the prison and its uses’ (p. 1) by focusing sharply on three intersecting issues. First, the means by which prisons divert attention from the complex social problems and fractious socio-economic contexts that feed them, whilst simultaneously obfuscating understanding of their enduring failings. Second, the manner in which rampant penality signifies an expanding and consolidating reliance on repression and violence as a preferred means of delivering ‘security’. Third, the extent to which the persistent and enduring ‘mythology’ of inherent human ‘bad or evil’ (p. 1) serves to legitimize carceral expansion. The same themes recur, and are developed, in one form or another, throughout the book.
Chapters 2–4 address questions pertaining to the political economy and ideological underpinnings of imprisonment together with its near-global legitimizing rationales, before focusing more sharply on developments in penal policy and practice in respect of maximum-security prisons. It is Drake’s incisive and authoritative analysis of the deepest recesses of the penal realm – five men’s maximum-security prisons in England – that best represents the distinctive originality of her book.
In Chapter 5 Drake introduces prisoners’ ‘voices’ by drawing on her innovative research and the transcripts from interviews with over 200 male prisoners in maximum-security institutions. As always, it is giving prisoners voice – emancipatory research – that allows the most powerful and penetrating insights to emerge. The dehumanization, monotony, despair, powerlessness and fear experienced by the men is movingly expressed: You’re not seen as a man, as a human being, you’re just seen as … a thing to be ‘managed’ … No one on the outside will give a shit if no one in here sees me – a scummy prisoner – as a human being … It makes you feel … like you don’t matter to anyone at all and they can do whatever they want to you in here. (p. 90) Even though you get used to these things happening to you, enduring it day in and day out for weeks, months, years … you feel, um, despairing. (p. 91) This place is scary. The way this place is run is scary. I don’t feel safe here because of that. For them to have the power that they do … That’s the scariest thing in this prison; other inmates aren’t scary. It’s the screws and security and the sheer power they hold over you. (p. 92)
Taken together, the men recount the manner in which high-security prisons are deployed both as punishment and for punishment. One prisoner captures it succinctly: It is making me worse. I am already being punished by my freedom being taken away from me but they are punishing me even more … in this place. It is more punishment. That is what it seems like. (p. 103)
In Chapters 6 and 7 Drake critically interrogates and rethinks ‘security’ and ‘punishment’ with theoretical and empirical lucidity. These chapters set the stage for the concluding chapter, neatly entitled ‘Making the Unthinkable Thinkable’, in which an alternative vision – an end to punishment and an appeal for reconciliatory justice – is thoughtfully articulated.
Drake’s compelling book is a ‘must read’ for students and researchers of penality. The appendix alone comprises an excellent reflexive essay on researching prisons. The eight chapters that precede it serve to unsettle, challenge and stimulate in equal measure.