Book review: The Prisoner

Abstract

This volume draws on a series of interviews with prisoners to provide an insight into the thoughts and feelings of men and women in prison. They talk in general terms about their lives and also about specific issues such as their families, prison culture, rehabilitation and desistance from crime. The accounts are followed by short discussions that draw on wider research and literature to provide context. The structure is simple and effective. Quotations are not used to illustrate academic discussion; rather the commentary develops themes in the accounts, a discipline that helps to keep to a minimum any tendency towards vague extrapolations and sweeping conclusions. It is the right kind of introduction for those who know little about prison life, but probably even more useful for practitioners and academics more involved in prisons; it is all too easy for the latter to start thinking of themselves as semi-experts on imprisoned people, seeing patterns and commonalities where there may be none, all the while becoming more distanced from the worlds described here. The sources for the various interviews are not made clear, but they are well chosen to provide multi-layered insights.

Most accounts are likely to provoke a range of emotions, including anger and irritation, pity and compassion. All of these are evoked by the story of a pregnant prisoner separated from her child after five months of a five year sentence:

I wish I was just separated straight from birth because it’s caused so much fucking heartache in my life now. That little girl is never going to come back to me now – she’s with my mum, my mum has taken over. And I do blame the fucking prison system for that. (p. 103)

For many others, prison seems easier to manage than the challenges of an altogether more unpredictable outside world: ‘this is my empire, this is where I’m comfortable at’ (p. 81). And it is hard not to be moved on some level by the following account:

I feel very diminished as a human being at the moment… over the years, I’ve become emotionally stunted… I do [have emotions] but it’s a very narrow range… you can literally go months without touching a human being, and it’s just something you get used to. (p. 41)

The changing nature of prison life is reflected in references to the importance of drugs, the softening of relationships between staff and prisoners, and the ‘new forms of psychological power’ that determine how prisoners progress through the system and help to motivate compliance and order:

… in the old days they could fuck you up with their fists. Now they can fuck you up with their pen. (p. 26)

The people quoted here often have a strong sense of personal morality. Most are both accepting of their guilt and quick to identify wrongs committed against them. One prisoner complains about terrible visiting facilities that mean that he feels unable to see his young son, another about the lack of support for the stressed and depressed, and an older prisoner talks with satisfaction about dealing with some younger prisoners who thought they could bully some older ones. Most probation and prison staff will have heard such accounts and felt the perplexingly righteous anger of someone who has committed damaging offences against others. The reasons why that moral sense does not easily come to the fore in situations leading to criminal acts becomes a little clearer through the description of psychological and social turmoil present in many accounts, even if it does not fully explain the behaviour. The contribution of prison itself to the suppression of feeling and empathy is explored in the final chapter by Jason Warr, an academic who was once a prisoner. I found myself reading it many times over:

… imprisonment had skewed my moral tolerance in certain ways, and I am not alone in this. Many… adapt a more pragmatic approach to ethical dilemmas, in order to survive the environment. (p. 146)

Prison life emerges as a guarded existence where front is everything and poor role models are everywhere. The effort to preserve physical and emotional safety becomes a daily preoccupation and mistrust is a constant. Warr articulately expresses a theme present in many other accounts:

… I spent so many years managing my emotional state that, seven years after release, the effects of that process are still with me. While I can empathise with people, the leap to sympathy does not occur unless I am already emotionally invested with someone. I became aware of this while I was still incarcerated, but to have discussed it would almost certainly have seen me ‘killed off’ on file. (p. 144)

The book throws light on the varied everyday experiences of people in prison, while confirming the huge challenges of minimizing the damage and dislocation of the carceral experience. If the accounts are typical, they suggest that prison achieves legitimate objectives of retribution and temporary incapacitation with ease. But this comes at a cost – there is too little in these accounts about how prison has helped and encouraged offenders to do things differently once back outside.