The cell and the corridor: Imprisonment as waiting,and waiting as mobile

Abstract

Imprisonment is the exemplary symbol of waiting, of being stuck in a space and for a time not of our choosing. This concept of waiting is perfectly represented by the image of the prison cell. In this paper, I contrast the cell with the less familiar imagery of the corridor, a space of prison that evokes and involves mobility. Through this juxtaposition, I aim to show that prisons are as much places of movement as stillness with associated implications for penal power and purpose. I argue that the incomplete imaginary of prison as a cell (and waiting as still) may operate as a necessary fiction that both sustains and undermines its legitimacy. By incorporating the corridor into the penal imaginary, key premises about how prisons do and should work, specifically by keeping prisoners busy, and how prison time flows and is experienced, are disrupted.

Keywords

Prison time waiting mobility

Introduction

Prison is a familiar metaphor of waiting, evoked when we feel stuck, caged, forced by others to endure a period of empty time. This metaphor draws on a literal understanding of prison as a form of waiting. The ‘two most essential experiential characteristics of prison time [are] a feeling of waiting and a sense of time as a burden’ (Miesenhelder, 1985: 44). Prison waiting may be experienced as particularly burdensome because it stops time (for the prisoner) while the rest of the world moves on; it produces the particular pain of ‘time standing still but passing away’ (Wahidin, 2006: para. 6.4). Other people wait for something specific and meaningful to happen (a medical diagnosis, the Second Coming, an asylum decision) while prisoners wait merely for the waiting to stop, for their sentence to be complete. This temporality of imprisonment finds its spatial translation in the prison cell where ‘time itself [is] compartmentalised through space’ (Matthews, 2009: 37). The cell visualises imprisonment as a waiting experience defined by immobilisation.

In this paper, I analyse and challenge the cell's dominance as a visual shorthand of punishment, particularly its representation of prison time. The imagery of the cell, deployed in empirical accounts of imprisonment, works as a conceptual metaphor of punishment, forming our basic understanding not only of what it might be like, but fundamentally of what it is, its nature, possibilities and pains (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). The cell provides a compelling and comprehensive imaginary of penality (Carlen, 2008) that encourages us to think of imprisonment as something which contains and immobilises bodies in both space and time. I argue that this imaginary obscures the extent to which imprisonment involves constant circulation, porous borders and unruly time. My aim is to explore mobility as an important and even defining aspect of penal waiting, and the consequences of mobility for critique and reform of the prison. I will argue that understanding penal waiting as a form of stopped time and stilled movement focuses us on a particular moment and population in prison (inmates who stay a while) which constructs their needs in particular ways (namely, that they should be made to engage in purposeful activities in designated spaces). The cellular mode of ‘seeing’ prison thereby ignores many other prison waiters – inmates who come and go, staff and visitors – and blinds us to seeing the range of ways prison can harm and help those within them.

In order to develop these arguments, I counter the influence of the cell's visual and imaginary power with an alternative and missing imagery, that of the corridor. Corridors, hallways and walkways are mundane spaces of constant movement, indeed spaces where movement supplies the spatial purpose. Juxtaposing the corridor with the cell shifts the imaginary of prison from a waiting room to a waiting space, from thinking about imprisonment through the connotations of a specifically bounded place to something that has spatial, but not necessarily fixed, dimensions. This move aims to short circuit the tendency to equate the prison experience of time with that connoted in waiting rooms. It also offers a different vantage point from which to survey a well-worn debate about the problem of managing time in prison, by inserting the concept of waiting as the analytic lens through which we attend to this problematic. What is it to wait in prison? Where and how does it happen? The growing literature on waiting has begun to document how waiting can be productive, active and mobile, and some have directly connected this work to that on mobilities (e.g. Bissell, 2007). Mobility in prison is a particularly neglected dimension of imprisoned experience, and the spatial metaphor of the corridor opens up our ability to consider prison as a technology of circulation as much as containment. The corridor allows us to see how waiting can be a mobile experience even in society's most monolithic and controlling spaces.

This is a conceptual piece, a thought experiment, in which I draw on a range of empirical and theoretical resources, as well as my own research engagement with penal practice and policy primarily of contemporary Scotland, where I live and work. I might be tempted to describe the method as a composite account of prison systems with an ethnographic interest in the representations, rather than empirical details, of imprisonment (what I called policy ethnography in Armstrong, 2010; and see Riles, 2006). This piece is situated in and builds on the literature on time and punishment (and the creative spirit of Cohen and Taylor (1972), one of the few works to focus on the phenomenology of time in prison) but, unlike much of the ethnographic and autobiographical work in this area, does not draw particularly on the voices of the punished in articulating the nature of carceral time (as do, among many others, Brown, 1998; Geunther, 2013; Mannochio and Dunn, 1970; Medlicott, 1999; Miesenhelder, 1985; Rhodes, 2004; Wahidin, 2006). Such work begins with premises that this paper seeks to unpack: about a particular version of time (waiting preconceived as dead, wasted, empty time) and subject (the prisoner as the only actor in prison with the burden of managing time).¹ After discussing the imagery and implications of the cell as a mode of imagining the prison, the paper shifts to document the ways that prison keeps people on the move and then, how the imagery of the corridor might help us make sense of this as waiting. The final section of the paper suggests how foregrounding the corridor, and circulation, inverts conventional normative considerations and critique of the prison, modernity's exemplary punishment.

In the cell

In Foucault's (1995) classic elaboration of modern power, the cell, and the other prison spaces in which the prisoner stops (to repent, work, learn, exercise, eat), are explicit in a timetable, but the corridor, a space of movement and passage between disciplinary activities, is only implied. Within the two-page excerpt of the prisoners' schedule in Discipline and Punish is a single reference to a space and time of circulation: ‘There is a five minute interval between each drum roll’ (Foucault, 1995: 6).² A copious literature documents the functions, effects and lived experience of destination spaces within prison (work rooms, exercise yards, dining halls), but the same cannot be said of the processes of circulation between them, nor of the wider circulations of individuals inside and between prisons, and to other institutions (with some important exceptions, e.g. Moran et al., 2013; Wacquant, 2001).

The cell is deeply embedded in collective memory as the crucial space of incarceration. It is allied to, and descended from, other ‘coercive spaces of segregation’ (Matthews, 2009: 25) – monasteries, barracks and asylums (Foucault, 1995; Goffman, 1961). The cell is where prison's purpose, and purposelessness, can be found: in penitence, boredom, suicide. Influential theories of power draw primarily on the iconography of this carceral space. Foucault envisions the cell within the Panopticon as the exemplar of modern power, training and producing the disciplined subject who sits under the assumed gaze of an authority figure. The prison itself often is depicted metonymically as a cell, a space apart in which a prisoner's ‘free life in society has been suspended’ (Medlicott, 1999: 211). It is the basic building block of social (and bio) power.

The cell makes visible a key function of the prison, possibly its least disputed purpose: confinement (but see Jefferson, 2014). Like all metaphors, however, the cell is at once ‘a way of seeing and of not seeing’, of prioritising some qualities of imprisonment over others (Eldridge, 2014, and see Schön, 1993). The cell shows us the experience of penal time through the imagery of the waiting room, an experience to which all can relate. The cell thus provides a readily legible symbol of the universal experience of enforced boredom and stillness, but in this comparison arguably under and misrepresents much of the experience of waiting in prison, not least in assimilating unbridgeable scales of intensity and duration of waiting, say, in a doctor's office compared to waiting out a prison sentence. A second feature of the cellular imaginary is that spatial, not temporal, considerations become the paramount dynamic to be managed, as the psychic pain of lost time is translated as the physical pain of enclosed space (Matthews, 2009). Prison staff faces the challenge of maintaining order and security while the prisoner faces that of maintaining sanity and physical safety in monotonous, threatening and squeezed spaces (Geunther, 2013; Rhodes, 2004). Coping with time is not a unique pain imposed by prison compared to other forms of punishment, nor is spatial confinement an inherent feature of ‘timed’ sanctions, though it may appear to be given the prominence of prison in our social imagination. Counterexamples include electronic ankle tags and probation, both sanctions meted out in temporal units (one is sentenced to so many hours or months ‘on the tag’) but complied with not necessarily by adherence to a space, but completion of an activity (such as a drug treatment course).

Finally, the cell situates us as viewers of punishment in much the same way that audiences are positioned by television and stage behind the invisible fourth wall, looking in on the action. This positioning produces a particular visibility of punishment that furnishes our social imagination of penal possibility. Debates over the rightness or wrongness, softness or hardness of prison often revolve around what the inmate is getting up to in his cell (and not getting up to in a prison classroom or work shed). These debates are historically situated; for example, in the early years of the American penitentiary (i.e. up to the mid 19th century) concern circled around different ideals of cellular isolation, as a place for silent penitence or a work space where inmates should be kept busy with piecework (Rothman, 2002). Both the still and active ideals of punishment played out in and were circumscribed by the spatial segregation of prisoners into individual cells.³ Our own times have been influenced, in the US and UK, by 20th-century progressive ideas of rehabilitation and a more recent ‘populist punitivism’ which seeks to make prison as unpleasant and punitive an experience as possible (Pratt, 2000). While these forces often are taken as contradictory, together they have swung the pendulum towards a contemporary view that imprisonment should be active. The progressive liberal and regressive conservative might come together in outrage at prisoners allowed to sleep all day, stare into space, play video games, shaking their heads at, respectively, the neglectful or soft hand of justice. The punishment of time, as spatialised through the cell, gives us a myopic, and sometimes literally a peephole, view of imprisonment in which we ‘see’ and therefore understand penal time as sitting around. This undergirds and makes sense of the perennial calls for imprisonment to be active and goal focused. Time must be done and not merely passed.⁴

I am analysing the cell per se but also, in making the case of it as the dominant symbol in a social imaginary of punishment, using it as a synecdoche or archetype of other prison spaces: dining hall, recreation area, classroom, visiting centre, hospital wing. In all of these, the inmate is watched, guarded and constrained in movement. Each space comes with its own timing, function and rules. One cannot exercise during a visit, eat during an anger management class or shower at midnight. The overall architecture and visualisation of control is the same, however, to manage order and assign to each space its purposeful activity. Hence, the swirling flow of life is broken up by the cellular prison into boxes of time in which particular activities are authorised, or not. In the modern prison, cellular slicing up of life into spatiotemporal boxes is then linked in a linear narrative of punishment as an institution of security and rehabilitation (shown in the first part graphic of Figure 1). Rehabilitation is the product of the discrete accumulation of activities including healthy eating, regular exercise, family contact, offender behaviour courses and job training. The two graphics in Figure 1 are taken from a recent strategy document of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS, 2013). Each displays key elements of the cellular imaginary, translating them into the cells of the organisational flow chart.

Figure 1.

Prison service organisational graphics. Scottish Prison Service, 2013, pp. 64, 86.

One after another, activities are set out in a timetable or a flow chart, driven by an official logic of progress. The logic of control expressed in such documents reveal a Foucauldian penal power in which ‘[w]e…become disciplined through the waiting process’ (Kohn, 2009: 225). The cell is at the heart of this account. It isolates the body in space and time making it available to be produced and trained as an individually disciplined subject. For Foucault, the penitentiary and its cellular arrangement control subjects by controlling time, it is ‘a new way of administering time and making it useful, by segmentation, seriation, synthesis and totalization’; it constructs ‘a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another…a social time of a serial, orientated, cumulative type: the discovery of an evolution in terms of “progress”’ (Foucault, 1995: 160). This narrative enlists time to discipline docile bodies; the physical organisation of the prison into cells is essential to this.

Popular culture and academic research abound with representations of prison that dwell on and reproduce waiting as a spatial phenomenon. Such images reflect a cell imaginary that encourages us to see prisoners as immobile, trapped in space symbolising ‘suspended lives’ (Medlicott, 1999). As the key site of action (and inaction), the cell thus organises description, critique and reform, urging us to understand and direct our efforts over prison's disciplinary effects to this and associated spaces, and to treat the cell as the key site of action. What remains missing from the picture is flow: how people get into, out of and around prison; how much time is wrapped up in movement; how disciplinary, painful and reforming processes play out beyond the cell, the classroom, the rec yard.

Figure 2.

Waiting/visiting room at HMP Barlinnie. Source: Used with permission of copyright holder (Jenny Wicks, 2012).

On the move

A cellular imaginary evokes the ‘[s]tasis and stagnation implicit in the term “waiting” (and popularly associated with the notion of incarceration)’ (Kohn, 2009: 218). But what happens if we centre waiting as a problem to be explained, rather than as an unexamined description of imprisonment? We would be forced then to identify its social dynamics and diverse settings, to somehow account for a ‘universal experience’ of time that nevertheless has infinite local meanings. ‘The analytic power of waiting…derives from its capacity to highlight certain features of a social process that might have hitherto been foreshadowed by others or entirely hidden’ (Hage, 2009: 4). Who waits in prison? How do they wait, and how does the waiting affect them? These questions offer a vantage point from which it is possible to see many kinds of phenomena, still and mobile, in and around prison. Imprisonment casts a long shadow, one which easily overlaps and risks collapsing onto an assumed and conventional understanding of waiting as ‘a state of “stuckedness”’ (Hage, 2009: 7) so that prison and waiting become unexamined metaphors for each other. Beginning with the social situation of waiting, rather than imprisonment, however, might allow us to bypass the conventional accounts and framing of prison time, opening our eyes to waiting's diverse cognitive, emotional and physical dimensions. From the vantage point of waiting, it is possible to see many kinds of activity, still and mobile, in and around prison.

Over a decade spent as a researcher moving through, documenting and studying the penal system in Scotland reveals that people are constantly on the move in prison. A composite account of this journey is as follows: If a prison sentence is on the cards, you are likely to be on remand already.⁵ The many affective dimensions of waiting for your case to be adjudicated (boredom, frustration, hope, fear; see Reed, 2010) accompany regular movement back and forth between jail and court, and back and forth between cell and visit room to meet with your lawyer. The typical amount of time spent on remand is 23 to 24 days, so you will see many others come and go, just as you have come and soon will go once sentenced or acquitted (Scottish Prisons Commission, 2008). If convicted, there will be a move to a different prison or a different part of the prison to serve out your time. The start of this sentence is marked by isolation in a special jail cell as risk is assessed and various other induction processes are carried out. Eventually, one is moved to more permanent housing with access to different parts of the prison. Prisoners move back and forth to attend visits from family and friends, meet with drug counsellors or attend religious services, use the library, hit the gym, take classes and so on. These punctuate the daily rhythms that comprise the regimented and repetitious movements inherent to life in a large institution. Alongside daily movements are rhythms orchestrated by the overall sentence length, which will determine eligibility and availability for courses that in turn involve moves around and between prisons.

Even those prisoners who might exemplify the cellular imaginary of stillness – the long-term and life-sentenced prisoners – are on the move. Though their time cycles are less compressed over the length of a sentence than short-term inmates, the repetitious daily circulations are identical. And they, too, will transfer from remand prisons to sentenced prisons, but in addition often circulate through a series of specialised institutions (e.g. those designated for ‘sex offenders’ or where particular courses and interventions are offered) and back again to general institutions or open prisons as they near the later stages of a sentence in what prison officials refer to as ‘progressing to liberty’.

All prisoners also can be moved about over the course of their sentences for many other reasons including: ‘population management’, a term of art referring to moving prisoners around facilities to keep within building capacity limits (Armstrong et al., 2011); for disciplinary reasons or sometimes specifically as a punitive measure (Gill, 2013); medical reasons; court appeals; revised risk assessments; new offending; for their own protection; to be closer to family. In the words of a senior manager who sat next to me as prisoners served us lunch: ‘See that guy over there? We started in the Prison Service together up at Perth [prison] nearly twenty years ago and now he's here. I stayed there longer than he did. Prisoners don't stay in the one prison any more, they move about’.⁶ Prisoners may make more exceptional moves to isolation (punitive segregation) or suicide watch cells. Circulations therefore encompass regular, constant and unpredictable movements. Prisoners often move cells, wings and prisons without any warning or understanding of why they are moving. It is not just sitting still, but the monotony of both routine and unpredictable circulations that creates the pain of punishment. On the former, a prisoner informant in Wahidin's research (2006) says: ‘Time has stood still in that everything goes on and on in the same repetitive way. It is as if the nineteen years could have all been fitted in one year… . Every single day is the same. It drives you mad!’ (Para 6.8). The linearity of past, present and future dissolves into a plurality of oppressive temporal scales of numbing repetition within the day and variability over the sentence. These different examples of waiting and mobility in prison reveal temporal flows which are multiple, nested, distorted and disciplining.

A key difference in focusing on waiting rather than imprisonment in thinking about prison's times is that it allows us to see more actors than the inmate as prison's ‘waiters’. Prisoners are not the only people that a prison makes wait and move. Solipsistically, the experience of prison research comes to mind. Researchers buzz to get in, sit and wait to be called, proceed to the gate and wait to be called for passage through the next gate. We sit and wait for the guard to let us through. Sit and wait in an interview room for a prisoner to be brought for interview, passing back and forth between interview room and break room. Then the process reverses to get back out of prison, to sit and wait for a train to return to offices and homes. To gather around 20 hours of recorded interview data for one project (Armstrong and Weaver, 2013), I estimate that over 100 hours were taken up working on and waiting for ethics approval, prison approval and finally prisoner consent (to be interviewed); this waiting involved much doing and moving (an important theme of the waiting literature, see, e.g., Bissell, 2007; Gasparini, 1995; Kohn, 2009). Prison managers and service providers also move regularly, from prison to prison and to prison headquarters (HQ) for meetings, on secondments as they wait on promotion, court decisions, policy change. Prison guards do a lot of waiting, too. A certain portion of any given shift's staff complement is available for prisoner escort – to move prisoners between meals, visits, appointments, research interviews. They stand around in between these times making cups of tea and small talk. And finally, prison waiting does not only happen within the prison system but is imposed also on families whose time is partly stopped but also marching forward as they carry on with their lives while waiting for a relative to re-emerge. Prisoners (and for the most part the prison's other habitués) have little control over the temporal orbits dictated by the spaces, scales and institutional agencies that arise in penal settings.

In sum, the prison is crossed by heterogenous and multiple time cycles that involve journeys of waiting around and between spaces, inside and outside the prison's gates. Like water forming an arc over a rock in a stream, these journeys compose a stable object made of ephemeral moving parts. Such flows reaffirm the immobility of prison as a built space and an institution of control – the rock that determines the direction and shape of the arc – but produce specific social realities in need of investigation. The cell imaginary veils these multiple actors and diverse time rhythms of prison waiting. The cell encourages us to treat the animal in the cage as the only actor in the drama whose time is fixed by punishment. Waiting is not just something that happens in locked cells, but flows through and out of the cell and in between spaces of designated activity. Circulation then is a core aspect of waiting in prison.

How does mobile waiting play out, how might it extend the pains or possibilities of punishment? This is not the first paper to consider these questions, nor the first to observe that confinement entails movement. Others have documented how prison literally and psychically dislocates people from places and relationships (e.g. Pallot and Piacentini, 2012, depict the transport journeys of women prisoners across Russia). Hiemstra (2013) maps the institutional journeys across the vastness of the United States of those accused of illegally migrating, quoting one informant for her title, ‘you don't even know where you are’. These dislocating, exiling effects might be intentionally sought, and a number of writers have discussed imposed movements within and between prisons as an intentional strategy of punishment (Gill, 2013; Matthews, 2009). These accounts allow one to see that the water between the islands is an essential disciplinary mechanism of Foucault's ‘carcercal archipelago’. It is interesting, though, that these pains of carceral mobility often are presented as enhancing or supplementing the ordinary pain of imprisonment, implying that the ‘normal’ state of imprisonment is having a predictable sense of where and for how long one will be in prison; in other words, a sense of prison time that reconfirms the spatial model of cellular stillness.⁷

One theorist who has focused on circulation as a site of control is of course, Deleuze. His essay on control societies explores the importance of circulation for modern power. He sets up his account in direct contrast to Foucault's in Discipline and Punish (to which he positions his essay as a ‘postscript’): circulation, Deleuze argues, is not merely the means of getting from one disciplinary enclosure to another, but contains the essence of social control itself. ‘[In] societies of control one is never finished with anything…perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination’ (Deleuze, 1992: 3). Foucault, in contrast, set his theory of power within the institutions of modernity that could ‘initiate vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: …the school…the factory…the barracks…from time to time the hospital, possibly the prison… . Their ideal project is… to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force’ (Deleuze, 1992: 3). But Deleuze faults Foucault's account as missing out on the disciplinary effects of moving between and around institutional enclosures. The key point of disciplinary institutions like prison (or schools, hospitals, families and factories) is not in the realization of the ideal subject, impossible in practical terms, but the creation of an ideal that can never be realised. This paradox of unachievable aspiration is productive because it authorises never-ending processes of control. The prison serves not to rehabilitate (to produce once and for all law abiding citizens) but through a rehabilitative logic to mark an individual as in need of a particular style of intervention and control throughout their lives in the same way that employees and students are subject to continuous training and certification. In sum, Deleuze offers an account in which circulation itself is central to understanding the nature of power, where ‘moulding’ the individual within the institution gives way to a system in which individuals are exposed to infinite and infinitely ratcheted modulations of continuous processes. The distinctive quality of control through circulation lies in its assertion that the individual will always require intervention – she is never fully cured, reformed, trained, qualified or authorised but will always benefit from or require some additional intervention. She must always be kept on the move.

Along the corridor

If circulation is a mode of control and a site of pain, how can we make it visible? What would happen to our understanding of penal time if we did? I turn now to the space of the corridor as a counter imagery to cellular waiting, considering the literal and metaphorical dimensions of the corridor and its potential value as an analytical lens. In literal terms, corridors are mundane and familiar spaces. Walking along them brings to mind ‘waiting's “special orientation with time” – its only meaning lies in the future “arrival or non-arrival” of the object of waiting’ (Kohn, 2009: 225 quoting Crapanzo, p. 44). The corridor thus also materialises the translation of time as space but unlike cells (and their associated settings), are not themselves destinations. The waiting experience of corridors can be mobile or immobile. One might wait in a hallway until a guard arrives to unlock a door, but also experience moving along the corridor as waiting, waiting in anticipation of the thing that sits at its end. Corridors move people and things into, around and out of the prison. They are sites of quotidian and extraordinary journeys: taking the prisoner every day to the dining hall, and only once to the death chamber. Corridors as spaces of waiting encompass and symbolise many of the prison's temporal scales and their differing affective registers. And significantly, the corridor allows for imprisoned waiting to be conceived as movement.

A key quality of the corridor is the diversity and mingling of its users. Only one kind of subject is normally visible in the cell – the prisoner, whose isolation is symbolic of the organisation of the prison into sections and buildings that segregate based on the classifications of gender, conviction status, sentence length. Corridors do not discriminate between kinds of prisoners, or for that matter between prison roles. Not every prison denizen sleeps in a cell, but everyone moves through a corridor. Unlike cell design, the corridor lacks specialisation, perhaps because its purpose is so basic and singular: everybody needs to get somewhere.

This is not to say that corridors are spaces of free and open assembly or that they are not complicit in the unequal social relationships produced by prisons. Corridors, like any other built space, communicate a social purpose and narrative (Yanow, 1998: 215). The corridor communicates, inevitably, the power of the institution. It displays and enacts hierarchy by channelling prisoners in ordered lines under watch of guards. The corridor creates yet another opportunity for the prisoner to be tested, monitored and disciplined and it reminds the non-prisoner about the nature of the institution. The painted walkway lines at HMP Barlinnie Prison, in Figure 3, and the metal sheets preventing one from seeing the rural landscape in which HMP Shotts Prison is set, in Figure 4, prevent the corridor's user from stepping (or gazing) out of line. While the prisoner is the justification for these security measures, all users of the corridors adhere to them. I feel compelled to stay within the painted lines of prison walkways, and am accompanied by staff who do the same. No one, no matter how powerful, runs (skips or hops) down a prison corridor. In this it reveals the prison's disciplinary and productive power extends beyond the inmate.

Figure 3.

Painted walkway at HMP Barlinnie. Copyright Jenny Wicks, 2012.

Figure 4.

Outside corridor at HMP Shotts. Copyright Jenny Wicks, 2012.

The prison corridor is not conventionally thought of as a place where the work of punishment is done. Corridors are side spaces, of getting to and from somewhere else. They are neither meaningful nor meaningless; no activities are scheduled in corridors. But spaces of circulation are central considerations in prison architecture, their design and positioning recognised as crucial to security and control (Matthews, 2009: 32–33). One value of adding the corridor to the carceral imagination is the restoration of movement and circulation as ordinary rather than exceptional qualities of punishment, showing how mobility is embedded in, rather than the binary opposite of, immobility (Bissell, 2007).

A prison might be thought of as a ‘universe … filled with corridors and antechambers in both a literal and a metaphorical sense’ (Phillips, 1998: 28). The quotation refers to the works of the infamous Marquis de Sade in which corridors are constituted as disorderly, secret places literally outside the functional spaces of rooms and metaphorically ‘outside social and moral convention’ (Phillips, 1998: 32). Attending to the figurative role of corridors makes it possible to analyse not only their own disciplinary style but also their potential to disrupt the official narrative of punishment.

As a space ‘outside’ the sites of normal social interaction, the corridor creates potential for anarchic, deviant behaviour in that it falls outside the gaze of social control (Phillips, 1998: 36). Sade's grotesque protagonists look in on the conventional activities of the salon and the ballroom, literally hidden and metaphorically excluded in corridors and cupboards, and thus free to engage in (and be victimized by) perverse behaviour. The furtive and outside status of the corridor emphasised in Sade's work, is a useful contrast both to critical and official accounts of the prison as a site of control. It illustrates the potential of side spaces, movement and fleeting interaction to be productive of social relations. Such a possibility challenges the narrative of prison which vests power exclusively in purposive spaces. Corridors are excluded from political reform, exiled as technical design problems, because they have no role in discourses of rehabilitation or retribution. They display the prison's bare function to manage movement. Centring the corridor belies the claim that imprisonment does something with and to people beyond shuffling them around until their time is up. As a metaphor for imprisonment, the corridor provides a needed thought space outside conventional values and accounts, storing the stuff ‘of our worst nightmares [but] necessary and safe (because imaginary) spaces of cathartic play, situated at the very edge of sanity beyond the real and its moral dimensions’ (Phillips, 1998: 36). The corridor frees us to see the unseeable and to think the unthinkable (Drake, 2012).

I conclude this section by exploring the corridor imaginary, considering through the example of statistics how it might reveal what cannot be seen in the cell. Statistical representations often amount to artefacts of a cellular imaginary. They tend to report prison populations statically as ‘average daily populations’ (the total number who can be found in prison on any given day averaged over a year). This approach equates the single prisoner serving a year with 12 prisoners serving a month each – the one and the dozen occupy the same space of the table cell and time of the prison cell. But one is not the same as 12, nor is the impact of one prison sentence – on a person, their family, society – the same as 12 prison sentences. In Figure 5, the 50 people taking up cell space under the sentence category ‘Less than 3 months’ in 2011–2012 are actually 1756 people passing through during the course of the year (Scottish Government, 2012).⁸

Figure 5.

Excerpted table from Scottish prison statistical bulletin. Source: Scottish Government (2012).

The people in the corridor regularly outnumber those in the cells by 10, 20 times and more. If the prison were reimagined as a corridor we could, and would have to, find ways of giving presence to the 1756 and not merely the 50, to understand how these prisoners – who are in too briefly to partake of most prison services and so are left out of design, reform and research work – relate to and are affected by the contact they have with each other, their families, prison staff and others. We would see their waiting time as real as the waiting time of a lifer. This is only one way that a focus on the occupants of a cell, and research shaped by the cell imaginary, misses both quantities and qualities of prison experience.

Passing through

Among the worst things prisons do, according to a large body of critique, is acting as no more than a warehouse of human beings. In this final section, I propose one unthinkable thought, that using the prison as a warehouse, as a short-term container of human stock, could be actually its most normatively defensible function. Such an idea becomes thinkable by reframing imprisonment through the concept of corridor time. The human warehouse accusation is normally deployed as a self-evident marker of prison's failure.⁹ ‘Doing nothing’ but warehousing people is a failure, however, only if we have accepted that the prison's appropriate purpose is to ‘do something’ with prisoners that assists them to become better (and better behaved) people – through treatment, training, reflection, classes, punishments. The acceptance of such a premise derives from the success of the cell imaginary in convincing us that the punishment of time (a fixed loss of liberty) is best understood and practiced as a confinement, in a particular style and use, of space.¹⁰

Let us think instead of the corridor, which presents mobility and movement as normal, central functions of imprisonment. The corridor envisions the prison as a technology of circulation and Deleuze's ideas here about control are important. If circulatory processes effect control by marking people and tracking them into particular routes and subjectivities (the mentally ill person, the offender, the student), then understanding the details of this process in prison requires us to see and account for all the people passing through. A corridor imaginary suggests the prison is, or ought to be thought of as, more institutionally similar to train stations and warehouses than to schools and hospitals.

The mobilities literature (Urry, 2007) provides a trove of conceptual and empirical resources for thinking this idea through. With its interest in the different speeds, and general speeding up, of modernity, mobilities research encourages us to see the prison as an assemblage of different temporal paces and circuits. In Laura Watts' (Watts and Urry, 2008) ethnography of train travel, the shared experience of commuting (a perfect example of the simultaneous mingling of mobility and immobility) diversifies through the range of activities travellers engage in producing distinctive waiting experiences. The imagery of the corridor visualises and centres a between time and between space as an interstitial site of meaningful social activity and therefore empirical interest (and see also Gasparini, 1995). In contrast, prison writing often positions the corridor as subsidiary to the real activity that happens somewhere else, as one prison Governor wrote: ‘the corridors remain bleak, transitional places, a no man's land betwixt prison and community’ in need of ‘brightening up’ to support the rehabilitative work of the institution (Bennett, 2010: 51). Watts’ ethnography challenged one of the most self-evident aims of Government transport policy – that commuting time should be minimised, by showing people using their commuting time in emotionally and materially productive ways. In the same way, we might explode assumptions about the proper scope of penal policy in thinking about how to see hallways as more than transitional spaces in need of brightening up, but as literal sites of human action and oppression and as imaginative resources that can fundamentally reframe understanding of prison space and time. Cell spaces hold people still and their waiting is made productive by organising time in them, through offender treatment programmes and work training modules and education classes. Corridors move people along and interaction happens in passing. The challenge for research is to hold this movement still, to make it possible to notice the power and (sometime positive) effects of passing through alongside those of standing in place (Figure 6). Corridors, both literal and symbolic, present opportunities, resources and power ripe for empirical study (Iedema et al., 2006). At the same time, a corridor imaginary upsets the logic and risks the order of a prison where only those inmates standing still can be seen, counted and disciplined.

Figure 6.

Moving figures at a train station. Source: Used with permission of copyright holder (Morguefile, http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/65311).

Conclusion

We need to break the chain around the prison stuck in our minds, and I have argued this prison is a construct of a cell imaginary, a site of stillness in which the natural response is to offer activity and purpose. If we see movement and activity instead already built into the prison story, we might find new routes into a project of critique that does not lead us into the same refrain as prison's apologists: if only we could make waiting in prison more useful, it would be more humane. This uneasy alliance between those who seek fundamentally to criticize and those who seek, as practitioners and policy makers, to make it effective might finally be broken. We might then stop finding ourselves coming up with ideas whose policy translation seems inevitably to argue we should hang onto people for longer and in more isolated spaces in order to have the time we need of making them remorseful or well. As Stan Cohen found:

the penological and criminological literature depends on proposals for change, and in making them critics are drawn into an inevitable relationship to the rhetoric they hope to “pierce.” “Every attempt I ever made to distance myself from the subject, to criticize it, even to question its very right to exist, has only got me more involved in its inner life” (Rhodes, 2004: 70, quoting Stan Cohen).

This is the imaginary in which the cell is complicit and from which the corridor might lead us, finally, to an exit.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge useful opportunities to present this work at the ESRC funded seminar series on Visual Criminology (and particularly organiser Yvonne Jewkes) and the Workshop on Waiting, held at the University of Glasgow, June 2014. Images by Jenny Wicks are used gratefully with permission, and were produced as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded artistic residency (‘Working Spaces, Punishing Spaces’). And special thanks to Anita Lam for her many insights on corridors!

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. A small grant from the University of Glasgow Sociology Research Incentivisation Fund paid for organisation of a workshop on waiting (Glasgow, June 2014) at which an early version of this paper was presented.

Notes

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