The return of the suppressed: Exploring how emotional suppression reappears as violence and pain among male and female prisoners

Abstract

Prisons research is familiar with the idea that prisoners ‘mask’ their feelings. But this behaviour is often characterised as a social defence mechanism, or a product of prison masculinity, rather than a deeply embedded psychosocial strategy forged over time. The term ‘emotional suppression’ is introduced as a way of better exploring the ‘biographical depth' of this behaviour. This article aims to outline why both male (n = 25) and female prisoners (n = 25) engage in suppression, by uniting their traumatic life histories with their current lives in prison. One of the most salient findings is the connection between ‘bottling-up’ emotions and an explosive ‘boomerang’ effect—suppressed emotions return through violence towards others and the self. This implies that emotion suppression cannot easily be separated from subsequent discharge. This article suggests the need for ‘integration work’ and a crucial re-orientation of our current understanding of suppression, violence and aggression in prison environments which are often treated as separate entities. Importantly, withholding emotions has been associated with a range of negative health outcomes, and may be especially damaging in the long-term. Prison regimes could do more to encourage therapeutic talk and psychological attunement to reverse the process of emotional numbing.

Keywords

coping emotions masking prisons suppression

Introduction

In tiny surreptitious doses, anaesthesia is dripping into my heart—a formerly complacent heart that is slowly beginning to resemble my dreadful surroundings…Like an ancient tree—gnarled and wizened by time and nature’s elements—my heart has grown rugged and callused…this setting helps drive people to anger, frustration, and despair. (Hairgrove, 2000: 147)

Hairgrove’s poetic testimony above highlights how imprisonment drives the suppression of some emotions (like anaesthesia for the heart) and increases the likelihood of others (anger, frustration and despair). Yet, while prisons research acknowledges the existence of ‘masking’ in prison, the deeper processes that underpin this mechanism of emotional control, and the idea that it may be connected with behaviours at a later time, are not well-evidenced.¹ This article shifts the emphasis from ‘masking’ as a surface-level social survival strategy to ‘emotional suppression’, arguing that the later term is better placed to explain the traumatic roots of this behaviour and the connections with subsequent destructive behaviours.

According to Sim (1994), masking feelings is necessary in men’s prisons to survive socially as a man. Masculinity, it is argued, is achieved in prison through rampant displays of physicality and dominance (Cowburn, 2007; Scraton, Sim and Skidmore, 1999), and a complete repugnance for ‘soft’ emotions such as kindness, fear, love and care—which all signal ‘weakness’ (Karp, 2010; Sabo, 2001; Toch, 1992). A crystallized form of this process, and an extreme caricature of masculinity, has been termed ‘hypermasculinity’ (see Toch, 1998), where the only acceptable displays of emotion are those expressed through anger or ‘retaliatory rage’ (173). Even then, the expression of anger should involve ‘cool calculation’ (Sykes, 1958: 100) and the kind of ‘silent stoicism which finds its apotheosis in the legendary figure of the cowboy or the gangster’ (101). This literature concludes that masking emotion is related closely to maleness. But it is not clear what the implications are here for female prisoners. Given that women and girls are routinely ‘sanctioned in their families…and discursively policed by a language which focuses on their sexuality’ (Howe, 1994: 183), female prisoners may already be adept at controlling their emotions too, though perhaps for a different set of reasons than men. In sum, the emphasis on masking and maleness may be correlative rather than causative and not reflexive of the deeper roots of emotional suppression.

In a different manner, accounts of impression management in prison are described in ways that highlight the importance of social acceptability and competition. As De Viggiani (2012: 277) explains, masking reflects ‘efforts to fit into the prison community and avoid exploitation’ and provides a route to achieving ‘legitimacy, status, and superiority’. Similarly, Jewkes (2002) argues that prisoners present a public persona of ‘bodily, gestural and verbal codes’ in response to the demands of the prison environment. According to these accounts then, masking is primarily a social strategy and situational defence mechanism against predatory prisoners, encouraging individuals to ‘masquerade as strong-willed, confident, and in control’ (De Viggiani, 2012: 284). But learning to control emotions has deeper roots, reflecting time forged strategies of coping with affective states long before imprisonment. That is, male and female prisoners are well accustomed to withholding their feelings, having experienced other environments and institutions (orphanages, hostels, care-homes) that encourage this behaviour. These engrained aspects of impression management are infrequently acknowledged in the literature on masking. Though De Viggiani (2012) does briefly appeal to ‘pre-existing values and beliefs’, these remarks are somewhat cursory. While Toch (1992) notes a transactional relationship between prisoners’ personalities and the impacts of the institution, in this area of literature, effects are purported to be indigenous to the prison environment. By contrast, this article argues that prior experiences are also essential to this process, laying the foundations for emotional control among prisoner populations.

Third, masking is rarely explicitly connected to later prison behaviours. Because it is often seen in isolation, then, emotional suppression is sometimes described as adaptive. For example, Wright S, Crewe B and Hulley S (2017: 236) introduce the concept of suppression as ‘an important and high adaptive psychic defence mechanism’ that ‘enables the minimization of painful affects and realities’ in prison. Suppression, the authors continue, is a ‘deliberate and pro-active means’ to defend against some of the most pernicious challenges of prison life (236)—such as blocking out unwanted thoughts or ‘intrusive recollections’—and is therefore a ‘useful defensive means’ for coping (237). Further, when psychological resources fail, alcohol and narcotics constitute a form of ‘chemical oblivion’, ‘facilitating escape’ and ‘cheating temporality’ (237). The point here is not to deny the ‘protective potential’ of suppression in the short-term and the advantages of this approach in the ways the authors describe, but rather to explore the outcomes and efficacy of suppression on other forms of prison behaviour and the less positive, long-term implications, on health and well-being. As Van Der Kolk (2014) reflects:

Many adults who survive terrible experiences are caught in the same trap. Pushing away intense feelings can be highly adaptive in the short run. It may help you preserve your dignity and independence; it may help you maintain focus on critical tasks…the problems come later.

In sum, then, there are three issues in the literature that this article will address. First, the idea that suppression is as a product of rugged masculinity is considered as limiting. Second, masking has been described as a situational strategy, adopted due to the demands of prison culture, but little emphasis has been given to traumatic life experiences before prison that provide an important context to understand it more fully. Third, suppression is typically seen as an end in itself, or as a discrete behaviour, rather than being closely tied with other behaviours—making it appear more adaptive that it is.

Background and methods

The data presented in this article is drawn from my doctoral study of emotions in two prisons. The selection of a men’s and a women’s prison was based upon the relative neglect of gendered comparisons in prisons research (sometimes justified by the low ratio of female to male prisoners). The selection of a category-C men’s prison and closed category women’s establishment reflected a broader aim of this study to explore emotions among a general prisoner population as opposed to particular sub-set populations. That is to say, medium security establishments house a wide-range of prisoners under more flexible conditions than the high-security estate, and therefore provide a useful starting point. Further, both prisons have more stable populations that would be found in local prisons, where the prisoner population is far more transient. The two research sites differed on many levels. The men’s prison had a significantly larger prisoner population (around five times greater); serious problems with debt, violence and new psychological substances; a high turnover of prisoners; and was undergoing a substantial process of reform and administrative transition during the fieldwork period. Conversely, the women’s prison seemed to be quietly thriving, having a relatively stable prisoner population (most prisoners were serving long sentences), and a number of diverse, well-attended, programmes.

I undertook 50 interviews with 25 male and 25 female prisoners, and shadowed each prisoner before the longer sit-down discussions. A mixture of random and purposeful sampling was used to invite prisoners to participate in shadowing and interviews. Only one prisoner who was approached did not want to take part in the study. The logic was to try to collate a wide range of perspectives on prisoner emotion. Each prisoner who was shadowed was subsequently interviewed. The purposeful approach entailed spending time (usually three to four research days) in different areas of each prison (including the residential wings, dining room, classrooms and visits halls) and engaging in conversations with prisoners and staff. I initially sought out prison ‘listeners’,² or prisoners in other positions of responsibility (e.g. mental health mentors). The rationale here was that these prisoners often have a detailed understanding of the issues facing the overall prisoner population and especially some of the emotional challenges of imprisonment. The second half of the sample involved randomly selecting names from prisoner lists. There were some exclusion criteria in this sampling frame. First, in negotiation with staff members, any prisoners with serious mental health problems (individuals who posed a risk of causing harm to themselves or others) were omitted from this research. Similarly, any prisoners who were listed on prison observation lists (e.g. prisoners posing security threats and those with serious physical health problems) were excluded.

The shadowing protocol was agreed with prisoners a few days in advance (usually the week before). There was a preliminary discussion about which places would be deemed appropriate (and ethical) to observe prisoners in, and the best times to do so. While an important aim of this research was to capture the day-to-day rhythms of prisoners’ lives—I wanted to avoid seeing only the ‘highlights’—some parts of their timetable (therapy sessions and medical appointments, for example) were clearly off-limits. After agreeing on these details, I spent between four and eight hours with each participant in the hope of entering into their worlds for a brief period. This exercise led me to a diverse number of locations, including: beauty parlours, hair salons, gymnasiums, prison libraries, a rail track programme, art classes, business management, culinary classes, kitchens and gardening programmes. Overall, prisoners reflected positively on the shadowing experience (‘it was quite good because you’re really easy to talk to’ [Neil]) and indicated that they were relaxed during the process (‘I hardly noticed you were there’ [Amber]).

The interview format was semi-structured, and while it followed a schedule of questions it was not bound by them. That is, there were moments where interesting themes were pursued and time was spent asking follow-up questions. The freedom to move around the questions in a non-linear manner gave the interviews a relaxed, informal quality. The interview schedule itself focused on various aspects of emotions in prison including, emotions and privacy, losing control of emotions, and emotion management strategies. I was particularly interested in asking questions about the spaces where prisoners experienced particular emotions, and the intensity of their affective states. General questions were asked first (What kinds of emotions do you see across this prison?), before funnelling down to individual feelings (How do you manage your emotions in here?). Yet, before asking these types of questions, time was invested exploring participants’ pre-prison life histories. This began what felt like a humanizing process and helped to build rapport and trust. Further, this biographic line of questioning provided an indispensable context to help understand and attune to the behaviour and attitudes of prisoners in real time. That is, to some extent the forces that shaped their past were playing out in prison.

Researching emotions is not without its methodological limitations (see Laws and Crewe, 2016 for a discussion), and there are particular challenges to asking about emotions during interviews. For example, how well do people know their emotions? How possible is it to put emotions into words? However, this has been more challenging for other aspects of this research on emotions compared with suppression. That is, prisoners were relatively comfortable explaining the need to hold back feelings, and spoke openly about the principle drivers of it. The methods adopted in this study do not enable the exploration of unconscious, or pre-conscious, forms of ‘repression’: only conscious manifestations, that could be articulated verbally, have been considered here.

Troubled lives: Exploring the roots of suppression

Most of the study participants summarised that they had had ‘horrific childhood experiences’ (Haley) and related stories that involved multiple traumatic events. At times, prisoners explained that the chaotic nature of their stories made them hard to verbalise: ‘I couldn’t even put it in a box, it was one extreme to the other’ (Lacey). These accounts were united by the overall level of instability that was being conveyed. Put in a different way, while there was wide variance in their individual circumstances and life experiences, volatility consistently emerged as a motif. Often this was manifested in the form of turbulent living situations, which involved being taken from primary caregivers and placed in the care system or foster homes. In the former case, this provided a first exposure to institutional life. Similarly, many prisoners had unstable learning experiences, ranging from reallocation (‘I couldn’t cope with managing at school so they put me in another one’ – Wayne) to complete termination (‘Kicked out of school at 14, so education pretty much stopped’ – Katherine). These experiences may be symptoms rather than the root cause of the problems described—that is, something must have necessitated the removal from home and school environments. However, it was clear that these incidents were extremely destabilising and impactful life events that intensified existing problems: ‘When my mum put me into foster care that made me tenfold worse. I felt like I was pushed from pillar to post’ (Molly).

Often, destabilisation was triggered by parental neglect, or by ‘caregivers’ who abused drugs and instilled feelings of helplessness in their children (‘Both my parents were alkies [alcoholics] and my dad left before I could even recognize him’ – Neil). Some participants related specific instances or key turning points when they had become conscious of feeling unworthy. For Dean, this moment arose when he found out he had been adopted by his parents: ‘They [his family members] told me he’s not your real dad. You’re feeling unloved’. Paul described a particularly stark moment of childhood abandonment: ‘I came back from school one day and my mum had left with my twin brother. I was 15 and it completely burned my head out’. For others, these realisations were not moments of epiphany but rather more measured assessments of their lives. Irene explained that, having lived in over 50 foster homes and secure units, she never felt like ‘part of a family, I couldn’t attach myself to anything’. In all of these accounts, intense feelings of isolation, hurt and a longing for genuine connection were being communicated.

Some interviewees explained that their isolation was the product of unfathomable levels of childhood suffering and encounters with death:

My real dad killed himself, and my stepdad hung himself, and I found him when I was ten. And obviously my mum died. And I actually know that life is important, but sometimes you feel what is the point? (Stacey)

Such tragic events created profound grief and existential pain that lingered for many years: ‘Do I get haunted by it? Sometimes…I’ve got so many unanswered questions about my dad’s death’ (Blanche). Such circumstances made some prisoners cynical about whether they possessed the capacity to feel affection: ‘I loved once, and I saw him murdered in front of me, and every bit of life I had left in me went’ (Gabriella). Experiencing the death of a loved one signalled a turning point in the behaviours of some interviewees. Billy, for example, reflected on losing his father: ‘Ever since then, if anybody ever said anything that made me angry, I would just attack them. Before that I had never been violent in my life with anyone’.

But a rule that was learned early on by these participants was the ‘virtue’ of emotional suppression. Indeed, many were taught from a young age that emotions should be kept to oneself. One prisoner described a painfully restrained home environment that gave no opportunity to ventilate emotions in general: ‘Family very much was where is the elephant in the room? Let’s not discuss things and they’ll go away’ (Danielle). At times, specific emotions, especially sadness, were circumscribed: ‘I’ve never really been one to cry, my dad has always told me not to cry and suck it in’ (Mikey). Moreover, when difficult feelings actually did bubble to the surface, they were met with derision and rejection:

I was really upset and I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. My family would say “why are you crying, stop crying!” We just don’t talk about those things. I struggled a lot because I am the person who likes to talk, I do cry, even when I get angry I do cry. (Francesca)

Outpourings of emotion were met with indifference in the school environment too: ‘I blurted everything out about it [the story of being physically abused] in school but nothing actually happened’ (Liam). Over time, the study participants thereby learned that emotions were unwelcome intrusions in social life and that the consequences of sharing feelings were often negative. Because there was little viable outlet for their inner pain, participants could be left with a deep sense of affective dissonance, a process that van der Kolk (2014: 272) argues leads to either emotional ‘numbing’, ‘compensatory sensation seeking’ or some combination of both.

The way in which prisoners delivered these testimonies was also striking. That is, extremely difficult life experiences were shared with disarming openness and understatement (‘I had a bit of trouble, my work partner committed suicide’ – Alan). This may be indicative of both the frequency and ‘normalization’ of such stark events in the lives of these participants. Furthermore, there was a sense of generational circularity in these accounts. That is, prisoners spoke of living in a ‘vicious circle’ (Molly) and following in the footsteps of parental figures either to custody (‘My dad has been in prison since I was six’ – Ula) or addiction: ‘Remember, your life is a circle, some people go around and around and around. I am one of them. My mum was an alcoholic. I am an alcoholic too’ (Irene). Freddy, felt strongly that he was a ‘natural product’ of his life circumstances:

Obviously being from the environment I’m from people don’t always know how to get out of the situations they’re in…because of other people, I was forced into a certain situation where I had to defend myself. That brought the sentence on me. Circle of life I suppose. (Freddy)

It is notable that only one participant spoke in positive terms about his upbringing and could not point towards any traumatic incidents. To some degree, prisoners probably engaged in ‘re-biographing’ when sharing their stories: downplaying their own accountability while casting blame on external forces. Almost in anticipation of such a criticism, Mikey reflected: ‘I can’t blame my life. I’ve made the choices I’ve made’. That prisoners themselves often espoused a sense of personal responsibility places important limits on any neat deterministic interpretation of these accounts. Nonetheless, it is apparent that life events can, for many individuals, create traumatic fissures that at least partially constrain and mould their patterns of emotional response.

As will become clearer in the next section, difficulties sharing emotions were often perpetuated or amplified by the prison environment. On some occasions, prisoners explicitly outlined these connections. For example, while discussing the numbing of emotions in prison, Katherine stated: ‘I’m so used to doing it, that’s the way I grew up in my house; we don’t cry, we don’t show emotions, so being like that in here is normal for me’. Female prisoners explained that communicating emotion had a similar quality: for example, it was claimed that ‘just like outside’ (Molly) women were inclined to be more indirect; capable of being ‘friendly to your face and bitchy behind your back’ (Molly). In a different manner, those who suffered severe traumas before custody struggled to stave off re-experiencing these unpleasant memories and were periodically triggered by the environment. Chantal explained her attempts to manage her PTSD: ‘I keep reminding myself that this is now, this is now, you’re in the prison. I’m here. I’m grounded, I’m not there. It will literally take you back if you don’t know what you’re doing’.

Emotional suppression in prison

I bottle it up, bottle it up, bottle it up until it spills over and then I talk about what’s on the surface but never actually get in too deep. And then you skim the top away and then you go again. And then when it runs over, you do the same thing, but you never actually empty that bottle. (Chantal)

Most participants explained that, to some degree, they suppressed their emotions in prison. Prisoners employed a variety of imagery to explain how they ‘pushed down’ their feelings, including fluid containment (‘You’re almost like a kettle, you’re waiting to boil, but you’re suppressing everything’ – Danielle) and dissociative experiences: ‘[you] just do the zombie thing and go through the motions…rather than dealing with the actual emotions’ (Katherine). Essentially, then, suppression entailed locking off from or ‘bottling up’ (Alan) one’s ‘true emotions’ (Molly). A key part of this process was a feeling that one could only ‘touch briefly on the surface’ (Nia) of feelings without delving any deeper. As Wright et al. (2017) found, a small number of prisoners in this study explained that drugs could be used ‘as a blocker’ (Paul) to assist in this process, especially because they could numb sensitivity to powerful emotions (using opioids such as methadone, heroin and Subutex). However, as Paula explained, blunting one’s affect could have a number of undesirable consequences: ‘I realised when I came to prison that cannabis suppresses the emotions. And while you might want it to suppress bad emotions, it suppresses good emotions too’. Even without the addition of illicit substances, suppression often involved shutting off all affective states in prison—including joy and love. A number of participants openly acknowledged that there were negative side effects to suppressing feelings: ‘I know I’m not dealing with things by putting it to the back of my head’ (Mikey). Taken together, these perspectives beg the question as to why a strategy characterised by avoidance was so prevalent in both prisons?

A range of explanations are relevant here. First, the suppression of emotions was typically connected to specific gender expectations in prison, at least at first glance. Among male participants, this surfaced through the pride of being a ‘strong’ man, defined by self-reliance: ‘I’ve never asked for help before, and I’m not going to ask for it now…I’ve never wanted to put my family under strain’ (Alan). Further, the repercussions for not displaying such masculine ‘virtues’ could be severe in prison, including the risk of exploitation and public shaming from other prisoners (Jewkes, 2005). As Paulie explained: ‘If you start coming out [of your cell] crying and getting upset, people will call you a pussy’. Dean used animalistic imagery to summarize this atmosphere:

Say you’ve got a bunch of wildebeest, and you’ve got one outside on the edges talking about emotions and that. As men, normal people, some look at that as weakness. You’ve got a pack of wolves, all gathering for these fucking wildebeest here. They’re looking and they’re thinking that’s the weak one there. Every one of them will go for the weak one. That’s prison man. That’s why you keep it bottled up. That’s why violence and aggression is needed in these places. I don’t like using it myself, obviously I have done it. But violence and aggression is needed for you to be kept safe. (Dean)

It was noteworthy, then, that because withholding emotions was encouraged and open expression could be penalised, there was a double incentive to suppress. This is strongly redolent of broader accounts of masculinity introduced above, that describe an atmosphere of fierce dominance and a rejection of all emotions apart from anger (see de Viggiani, 2012, for example). Suppression was more obviously prevalent and somewhat more explicit in the men’s prison. Interestingly, however, similar accounts were shared by women in this study: according to Rebecka ‘people will kick you when you’re down’, and Pia further explained that ‘if you show your emotions, people think you’re weak…then people start bullying you and taking liberties’. That these narratives existed in the women’s prison too hint that they are not the sole province of ‘masculine’ conditioning, and are perhaps indicative of a more universal prisoner experience. This is not surprising given that women are subject to a range of ‘disciplinary regimes’ and ‘control mechanisms’ both within and without the prison (Howe, 1994: 129), which place limits on their personalities and emotional expressions (Carlen, 1983).

Second, a number of participants explained that there were negative institutional repercussions that reduced the incentive to share feelings. One of these concerned the perception that all behavioural displays were closely scrutinized. Prisoners felt that any aberration from the norm would result in ‘people writing reports on us’ and ‘if they [officers and staff] see you’re not stable then you’re not getting out’ (Pia, both quotations). This concern appeared to be more acutely felt by prisoners serving long sentences. While prisoners might desperately want support, institutional responses often left them feeling ‘under the spotlight’ (Danielle) and ostracised, rather than assisted. There are strong resonances here with Crewe’s (2011) concept of ‘tightness’, a form of penal power characterised by ‘the sense of not knowing which way to move’ (522), and a ‘highly adhesive’ (518) culture of report writing (and record keeping) that can leave prisoners feeling suffocated. Engaging with the ACCT (Assessment, Care in Custody and Teamwork) planning system—this process is used to identify and manage prisoners at risk of self-harm or suicide—was a pertinent example of this in the women’s prison. Going on an ACCT document was perceived as a hindrance and something that prisoners would come to ‘regret straightaway’ (Lacey). Danielle further explained that her resentment was rooted in the perceived inequity over the level of behavioural examination:

They think you can’t cope and that by showing emotions when you get into the world again you’re not going to be able to cope. But people out there cry, people out their show emotions, but in prison you seem not to be allowed to. (Danielle)

Going on an ACCT document could also stain a prisoner’s parole report years after an emotional episode had passed; lifers were particularly sensitive about not having such ‘baggage’ on their record. Reaching out for help in prison then could have long-term ramifications that were better off avoided. In a similar vein, Zoe explained that this degree of behavioural scrutiny also applied to expressions of anger:

I can’t voice my opinions to them [officers] because you’re not allowed. If you do decide to voice your opinion, you’re being aggressive. Because I’m not allowed to voice my opinion I keep it in, and then when I keep it in I get angry and I get frustrated…I just start screaming because I don’t know what to do. (Zoe)

Some participants felt that expressing emotional states such as joy and happiness was also penalised.

I was dancing around, proper dancing around the prison, letting other people listen to the music. The next day I’m doing an MDT [mandatory drug test]. I was like what is this for, they said “suspicion”. Suspicion of what? They said “well you’ve been very happy lately”. (Zoe)

Craig further explained that for a number of reasons ‘you can’t be happy, you can’t be shining in here’, because officers will ‘try and rock your world’. This could lead not only to more drugs tests but also an increased frequency of ‘pad spins’³ and frisk searches. In sum, then, the environmental conditions were shaping prisoners’ affective responses by making certain kinds of emotional expressions more or less permissible. Penalising emotions like anger, joy or sadness effectively tightened and funnelled the repertoire of ‘acceptable’ feelings that prisoners could display.

Positive emotions could also risk unsettling other prisoners. This was most apparent in relation to sentencing decisions. Expressing jubilance about an upcoming release date was disturbing for others serving long, or indeterminate, sentences: ‘Being too happy can have a negative effect on people…I have to downplay it’ (Ula). A final concern related not so much to being reprimanded by officers per se but rather that their response would be underwhelming. That is, prisoners felt that staff did not have the correct resources to assist with their problems or did not want to provide this assistance: ‘When you try to speak about it, you don’t get help’ (Elliot). For some, this was not simply a product of cynicism about officers’ capabilities. Prisoners with PTSD diagnoses had highly complex issues that officers had not been trained to support. Finally, there was discord about the social distance between prisoners and officers: ‘It’s hard to cry to someone who you don’t know’ (Pia). For all of these reasons, many prisoners felt they had no viable outlet for their emotions. When they tried to express them, it repeatedly brought them the wrong kind of attention and left them feeling trapped.

The third rationale for suppressing emotions—especially salient among the female prisoners—was a deep fear that one might deteriorate if feelings were explored: ‘It’s like the past and maybe I shouldn’t go there, because God knows what going to happen’ (Nia). Pia speculated that looking inside could induce a downward spiral of uncertainty about ‘what would happen next? Will it be anger? Will I want to commit suicide?’ Clearly, then, the prospect of creating irreversible states of suffering led to existential angst for these participants. A small number of prisoners perceived that even acknowledging pain and sadness was akin to admitting defeat: ‘What do you do? Just give up and sit in your room depressed?’ (Francesca). Prisoners who had relied on medication and drugs to deal with their emotions described an unsettling process of re-experiencing difficult affective states when going clean. Paula was haunted by reoccurring nightmares and ‘an overwhelming anxiety’ after giving up cannabis (which she claimed suppressed the recall of unpleasant memories), while Elliot explained that ‘it all came to a breakdown’ when he realised that drugs had helped to block out his emotions. Overall then, emotional suppression served a range of diverse and important protective functions for prisoners—including both external concerns (avoiding exploitation from other prisoners, keeping a clean record for parole, protection against behavioural scrutiny from officers) and internal factors (buffering fears of breakdown and self-capitulation). However, while some degree of ‘bottling up’ might be necessary, when relied upon extensively this strategy had pernicious side-effects, as discussed in the section that follows.

‘Pressurised explosions’ and losing control

If I’m feeling angry sometimes I just keep quiet. But then it’s like a pressure cooker and I let it out. (Tamara)

As suggested by Tamara’s commentary, Prisoners who regularly ‘locked off’ their feelings suffered from a kind of boomerang effect, which suggested that emotional suppression was part of a cycle—or oscillation—between avoiding emotions and feeling overwhelmed by them. This was readily acknowledged by some participants: ‘I am an emotional person, but trying to hide your feelings all the time, it does make it worse and I can get quite angry’ (Rebecka). Zoe further explained:

I try my best, but it accumulates and builds up and builds up. I just keep suppressing my feelings and suppressing my feelings, that’s me, I suppress my feeling so much that when it does come out it’s like people say “we’ve never seen you like this before!” (Zoe)

Unlike Zoe, not all participants lucidly identified a link between their behaviours. However, almost all of those who blocked their emotions regularly could articulate times when they had been suddenly overcome with rage or sadness: suppressed emotions returned in different forms. These episodes were defined by the following features. First, there was a loss of temporal agency in these moments (‘It all comes out at the wrong times’ – Lacey) and prisoners felt that their behaviours were ‘very unpredictable’ (Molly). Second, these outbursts occurred in an altered state of awareness that felt alien. This included feeling dissociated from one’s mind (‘It wasn’t a conscious thing that I did’ – Jerry), physiological reactions (‘I felt like I was betraying myself by crying. Normally I don’t cry for anything’ – Amber), or a complete separation from the body itself (‘My head went’ – Zak). This is highly concordant with clinical descriptions of trauma re-enactments which are often characterised by detachment, the reappearance of old behaviours in ‘disguised form’, and a ‘feeling of involuntariness’ (Herman, 1992: 40–41). Third, losing control over emotions could lead to extreme outcomes that were described as ‘nervous breakdowns’ (Bernie) or ‘meltdowns’ where one completely ‘lost the plot’ (Stacey, both quotations). One way this manifested itself was through explosive confrontations with officers:

Listen, I went ballistic, I went crazy, and I open the door and I said ‘how dare you, are you fucking crazy? Do I look like a dog?’ I said ‘this is madness, do I look like a dog? You don’t even do that to a child that is rude!’ (Zoe)

For some, such explosions were channelled inwards through suicide attempts or extreme self-harm: ‘I tried to light myself on fire’ (Gabriella). It is worth reiterating that the onset of these behaviours was, to some degree, shaped and intensified by institutional factors.⁴ Liebling (2001: 35) notes that the ‘helpless and sometimes angry reaction of staff’ to self-harm and suicide incidents can lead to further feelings of social isolation. For current purposes, such reactions serve to perpetuate emotional suppression by ratcheting up the pressure on prisoners to dull their affective states, or only display those feelings that are institutionally acceptable.

Discussion: Cycles of pain and trauma

Many of these prisoners were stuck in a toxic cycle of suppression and explosion—stifling their emotions entirely or being completely overpowered by them. De Zulueta (1993: 169) explains this as a typical ‘biphasic response’ brought on by traumatic experiences, involving ‘numbness or a reduced responsiveness to the outside world’ alternating with ‘the reliving of the traumatic events’. That is, according to the author, victims of unresolved trauma oscillate between these two phases. This cycle of extremes is strongly redolent of Maté’s (2003) argument that ‘repression and discharge are two sides of the same coin’. Both represent fear and anxiety, and for that reason, both trigger physiological stress responses’ (272). Maté further argues that because both processes put the body under such acute stress, they are ‘examples of the abnormal release of emotions that is at the root of disease’ (270). This sense of oscillation is further described by Herman (1992: 47) who notes a fluctuation ‘between floods of intense, overwhelming feeling and arid states of no feelings at all, between irritable, impulsive action and complete inhibition of action’. The main contention of this article is that it is important to see emotional suppression and discharge in totality, as the sum of both extremes.

While it is beyond the scope of this article to consider the impacts of emotional stress and long-term health outcomes in detail, the participants in this study who were caught in this cycle did appear to be more unsettled, both physiologically and psychologically, than others. Further, there was evidence that losing control often led to short-term injuries, including skin lacerations, muscle tears and bone fractures. These injuries were typically sustained through self-harm,⁵ punching walls, engaging in fights, or being restrained by officers. By way of contrast, there was some sentiment that losing control, or at least pretending to do so, was an effective means of achieving goals in prison. That is, in an environment where staff resources were limited and needs could easily be overlooked, shouting loudly and acting out could at least provide some guarantee of being dealt with. In some respects, the institutional climate could reinforce this, often destructive, response strategy. A primary aim of this article, then, is to connect, and integrate, sets of prisoner behaviours that have often been treated as discrete events. To see numbing and discharge as two sides of the same problem, having deep roots in traumatic experiences prior to prison.

This integration work signals a re-orientation in the approach to suppression, violence and aggression in prison environments that risks overemphasising rugged masculinity. By squaring the debate on prisoner masculinity, the roots that underlie these behaviours can be missed. As van der Kolk (2014: 282) notes:

…rage and withdrawal are only facets of a whole range of desperate attempts at survival…Most of the men I evaluated with regard to their childhood molestation…took anabolic steroids and spent an inordinate amount of time in the gym pumping iron. These compulsive bodybuilders lived in a masculine culture of sweat, football, and beer, where weakness and fear were carefully concealed. Only after they felt safe with me did I meet the terrified kids inside.

Seen in this light, assertive masculinity is more of an active ‘response’ or solution to pain, rather than the source of the problem per se. This is not to deny that masculine prison cultures perpetuate a code of suppression, only that this is not the origin of this strategy. This contention appears to be corroborated, in part, by the narratives presented here from female prisoners, and the high prevalence of emotional suppression among them. Less has been said here about the ways in which men and women might withhold for different reasons. It was apparent, though, that women more than men, feared exploring their emotions would lead to a destructive cycle of rumination that could overwhelm them.

From a different perspective, there is a danger that by focusing on emotion suppression as a situational response to environmental pressures, it will be understood as adaptive. After all, in the short term, it does appear that withholding vulnerabilities—and emotions that might signal ‘weakness’—serves to keep prisoners safe. However, as Herman (1992: 45) explains:

Although dissociative alterations in consciousness, or even intoxication, may be adaptive at the moment of total helplessness, they become maladaptive once the danger is past. Because these altered states keep the traumatic experience walled off from ordinary consciousness, they prevent the integration necessary for healing.

Creating space, both formally and informally, for talk and therapeutic conversations helps prisoners explore buried pain, heal emotional wounds, and process ‘warring’ impulses inside. Enabling Environments, Therapeutic Communities (TCs) and Psychologically Informed Planned Environments (PIPEs) set an intention towards achieving this. A recent study of a quietly thriving prison in the UK (HMP Warren Hill) reveals the benefits of such forms of therapeutic engagement in practice (Liebling, Laws, Liebling et al., forthcoming). However, only a small proportion of prisoners in this research encountered meaningful and consistent therapeutic engagement. Further, the implementation of clinical interventions is no guarantee of their quality and there is wide variation between individual programmes, which are sometimes experienced by prisoners as alienating rather than integrating see Laursen and Laws, 2017).

The structure of the findings above attempts to make an explicit connection between withholding emotions and their subsequent discharge. But the prior life experiences of prisoners in this study laid the foundation for this cycle. Again, Herman (1992: 37) makes clear that: ‘Long after the danger is past, traumatized people relive the event as though it was continually recurring in the present’ and further, that these individuals often ‘find themselves re-enacting some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form, without realizing what they are doing’ (40). Freud (1914) named this the ‘repetition compulsion’, and the title of this article is a further appeal to Freud’s ‘return of the repressed’. The implication here is that the appearance of violence in prison is only partially located in environmental triggers, while also being a result of a repetitive pattern of responses to internalised pain. Though most participants did not have a formal trauma diagnosis (though some did), they clearly harboured unresolved emotional pain. But this process is neither linear, nor it is without interpretive complexity. Difficult questions remain about how exactly to measure or disentangle the amount of emotional suppression that is imported into prison versus suppression caused by the prison environment. As Crewe (2009: 369) comments: ‘Prison culture combines imported and institutional variables. What is less clear is how that combine in practice.’ But by foregrounding prisoners’ exposure to trauma and other experiences of painful disconnection, the value of ‘deep talk’, relational attunement, and therapeutic connectivity emerge as important themes for empirical examination. Prison environments can perpetuate and amplify existing cycles of repression and discharge. Indeed, a number of studies (Carlen, 1998; Crewe, 2009; Easteal, 2001; Kruttschnitt and Gartner, 2005 inter alia) highlight how imprisonment reflects pre-prison life experiences, and that because ‘nothing has occurred to break the cycle…[often prisoners] leave with the unhealed wounds that have festered since childhood’ (Easteal, 2001: 109). The point here is that future discussions of ‘fronting’, ‘masking’ and emotional control can be usefully developed in dialogue with these existing arguments. That is, to align situational analysis with a wider ‘life-course’ approach and add in a sometimes missing layer of ‘biological depth’ to these debates.

Conclusion

Steve Gross used to run the play program at the Trauma Center [in Brookline, Massachusetts]. Steve often walked around the clinic with a brightly colored beach ball, and when he saw angry or frozen kids in the waiting room, he would flash them a big smile. The kids rarely responded. Then, a little later, he would return and “accidentally” drop his ball close to where a kid was sitting. As Steve leaned over to pick it up, he’d nudge it gently toward the kid, who’d usually give it a half-hearted push in return. Gradually Steve got a back-and-forth going, and before long you’d see smiles on both faces…From simple, rhythmically attuned movements, Steve had created a small, safe place where the social-engagement system could begin to reemerge. (Van Der Kolk, 2014: 85)

Some prison environments implement this kind of relational attunement: the therapeutic community in the women’s prison was successfully teaching prisoners to socially engage and explore unresolved conflicts, and the Older Men’s library in the men’s prison was like an informal therapeutic zone. These areas had the potential to be highly transformational for prisoners. However, these areas felt ‘exceptional’ rather than normalised, and many prisoners in the study had no meaningful outlet to explore their emotions. Importantly, Van der Kolk (2014: 348) explains that: ‘Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people’. Prior life experiences can be perpetuated by prison environments which spotlight, rather than support prisoners on the pathway to change. The aim of this article has been to try and synthesize behaviours that have often been treated discretely: to view the ebb and the flow of numbing and violence, suppression and discharge, in their totality. Alan Watts colourfully explains the sometimes misguided tendency to narrow the causal gaze, and prioritise parts over the whole in this manner.

Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns around and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable…Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause and even tail, which is the head’s effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together; they are all one cat. (Watts, 2011: 31)

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful responses to this article.

Notes

Ben Laws is a member of the Prisons Research Centre, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

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