Free space in the processes of action research

Processes

The purpose of this article is to highlight the notion of free space within action research. We wish to do so partly through a theoretical discussion, and partly through an action research project carried out together with inmates from a secured prison located in Vridsløselille, Denmark. The question we wish to discuss is simple but central: is it possible to create free space in a prison?

Prison inmates are an example of a social group that has so many limitations on their possible actions that one has to ask whether it makes sense to establish an action research project or whether it simply does not meet the minimum requirements necessary for action research. The implication here is that if action research can be carried out in this context, it can be carried out in many others (exceptions might include cases of severe mental retardation). The case is also used to discuss whether highly totalitarian institutions challenge methods of action research. Thus the aim of this article is to emphasize the emancipatory possibilities of action research in prisons and other totalizing settings through the use of critical utopian action research (CUAR).

Our theoretical discussion aims to pin down the concept of free space and its implications for the creation of knowledge in democratic and dialogical processes. Here we wish, among other things, to identify how free space can be understood when, at the same time, one believes, as does Foucault, that there is nothing outside the realm of power. It will be underlined that free space should be understood as a democratic process or procedural norm rather than as an absolute demand for the neutralization of power within a field. As a democratic norm of how social learning processes can be developed and advanced, free space becomes a quality within a learning space, which is created by the methods of action research.

The prison case (Bladt, 2009) will be central to the article, because here the question of everyday life or the changeability and the freedom of action within the organization are put to the test. Here most of all, existing cultures and institutional frameworks have to be able to open up to the unfinished, to let variations for action opportunities remain open (Mathiesen, 1971). In our case study, it shows that, for example, the participants’ wishes and visions take the form by having a regular everyday life. Action proposals vary between giving the inmates ‘free’ options in producing their own relations or ‘inmate culture’ on the one hand, and demanding and entering into negotiations with a totalitarian system/management on the other. The conclusion drawn from the prison case makes clear the importance of permanently working with a notion of free space which contains a utopian level that breaks free of reality and opens up a dream. Within that dream it is possible to symbolically articulate human values, values that would in other cases be excluded as unrealistic within the given power relations that characterize everyday life in prison. The utopian level helps us create new alternative realities.

Action research in a prison

In Denmark there is an ongoing debate about the punishment and prison system. It is no secret that the way we punish and imprison people today is not resulting in less crime, and it is certainly not resulting in the rehabilitation of the prisoners. The relapse figures shows that hardly any ex-prisoners are becoming ‘normal’, crime-free citizens after their sentence. Most of them actually commit new crimes and end up in prison again. This situation is both expensive for society and society is not becoming safer (Christie, 2004, 2006; Holstein, 1985; Koudhal, 2006, 2007; Mathiesen, 2007). This discussion is not limited to the Danish context, but can be found across the world. In the United States, for example, critics argue that the prison system is ‘out of control’. Over the last 20–30 years, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450 percent, but at the same time the crime rate has been falling steadily. Thus Ruth W. Gilmore criticizes a system ‘in which punishment has become as industrialized as making cars, clothes ore missiles’ (2007, p. 2). From a scientific point of view it is interesting that social science is a part of this debate, and stresses that the prison and punishment system is not working in terms of achieving a safer society nor in terms of rehabilitating inmates. Whilst the conclusion is clear, social science has not produced any guidelines on how to change the situation.

We (the research team and the authors of this article ¹ ) were discussing this when the debate arose again in the late summer of 2007. Our question was would it be possible to contribute to a viable alternative to the dominant models of social science in this field by undertaking an action research project in a Danish prison? Could such an action research approach contribute to more sustainable solutions and alternatives to the present situation? Could the work using ‘free space’ enable a process of change within a prison system?

As we both were working within the CUAR tradition of action research this, of course, became our approach. CUAR is an action research tradition, which was developed and is widespread in Northern Europe. And even though CUAR is strongly influenced by the Frankfurt School, as are other action research traditions in the North, it reads the Frankfurt School differently as it is inspired by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Bloch as well as the second generation, Negt and Becker-Schmidt. The impact of the inspiration of the ‘old’ Frankfurt School is that both a critical and a utopian perspective are emphasized much more decisively than is the case by Habermas and his followers that have opened up the Frankfurt tradition to a basically more affirmative position (on CUAR, see Drewes-Nielsen, 2006; Elle, 2006; Husted & Tofteng, 2006; Nielsen & Nielsen, 2006).

CUAR is based on an assumption that everyday life often lacks space for the continuous and autonomous development of citizens’ social and cultural lives. The result is an everyday life culture with only limited possibilities for individual and social transformations. This, on the other hand, emphasizes a unique and more emancipatory agenda of CUAR; emancipation is a key word which is why the notion of free space occupies a central role in the CUAR tradition. CUAR intends to create free spaces where people can challenge their everyday conditions in a radical way. The utopian level plays an important role here; by introducing a utopian level it becomes possible to create alternative realities and it becomes possible to emancipate and transcend the boundaries of social life. The question asked when working with the utopian level is not how can we live but how do we wish to live. In this sense, the CUAR tradition is critical in its view of the world, as it has developed, but not the capabilities of citizens and their dreams. This underlines the dialectic point that the CUAR tradition always uses as a starting point for practical work and in academic analyses.

Thus the research project was an attempt to initiate new dynamics in a prison system. The present `modern prison’ system has failed in terms of managing inmates’ rehabilitation, that is, preparation and integration within society as a crime-free person. Time and time again, it has been found both by critical social scientists (see Christie, 2004, 2006; Mathiesen, 2007), and by the prison world’s own reports (see Holstein, 1985; Koudhal, 2006, 2007) that the prison system is far from managing to help inmates with their personal development. Rather it has been shown many times in recent decades that prisons dismantle inmates. Prison punishment impacts individuals, with implications that go far beyond the prison walls and affects inmates after they have been released. In other words, punishment casts long shadows (Harris, 2012; Katzenstein & Shanley, 2008).

Rehabilitation according to several experts is a total failure (Christie, 2004, 2006; Mathiesen, 2007). Using a CUAR approach, the project aimed to examine the potential for change in relation to initiatives aimed at rehabilitation. The project’s agenda was to try new methods and new participation strategies in the investigation of the possibilities of change. As such, the purpose was to focus on a different agenda than the one currently present in Danish prisons. The inmates, who had experience of the prison system, were to carry out this agenda. We assumed that since it is the inmates that are serving the punishment, inhabit and live in the prison and since they are the ones being rehabilitated, it must be their thoughts, visions and dreams that are important and the essential factors when the development and change of the prison system in Denmark is to be challenged. Nevertheless, the ambition seemed difficult if not impossible. Is it possible to create free space in a prison? And is it even possible to work with empowerment within a prison system? The question is whether a life in totalizing dependency of the prison institution can be opened up towards what we, in theoretical terms, call a free space. The project took place in a secured prison and the frames a secured prison presents an everyday life which is in sharp contrast to the establishment of free space. The shape and function of the secured prison limits the inmates’ movement physically, socially and psychologically in such a way that there is no room left for the inmates’ autonomy as self-managed individuals. Security is the main issue for all activity within the prison.

Inmates lead an everyday life, which is thoroughly supervised, sanctioned and controlled by others. The content is limited and all activities happen solely on the premises of the institution. In line with Ervin Goffman’s analysis of asylums, it can be argued that the total institution functions as the total institution itself. Activities and structures function on the premises of the institution. Routines are determined from above and are sustained through a system of formal rules practiced by a controlling staff. The activities, the system and the formal rules are incorporated into a single rational plan, which certainly meets the official goals of the institution (Goffman, 1967). The commencement of the total institution becomes ‘(. . .) handling many people’s needs through a bureaucratic organization of a large group of humans, no matter whether this socio-organizational method in this case is necessary or even effective’ (Goffman, 1967, pp. 13–14). Goffman’s analyses can be elaborated with some comments about the known weaknesses of totalitarian systems. Totalitarian systems are also fragile systems maintained by brute force and threatened by the slightest disorder. Thus the totalitarian system is a great system for creating negative, oppositional resistance.

All human activity within the prison happens at set times following the same routine. The day starts every day at 07.00 a.m. with a knock on the door of the approximately 12 m² cells, which are the homes of the inmates. Good morning is shouted and the door is unlocked from the outside. Now the inmates have an hour to get up, eat breakfast, get ready for the day, and maybe take a shower in one of the two showers available for the 22 inmates that live on the ward. At 8 a.m. the optional employment activities begin. To maintain order and safety the inmates are let out – not out of the prison but out of their rooms and blocks – to undertake the employment activities in three groups. At 8.00, 8.05, and 8.10 a.m. the inmates from the three respective groups are to stand in the center, the epicenter of the prison, which leads one’s thoughts back to the panopticon. Here the inmates are to stand outside their block and wait until the guards come and lead them to the employment sections. The prison official leads the inmates through numerous locked doors, locked fences and metal detectors. With them, on this trip, they carry their belongings, for example schoolbooks and folders, in special bags made from see-through plastic. The inmates stay in the employment sections until 2.30 p.m. where they, for security reasons, are led back in three groups, in the same manner as they were being let out. At 9.30 p.m. the inmates have to be in their cells and the door is locked for the night.

The inmates have very few activities in their ‘spare time’. Whether the inmates can have visits from family and friends, whether they can get any yard time or time in the fitness room depends on the institution. All activity is only possible if it leaves room for what is the essential function of the prison – to maintain order and security. The inmates are constantly subject to the ‘mercy’ of the institution and staff who persistently monitor all activity. An inmate is lucky if he gets to check his e-mails in connection to his independent study and he is even luckier if he gets to push the buttons on the keyboard himself during the process (Bladt, 2009; Bladt & Larsen, 2008).

The inmates, participating in this research process, suffered immensely under the totalizing conditions of the prison and they described how they became dismantled and broken-down as human beings, socially and mentally. They are alarmingly aware that their chances of getting out of prison and in time to lead a life free of crime, a ‘normal’ life, are incredibly small. They explain how they are broken down as human beings: ‘When you’ve lost it all [family, friends, etc.] you can settle down and become that psychopath who you’ve become’ (Bladt, 2009, p. 77) and after a few years in prison ‘you are already done’ (Bladt, 2009, p. 12). They formulate the mechanisms at random: ‘You mind your own business and become apathetic’; ‘I stop caring’; ‘We become odd characters’; ‘You are forced to become a type’; ‘We become zombies’; ‘You are not allowed to be happy’; ‘You are being destroyed’; ‘You get prison-damaged’; ‘You are supposed to break’ (Bladt, 2009, p. 77). The frames that the prison sets for the inmates are universally present in their destructive function. The conditions are an attack on the status of the individual as an acting person and on his or her grown-up identity. There is a complete lack of personal action-economy and the inmates are robbed of the opportunity to balance needs and wishes in a personal and effective way (Bladt, 2009; Bladt & Larsen, 2008; Goffman, 1967).

We started here, and it was in these conditions and frames we wished to create free space and an action research that could further change everyday lives and life perspectives.

The notion of free space in action research

In order to bring the debate about free space in prison to the level of a more general debate about what free space means within action research, we wish to use the following to reflect on what it means for us in the CUAR tradition to say that ‘action research should create free space’ as part of the development of knowledge and change. We are aware that the notion of free space is used in other traditions within AR, but here we invite you in to understand the thinking within our tradition and our inspirations and threads back from the AR history.

Ever since Kurt Lewin (1946) there has been an often unspoken premise within action research that learning processes in action learning presuppose a minimum of free space both for the participants as well as for the researchers. The participants in an action research project should, on the one hand, be given collective protection by the researcher, so that their change-orientated participation does not result in any complications, and on other hand the whole point of the action research process is that the participants, together with the researcher, go into the organization, institution or out into society with suggestions concerning challenges and changes of the existing reality. This looks like a paradox – and for many outside the action research world this paradox is the main argument against action research. Among others, Habermas argues that the ability to understand and theorize on the existing realities is reduced if one is at the same time involved in instrumental processes of change (Habermas, 1981).

Lewin’s experimental model for solving the paradox was the establishment of a kind of laboratory, where the participants are safeguarded from concrete pressure from the usual surroundings. This refuge was to ensure that the participants could work out their suggestions and ideas for change and safely do training for a new practice. Both through practical learning processes and through support from the researchers, the participants prepared themselves to step out into the real world with their united suggestions for change, which often consisted of more egalitarian and democratic organizational behavior. As such there is no doubt that Lewin’s action research implies a free space, and that he sees it as the role of the researcher to establish and protect this free space while the action research project lasts. Within classic action research, the laboratory metaphor is coupled with the experiment. That research utilizes experiments is also an aspect of free space. When Lewin and his successors define action research as experimental they also underline that they need protection from the real world, for a while, in order to test whether the new practice and knowledge is superior to the old. Lewin believes that the resistance to changes will stop if it is. Lewin invented his form of action research on the belief that society is basically consensual where these types of innovations in themselves are not controversial. It is the naivety of this consensus premise that has created problems for experimental work within action research (Nielsen & Svensson, 2006). There are multiple examples that knowledge gained from an experimental democratic practice developed in experimental arena meets resistance once one has stepped out from the laboratory, that is, no longer being protected by a free space. Stronger forces oppose change because they fear losing control – even if these changes imply elements of shared advantages.

The power that ruins the Lewinian laboratory is best articulated through a Foucauldian perspective which sees that there is both a hegemonic power as well as a bio-power at stake. An example of hegemonic power (i.e. direct intervention which by open power opposes a change), which makes it difficult for the process of action research established within a free space to operate outside it, is the English coalmine-owners who in the 1950s refused to recognize the experimentally developed briefs for those work environment solutions which arose from the coalmine workers’ concrete knowledge and creativity. The employers refused collaboration, arguing that these work environment solutions would grant the workers too much influence over their work (see van Beinum, 1996). An example of bio-power, that is, power that exists in all relations without it necessarily being exercised through suppression, can be seen from Thorsrud and Emery’s Norwegian collaborative experiment of the 1960s (Thorsrud & Emery, 1970). Here action research-based workshops experimentally developed a new organizational model characterized by autonomous groups. In the trial period the results were positive, but the autonomous groups slowly eroded at those companies where they were developed. They disappeared because of those informal power structures within a company that favor notions of flexibility and readjustment, and as such they discursively weaken autonomous groups and the workers’ power that lay therein (Gustavsen, 1992).

As a result of these findings, action researchers start redefining and reformulating the term ‘free space’. These reformulations have a certain amount of influence on today’s action research theory and methodological discussions. In the beginning the reformulation of the experimental free space, as it was reformulated in the CUAR tradition, was not particularly embedded in international action research. To a greater extent CUAR drew on a culture-radical futurology with strong connections to critical theory. Likewise in the 1980s, the futurologist Robert Jungk developed an action research approach in which future creating workshops play a central role in the development of social experiments such as societal strategies of change. Jungk (1988) considered social experiments as being necessary to win a broad backing for those radical reforms set to limit the centralistic and bureaucratic structures of society. Free space was, for Jungk, not so much a space for action learning as it was an arena where grassroots and regular citizens could practice formulating their wishes and dreams (utopias) for a long-term future horizon. Jungk did not primarily emphasize learning processes aimed at change, but rather wished to develop subjective cultural orientations and emotions (Jungk & Müllert, 1984). In other words, free space is in this understanding primarily an arena that should enable participants to take part openly and in public and seek to challenge and criticize existing power structures. It is an arena to liberate their subjectivity from bio-power and hegemony. Without this free space, the participants in processes of change become easy victims for those knowledge/power-discourses which increasingly embrace everyday life, and those hegemonic structures that with discourses discipline everyday life.

Jungk’s approach is connected to, and inspired by, those parts of critical theory that also accentuate how everyday life subjectivity is increasingly pervaded by management concepts and language rooted in abstract organizational systems (zur Lippe, 1988). However, as Rudolf zur Lippe (1987) sees it, there are opportunities to break with such abstractions in what he calls sensory awareness (Sinnenbewustsein). Sensory awareness is based on the subject’s aesthetic experiences of everyday life and these contain in itself opportunities to develop an inner subjectivity together with other people’s aesthetic experiences of everyday life. It is, in other words, to a greater extent the body and the bodily experiences that are pulled forth as the starting point for reflection and relations to others, more than the purely linguistic symbols of relations and action coordination. ²

Free space, as it unfolds in CUAR should ensure that there arises within the participants an inner subjective context as a basis for action-oriented dialogues regarding change. The inner context does not only evolve individually, but in associative exchanges with others who share their everyday life. Actions that correspond with inner subjective learning processes, will not be fragmented and reproduce. This, in line with Goffman, can be seen as the totalitarian institution’s incoherent identity constructions that totally lack space for processing the inner subjective needs. Such actions have on the contrary, the potential emancipatory force which is needed to overcome the hegemonic structures that discipline everyday life.

If you imagined it in a utopian manner

The project ‘Education and employment whilst serving a sentence: Good rehabilitation in Vridsløselille State prison’ began in October 2007. Vridsløselille State prison is a secured prison, which means that the prison is constantly locked and that there are very strict rules concerning prisoners’ whereabouts. The prison mainly includes inmates serving long sentences – eight years to life (life in Denmark is in practice between 16 and 30 years). Prisoners have usually committed the following types of crime: intentional homicide, intentional violence in general, other bodily harm crime, serious drug offenses, rape (including attempts), other sex offenses, robbery, property offenses, criminal offences, and special law violations. All inmates are men over 23 years. There are about 200 inmates (Engbo & Secher, 2008).

The project was initiated by the research team as we, highly unusually ‘fought’ our way into the prison, through bureaucratic structures and, in the end, were allowed to contact the inmate union in the prison, which thought the project idea was interesting, and mediated our request for participants to all the inmates in the prison.

The workgroup consisted of two female researchers who facilitated the project and 25 inmates from different sections and who undertook different jobs within the prison. The participating group of inmates worked and participated – with some dropping out along the way – on the project until June 2009. During the two years in which the project lasted, 37 activities and meetings were held and the group of inmates participated in most of them.

It was not an easy task and it was not an ambition that could be straightforwardly honored. From the beginning we meet numerous challenges, difficulties and paradoxes, which we had to handle along the way. Of course there were all the logistical challenges: in which physical setting is it most suitable to try to create the free space? What kind of catering could we offer the inmates, when all cutlery, knifes, glasses and so on, either were locked away or fixed to the walls. And so on.

Also according to the attempt to create a free space where inner subjective learning processes and to set free the emancipatory possibilities, we, not unexpectedly, met challenges. During the early project period it became clear that the logic and function of the prison keeps the inmates in a ‘monorole’: when serving their sentence they are only being conceived of as prisoners in a negative way. All the different roles that an individual normally possesses disappear in prison. If the ambition of the action research project was to be maintained, we had to install the opposite logic. Within the free space the prisoners were given room to be ‘whole people’. That means that we tried to offer the inmates other roles than the ‘prisoner-role’. We insisted on taking a stand against the general suspicious attitude – the brutalization and distrust – inmates often met in and through the prison system. We maintained that the wishes and utopian horizons the inmates formulated are an expression for, and stems from, other aspects of the inmates than ‘the criminal side’. We insisted that a prisoner is also a worried dad who wishes access to a phone and the Internet to be able to contact his children and not a criminal who wishes to maintain criminal company via the Internet.

Thus it is pointed out that the inmates are human beings with many different facets, competences and knowledge, that the inmates are authoritative human beings, whose knowledge and experience can contribute positively to the development of the institutional praxis of the prison institution. Socially situated roles that people are expected to occupy are challenged. The free space in our action research project intended to break with the societally created discourses about attributes and qualities ascribed to the inmates. In that way, the free space in this particular case can also be characterized as a way of implementing movement and creating counter-images for stigmatization and categorization (Bladt, 2009). Through the free space we implemented a different logic than the normal logic of the prison system. This was a logic that set the system’s normal power and structure on ‘standby’ (Bladt, 2009).

The privileged arena within this action research project was the future-creating workshop. And all the meetings and activities held arise from the future-creating workshop method. The future-creating workshop is built around three phases: a critique phase, a utopian phase and a realization phase. Workshop momentum is controlled by a few rules to ensure the movement of mind and imagination and to ensure a democratic space. Each phase has its rules and unilateral entirety (Jungk & Müllert, 1984). In the future-creating workshop participants are encouraged to express one-sided criticism and discomfort and to express how they wish to live. The expressions are not only discourses and argumentations but also use body language and associative reflections that break with dominating discourses in everyday life. This constitution underlies the making of the inner subjective context within which sensory awareness can be unfolded.

Concretely, the group of inmates and researchers met approximately once every third week in the prison church. ³ Here the group worked with the creation of alternative developments in accordance with the theme of the project ‘Education and employment whilst serving a sentence: Good rehabilitation in Vridsløselille State prison’. The methodological framework was the future-creating workshop: through discussion and criticism of the present, through thematizing the utopian level – ‘how do we wish the situation to be?’; through concrete work with the possible realization of the ideas the alternatives took form. The inmates created and worked with four ideas that they developed during the two years. The four ideas were: a inmate-based union-like organization within the prison; a new way of making the individual rehabilitation plans; the making of a communication system so that the inmates could gain more contact with ‘the outside world’; and the vision of changing the societal role of the prison.

Parallel with this process, the researchers also met a group of prison officials, partly to discuss the same issues with them and partly to involve them in the status of the research project with the inmates. Of course these meetings played a very important role according to the implementation of the ideas that arose from the project. When the ideas had a deliberate content and form, the researchers invited prison officials and different experts to a meeting with the inmates and the researchers. At these meetings, two things happened: first, the ideas were developed further; second, new alliances were made, as the prison officials and the experts (surprisingly) more or less agreed to almost everything the inmates developed, inmates, experts and prison officials joined in working groups together to try to realize the ideas for development. This methodological ‘system’ or circle was carried out several times during the research process.

During the future-workshop (Figure 1), the inmates put forward a reform-eager innovation of the prison institution. The inmates formulated utopian wishes displayed as alternatives to the prison as an institution. These alternatives showed a prison oriented towards more openness (not to be confused with an open prison). Contact with family, friends and society, as a whole, should be made possible and maintained, such that the inmate does not lose their close relations and ‘is put outside the door’; even if one is ‘the baddest of the bad’ one has a right and duty to try and develop oneself. The prison as an arena for interpersonal contact and building relationships, where human beings from different sides of society meet and break down prejudice was also formulated; in the so called Multi-arena it should be possible to maintain relations but also make new ones. The idea is that the Multi-arena is both open from within the prison, but at the same time it has an entrance where people from the outside can come in. In the Multi-arena, it should be possible for the inmates as well as the rest of the population to gather around fun, cultural and innovative activities. In the inmates’ utopias a whole new and different prison arose, as did a new and radically different way of thinking about prison (Bladt, 2009). OPEN IN VIEWER

However, as the process progressed, the inmates’ perspectives were turned inwards towards the system. The inmates started turning their eyes away from reform-eager thoughts about a new prison structure. Instead, they concentrated on the existing institution, prison structure and prison praxis. The inmates became increasingly concerned with their concrete existing relationships in the prison and its everyday praxis. The work focused more on an expansion of opportunities for the inmates under the already given framework. The inmates’ work ended up being critiques and reactions to the unreasonable conditions they experience now, instead of being thoughts on creating a totally different prison (Bladt, 2009).

‘Action plan with action’ became an initiative led by the inmates’ workgroup. Here they formulated a new way of thinking, namely the inmates’ personal rehabilitation plan, a plan that the social worker makes for each inmate. The inmates composed a comprehensive and concrete method concerning how they thought these plans and connected goals and subsidiary goals should be set up and motivate the inmates to develop whilst serving their sentences. In this connection a working group produced a plan for the institutional framework for enrolment in the prison. They formulated how the first three months of the serving of a sentence in prison should be. In this ‘intro course’ – as they named it – they incorporated household courses, work testing and education guidance. It was this idea that was adopted by the system. In other words, the inmates in cooperation with employees and management in prison established a new structure of reception. When we left the project, this arrangement was a part of the praxis of the prison institution. For the inmates, this was a huge victory and at the same time the example shows that it is actually possible to influence the system; the initiatives developed by the working group, the inmates and the researchers, could change the institutional praxis of the prison.

Other initiatives were made to make the inmates ‘masters in their own homes’ and to co-determine their own lives and everyday lives whilst serving a sentence. The inmates were no longer willing to let everything happen above their heads: they wanted influence on the activities of the institution. Thus the process accumulated a strong prisoner-political initiative (Bladt, 2009).

During and arising from the research process three major concrete changes happened within the prison system:

The inmates managed to create a completely new institutional frame for the introduction to the prison, one that rests on the inmates’ own experiences about ‘going to prison’. The ‘intro course’ was implemented as formulated by the inmates. The prison even rebuilt an old building for the purpose.

Actually, it can be seen as positive that the inmates do not wish to identify themselves with a criminal group and thereby a criminal identity. This reluctance constitutes a distancing from a criminal identity. It can be argued that in lieu of personal development, it is mainly positive to be able to stand out and view oneself as disconnected from a criminal group. In this way a seed is sowed towards a new development process that leads away from criminality and in that way leads to rehabilitation.

As the years passed by, a comprehensive change in the internal relationship and perception of the inmates came about. For example, during the evaluation of the future-workshop one inmate exclaimed proudly: ‘It is positively surprising that we can work together’ (Bladt, 2009, p. 75). An obvious mobilization and gathering as a group happens and the inmates start to consider each other as equals, equal-minded and even friends. We believe that the inmates’ changed view of each other was caused by them experiencing the more non-criminal aspects of each other. The inmates have experienced other roles and their roles contain more than just the ‘prisoner-role’. The inmates share experiences that are more than the prisoners’ experiences. The beginning of a development of solidarity, away from a criminal identity, occurred.

As mentioned, not only did the inmates’ view of each other change, they also changed their view of themselves during the research process. The inmates told how they, in connection with the project, experienced gaining a space to be ‘themselves’. Towards the end of the project, several of the inmates described how they, through the project, experienced a free space, where they have found themselves again: ‘Maybe I found something of myself that I thought was gone – something that had been drowned in all this prison-system. It is nice. It was fine that I was still a bit within myself – maybe that is why it has been a breathing space for me and to meet myself in those meetings there was held here’ (Bladt, 2009, p. 78). A lot of evidence seems to point to the democratic method, free space and the special structure of encouragement entails that the inmates start rediscovering their own ‘self’: ‘It is not like we are displayed as monsters. We have turned into people, right’ (Bladt, 2009, p. 37).

The inmates ascribe all these changes to the methods of the project and furthermore describe how the work with the utopian horizons in itself has seemed rehabilitating for them; the inmates describe how the work with utopian horizons put things in perspective for the individual. To think in a utopian manner does not only mean that one becomes better at viewing the activity, flaws and defects of the system, but also how it contributes to the individual’s consciousness about how their own lives and dreams can be developed. The utopia work made the inmates problematize and discuss their criminal activity and identity:

it was our own task you see, it was our task to consider what it was that we wanted, what could become better – you don’t do that in the cell. I even also think that when you are finished with your serving sentence and end up in a better place, then because you have thought about the situation, how the situation could be, if you thought about it in a utopian way – that you become more aware that it actually wasn’t that smart being in prison. Really, this is what ensures that you don’t just wear your blinders and think ‘oh well, that wasn’t so bad’. And this we have become aware about. (Bladt, 2009, p. 80)

Conclusions

Both the concrete institutional changes and the more relationally and individually developing dynamics appearing during this action research project suggest that in this case an action research approach actually could contribute to more sustainable solutions and alternatives to the present situation, according to the question of rehabilitation of inmates.

Our review of the Vridsløselille State prison case suggests that it is possible, despite the intensely atomized and extreme problematic social relations, to create the premises for the establishment of coherent utopian orientations among the participants of the action research process. It turns out that the systematic work with the formation of a free space that encourages a utopian horizon resulted in the inmates creating a reciprocal respect and to a higher degree a belief in themselves. The free space established enabled the inmates to be capable of mobilizing human experiences and future dreams from their life-story and life-correlation outside prison. Through this process, new opportunities opened up for them to meet their immediate practical relations in their everyday lives in the prison. The individual subjective formation process was initially developed in the interplay with the action researchers and with each other – an interplay that has managed to evoke a group-feeling, one that was not there before. The utopian work has induced other aspects of the people behind prison-life and prison-relations. This formation process has obviously also managed to generate new starting points for participation in the actual relations that the everyday life of prison entails. Those concrete initiatives that grew out of the utopias became new, shared tasks that the participants challenged the everyday life of prison through several concrete institutional changes. The inmates managed to create a completely new institutional framework for new inmates’ introduction to the prison, one that in its activity rests on the inmates’ own experiences about ‘going to prison’. Furthermore, their communicative freedom of movement was improved because of the installation of an IP-telephone. The first initiative in a prisoner-political direction showed itself to be the establishment of shop stewards’ newsletter, TGnyt, which gives the inmates an opportunity to communicate with each other, the prison staff and external stakeholders. Currently, there are still unfinished initiatives. For example, the inmates work on designing, printing and selling 100 T-shirts, as part of a sort of information campaign to the general population.

However, as yet we do not have a clear picture of whether it has proved successful for the inmates to pass on the working methods they themselves pointed out as being the most important results from the action research process. As indicated in the theoretical discussion, one of the most important aspects of CUAR is whether it is possible to create cultures that reproduce those shared utopian horizons which are created during the action research. In the meantime it is a key point in the whole tradition that is thematized. There are numerous examples of how subjective formation processes are accomplished productively; but there are also plenty of examples of how they are difficult to maintain as cultural surplus profit after the completion of action research projects. There is a challenge to the critical utopian action researcher working with this theme. This matter is brought to a head in the prison project because everyday life in an extremely minimal way itself contains a free space understood as a community where the participants can process life context in the light of critique, dreams and future visions. In order to honor such a goal, it is necessary to work very concretely on making the free space itself permanent – shared breaks, un-instrumental activity forms that have a meaning in themselves and which can reproduce the subjectivity within the social communities. Institutions and workplaces – even the local community – suffer from a lack of social connections that can accommodate this free space character. And it should be a focus of future action research projects to consider how this question is addressed during the action research process itself.