Abstract
Sensory Penalties is a timely collection that vividly analyses sites of punishment and aspects of social control by prioritising the senses – smell, sound, touch, heat, emotion, affect. The editors (Kate Herrity, Bethany E. Schmidt and Jason Warr) have achieved this by ensuring the explorations and descriptions contained within the book focus on the sensorial facets of the authors’ empirical research and ethnographic practices. Very quickly it becomes apparent to the reader that these sensorial sensibilities can provide a rich, new vehicle with which to illuminate criminological spaces, and everything they encompass. From this alternative perspective, there is potential to further comprehend the complex human and social interactions, embodied experiences and symbolic practices that exist in these penal contexts. Despite the senses being a resource that is ordinarily absent in published work or relegated to brief, often ‘thin’ reflexive commentaries, this collection poses important epistemological questions. It invites the reader to ponder how criminological knowledge might differently be acquired, analysed, presented and theorised through a greater inclusion of the sensory. Consequently, it opens the reader’s mind and imagination to the possibilities that accompany a greater consideration of these elements, including what they can tell us about penality in contemporary society.
The collection fills a gap in the field of criminology, a gap that many of us probably were not even aware existed. While the authors recognise previous sensorily-informed approaches, for instance by Simmel (1907) and Goffman (1967), helping to theoretically ground the work, the unique insights offered together in one place is one of the reasons that this is a ‘genuinely innovative’ collection (Eamonn Carrabine, Afterword, p. 236). As the editors articulate, ‘the way that people physically and sensorily experience the realities with which we are concerned, and what such embodied experiences mean for those people’ (p. xxii) has not always been a central consideration. As is demonstrated throughout the book, ready attunement to our senses can richen our awareness of different people, places, practices, processes and, rather interestingly the positionality and personality of the author, through the sharing of visceral and inherently ‘human’ accounts and analyses. By revealing such aspects of the ‘penal sensorium’ (p. 31) we see first-hand how richly and deeply penality can be explored and newly conceptualised; both its theoretical, ideological components, as well as in its applied, lived reality. The book is not merely an assortment of ethnographies of sites of punishment and mechanisms of social control, but a collection of distinct contributions that, in the words of Alison Liebling (Foreword, p. xx) ‘represents the signaling of a “sensory revolution” in social and criminological research’.
In the introduction we learn how the book materialised in a wonderfully organic fashion, with academic discussion, engagement and reflection. Likewise, it is heartening to see that the contributors were ‘intentionally selected’ owing to their ‘ethnographic sensibility’ (p. xxix), a deliberate decision on the part of the editors to remain true to the project’s original intention to only present sensorial accounts. There are three themes to the book. The first two refer to the political, symbolic and ideological meanings ‘inherent to places and processes of punishment and social control’ and how these are ‘experienced sensorily’ by those exposed to them (p. xxiii). The third consolidates the former themes by proposing that ‘we need to account for these multifarious sensorial experiences and their effects’ (p. xxiii). I would argue that this latter theme is achieved in a much more tangible and palpable way than has previously been accomplished in other published texts in the field. This is achieved through the methods of communication adopted by some of the authors. Vignettes, short stories and creative writing are all techniques used to effectively evoke a deepened sense of the intricacies and nuances of the environments being investigated, as well as the meaning they imbue for those in contact with them.
The main body of the book consists of chapters divided into four parts. The first, Making Sense of the Sensory, opens with Kate Herrity’s auditory analysis of pubs and prisons. The process of sensemaking and attunement adopted to decipher the sensory information of these seemingly disparate sites is expressed, before indicating how this aural analysis indicated (dis)order in the respective environments. Jason Warr (Chapter 2) provides a hauntingly evocative account of ‘trapedness’ during a prison fire via a vignette which illuminates the sensorial experience of captivity – both literally and symbolically for those detained. In Chapter 3, Jo Collinson Scott and Fergus McNeill draw attention to the ‘invisible and inaudible’ aspects of punishment in the community which are otherwise difficult for most people to imagine. The fourth and concluding chapter in this section, by Daina Stanley, contains an emotionally expressive narrative of Daniel, a participant in the ethnographic study of a US State prison infirmary, and interactions with him during his end-of-life care. Brought to light are her ethnographic practices which are touching (literally and metaphorically) and inherently human.
The second part of the book, Sensing the Field, opens with Bethany E. Schmidt and Andrew M. Jefferson’s discussion of the contradiction within Tunisian prisons where new creative/arts reform agendas are juxtaposed with severe overcrowding (Chapter 5). Julienne Weegels begins Chapter 6 with a quotation from a participant, Javi, which captures the essence and key messages of what follows; the requirement to be ‘blind, deaf and mute’ in Nicaraguan prisons (p. 89). Chapter 7, in conceptualising a probation approved hostel for male sex offenders in England and Wales, provides a ‘sensory reflective analysis’ by the author, Carla Reeves. The detailed descriptions of the hostel, from the corridors’ architectural structure to the exertion of power through operational practices, reveals new and important insights into these transitional spaces for released prisoners waiting to re-enter the community. Jennifer Peirce’s contribution (Chapter 8) closes this section by analysing pre and post reform prisons in the Dominican Republic. Critically, it is by making use of a sensory analysis that Peirce concludes that the ‘new’ prisons purporting to be rehabilitative continue to depend upon mechanisms of power which inflict harm.
The third part, Subverting the Senses, contains just two chapters. Chapter 9, authored by Victoria Canning provides a sensorial account that highlights her extreme, ethical and political unease derived from conducting research as an abolitionist in three Danish immigration sites. In a different way, Lisa Flower’s contribution in Chapter 10 uncovers the sensorial absence in Swedish judicial settings; she uncovers muted aspects of courtroom practices, including emotional, physical and audible aspects.
The final part of the book, Sensory Reflections, opens with Yvonne Jewkes and Alison Young (Chapter 11), providing twofold insights, first into the previously hidden sensory experience of being in a Japanese prison, and second of a Japanese prison which is usually hidden from an external gaze. Amy B. Smoyer asks the reader to consider ‘to whom do these smells and sights belong?’ (Chapter 12, p. 202) while reflexively recounting and sharing 10 stories from her fieldwork that did not fit into ‘progress reports’ which hold so-called ‘relevant’ documents from various studies exploring the experiences of HIV-positive women. Likewise, Ian O’Donnell acknowledges how ‘sensory experiences can add heft and nuance to any analysis of penality’ (chapter 13, p. 203) as his reflective narrative describes his embodied experience in a Southern Ethiopian prison. Likewise, a similar reflexive sensorial analysis by Alistair Fraser (Chapter 14) details the ‘affective atmosphere’ found on ‘the street’, an often-visited site by criminological researchers filled with crime cultures, risk and politics. The Afterword, by Eamonn Carrabine, offers a comprehensive reflection on the book’s contents and links to other sensorially-informed works, before suggesting that each contribution will compel future ethnographers to take seriously the senses in their investigations.
While the book does not intend to be a methodological ‘how to’ and does not provide recipes for conducting sensorially engaged research, it alerts the reader to approaches developed and used by the authors which might be replicated and/or adapted in the future. We can more easily see an empirical focus on sound (Chapter 1), touch (Chapter 4), emotion (Chapter 10) and affect (Chapter 14) might yield new criminological insights. Also included are rich reflective commentaries which consider ‘the everything else’ (Chapter 12), or as O’Donnell puts it, the ‘going, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, being, reflecting and comparing’ of criminological research (Chapter 13, p. 203). It is through this newfound appreciation for using sensory tools – and those that occur beyond the visual – that the book really achieves a (re)focusing of criminological attention and thinking. This has benefits as the descriptions provided on the page are much more palpable and therefore help transport the reader into the environment under examination. For instance, the book hosts various forms of creative writing, such as vignettes, short stories and music lyrics, which are extremely effective mediums with which to communicate the respective penal landscapes. Other significant methodological challenges are discussed, including issues of integrity and accountability – how researchers navigate ethnographic research which necessities a sensorial embodiment of spaces which conflict with and/or mute ethical and political positionalities (Chapters 6 and 9).
Despite penal reform agendas appearing in different international contexts in recent years, insights uncovered throughout the book show how these top-down policies often contradict operational practices in penal sites. By focusing on the minutiae of environments and processes within spaces of social control, and specifically the embodied experiences of punishment, we see how these spaces continue to be painful (Chapters 5 and 8). Indeed, the textured narratives in this collection allow the reader to encounter an array of carceral spaces in different geographical contexts and cultures. It was striking to see how the disregard for (some) human life was depicted in so many of the chapters, reinforcing questions concerning the purpose and practice of punishment. We are reminded that state-sanctioned violence occurs each and every day across the globe through, for instance, the continued use of incarceration (Chapters 2, 11 and 13). Albeit this violence manifests in different ways, and to varying degrees, it remains present in our contemporary ‘humane’ societies.
This text moves us away from more traditional narratives about punishment and penalty that rely on the visual, and while this may cause some ‘academic discomfort’ (Herrity, Schmidt, Warr, p. xxix), I agree with the editors that this is ‘necessary’ for a new sensory epistemology to blossom. However, readers of this book will feel some discomfort as it will prompt them to think about their own positionality and practice; from their epistemological stance to their previous and/or forthcoming methodological choices, analytical processes and reflexive practices. Even if readers come to the decision that this is ‘touchy feely’ or otherwise an unscientific way of conducting criminological research, it will have encouraged a form of self-interrogation – and this, so rarely a part of our criminological training, is one of the achievements of this edited collection. As such, it is without doubt that the editors’ aim to ‘invigorate a conversation about the role of sensory experience in the production of knowledge’ (p. xxi), has been met. If, like me, readers find themselves agreeing with the editors and can appreciate how ‘penality has an inherent sensory component’ (Herrity, Schmidt and Warr, p. xxiii), then they will appreciate this book as more than this – as a seminal methodological and intellectual contribution.