Penitentiary pleasures: Queer understandings of prison paradoxes

Introduction

I’ve had many positive experiences from inside [prison]. I remember, [. . .] and it feels like a dream, a class about folk dancing with Max [the teacher]. In one of the sessions Max invited a dance teacher to talk about zeibekiko [a folk dance]. Another positive experience is situated in the drawing class where I could see that a few people had talent in drawing. So, there are some things that I recall with some nostalgia. [. . .] Would it sound crazy if I told you that I am actually missing all this? It would sound crazy, right? Perhaps not missing them per se but I am merely nostalgic for those feelings. (Andreas, 46 years old, ex-prisoner, author translation ¹ )

When Sykes (1958) wrote about the “pains of imprisonment,” he was certainly not anticipating an ex-prisoner like Andreas waxing poetical about art and dance lessons in prison. Instead, Sykes’ seminal book The Society of Captives provided a grounded analysis of how different types of deprivation endured by inmates, including a violent subculture, shape the “inmate social system.” Most sociological prison research has focused on how an ever-expanding punitive system is the site of agony that leads to suicide, mental health struggles, and lasting reproduction of inequality (Adler and Gray, 2010; Davis, 2011; Liebling, 2002; Phillips, 2012). How, then, is it possible to speak of pleasure in the prison context? When pleasure first emerged in narrative accounts during my interviews with ex-prisoners of the Nicosia Central Prison (NCP, Cyprus), I considered them aberrations. When these narratives became more frequent, I began to wonder whether pleasure and pain are not simply binary poles but inextricably linked under conditions of imprisonment.

In this article, I use queer theory as an epistemic tool to disentangle the complex relationship between the pain of punishment and unanticipated moments of penitentiary pleasure. The use of “queer” takes into consideration that “queerness bears a different relation to liberal logics of choice and will” (Warner, 1993: xviii) and lines up with the premises of queer scholarship, the thinking tools of Foucault (1977, 1978), the work of Butler (1997), Halberstam’s (2011) concept of failure, and Edelman’s (2004) idea of reproductive futurism. According to Ball (2016), a queer criminology that utilizes queerness in this manner might move further away from the conventional knowledge projects of criminology. In this frame of analysis, I argue that a queer understanding of pleasure and pain in a spectrum is possible—a view that sheds a different theoretical light on the nexus of punishment, pain, resistance, and pleasure.

Deconstructing normalization principles: Criminology and queer theory

Ball (2016) has underlined the increasing need for engagement between criminology and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) communities: “Queer criminology involves both a scholarly criminological endeavor of producing knowledge about crime and criminal justice, as well as a queer, political project of advocating for a variety of institutional and social changes” (Ball, 2019: 1). According to Ball (2016), prison studies intersect with queer theory on two levels. The first level refers to an examination of the material realities of LGBTQ individuals and the various forms of discrimination that may be experienced in prison settings and in the criminal justice system (Mogul et al., 2011). LGBTQ individuals have historically faced and are still facing discrimination and intolerance from law enforcement and the criminal justice system (Spade, 2015). Moreover, queer and trans people are more vulnerable than the general prison population and more frequently become victims of violent treatment (Spade, 2015). The second level of analysis refers to the use of queer theories as alternative epistemic tools for understanding the points where sexuality, punishment, and knowledge intersect, as well as the political consequences of such an understanding. On both levels, queer theory and criminology share common territory; however, their epistemological projects may be seen as divergent: criminology, especially its more mainstream parts, is dedicated to constructing normalization principles and deviant subjects. Queer theory, on the other hand, is distinguished by a “resistance to regimes of the normal” (Warner, 1993: xxvi).

Kunzel (2008) has also maintained that prisons are queer places. She underlines the complexities of gender issues in American prisons and suggests that certain identity politics do not apply in prisons. For example, sexual practices that take place outside essentialized identities (i.e. gay or straight) evade strict norms and make a fluid understanding of sexuality possible. Indeed, prisons are queer places in a broader sense: given that prisons are sex-segregated institutions and heterosexual activities are usually banned, prison turns into a place of/for queer interest (Spade, 2015). Hence, prisons can be seen as a topos where sexuality, power, and deviancy merge (Kunzel, 2008). In that way, sexual practices and gender issues in prisons challenge conventional norms about deviancy, punishment, and sexuality and constitute spaces ripe for queer analysis.

Others, such as Spade (2015), have questioned the ways in which punitive logic is adopted by LGBTQ campaigns and strategies regarding hate speech, marriage equality, and adoption rights. He argues that by insisting on the punishment and often incarceration of hate speech offenders, mainstream LGBTQ movements reproduce a revengeful logic that has so far been mostly used against them. In a similar vein, and considering both the American and European contexts, Lamble (2013) has challenged the commitment of queer people in criminally prosecuting hate crimes, homophobia, and transphobia. For Lamble (2013), this “queer investment in punishment” results in a punitive state and society as the only countermeasure for social injustice (p. 152).

In this article, I pursue a possible intersection between these emerging queer criminology projects and queer theorists like Edelman and Halberstam. Edelman (2004) states that the logic of “futurity,” which contains a heteronormative investment in reproduction and the figure of “the Child,” is at odds with queer lives and politics. He urges us to reject this “reproductive futurism” and refuse to engage with it. I argue that this embrace of negativity shares common ground with some prisoners’ refutation of reformation, development, and progress—in other words, an investment in the future. For Halberstam (2011), this is also an embracing of “failure,” that is, the queer realization that it is impossible to live up to normative expectations and that queer people need to discover alternative ways of being and modalities of knowledge. Halberstam and Edelman challenge the binary of success/failure, pain/pleasure, and death drive/futurity. Drawing from these ideas, I explore how criminology’s investment in progress, reformation, and the future might be challenged by those for whom imprisonment is not a “straightening up” but a paradoxical pleasure in resisting reformation, normality, success, and futurity.

Punishment, pain, and pleasure: Beyond binary formations

The concepts of punishment and pain are central in criminology. Sykes (1958) theorized pain as the first element of imprisonment and as a consequence of punishment. His “pains of imprisonment” include five basic deprivations: dispossession of liberty, deprivation of goods and services, loss of autonomy, loss of heterosexual relationships, and stripping of security. Sykes’ disregard for homoerotic desire, and the fact that the loss of heterosexual relationships may not be a loss for everyone, is indicative of his historical context. In attempting to rationalize punishment, a year later, Hart (1959) described the first element of punishment as follows: “It must involve pain or other consequences normally considered unpleasant” (p. 4, emphasis added by author). The use of the word “normally” implies that there may be ways in which punishment and pain could be experienced as (perversely) pleasurable. This is precisely what this article seeks to account for: how prison life may, at moments, produce a queer feeling of pleasure. More recently, Sexton (2015) argued that there is a subjective dimension to what constitutes punishment and a profound gap between the “punishment on the books” and “punishment in action”: “Punishment is not just something that is done—it is something that is done to people and experienced by people” (p. 118). Thus, punishment may not result in a (solely) painful experience for everyone.

Prison research that engages more ethnographically with prisoners’ own understandings and interpretation of punishment reveals that there are further nuances in the complicated relationship between power, punishment, pain, and resistance and in how the pain/pleasure binary functions. For example, Bosworth and Carrabine’s (2001) research on “strategies of resistance” problematized unilateral interpretations of resistance as a sign of political action. Drawing on research with male and female prisoners in the United Kingdom, Bosworth and Carrabine (2001) open up the possibility of reading acts of resistance as carnivalesque expressions of “pleasure, play and boredom” (p. 507). In another study on female prisoners’ self-harming practices, Chamberlen (2016) showed that by going beyond obvious approaches toward the “pains of imprisonment,” we can observe that “self-harm can also be understood as a practice of liberation and agency” (p. 12). Other studies have also broached the issue of pleasure as it relates to, for example, the excitement of drug dealing as a kind of resistance (Crewe, 2006) or indulging in the satisfaction of food consumption (Godderis, 2006; Smith, 2002; Ugelvik, 2014). Finally, Rhodes (2004) writes that prisoners in a maximum-security prison confessed to a “seductive element” in their ritualized feces-flinging habit, which they saw as an act of resistance. Synthesizing these, it becomes clear that the concept of pleasure in prison is sporadically present in prison scholarship. What is missing is a more thorough and extensive engagement with theory and empirical evidence that examines the intersection of punishment and pain with strategies of resistance that take the form of pleasure. This article is an invitation to rethink pleasure not in a cause-and-effect relationship with resistance but as an embodied performative act which relates to strategies of resistance from the perspective of those who are considered failures and losers.

Foucault (1977) refers to pain in Discipline and Punish as an element of the punishment process; however, the experience of pain is not his main concern (Shoemaker, 2001). In opposition with Sykes, he does not seek meaning in pain. Instead, Foucault (1977) was interested in exposing the shift from “pain at the heart of punishment [which] is not the actual sensation of pain but the idea of pain” (p. 94). At this point, Foucault does not engage explicitly with the notion of pleasure. Later, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that power creates discourses around sexualities, instead of erasing them. He also described the relationship of pleasure to power as a two-way dynamic relation (Foucault, 1978: 45). He noted that “pleasure [. . .] can be intensified, increased, its qualities modified” (Foucault quoted in Halperin, 2011: 377). In this way, pleasure emerges explicitly in Foucault, nuanced and complex. Pleasure is not linked to a fixed identity or exclusively to sexuality, it is related to resistance and can be linked to a force that interacts with and modifies certain environments.

Butler (1997) wonders if there is something different which makes Foucault underline the importance of resistance and pleasure in power in The History of Sexuality—a link which is absent in the description of disciplined bodies in Discipline and Punish. Moreover, Butler asks whether pleasure may be embedded in resistance beyond the domain of sexuality—if it is possible for the subject to derive pleasure from resistance to disciplinary or other modes of power. She argues that while punishment takes place (as a process), “this very productivity of punishment is the site of the freedom and the pleasure of the will, its fabricating activity” (Butler, 1997: 75, emphasis mine). Thus, punishment may motivate a need for resistance which could generate moments, events, elements, or situations of pleasure. Foucault’s and Butler’s approach toward pleasure moves beyond the binary formation of pleasure and pain. Their approach sheds light on the complexity and ambiguity of pleasure as not merely negative or positive but as a temporal fleeting effect. What Foucault and Butler achieve here is the reordering of pleasure apropos sexuality (Bersani, 1995). The suggestion here is one of desexualized pleasure which was Freud’s goal in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1990). Freud’s work pioneered the process of desexualization of pleasure by asserting that the pleasant/unpleasant binary is actually a paradox wherein pleasure is connected to tension, pain, horror, and disgust (Schuster, 2016). This article derives impetus from the “personal, political and conceptual investment” (Halperin, 2011: 377), that Foucault had in the concept of pleasure, in combination with the Butler’s claim about the productivity of punishment, and suggests an empirical and theoretical shift from the power/resistance axis to the power/resistance/pleasure axis. This tripartite is what enables the destabilization of the binary formation of pleasure and pain in prison settings.

The research context

The NCP, in Cyprus, accommodates all prisoners (sentenced and under trial) in the same building complex, with women and juveniles in separate wings. Although the official maximum capacity of the prison is 540, the facilities accommodated up to 762 detainees in 2019 (World Prison Brief, 2019). As an European Union (EU) member-state that has been divided since the 1974 Turkish intervention that separated Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. According to Trimikliniotis and Bozkurt (2012), Cyprus is also a society that valorizes the figure of the social bandit à la Robin Hood, and the bandit held a position of respect and admiration in the local community. Although none of these issues are immediately apparent in a prison setting that resembles most prisons around the world, it is worth noting the larger historical, political, and cultural context of power, discipline, and punishment, especially as it relates to the construction of Cypriot masculinity.

This article draws data from a broader study of ex-prisoners in Cyprus where I focus on their experiences in prison through the lens of queer theory. The participants included 17 ex-prisoners (11 men and 6 women, one of whom is a trans woman), two educators, and two psychologists. Most participants were Cypriot; five of them stated other countries of origin or other ethnicities or mixed ethnicities. The data collection was conducted in 2017–2019 and my entry into the field was facilitated by those relationships that I had cultivated as a Psychology Teacher in the NCP for 5 years (2009–2014). The study has received ethics clearance from the Cyprus National Bioethics Committee.

One of the many challenges I faced in analyzing these interviews was to reconcile the interpretive gap between the philosophical depth of queer theory and the ex-prisoners’ narratives. This is why Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) “plugging in” approach is the most appropriate when researchers want to maintain a constant negotiation between concepts and data. Jackson and Mazzei (2012) apply the work of six contemporary philosophers (Derrida, Spivak, Butler, Foucault, Deleuze, Barad) to the analysis of a traditional data set. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of “plugging in” means that the data are not interpreted through a single holistic theory but are viewed through the lens of concepts that have their own epistemological history (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). For the purposes of this article, I “plug in” the concept of “pleasure” from Foucault—pleasure as a productive force which produces effects, unhinged from set categories, not always bound by sexuality and in close relationship with pain and resistance—to the data set of ex-prisoner narratives in order to answer the following question: Does the experience of prison produce effects, moments and events of pleasure in ex-prisoners’ and professionals’ narratives? The data analysis initially followed a traditional route: I used NVivo to classify themes and identify 25 codes from the participants’ narratives. Some examples of these codes are as follows: Practices of Punishment and Surveillance, Practices of Disobedience, Drugs and Medicalization. This article is based on a re-reading of all the codes through the “plugging in” concept of pleasure. Findings in relation to pleasure are grouped in three themes: (1) pleasure and pain, (2) pleasure and resistance, and (3) pleasure and sexuality.

Pleasure and pain: Positive feelings, subjection, and pain

In the narratives of some ex-prisoners, pleasure in relation to pain is connected with body piercing and tattooing, and these narratives may offer the most direct way to understand how pleasure and pain are connected in prison and are situated within the body. Moses ² (35 years old) explained that testicles were common places for piercing regardless of possible infection. The line between an embodied experience of pleasure from piercing and self-harm is blurry at this point. Getting tattooed secretly is common among prisoners (Healey, 2017; Tran et al., 2018) and it is often attempted through unsafe methods: “sewing needles, studs, safety pins, hot pins and copper wire” (Crofts et al., 1996: 24). Moses added, “The day that Michalis’ sentence was announced he decided to do a piercing on his testicles.” Chamberlen’s (2016) study of women’s self-harming practices as a means of self-healing shows that prisoners may see self-harming as a way to channel psychic pain into physical pain.

Beyond the bodily pain/pleasure nexus, positive feelings about imprisonment overall were also common. Connor, a 28-year-old man from a Balkan country, said, “I felt very excited when I did prison time, especially when I was younger, like 15, 16, and I wanted to spend time in prison so I could say later that I experienced it.” By taking pride in his mischievous acts against the status quo, Connor narrates a type of masculinity that thrives though illicit acts (Sabo et al., 2001; Sloan, 2016). Similarly, Phileas, who was 50 years old with a long history of imprisonment outside of Cyprus, said,

For example, personally when the judge announces the verdict is prison, I am happy and I laugh because I know am going to a friendly place to see my friends and I have many friends who are sentenced for life in there [. . .] they make jokes and tell stories.

Punishment for Phileas became normalized after so many years of recidivism. Excitement in the idea of seeing friends in prison is something that Ugelvik (2014) also notes.

Isaak, a 32 year-old ex-prisoner of mixed ethnic background, also cited positive feelings overlapping with the pain of imprisonment:

There were good moments, in a miserable situation. Wretchedness was there too. Because in prison you see absurd people, incomprehensible [. . .] yes, we were laughing at that place [prison], we were doing our best to have a good time. Even bad jokes made us laugh, as if we did not want to let ourselves down. We even hug other prisoners, we come close to each other . . .

Isaak recognized failure as a starting point for this bond and attempted to redefine failure as a way of being which resists the logic of futurity and normativity. For Halberstam (2011), the “queer art of failure” is an opportunity to access other ways of relating to each other—similar to how these ex-prisoners discover penitentiary pleasures in sharing a joke, performing stories, gesturing, drawing or dancing.

Pleasure and resistance

Robin was 32 years old and had already served two sentences when I met him. He was the type of prisoner who refused to change, constantly fought with the authorities, and justified his criminal behavior through the lens of harsh poverty and deprivation, referring to himself as a type of bandit. He felt he had the support of his family and believed that his role in prison was to resist any type of disciplinary measure. At the beginning of our interview, he stated,

Moses also saw himself as a rebel through mundane yet sophisticated forms of resistance: he stole eggs from the kitchen, created weightlifts from water bottles and broomsticks, and hang a curtain in his wing that forced officers to make extra effort to check on him. He answered loudly to every command from the officers and he was often put in solitary confinement for long periods of time: “I had to spend 7 years in prison. While I was in, someone who saw me laughing in the kitchen said to me, ‘You don’t look like someone who does prison time’.” Moses, through laughter, creates a performative experience of pleasure. In his account, pleasure emerges as a performative act of resistance, and it was in close relation with disobedience and a refusal to look like a sorrowful prisoner.

Almost all the prisoners admitted that the prohibition of certain objects and the scheduled activities offered to them had the opposite effect than what was intended. Robin said, “Anything that is banned in prison takes place there. For example, drugs: if I want to use drugs, I will do it in any circumstances. I think this is happening in prisons outside of Cyprus as well.” Participants in Crewe’s (2006) research in UK prisons argued that the pleasure of drug dealing is related to the comfort of an income (e.g. phone cards, clothes) but it also points to a larger theme of how the prohibition of an object of desire brings immense pleasure when that object is attained. For Fassin (2016), this is an important part of the subjectivity of the prisoner: objects within prison acquire a different meaning that creates a distinct view of the materiality.

Phileas (50 years old), who spent time in various prison systems, was conscious of the fact that every rule violation was a way of mocking the system: “In prison you can start any kind of noise: singing, screaming, or even praying just for fun. Just to make the officers angry or to defeat your boredom.” Phileas and Robin described prison fights not simply as violent outbursts but as deliberate acts with their own ground rules and meanings. Both emphasized that this power-and-resistance game contains some form of spontaneous pleasure, which has also been noted in other activities such as collective strikes (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001). More importantly, these narratives show that resistance in prison is often a means to sabotage reformation. Edelman uses Freud’s “death drive” to denote a form of resistance to the master heteronormative narrative. The death drive, through this perspective, counters the promises of futurity, the identity, and the progression of humanity. Queer pleasure as resistance in prison could sabotage reformation and futurity sometimes in a violent way.

Pleasure and sexuality

When talking about sexual or erotic pleasures in prison, it is easy to fall into the trap of aestheticizing the prison or oversimplifying the nexus of pleasure, punishment, and sexuality. Prisons are often structured under the assumption that all prisoners are heterosexual. In my research, none of the 11 male ex-prisoner interviewees admitted to homoerotic relationships or homosexual acts, even though some of them talked about other male prisoners engaging in homosexual relationships. This relates to the prevalence of homophobia in Cyprus (Shoshilou and Vasiliou, 2016), and in the performance of their masculinity these discourses are considered unacceptable. However, four of the six women I interviewed mentioned a homoerotic relationship during incarceration. Sandra, a 38-year-old woman from a Middle Eastern country, shifted to homosexual relationships in prison and is now “out” and in a long-term relationship with a woman: “My life changed after that experience; I’m a new person after that imprisonment. I have more confidence and a new life. [. . .] Having relationships with women is one of the things that I discovered in prison.” Gertrude, a 46-year-old woman who some described as “masculine” and who was openly lesbian in prison said that the female officers’ homophobia was painful but added that she found comfort in discussions and relationships with other women in prison, even if those relationships were platonic. Thus, amid testimonies of sexualization there was also the satisfaction of just talking about sex and pleasure which is erotic but not necessarily sexualized—a point that Lacan makes: “For the moment I’m not fucking, I’m talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking” (as cited in Zupancic, 2017: 1). Kalliope (32 years old) also attested to the desexualization of pleasure when she told me that she had a relationship with a woman but the only possible way of showing affection was holding hands. In that account, pleasure emerges as: “nothing other than an event, an event that happens [. . .] outside from the subject, or at the limits of the subject or between two subjects” (Foucault et al., 2011: 389).

The narrative of the trans woman (Julia, 36 years old) also reveals the complexities and ambiguities in discussing pleasure in prison settings. It also illuminates the complex administrative issues that arise in relation to transgender prisoners: placement in prison, victimization and treatment, and health care provisions (Lamble, 2012). Julia had a difficult time in prison: she stayed in solitary confinement for 15 days due to the confusion her body caused—a body with breasts and a penis. She was then transferred to a detention facility to serve her remaining time. Due to her case, the Ombudsman’s Office investigated the NCP and published a report (Commissioner for Administration and Human Rights, 2013) about the situation of trans people in detention centers in Cyprus.

Julia’s narrative focused on the painful systemic discrimination and intolerance she faced in prison. However, she also talked with great pleasure about how she used her body to bewilder the authorities and refuse victimization: “I insisted that you bring me my kinky mini-skirt so I could wear it, with full-on makeup, curled hair, sitting with my coffee. And I wanted the prison guard to watch me and get horny, and if I felt like it then I would do it with him. If this is what you want, this is what you’ll have.” As Terry (1991) noted, “Deviant subjectivity is itself evidence of our power, not victimhood” (p. 298). This suggestion allows us to understand Julia’s narrative as a (temporal) shift from victimization to power and empowerment. A queer understanding of that narrative suggests that while Julia experienced pain, failure, and victimization in prison, a temporal effect of pleasure and resistance was possible through her body.

Conclusion

This article engages with Ball’s invitation to link queer theory and criminology and contributes to the process of enriching queer criminology projects. This contribution builds on queer theorists such as Foucault and Butler as well as more recent contributions from Edelman and Halberstam. By exploring the concept of penitentiary pleasures through queer theory, I attempt to go beyond normative and binary formations in order to highlight alternative forms of epistemic and political understandings of success/failure, futurity/death drive, and power/resistance/pleasure. My analysis draws from the work of these queer theorists in an effort to examine how we can extend our understanding of pleasure (and/or pain) in prison settings by revisiting how traditional criminology engages with those notions. This article adds to existing research on the possibility of understanding pleasure in prisons (Chamberlen, 2016; Rhodes, 2004; Sexton, 2015; Smith, 2002; Ugelvik, 2014) by arguing that pleasure and pain are interlinked in various and complex ways and that pleasure is a productive force that is linked to pain, punishment, power, and resistance in conditions of imprisonment.

The narratives of ex-prisoners reveal that they are likely to speak of pleasure in conditions of pain and punishment; it is possible to derive pleasure from resisting discipline and to form a sexual/erotic imprisoned subject. I find that the queer narratives of pleasure in prison from my participants reveal several paradoxes. First is the paradox of good memories (falling in love, intimacy, laughing) despite and along with the pain, punishment, and violence of prison. The second paradox is the transformation of pain into pleasure. The bodily pleasure/pain nexus offers some kind of satisfaction to prisoners, as the testimonies about tattooing and piercing suggest. Scarry’s (1985) seminal study The Body in Pain corresponds with this argument: “Physical pain is able to obliterate all psychological pain because it obliterates all psychological content, painful pleasurable and neutral” (p. 34). The third paradox is related to the urge to resist through pleasure or the urge to gain pleasure though resisting. Testimonies here suggest that resisting in prison could be a source of spontaneous pleasure as prisoners resist the logic of futurity (Edelman, 2004) by sabotaging the reformation process and by redefining failure (Halberstam, 2011). It is challenging to comprehend whether it is the punishment and pain that generate the necessity to resist and, through the process of resisting, create pleasure. Conversely, it could be the impulsive need to avoid the stress and discomfort of punishment and pain that transforms the desire for resistance into a desire for pleasure. As a consequence, in such conditions, gaining pleasure may acquire an urgency for the psychic and bodily formations of the subject. That urgency could direct the subject to various directions: to resist, to mock, to sexualize, to be submissive, to develop a coping mechanism, or to self-destruct though self-harm or violence.

Prison sociology has been dominated in the past 50 years by a focus on the “pains of imprisonment” (Sykes, 1958). Any discussion of penitentiary pleasures may seem incongruous with this literature, especially considering the critique that has been leveled against the “punitive turn” and the global expansion of mass incarceration (Garland, 2001). While this gap requires a more in-depth analysis, it is possible to claim that “penitentiary pleasures” align with similar research which “serves to complicate the macro-levels explanations of punishment that currently dominate the penological theoretical landscape” (Sexton, 2015: 132). With this perspective, the paradoxes of penitentiary pleasures can be used as a starting point to raise new questions about the goals of prison sociology and the goals of criminal reform systems.