Resizing Sykes: Ian O’Donnell in conversation with David Skarbek

This is an innovative project that looks at four distinct prison systems across several different countries. Based on first-hand observation, interviews, and archival research, it is an engaging read that provides thick descriptions of prison life. If possible, can you briefly explain your main argument and novel contribution?

Succinctly stated, my main argument is that we can – and should – add nuance to our understanding of the dynamics of prison life by widening our focus. We need to probe Sykes's (1958: xiii) assertion that prisons share ‘basic similarities which … override the variations of time, place, and purpose’. I am not suggesting that Sykes's argument has become redundant with age but rather that it never had the universality sometimes attributed to it. Even when The Society of Captives appeared in the late 1950s there was no reason to think that the New Jersey State Prison, where he conducted his research, would be essentially the same as a prison in Texas or Arkansas, let alone one in Belgium or Germany (where Sykes served with the US Army during World War II), or Mexico (where he lived for a couple of years), or elsewhere.

One contribution of Prison Life then is to resize Sykes. As I put it on the book’s opening page: ‘Sykes’s insightful and eloquent rendering of a prison was just that: a depiction of one prison, in one era, which differed in important aspects from other contemporaneous prisons.'

How did you choose integration and regulation as the two key characteristics?

To answer this question I must at the outset say something about the book's intellectual history and the importance of serendipity – and patience – in research.

The genesis of this book is somewhat unorthodox. It began with a resourceful Catholic priest, continued with trips to Ethiopia and the US, was given added impetus by the memory of a visit many years ago to an institution in Northern Ireland, most of which has since been torn down, and culminated – after much reading, reflection, and rewriting – in the subject of this dialogue.

First, the beginning. A previous book of mine – Prisoners, Solitude, and Time (O’Donnell, 2014) – explored the role of solitary confinement as a penal strategy and how those who must endure it strive to soften its impact. University College Dublin, where I have worked for more than 20 years, used this book in a media campaign to promote its graduate programs in criminology. In addition to online videos and radio advertisements, posters were placed on buses and trains. One of these was seen by Paddy Moran, a missionary priest.

Father Moran invited me to Ethiopia to advise on possible regime improvements to a prison he had a close association with (which I call Isir Bet in the book). I accepted his invitation and in 2016 made the first of several visits to this wonderful country. I was impressed by the sociable nature of prison life, the high level of constructive activity, and the degree to which the prison community had determined the rules by which it would operate, to the extent of drawing up – after much consultation and revision – a written constitution by which everyone agreed to be bound. These factors compensated to a great extent for the poor material conditions, paltry number of staff, and severely crowded dormitories.

There was a striking contrast with the penal isolation I had examined for Prisoners, Solitude, and Time, the apotheosis of which is found in ADX Florence, a federal prison in Colorado known as the ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies’. This is a place where the obliteration of human companionship is an integral design feature. This disparity caused me to reflect on the twin dimensions of integration (which is high in Isir Bet but low in ADX Florence) and regulation (vice versa). I thought that there would be value in exploring the extent to which the interplay of these dimensions might offer a handle on the social life of the prison and turned my attention to identifying other cases that occupied extreme positions along them.

I recalled being part of a delegation that met incarcerated members of the Irish Republican Army in the context of a maturing peace process in Northern Ireland. This meeting occurred in November 1999 in the H Blocks, one of Europe's most secure and tightly regulated prisons. But within these confines the prisoners lived communally and according to their own organizational structure and self-defined imperatives. The punishment block had been shut down and there was a vibrant culture of political debate. This was a place where integration and regulation were high. This left me one case to identify, namely a prison where both were low. I settled on the Eastham Unit in Texas while it was being run by the ‘building tenders’, violent men coopted by the authorities to maintain order, despite a clear legal prohibition on prisoner involvement in supervision and discipline. The regulatory environment was lax, and the prisoner society was deeply divided.

Any prison can be plotted along these two axes and the schematic in Figure 1 summarizes the foregoing.

In short, Prison Life resulted from a combination of fortuitousness, scholarly immersion, and a thoroughgoing commitment to the importance of embracing a comparative perspective. It was driven by curiosity about the social world and is the culmination of an individual intellectual enterprise, according to a timeframe that was deemed suitable to the task, and not following the dictates of any external funding agency. I had no clear sense of the shape of a possible project when I travelled to Ethiopia in 2016 (or indeed when I visited the H Blocks in 1999!).

Either of these could be conceptualized in more multidimensional ways. For example, prison staff might regulate in both informal and formal ways, or with more or less threat of violence. As such, is it problematic to discuss them as unidimensional?

I believe that the concepts of integration and regulation – as I deploy them – are elastic enough to embrace a wide range of possibilities. Given their significance to our dialogue it might be worth teasing them out a little. They are characterized in the book's introductory chapter in the following terms:

The book's audience is prison scholars and criminologists more generally. Given that this is a diverse field with participants from across a variety of disciplines, how would you describe your research method?

Underpinning the book is a recognition of Jacobs's (1977: 11) observation that the prison cannot be understood in isolation but must rather be viewed as ‘an organization in action, in dynamic relationship with its political, moral, and institutional environments. At any point in time, various pressures and criss-crossing strains are evident; there is no inevitable or predetermined outcome’. I have tried to show how the social life of each case study prison reflected the external ‘political, moral, and institutional’ domain in which it was rooted.

To elaborate, Northern Ireland's H Blocks became another site for the republican struggle against the British; they were built in, and sustained by, a warring state. Contexts and people change, of course, and the men viewed as Europe's most determined and dangerous terrorists were released to become productive and law-abiding members of their communities. The Eastham Unit must be understood in light of a fiscally conservative government in Texas that shirked its responsibilities and allowed prisoners to become adjunct custodians. It also reflected a deeply racist environment where the echo of the slave plantation rang loud. ADX Florence is the outworking of a vengeful penality where exaggerated fears about the so-called ‘worst of the worst’ have facilitated the emergence of an extreme form of demonization and social exclusion. These arrangements have allowed cruelty to become unremarkable. In Isir Bet, the state was too poor to provide more than the basics in terms of food, shelter and staffing so the prisoners took it upon themselves to fill the gaps. Life in prison mirrored the outside world with its emphasis on organized religion, respect for elders, community involvement in dispute resolution, and high levels of entrepreneurialism and self-sufficiency.

I could have offered ‘ideal types’ instead of concrete examples and this is the approach I adopted in early drafts, when I worked with a two-by-two matrix incorporating types tentatively labeled as ‘atomized’ (low integration, high regulation), ‘interstitial’ (high integration, low regulation), ‘repudiatory’ (low on both dimensions), and ‘mosaic’ (high on both dimensions). But I felt that to properly see the prison in context required specificity so I changed tack and proceeded to examine real cases. I felt that such an approach would allow me to foreground the human component of what was at issue thereby facilitating deeper engagement with the material.

Once I had selected prisons to represent extreme combinations of the presence and absence of integration and regulation I turned my attention to the temporal parameters of the study. I decided to focus on a pivotal decade in each institution. For the Eastham Unit I concentrated on the period from 1972 to 1982, from the initiation of a legal challenge to the building tender system to its abolition. In the H Blocks I chose 1990 to 2000, extending from the adoption by the prisoners of a written charter to the establishment's closure. In ADX Florence the span was 2001 to 2011, a time when the psychological harms of prolonged solitary confinement became horribly, and floridly, apparent. In Isir Bet, I looked at 2010 to 2020, during which period the prisoners elected a charismatic chairman, produced and assented to a detailed code of conduct, and experienced an episode of unusual turbulence.

In each prison I chose one individual whose story seemed emblematic of the place. The men I singled out were Laurence McKeown in the H Blocks, whose reading of Paulo Freire contributed to the evolution of a written charter and the creation of wing communes; David Ruiz in the Eastham Unit, a writ writer whose legal maneuvers cost the state of Texas a fortune; Chalew Gebino in Isir Bet, an impactful leader and skilled consensus builder; and Jack Powers in ADX Florence, who endured soul-destroying solitary confinement, but lived to tell the tale with eloquence and discernment. Through concentrated personal effort, each of these four men helped to reshape the world they were compelled to occupy.

In comparative politics, we place a lot of importance on the justification for case selection. One reason for this is that it provides a guide on how far, if at all, one can generalize. How and why did you choose your cases and how does that affect what we can conclude from your study?

There is a growing number of case studies of individual prisons, including in the Global South. This is a very welcome development. I wanted to include one such in my book and also to develop tools that might be useful regardless of geography. In this regard I should say that, as is often the case with writing, the final product includes only a fraction of the material consulted during its preparation. Having collated and considered information relating to institutions in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, India, Europe, the US and so forth I decided, in the interests of parsimony (and, hopefully, clarity) to limit my attention to four places, and in each of them to home in on a single decade and the role of one particular prisoner. Each of the book's case study chapters has a coda that nods in the direction of the wider literature, with a view to suggesting that the book's argument merits testing in different locales at different times.

I hope that the four cases I chose indicate the value – and generalizability – of the three-step approach to understanding prison life that is set out in the book. Different cases could, of course, have been selected to make the same points and hopefully other scholars will test my conceptual framework in different contexts. Indeed, even if each of the cases was sui generis, the model they illustrate could still have wide relevance and reach.

Do you consider your work to be ‘theory testing’ or strictly descriptive?

I would characterize it as largely descriptive – a term that I do not use pejoratively – and theory building, although I do test and critique some of the assumptions that undergird ideas of legitimacy, governance, and compliance. I will be happy if I have succeeded in specifying some key dimensions of prison life, indicating how they might be mapped, and offering a series of permutations. I was not always prepared to refrain from evaluative judgments such as how ADX Florence is cynically destructive of human potential; how the lack of legitimacy that characterized arrangements at the Eastham Unit during the decade of interest allowed predatory violence to fester; and how the integrative milieus of Isir Bet and the H Blocks could sustain, and even uplift, their occupants.

To add depth and perspective to the thick descriptions, I have augmented the text with prisoner art, photographs (aerial and interior) of the various buildings, sociograms, and pen portraits in addition to the usual run of charts and tables. The epigraphs for the case study chapters required careful selection as they encapsulate an official statement of institutional aims, which is then contrasted with the quotidian reality. The quotations that feature in the book's prelims – one from each of the four men whose stories are woven throughout the analysis – highlight important experiential aspects of their predicament. (I spent much time drafting and redrafting and recasting and rephrasing and hope I will be forgiven for some occasional wordplay!)

Prison Life was not written as a crossover book but its competitive cover price and emphasis on personal stories may extend its appeal beyond that of the hugely expensive and visually uninspiring monograph which has become all too common. NYU Press deserves credit for the care and attention given to layout, the openness to unusual illustrations, and the willingness to publish simultaneously in very affordable paperback and e-book formats as well as in hardcover. (Other academic publishers, please take note.)

Why has it taken us so long as a field to study prison social order from a comparative perspective?

I think that the importance of a comparative perspective is widely accepted but honored in the breach because the practical difficulties associated with adopting it in a meaningful way can seem overwhelming and this stifles initiative. Comparative work takes a long time. It is challenging to execute when there is pressure to publish research findings at frequent intervals and in thin slices, when funding bodies determine research agendas and set deadlines, and when scholars lack familiarity with literature not published in the English language.

Allow me to offer an analogy. The number of prisoners per 100,000 population is an imperfect indicator of a society's level of punitiveness and social control. Instead of limiting the focus to prisons we need to incorporate other sites where people have been detained against their will such as psychiatric hospitals, homes for ‘wayward’ women and girls, and various residential institutions for children. We need to shift our frame of reference from imprisonment to ‘coercive confinement’, to think historically, and to repeat this exercise across jurisdictions if we are to develop a meaningful comparative metric (for a recent restatement of this position, see O’Donnell and O’Sullivan, 2020). We also need to question whether a country's resident population is the appropriate denominator. Yet little headway has been made and we persist in using imprisonment rates in cross-national analyses despite their acknowledged flaws. For understandable reasons, convenience wins out time and again.

It is surprising perhaps given the burgeoning number of scholars and the increase in publication outlets that progress has not been swifter. But there are encouraging signs. We need a greater number of detailed case studies in parts of the world about which little is known; this is happening. Then we need to develop tools that allow us to interrogate – and integrate – these very different penal milieus. This is what I am trying to stimulate with Prison Life. It is an incremental process and I am optimistic that, over time, we will develop a tool kit suitable to the task.

What are the main intellectual and scholarly works that you see your work being in conversation with? Related to this, which theories or approaches should we revise or discard as a result of your work?

I hope that Prison Life has built on your own studies of extralegal governance in prisons and the conditions that promote or inhibit its emergence, especially the extent to which prison gangs emerged to fill a governance vacuum created by the weakening of the inmate code (e.g., Skarbek, 2014, 2020). I have also engaged with work on legitimacy, power and compliance by David Beetham, Tony Bottoms, Eamonn Carrabine, Ben Crewe, Alison Liebling, Richard Sparks and Justice Tankebe, This has allowed me to explore how conflict is managed and order maintained in custodial environments, returning to a seam of inquiry that has occupied me, intermittently, for quite a while (e.g., Edgar et al., 2003).

There are specialist literatures, of varying expansiveness and quality, for each of my case study institutions. These range from autobiographical narratives, PhD theses and affidavits written by prisoners and former prisoners to investigative journalism, reports from official and non-governmental bodies, archives, and traditional academic sources. These are woven into the text as appropriate. In other words, I have tried to embrace an eclectic variety of contributions, not just scholarly ones. Rather than discarding what others have done I am trying to amplify – and refashion – the debate.

The book is in conversation with Sykes's work and indicates the value of seeking points of divergence rather than convergence with classic texts. The penal field is much more crowded now than when Sykes was tilling it – he had first-mover advantage! – and this is an exciting time for those of us with an interest in nurturing new developments. (If Google Scholar is any guide, The Society of Captives is becoming increasingly influential. It was cited 31 times in 1992, 84 times in 2002, 223 times in 2012 and 434 times in 2022.) If Sykes had worked in Texas rather than New Jersey his portrayal of regime dynamics, power relations, the pains of confinement and cycles of crisis and equilibrium, would have looked very different. If he had taken a comparative approach who knows how the society of captives might have been formulated? I am not for a moment suggesting that we should jettison his work but rather that it is time for a respectful resizing of Sykes's contribution to prison studies.

Ian, thanks for the opportunity to dialogue about this exciting new project. I hope that it helps to ignite even further interest in comparative approaches to the study of life in prison. By way of a final question, each chapter features a particular individual who has experience with one of the four different prisons. They bring a tremendous depth of knowledge and humanity to the text. Have they had an opportunity to read it, and if so, what was their reaction?

David, my pleasure, and thank you in return for taking the time to read the book and to ponder its potential contribution to prisons research. To answer your final question, David Ruiz died in prison in 2005 but the three other men who feature in Prison Life are still alive. I sent each of them a copy of the book and asked them to contribute to a short video that I made to accompany a launch event that took place at the North / South Criminology Conference in Dublin City University on 16 June 2023. I was delighted to learn that they felt my efforts had captured important aspects of their incarceration as I did not want the book to become an arid academic exercise detached from human concerns. It is satisfying to know that my analysis chimes with their experience and it is a pleasure to add their voices to our dialogue.