Potting,power and imprisonment: Understanding the use of shit as a form of resistance

Abstract

Prisons are places of power and resistance. When the staff oppress prisoners, the latter participate in various forms of resistance, such as violence, substance misuse, riots, or protests to communicate a sense of injustice. Many of these struggles have been documented and discussed at length, revealing and communicating the national and local structures that produce them. However, potting remains a taboo on the wings and in criminological literature, where the use of bodily fluids as a means of prisoners rejecting penal power is rarely discussed beyond macro-political contexts. Drawing on symbolic interactionism and phenomenological approaches to knowledge, this paper challenges that taboo and proposes that potting is an embodied expression of oppression, a symbolic representation of prisoners’ defilement and a physical transference of their sense of injustice. Potting is a pervasive and perverse form of resistance.

Introduction

Prisons are well-established in criminological literature as places of symbolic and physical violence, of power and (in)justice. Since Sykes (1958) highlighted the psychological and physical ‘afflictions’ (p. 64) of imprisonment, the loss of liberty, deprivation of autonomy, frustration of sexual desire and physical mistreatment, various scholars have analysed some of the ways prisoners are regulated and dominated by its social structures (see Foucault, 1995; Crewe, 2005, 2012). These pains of imprisonment are experienced through the touch of invasive searching practices (Warr, 2023), the sound of keys and alarms that assert order and define status (Herrity, 2019), and through controls on movement, autonomy and identity that induce feelings of tightness and weight (Crewe, 2011). Prisoners are weighed down by the ‘unrelenting imposition of authority’ (Scraton et al., 1991: 63). However, prisoners are not passive social agents. Despite a radical power imbalance, ‘all prisons entail power negotiations between the administration and prisoners, even though the nature, function and degree of such negotiations and the resultant order vary considerably' (Symkovych, 2018: 200). Power in prison is fluid and prisoners practice various strategies of resistance in custody (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001; Crewe, 2012). This paper is concerned with the production of a prevalent yet under-appreciated form of resistance, of assaulting prison staff with shit and urine: ‘potting’.

This paper draws on symbolic interactionism and phenomenological approaches to knowledge. It starts from a belief that our senses are intrinsically linked with meaning. From the affective relations of a cosy pub, a sweaty nightclub, or a baby’s diaper, the senses communicate meaning. Phenomenology promotes a focus on embodied knowledge, on an awareness of ourselves (Mohr, 1969: 7) whilst symbolic interactionism highlights the relationship between subjective experiences, the way we embody and construct our subjectivities (Blumer, 1969). Informed by both approaches, this paper assumes we interpret our realities through intersubjective processes (Prus, 1996). As Warr (2021) explains, ‘we sense first, then we feel, then we rationalise’ (p. 21) The body is not just a thing in the world, it is our general ‘medium’ for having a world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 72). The senses mediate our contexts, bound up with social processes and meaning-making.

Applying this theoretical framework in prison settings, sensations can reveal the mental and physical structures that (re-)produce their experience and outcomes. In her novel sensorial investigation of HMP Midtown, Herrity (2019) noted that sight, sound and smell are central to complex social systems demarcating purity and danger. Each sense is a powerful communicator of the prison’s power and intent. From the metallic greys of razor wires to the sound of keys jangling, gates clanging and the smell of drugs, Herrity (2019) bridges the gap between abstract conditions and everyday experiences. Continuing the emergence of sensory criminology, this paper provides a sociology of the senses to examine how prisoners experience, learn and resist the punitive sensorial outputs and transmissions that occur within custody (Herrity et al., 2021: xxiii). Specifically, it investigates the sociogenesis of ‘potting’, the why and the how. This paper conceives of potting as regulated improvisation, an embodied assault of the senses to rebalance power and control in prisons.

Potting is an under-explored behaviour in prisons. Unlike the more well-known ‘dirty protest’ that uses bodily fluids to symbolically communicate a sense of unjust behaviour through passive means (HMPPS, 2022), potting is the impositional act of physically assaulting another with bodily fluids as a projectile. According to the official policy in England and Wales, the former is a distinct form of protest with ‘every effort… made to ascertain the reasons for the protest’ (p. 57) and the latter is a vile and senseless ‘bad behaviour’ for which the prison service has ‘zero tolerance’ (Hansard, 2022). National data is not readily available on the frequency of dirty protests however, in the 12 months to April 2023, there were just 85 ‘passive concerted indisciplines’ (protest without violence) in England and Wales prisons (HMPPS, 2023a) and almost 2000 reported assaults involving bodily fluids or ‘dangerous liquids’, such as urine, excrement, spitting or boiling water (Ministry of Justice, 2023). Both uses have a long history of practice in prisons but ‘dirty protests’ are more established in sociological analyses as ‘mute defiance’ (Sparks, 2002) and an oppositional force against socio-political repression (Aretxaga, 1995). Potting is a more obscure subject in criminological literature. Herrity (2019) provides a rare but brief analysis of a potting incident in HMP Midtown, proposing that it had a ‘specific, instrumental purpose’ to communicate a perceived injustice (p. 164). This paper develops this idea of potting as resistance and deconstructs its production, theorising that dirty protests and potting share a similar sociogenesis.

This article is grounded in how individuals make sense of their world. To address how individuals use language and give meaning to actions, it utilises accounts from prison staff and prisoners during ethnographic fieldwork (10 weeks of observation and 28 interviews with the staff and prisoners) in an English prison in pursuit of a PhD in 2020. The attention of this paper is on how the people in prison construct their social context and it addresses themes of power, resistance, shame, and identity in prison. It explains how prison is understood, interpreted and experienced as a sensorial environment, and the social dimensions that produce what happens within.

The body and power

Prisons are infamous places of control and resistance, with the staff and prisoners using their bodies to contest and negotiate power daily. Prisons in England and Wales are hyper-organised spaces designed to control prisoners in the name of ‘security’ and ‘public protection’. To quote searching policy (HMPPS, 2023a), prisoners and their bodies are ‘security risks’ and ‘threats’ to ‘security, order and control’ (p. 55) that must be ‘managed’ and ‘mitigated’. Security is an endless quest of imprisonment, the pursuit of control that claims to protect liberty but diminishes it and perpetuates insecurity.

The body is central to imprisonment. Foucault (1995) explained that the body is always the issue: ‘the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission’ (p. 19). It is an object to be acted upon, to be punished, regulated and supervised to retract agency and (re-)produce control. Upon imprisonment, prisoners are ‘stripped’ of their liberty, social identity, and their bodily autonomy. During the entry process, prisoners are assigned a unique prison number to identify them from entry until they are released, and prisoners are regularly searched via X-ray machines, stripping naked, and/or pat-downs (a physical search of the full body but with clothes on) to reveal any potentially concealed items. At a superficial or an ‘official’ level of discourse, these searches are ‘fundamental’ to security (Bennett, 2023), seemingly indispensable and deeply embedded in the practice and logic of contemporary imprisonment for ‘safety’ (Tschanz, 2023). In explaining these practices, Bennett (2023) reproduces official doxic (uncritical) narratives by contending that searching is ‘both necessary and effective’ (p. 35), citing government statistics on finding drugs and mobile phones as a ‘material basis for concern’ (p. 30). Despite pervasive searching practices, Bennett (2023) does not reference record levels of violence and deaths in prisons in recent years (Ministry of Justice, 2023). Bennett (2023) argues only that any critical accounts of prison security ‘underplay the significance of ongoing criminality’ in prisons (p. 29). His analysis underplays the sociological dimensions of security.

At a subjective level, prisons assault the senses. Prisoners experience sensory and emotional control of state power:

‘[the prisoner] cannot move freely, leave the prison, secure privacy, or pursue [their] preferences… bodily location, dress, and actions are largely dictated by the state’, the ‘imprisoned body… associated with violence and deficit, objectified by a fearful gaze, appropriated by hostile others.’ (Leder, 2004: 61)

By disconnecting the application of security in prison from employment, income, health, or housing security, prisons normalise overt and covert oppression through disciplinary procedures, invasive technologies and derelict infrastructure (Moran and Jewkes, 2015). In particular, being searched ‘shouts that you are now a prisoner, nothing but a prisoner’ (Warr, 2023: 16), not harmed by social inequality but a risk to be contained. The unwanted touch of powerful hands, these searching practices, are invasive, degrading and evoke feelings of control (Daems, 2023; Warr, 2023). The searches represent a state monopoly over a prisoner’s body, communicating and reproducing the social hierarchy of the prison, the status of a prisoner, what they represent and what they have lost. Although the policy states that searches of prisoners should be based on ‘local risk assessments’ or ‘intelligence-led’ (HMPPS, 2023b: 8), the same policy that Bennett (2023) states regulates staff actions, prisoners were subject to all the three searching procedures upon arrival into the fieldwork site and other prisons (InsideTime, 2023, Online). In interviews and informal interactions, staff repeated the policy principles to justify their behaviour, ‘empowered’ to ‘identity and manage their security risks’ (HMPPS, 2023b: 7). Searching “kept the prison safe”, it was a “security measure” (fieldnotes, 27/01/2020) ‘embedded’ in the carceral logic (Tschanz, 2023: 241) of what a prison is and what it is for. Searching was ‘just one of their duties’ (Warr, 2023: 19) as staff, like Bennett (2023) did not question its security imperative and were generally dismissive of the power imbalance it reproduced. The searching of prisoners’ bodies indicated how prisoners experience civic and social death (see Price, 2015), removed from their rights to liberty, vote, bodily autonomy, privacy, and moral consideration upon incarceration (Tschanz, 2023). Citizens are transformed into prisoners (Gooch, 2013) as the imprisoned body is coerced into submission.

The status and coercion of the prisoner are reinforced and communicated throughout the liminal entry process. To restrict individuality and induce prisonisation (Clemmer, 1940), personal belongings are seized as they are provided with prison-issued bed-packs and clothing. Irrespective of the season or needs of the prisoner, they are issued with a grey jumper and tracksuit bottoms, a generic fire-retardant mattress, pillow, bed sheet, and blanket. Ross (2008) noted that material possessions, such as clothes, ‘sort’ people and ‘identify’ a person, distinguishing who people are and what they are. In the same way that the status and role of the operational staff are conveyed by their uniform and stripes on their epaulettes, the removal of personal belongings and provision of prison-issue possessions ‘physically and symbolically strips’ (Gooch, 2013: 80) imprisoned people of their identity. Their new status as ‘sub-citizens’ (Schliehe et al., 2022) is emphasised by the search procedures and provision of transparent bin bags to transport their belongings. The symbolism is clear, their bodies have ‘become public property’ (Wahidin and Tate, 2005: 60) and their personal belongings are worthless.

In the wings, physical and psychological prisonisation continues. Within austere material features (see Moran and Jewkes, 2015) and a dulled sensory experience (see Herrity et al., 2021), prisons are ‘designed’ to be hard, a metaphor for the loss of public empathy (Moran, et al. 2016: 118). The imprisoned body experiences social constraints and a hostile atmosphere. The wings are loud, the cells are small and dark, and the prisoners have minimal control over their conditions, such as ventilation and lighting. The inadequate ventilation and poor air quality, like the low ceilings, dark spaces, and tight walls, reflect the oppressiveness of the prison environment, affecting the health and well-being of staff and prisoners (Jewkes and Johnston, 2012). The embodied experience of imprisonment is then controlled at every turn through mandatory drug testing, the use of force, body-worn video cameras, closed-circuit television surveillance, continued searching of their bodies and cells, and, most recently, wastewater-based surveillance. According to the prison service, these measures contribute to a more ordered and safe prison community (Sturt and Hooch, 2021), a semantic euphemism for control. Scholars, such as Balfour (2018) have highlighted the ubiquitous surveillance in prisons, as prisoners see and feel the power of the prison. Prisoners are reminded of what they are, where they are, and what they have become (Warr, 2023) as prisons objectify the body, intended to render it powerless. The senses communicate the fundamental aspects of imprisonment (Warr, 2021) and they reveal the factors re-producing it: the ‘wider themes of penality’ (p. 31). According to this sensescape, we can understand ‘ideas in motion’ (Yang, 2022); make sense of the world around us and, where appropriate, do something about it. By addressing these themes of penality, we can question the security imperative of imprisonment.

Method

This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Clarendon,¹ a local adult male prison in England. As part of a PhD programme sponsored in part by HMPPS to analyse contemporary security issues, fieldwork evolved with the pandemic circumstances and was conducted over two periods in 2020 – for twenty days from January to March and three weeks in September and October. In total, nearly 200 hours of fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with 15 staff and 13 prisoners were conducted. The questions explored their experience of imprisonment, their interpretations of its purpose, their roles, and, among other reflections, changes over time. A fieldwork diary was maintained and written notes were typed up digitally at the end of every day. The data was synthesised and open-coded (Braun and Clarke, 2006), then categorised into themes concerning the primary research question of how security, safety, and rehabilitation are operationalised in contemporary imprisonment.

The fieldwork addressed the full spectrum of experience within Clarendon. Being in the field afforded the collection of sensorial data, including sound, sight, and smell, I saw the faces of prisoners waiting to be searched and heard the aural transitions between a controlled reception and a less compliant prison wing. I smelled the aftermath of a potting incident and heard prisoners’ feelings and interpretations. I felt the hostility and witnessed the violence. These sources of knowledge complemented the interviews and informal interactions, lending texture to spatial and temporal dimensions of power and order (Herrity, 2019). Words help understand how participants interpret their field, and senses mediate the structure, behaviour and knowledge, fusing the social and emotional dimensions of imprisonment. Being in the field revealed some of the wider social structures producing practice. In other words, a phenomenologically-informed ethnographic approach bridged the abstract and the everyday life in custody. A symbolic interactional analysis deconstructs and theorises actions, interpretations and outcomes in a prison.

Clarendon was selected for its place within the wider prison system. With a capacity for around 700 male prisoners either on remand, charged, sentenced, or awaiting sentence, it is an average-sized prison consistently at full capacity and one of the thirty that receive prisoners directly from the courts (HMPPS, 2020a). The prison holds those committed by the court until such time that they are (re-)categorised and transferred to another prison based on their ‘security risk’ – their risk of escape, harm to the public, ongoing criminality and/ or risk of violent behaviour (HMPPS, 2020b). These prisons hold a unique place in the prison system. These are the prisons in which all non-category A male prisoners commence their imprisonment, therefore they are the first, and frequently the last, impression of the custodial estate for many men.

Clarendon reflected the systemic conditions of imprisonment. At the time of site selection, national rates of self-harm, assaults and deaths were at or close to record highs in the prison system (Ministry of Justice, 2024). HMP Clarendon failed to meet three of the HM Inspectorate of Prison’s (HMIP) four tests for a healthy prison and had experienced a ‘significant deterioration’ in safety, rehabilitation and release planning in the years preceding this study (HMIP, 2020). Like prisons across England and Wales, Clarendon still faces high rates of violence, self-harm, use of force, drug use, staff sickness, overcrowding, and inexperienced staff (HMIP, 2022a, 2023). Clarendon should be considered ‘symptomatic of shortcomings evident across the prison estate’ (House of Commons Justice Select Committee, 2018) and its study identifies themes that speak to what is happening in other prisons. The following section discusses one of the dominant research themes relating to the relationship between prisoner's bodies and social marginalisation.

Violence as resistance

How you react causes other people to act and same, how they act, cause how you react, yeah. Actions cause reactions, reactions cause actions. (Jim, prisoner)

During the fieldwork, violence was a dominant topic of discussion among prisoners and staff. Reflecting national discourses where ministers and trade unions described prisoners as ‘difficult’ (Prison Officers Association, 2018, February) and “dangerous” (Dominic Raab, Ministry of Justice, 2021: 3) and prisons were ‘inherently violent’ (Prison Officers Association, 2022, January), most staff internalised policy narratives of ‘risk’ and ‘threats’. Prisoners were “violent” and “volatile”, a problem to be oppressed:

A lot of these people are violent when they come in and do you necessarily treat violence with violence? Does that work? I don’t know, some of these guys in here that’s the only language they understand … You’re never going to stop drugs in prison, you’re never going to stop violence. (Simon, supervising officer)

Prisoners were seen as violent when they arrived, violent when incarcerated, and dangerous upon release. Before and during the pandemic, a worst-case mindset, similar to ‘security think’ (Drake, 2012), was absolute and fundamental to imprisonment. The staff internalised official policy narratives, framing prisoners as “violent” risks to be managed. It reinforced a security disposition that represented the structure of the field. It was their role to enforce control.

Control frequently manifested in the use of force. In the six months before fieldwork commenced, nearly 25% of prisoners self-reported that they had been physically restrained by staff in Clarendon (HMIP, 2020a) compared with almost 15% nationally (HMIP, 2020b). On the second day of the fieldwork in January, I recorded three general alarms requiring ‘all available staff’ to respond and this continued during the pandemic. In July 2020, staff used force on average three times a day, 55 times a month in 2020-21, and 52 times a month in 2021-22 (IMB, 2022). This prevalence of force is not unique to Clarendon. Clarendon’s comparator group of prisons (male locals) averaged 60 uses of force per month per 1,000 prisoners in 2020-21, and 50 for 2021-22 (IMB, 2022). Nationally, force was used over 49,000 times in the 12 months to March 2020, 591 times per 1,000 prisoners (The Guardian 2021, January). The threat or physical use ‘of coercive force underpins and structures the very nature and texture of prison life’ (Gooch, 2013: 76). Violence is not unique to Clarendon and its use by the prison staff is ever-present in the delivery and experience of imprisonment. This violence conditions the behaviour of prisoners.

For prisoners, the staff were violent and ‘excessive’ in their use of force. As most prisoners explained, staff did not provide safety and security, but perpetuated a sense of insecurity and sense of injustice:

It’s like the Guvs are like a Gang. You punch one and another punches you back. They fold you up, they hurt you. You might not feel it that day but the next day you’re going to know, you’ll hurt. That’s what happened to me, I got in headlocks and everything by Guvs in this jail. Some of the force they do use is way too much, like I do feel like they use their force like Police sometimes. (Jerry)

For some of them, it’s like a steroid… sometimes, they provoke it to stir things up. There’s an Officer here, every time he works, you hear the bell go off. Every time. Every time he’s on shift, somebody has to get bent over, or the door will keep banging, or the window will be broken because they antagonise it. (Mr Adah)

Nearly all interviewed prisoners had stories of ‘excessive’ violence by staff in Clarendon. Before and during the pandemic, prisoners suggested that staff practice was predicated on the use of physical force as a means of violently enforcing control, a finding identified in other prison research (Gooch, 2013). Not only did prison strip those incarcerated of their identities, but it ‘mortified' (Goffman, 1961: 38) the self, “hurting” and scarring the bodies of prisoners. The enforced touch and the physical injuries of staff using force reinforced the social hierarchy and reproduced the loss of privacy and autonomy of prisoners. Scraton et al. (1991) contested that ‘all forms of incarceration imply the use of force’ (p. 62) as prisons enact symbolic and physical violence upon the bodies of prisoners by holding them against their will and imposing draconian policing and control of prisoners.

This violence was ‘encoded’ in the sensorial outputs within the prison (Herrity et al., 2021: xxiii). Jo, a prisoner and reception listener (support worker for prisoners) explained that the prison felt “dehumanising … prisoners aren’t being treated like humans”. Jo told me to look at the faces of prisoners in reception as a means of understanding how it feels to be imprisoned:

I noticed dejected, solemn looks. In contrast to the rest of the prison, reception is quiet and controlled, staff speak in calm statements to prisoners and they comply with every order – some could even confuse it as dignified. Those leaving are all smiles, those arriving seem close to tears. (fieldnotes, 27/01/2020)

The absence of noise seemed to suggest a prevailing sense of powerlessness and futility amongst the prisoners. Herrity (2019) explains that penal power can be communicated through sound. The assertiveness of orders by the staff in Clarendon, “stand here”, “hands out”, “sign here”, “turn around”, the quiet compliance of prisoners, and the absence of chatter or noise during and between interactions introduced and reinforced the oppressive nature of imprisonment. Violence by prisoners sought to subvert the normative structures of oppression and injustice.

Violence was a way of being and communicating in the field, conditioned by their embodied social inequality and a “very violent environment” (Felix). The majority of prisoners stated that violence should be met with violence to protect a prisoner’s respect and status. Below, prisoners described violence as a “defence mode”:

My criminal record is just all violence as well so that’s all I know from young ‘cause Bruv, I was brought up since I was 7 years old around violence. I can remember violence for as long as I can remember it and I’ve seen some nasty shit, so when it goes off in here, it’s all I know. It’s defence mode, punch them up… You get treated like an animal, I act like an animal. So you don’t put a wild dog in a cage and expect it to change overnight, be tamed and that, sit down when you get told to and that, the dog won’t do that, it’ll bite you and that’s how I see it. Some of these boys are like wild dogs, you need to help us, not just keep us locked away. It ain’t going to help no-one, when they open the door, [we] just go mad. (Jerry)

You see, in here, you’ve got to be somebody, you’ve got to fight for respect. Guvs have the law behind them, it means they can do whatever they want, we’ve got our reputations. If someone attacks you or disrespects you, Con or Guv, you got to hold your own. Punch them, shit, do whatever. Whatever it takes. (Shane, fieldnotes, 21/01/2020)

Most prisoners suggested that violence was part of their conditioned way of being. As Jim explained at the top of this section, behaviour is cause and effect. Prison violence is an ‘interactive trap’ (Neuber, 2011). There is no way out of it for prisoners who, like the staff, behave according to how they are shaped by the field, embodying their daily violations. Violence reproduced violence.

The majority of prisoners felt that the use of force produced a cycle of insecurity by provoking a violent reaction where prisoners felt they needed to “attack back”. They explained this paradox of prison ‘security’ below:

[After an incident with staff, being restrained and escorted to segregation] I just want to be respected, to be heard and listened to. She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t let me speak. I wouldn’t go in my cell until someone explained why I can’t move wings. She tried to push me inside so I pushed her back and then she jumped me. Xavier was upset at being restrained and close to tears as his voice broke. He told [the custodial manager] that he “can’t deal” with people being “aggressive” to him, it “makes” him “trigger”. (Fieldnotes, 14/01/2020)

In all fairness, I’d love to knock them out half the time ‘cause now, if I went out, if I got six of my mates in here and went and smacked up one of the screws, that would be frowned upon. Now when there’s six of them smacking up one of us, it’s called, ‘force’. So, I’m one of them people that believe there’s a mutual respect so I don’t agree with it and I do agree with the fact that when they attack us – which is, whether you call it force or not, it is an attack – that we’re well within our rights to attack back. They use weapons, they don’t want to be on the receiving end of one of our weapons. Going to be a lot different to a little bit of metal. (Luke)

The unwanted touch felt intrusive, a violation and “attack” on their autonomy. More than half of the prisoners felt unsafe in Clarendon and a similar number experienced bullying and/or victimisation from the staff (HMIP, 2022a). Force felt like an “escalation” that “triggered” a cycle of harm. The emotional response of these prisoners indicates that force is a paradox, depriving them of security. It induced feelings and actions of retribution and retaliation towards the operational staff using force, reproducing the conditions of its use in Clarendon. Between 2018 and 2022, the use of force in Clarendon had no effect in reducing prisoner violence (IMB, 2022). The belief among many staff and prison policy rhetoric that force provides security and a safer environment can be interpreted as allodoxic (Bourdieu, 1991), the misrecognition of security. The use of force and searching practices ‘penetrated the private reserve of the individual and violates the territories of self’ (Goffman, 1961: 29) and its unwanted touch induces feelings of contempt and humiliation (Warr, 2023). Violence reciprocated the violation.

Prisons have, in large part, produced passive, docile bodies (see Schlosser, 2013) but many prisoners struggle against impositions of control and subordination. Foucault (1978) asserted that ‘Where there is [coercive] power there is resistance’ (p. 95) and research has identified the various forms of resistance that prisoners use to disrupt the status quo, such as mind games (McDermott and King, 1988) and violence (Liebling and Arnold, 2012). Like the laws of physics, penal power does not flow only in one direction. Through covert and overt resistance, such as illicit drug trade and/or use (Crewe, 2005), self-harm (Aitchison and Essex, 2022), escapes and legal challenges (Buntman, 2003), riots and protests (Crewe, 2012), prisoners subvert state power and wield their own; indeed ‘prison life is characterised by ongoing negotiations of power’ (Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001: 501). By using their bodies, prisoners actively resist and ‘circumvent or eliminate the imposition of unwelcome power’ (Buntman, 2003: 237) but beyond the examination of dirty protests, there has been minimal scholarship addressing how prisoners use their bodily fluids to resist the local control and disciplinary boundaries imposed on them by institutions.

The use of bodily fluids is an extension of active prisoner resistance, another form of protest and violence with a long history. The etymology of potting, “shitting up” (Herrity, 2019) or ‘gassing’ (Rhodes, 2004) as a verb is likely associated with prisoners urinating and defecating into chamber pots in their cells and then (de-) potting contents into sluices or on staff when unlocked. The action has been identified in Ireland (O’Donnell, 2014), America (Rhodes, 2004; Shalev, 2009) and Australia (Carlton, 2007) and dates back to 1861 in the United Kingdom when the Offences Against the Persons Act was introduced into law, under which section 24 states,

Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously administer to or cause to be administered to or taken by any other person or other destructive or noxious thing, with intent to injure, aggrieve or annoy any such person, shall be guilty of [an offence].

The case law determined that bodily fluids, including urine and excrement, are ‘noxious thing(s)’ (Crown Prosecution Service, 2022) and assaults by potting are becoming an increasing issue for the HM Prison Service. According to the published statistics of the Ministry of Justice (2023), known and reported cases of assaults ‘involving weapons’, including food and spitting, include over 72,000 incidents between 2000-2022. Potting accounted for 2,370 assaults at an annual average of 240 since 2016, an increase of 352% compared with those in 2000-2006. Furthermore, over 12,300 incidents of spitting and almost 3,500 assaults by unidentified ‘dangerous liquid’ were reported, suggesting that the use of bodily fluids is pervasive in prisons. No comparative analysis is possible between prisons and differences in regimes or culture as this data is only available at the national level, yet the recent rise in potting coincides with the national deterioration of prison infrastructure in recent years. Correlation is not causation, however, scholars have pointed to the impacts of understaffing, corruption, endemic overcrowding, recidivism, austerity measures, deteriorating conditions, and industrial relations on local actions and outcomes, such as record levels of violence and prisoner deaths (Annison and Guiney, 2023; Ismail, 2022). Rather than punishing less, governments tried to ‘punish better’ (Chamberlen and Carvalho, 2019: 101) with more restrictions and control, such as pepper spray. Prisoners have borne the injuries of that punishment and the data indicates the transference of harm to the staff. Potting reinforces the harmful impacts of prison work and gives ‘dirty work’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999, 2007) another meaning as the increase in potting occurred alongside record levels of violence, staff sickness (Ministry of Justice, 2024), mental health issues and resignations (HMPPS, 2023c). UK and international research have identified that prison staff experience high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, stress and depression similar to that of military and police personnel (Carleton et al., 2020; Woodfield et al., 2023). The prison staff are physically, socially and morally tainted by contact with prisoners (Ashforth and Kreiner, 2007). Potting represents both a symbolic and physical contamination of prison work.

However, extant literature regarding the use of bodily fluids, such as menstrual blood, has predominantly focussed on the use of ‘dirty protests’ or ‘bronzing up’ (Carlton, 2007). With phenomenological theory, scholars have analysed the symbolic dimensions of passively smearing excrement and blood on cell walls as embodied agency. In an Australian context, Carlton (2007) identified that ‘bronzing up’ was a form of uncontrolled resistance, prisoners deliberately smeared their bodily fluids on the cell walls to express their dissatisfaction with prison conditions. In Northern Ireland, Wahidin (2019), described the experience of women incarcerated in the 1980s and how they turned their bodies into agentic weapons to demonstrate their resistance against the state and to reinforce their identities as Republicans – challenging the senses, authority, legitimacy and control of their captors through a ‘no wash’ protest. Like the ‘mute defiance’ of hunger strikes (Sparks, 2002), the women collectively employed their bodies as an oppositional force against repression by living in their waste and menstrual blood (Aretxaga, 1995). ‘The prisoners knew why they were smearing their cells with excrement and under which conditions they would cease to do so.’ (Wahidin, 2019: 126) As a form of bio-power (Foucault, 1995), their gendered bodies were used as symbolic and physical vehicles to communicate defiance and to strategically challenge the repressive technologies of the state and imprisonment. Excrement and blood, the techniques of the body, were central to their production of defiance.

Bodily fluids give social weight to acts of defiance. Burns (2013) explains that the dirty protest of women in Ireland broke from conventional bodily expressions and habits, embodying their dirtiness to anchor themselves within their world. Women were meant to be clean, prisoners were meant to be docile, and the unwashed body was repugnant. They transgressed normative ideas about femininity, the body, and power. In their prison cells, repressed by the everyday controls of imprisonment, the women refused to be normalised. The visibility and smell of excrement and menstrual blood subjugated conventional social structures and polluted the senses. Excrement was dangerous as it threatened the ego, challenging a sense of shame and menstrual blood was dangerous for threatening the relationship between the sexes (Kristeva, 1982). Together, bodily fluids questioned the construction of identity and power structures which triggered public reactions and empowered the imprisoned women. At a micro level, the dirty protests were another weapon deployed against the staff. The dirtiness of the women contaminated the staff who did not like to touch their polluted bodies. It became their focus of resistance, their act of agency, and ‘their rejection of docility’ (Burns, 2013: 36). The women used their bodily fluids to threaten the boundaries that constitute the social order (Burns, 2013). This paper is not a gendered analysis but it draws similarities between the symbolic and physical transference of dirty protests and potting.

The Lived Experience of Potting

Abi recalls that she went to lock the cell door at the end of Domestics and the prisoner threw the fluids at her. She knew immediately what it was and screamed, her colleagues quickly came to her aid and locked the cell door. She doesn’t want to go into details so I don’t press her but she said it “clung” to her for days: the smell, the feeling, the memory. Abi still “shivers” thinking about it. “I don’t think they even saw me as me.” Abi explains that she was “lucky”: “I’ve seen prisoners do far worse” but she felt embarrassed and ashamed. The prisoner hadn’t been at Clarendon long and Abi still didn’t know why they did it, “They were probably angry about something or other. No one asked.” (Fieldnotes, 03/02/2020)

In this brief vignette, Abi, a prison officer, recounts one of the multiple incidents involving prisoners potting staff in Clarendon. As Abi’s memory suggests, the assault of potting is a multi-sensorial experience. The smell of the bodily fluids, the physical sensation and shock, and the associated emotional response of shame and embarrassment made Abi “shiver” as the experience “clung” to her. The senses fused her imagination and perception. The smell of shit and the touch of bodily fluids, the sensual contamination, lent the physical assault a symbolic dimension. Potting reinforced its purpose by extending the experience of being assaulted to numerous sources of knowledge. Potting emotionally, physically and psychologically contaminated her sense of self. Abi’s experience resonates with the wider literature on the dirty work of imprisonment. Many staff who had witnessed or experienced an assault by potting said that it left an imprint, a physical and psychological memory:

It’s embarrassing having to go home after that, you don't want to talk about it. (Hendrick, a prison officer, Fieldnotes, 03/02/2020)

It happens and staff don’t feel like they can do anything, they’re powerless. There are no repercussions, they go home wash it off, and that’s that but they come back demoralised. (Edmond, senior manager, fieldnotes, 18/02/2020)

Potting left traces of itself on the outside and inside of the body (Wahidin, 2019: 119). Staff suggested that potting was a harmful assault committed by the “lowest of the low” (Fieldnotes, 03/02/2020) that affected their physical and psychological state, it spoiled their identity and sense of self. The staff internalised the defilement, an experience that they carried beyond the prison walls.

Violence, like excrement and urine, manifests itself in the bodies and minds of the perpetrator and survivor. Abi and her peers suggested potting was a traumatic assault on the body that left a memory, it symbolically stained her. The staff in Clarendon implied that potting was an exposure to ‘visceral repugnance’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999: 415), a shameful assault that polluted their ego and identity. Bobby, a prison officer, explained that “he would rather be punched in the face than potted”. Unlike Herrity’s (2019) interpretation of a potting incident where ‘no one has been seriously harmed’ (p. 164), being punched was interpreted as leaving less of a mark. These accounts reinforce the emotional labour of prison work (Nylander and Bruhn, 2020) and the pervasiveness of trauma within the workforce that deserves further attention. Ricciardelli et al. (2020) state that the work of officers is under-recognised and under-appreciated. Not only do the prison staff witness high levels of suicide, self-harm and violence (Bennett et al. 2013), but they are at high risk of experiencing emotional and psychological conflict. Understanding why potting occurs can better inform how to protect staff from harm.

These assaults have drawn the attention of the prison staff and politicians nationally. In a press release, the Prison Officers Association, a trade union for prison staff in England and Wales, emphasised potting as a ‘vile practice’ that has plagued the prison service for years. They advocated for laws to be introduced punishing prisoners who supply urine and faeces for the ‘facilitation of potting’, under the assumption that the measures would ‘directly improve the lives of our members and other prison staff by reducing the risk of violence against them’ (2022, January). In January 2022, with the support of Lord Atlee, an amendment was tabled to what was then the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill to criminalise the ‘facilitation of potting’ (Hansard, 2022). However, the amendment was soon withdrawn as preparatory acts are already a crime (Sections 44 to 46 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 and/or the Criminal Attempts Act 1981). Nevertheless, the public narratives of potting revealed its impact on staff. Whilst ‘dirty protests’ are passively accepted, the General Secretary of the Prison Officers Association, said that ‘everything possible’ needs to be done to eradicate the ‘vile’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘cowardly attacks’. National Chair, Mark Fairhurst stated:

Vile potting assaults are one of the most abhorrent types of assault and warrant prosecutions. (Prison Officers Association, 2022, January)

Members of the House of Lords similarly described potting as ‘vile’, ‘horrific’, ‘disgusting’, ‘malicious’ and ‘bad behaviour’. Prisoners who “shitted up” the staff are labelled ‘the most dangerous, wicked and obnoxious members of our society’ (Hansard, 2022). Shalev (2009) and O’Donnell (2014) separately identified that potting confirmed the general view of prisoners as savage, sub-human and unfathomable. The sentiment was that prisoners are mindless and ‘wicked’ causing an unprovoked awful and traumatic event. However, Lord Ponsonby did pose one question to the amendment: ‘How [would government] propose to monitor potting and whether it is done by somebody acting in extreme distress or whether it is part of a planned tactic, if you like, within the prison?’ (Hansard, 2022, col. 931). Amidst the punitive rhetoric, there was a willingness to understand why potting occurs and by whom to address its causes. The question was ignored by lawmakers but it remains important to address the behaviour, why are prisoners doing this? What are the aims and outcomes? What can scholars and policymakers learn from this action? The following section explores the meaning of potting from the perspective of prisoners in Clarendon.

Regulated improvisation: The symbolic act of potting

To prisoners in Clarendon, potting was associated with feelings of indignity, an embodied retaliation to learned violence:

I’ve seen prison officers get shitted up because of their demeanour, how they come across to people. If you come across too arrogant and thinking you’re big man, I have seen people shitted on, I mean they’re (prisoners) shitting in a tub, they’re pouring boiling hot water, pissing in it and letting it ferment for 2-3 weeks. They get some spice head, give them some spice to throw all that shit over the Guv, just because that Guv thought he was big man. So it’s a two-way thing, like the staff have to give us respect to get respect back. But it’s the same way, we have to give staff respect to get respect back. That make sense? If there’s no respect there, it’ll all go tits up, it’s all about respect in prison. (Vlad)

In contrast to the use of bodily fluids in Northern Ireland as political transgression (Aretxaga, 1997: 67), Vlad, a prisoner in Clarendon, describes potting or being “shitted on” as a product of local circumstances. It was an interpersonal response to disrespect and unjust treatment. Bodily fluids were weaponised by some prisoners to enable the staff to feel the equivalent sense of embodied imprisonment experienced by prisoners:

AJ, the prisoner who had potted the officer doesn’t care how anyone sees him, he is convinced that his actions were justified, “they deserved it”, “they expect us to just take shit, so it’s nice to give it back” and “they treat us like shit.” AJ said that the staff “disrespected me” and he was still angry, “They better listen when I talk next time!” He suggests that his actions have served “justice”, but staff still disrespect him by ignoring him. I ask him why he did it and AJ replies, “To get one over on them, they always talk down to me, make me feel crap. They think they are big in their Uniform, better than us, but they’re not.” I don’t have an opportunity to press further as staff and Graham [Orderly] are throwing dirty looks at me for “giving him [AJ] attention”, reinforcing the stigma towards prisoners who ‘pot’ staff and the harm of their actions. (Fieldnotes, 03/02/2020)

Potting was considered a symbolic communication from these prisoners to the staff, an act of transference and reciprocity: “Treat us like shit” and get treated with shit. AJ and Vlad associated violence with (dis)respect and potting was a means of regaining their loss of control and identity. “It’s all about respect”. Potting as a specific form of violence may be considered a ‘commemoration’ of conflict over the body between prisoners and prison staff (Wahidin, 2019: 119) – an act of resistance that points directly at how the system that has incarcerated them is both morally and literally ‘full of shit’ (Lyons, 1996: 112). Rhodes (2004) explained that:

The prisoner who sees himself defined as a piece of shit hurls into the faces of his keepers the very aspect of himself that most intensely represents his contaminated status in their eyes (p. 45)

In prisons where the body is controlled in almost every way, bodily fluids are a subversive means of communicating dissatisfaction. According to the prisoners, it is rational, deliberate and provocative, a desperate act evoked by a desperate situation (O’Donnell, 2014). The coercion and colonisation of the body, the experience of imprisonment, whether perceived or actual, motivates prisoners to resist and challenge the prison’s authority.

By inducing feelings of shame among the staff, potting countered the hierarchy of imprisonment (see Crewe et al., 2014). Prisoners were meant to be compliant and docile, to be “talked down to” but violence subverted their subordination and control. Like other forms of violence, potting reaffirmed their bodies as their possession and ‘locus of power’ (Leder, 2004: 61). When prisoners feel an injustice has been experienced, they may feel justified in hurting others as a way of ‘reasserting one’s dignity and identity’ (Young, 2003: 408). Inversely, if the prison system and prison procedures are seen as legitimate, then there is a reduction in the violation of prison rules (Reisig & Mesko, 2009). Prison conditions do not pre-determine prisoners’ actions but structure them, producing a form of ‘regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 79) among prisoners in response to their conditions. Shalev (2009) explained that in custody, the prisoners modify their behaviour in response to their controlling conditions. How the prisoners act is associated with their experience of imprisonment, after all, nothing happens without a reason. Potting was considered one of their few means of acting out in prison. It was an act of self-expression where most other avenues have been blocked. Its use may be theorised as a perverse form of “justice”.

Potting is not an incomprehensible assault, but a language of the oppressed. With every demeaning act, segregation, miscarriage of justice, and every futile and inactive period of time, prisoners interpret their experience as illegitimate and unjust (Sparks and Bottoms, 1996: 60). This is reproduced and reinforced by a loss of identity and autonomy, such as bin bags for their belongings, searching procedures, ‘basically adequate’ food (Gooch, 2013: 98), standard-issue clothing, and other symbolic processes of punishment. With their bodies largely contained and the absence of other forms of expression, they transmute their oppression through one of the few material possessions not actively policed: their bodily fluids. The use of bodily fluids in the prison remains, for now, within the control of the prisoners – it was their choice, their ‘weapon’ (Aretxaga, 1997: 136) to communicate a sense of injustice. Like the women in Northern Ireland used their menstruation, the prisoners in Clarendon used shit and urine as an in-bodied ‘vehicle’ and ‘symbol’ of transgression (Aretxaga, 1997: 67). Reinforcing how prison staff transgress the boundary from ‘pure’ to ‘dirty’ by proximity to prisoners, potting is infused with stigma. The bodily fluids marked the prison officer’s clothes, hair, body and mind. It had symbolic meaning as it transgressed the confines of the prison walls and enabled prisoners to regain a sense of autonomy, to “give it back”. Potting is a ‘pungent declaration of autonomy’ (O’Donnell, 2014: 245). Framed within this phenomenological lens of potting as an embodied response to physical control, it can be understood as an act of ‘regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 79), a socialised response to their conditions.

These prisoners personified their contaminated status and acted according to their socialisation, their experience of vilification and otherness. This embodied opposition has been noted in a few other accounts of imprisonment. As Herrity (2019) theorised in HMP Midtown:

Potting, however unpleasant, was about assaulting the dignity rather than the person, as a warning to rebalance respect. It had a specific, instrumental purpose and was part of a wider code of penalties to deliver a message for perceived unjust behaviour, albeit with a brutal method of delivery. (p. 164)

Where prisoners perceive illegitimacy, they establish opposition and resistance in the forms of learned violence – an act of interpersonal ‘rebalancing’. The active assault of throwing shit and urine on staff, like the passive smearing on cell walls and the unwashed body, communicates a prisoner’s sense of injustice. In America, Rhodes (2004) and Shalev (2009) theorised that ‘gassing’ was a reaction to the prison environment, a manifestation of emotional breakdown and an individual act of protest. O’Donnell concluded that ‘a well-aimed handful of human waste hurled from within a cell is a statement of dissatisfaction that is as emphatic as it is obnoxious’ (p. 245). Prisoners used their body products to offensively represent their feelings. Potting was not mindless, it was the ‘improvised’ product of external causes and subjective reasoning, an in-bodied and encoded response to their lived experience.

In summary, potting represents the embodied weaponisation of bodily fluids. Its use in Clarendon may not have been in the pursuit of political aims as it was in 1980s Northern Ireland, but the prisoners in England and Wales still employ shit and urine as ‘vehicles’ to subvert penal power. The bodies that are seemingly repressed by prison forces are ‘counter-employed’ by prisoners, inducing a sense of ‘contamination’ amongst prison staff (Wahidin, 2019: 118) that produces shame, embarrassment and, most importantly to prisoners, powerlessness on the part of staff. To turn Yang’s (2022) phrase that senses enable us to understand ‘ideas in motion’, potting should be interpreted as power in motion. While documenting the ‘dirty protest’ in Northern Ireland, Aretxaga (1997) observed that staff, ‘“felt defiled coming in contact with the prisoners”, … so that became our little weapon’ (p. 136). That little weapon has become a big problem in prisons and potting will continue to be employed until more people ask ‘Why?’

Conclusion

Potting can be theorised as an embodied assault of the senses and has sociocultural connotations about the prison climate. It is a cause and symptom of powerlessness and disrespect, a response to the symbolic and physical violence inscribed on the prisoner’s body and the suffocating surveillance and control of imprisonment. The prison has removed their privacy and their physical autonomy in the name of ‘security’. By seizing the body, prisons leave prisoners with little recourse when they experience injustice and reciprocate with one of the few remaining materials and actions left to them – the agency of bodily fluids. Like a passive ‘dirty protest’, prisoners know why they are actively assaulting staff with shit and urine. Potting should be considered an oppositional expression to lived experience in its purest sense, a symbolic representation of prisoners’ defilement and a physical transference of their sense of injustice. Potting is resistance.

Punishing prisoners further may not address the problem. So far, this approach has only perpetuated the issue. Understanding the relationship between violence and disrespect, between potting and feelings of shame and humiliation, reveals how staff safety is related to prisoner treatment and perceptions. Questions must be asked of prisoners, their reasons, and of the structural conditions they experience, including the meaning of ‘prison security’ and its aims. Security procedures in their current state paradoxically produce insecurity. By listening to the lived experience of prisoners and exploring the deep sensuality of what happens in prisons, the cause(s) of potting can be better understood and addressed.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by HMPPS with their partial sponsorship towards PhD tuition fees.

ORCID iD

Oscar O’Mara

Notes

References

InsideTime (2023, Online) X-ray scanning: Complaint upheld, available via: https://insidetime.org/x-ray-scanning-complaint-upheld/

Prison Officers Association (2018, February) General Secretary: The risks of doing your job, Available at: https://www.poauk.org.uk/news-events/news-room/posts/2018/february/general-secretary-the-risks-of-doing-your-job/

The Guardian (2021, January) ‘Deep crisis’ in British prisons as use of force against inmates doubles, Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/03/deep-crisis-british-prisons-use-force-inmates-overcrowding

Aitchison

Essex

(2022) Self-harm in immigration detention: political, not (just) medical. Journal of medical ethics. doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/jme-2022-108366

Annison

HMJ

Guiney

(2023) Locked In? Achieving Penal Change in the Context of Crisis and Scandal. Prison Reform Trust.

Aretxaga

(1995) Dirty protest: Symbolic and overdetermination and gender in Northern Ireland ethnic violence. Ethos 23: 123–148.

Aretxaga

(1997) Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton University Press.

Ashforth

Kreiner

(1999) How can you do it?”: Dirty work and the challenge of constructing a positive identity. Academy of management Review 24(3): 413–434.

Ashforth

Kreiner

(2007) The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. North Point Press.

10.

Balfour

(2018) Searching prison cells and prisoner bodies: redacting carceral power and glimpsing gendered resistance in women's prisons. Criminology & Criminal Justice 18(2): 139–155.

11.

Bennett

(2023) Searching, ‘State of Security’ and the Structuration of Prison Security. In: Body Searches and Imprisonment. Springer, pp. 27–44.

12.

Bennett

Crewe

Wahidin

. (Eds.). (2013). Understanding Prison Staff. Willan.

13.

Blumer

(1969) Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press.

14.

Bosworth

Carrabine

(2001) Reassessing resistance: Race, gender and sexuality in prison. Punishment & Society 3: 501–515.

15.

Bourdieu

(1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. R. Nice (trans). Cambridge University Press.

16.

Bourdieu

(1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Raymond and Adamson (Trans.) Polity.

17.

Braun

Clarke

(2006) Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3(2): 77–101.

18.

Buntman

(2003) Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid. Cambridge University Press.

19.

Burns

(2013) Rethinking the Armagh Women’s Dirty Protest. In: Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 29–37.

20.

Carleton

et al., (2020) Provincial correctional service workers: The prevalence of mental disorders. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17(7): 2203.

21.

Carlton

(2007) Imprisoning resistance: Life and death in an Australian supermax. Institute of Criminology.

22.

Chamberlen

Carvalho

(2019) The Thrill of the Chase: Punishment, Hostility and the Prison Crisis. Social & Legal Studies 28(1): 100–117.

23.

Clemmer

(1940) The Prison Community. Holt: Rinehart and Winston.

24.

Crewe

(2005) Prisoner society in the era of hard drugs. Punishment & Society 7(4): 457–481.

25.

Crewe

(2011) “Depth, weight, tightness: revisiting the pains of imprisonment”. Punishment & Society 13(5): 509–529.

26.

Crewe

(2012) The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison. OUP.

27.

Crewe

et al., (2014) Heavy–light, absent–present: rethinking the ‘weight’ of imprisonment. British Journal of Sociology 65(3): 387–410.

28.

Crown Prosecution Service (2022) Prison-related offences, Available at: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/prison-related-offences-0

29.

Daems

(2023) Body searches as contested control measures. In: Body Searches and Imprisonment. Springer, pp.1–6.

30.

Drake

(2012) Prisons, Punishment and the Pursuit of Security. Springer.

31.

Foucault

(1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Penguin.

32.

Foucault

(1995) Discipline and Punish : the Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.

33.

Goffman

(1961) On the characteristics of total institutions: the inmate world. In: Cressey

(eds) The Prison: Studies in Institutional Organization and Change. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

34.

Gooch

, 2013. Boys to Men: Growing Up and Doing Time in an English Young Offender Institution . Doctoral dissertation. University of Birmingham.

35.

Hansard (2022) House of Lords Debate: Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, Vol. 817.

36.

Herrity

, 2019. Rhythms and routines: Sounding order in a local men’s prison through aural ethnography . Doctoral dissertation. University of Leicester.

37.

Herrity

et al. (Eds.), (2021) Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control. Emerald Group Publishing.

38.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) (2020) Report on an unannounced inspection of HMP [Clarendon] by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons.

39.

HMIP (2023) Annual Report 2022-2023, Available via: https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2023/07/15.91_HMIP_HMI-Prisons_ARA-2022-23_Web-Accessible.pdf

40.

HMIP (2022a) Report on an unannounced inspection of HMP [Clarendon] by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons.

41.

HMIP (2022b) Annual Report 2021-22, Available at: https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2022/07/HMIP-Annual-Report-web-2021-22.pdf

42.

HMPPS (2022) Segregation: PSO 1700, Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/627b8f278fa8f57d86f3f0e3/pso1700-segregationpdf.pdf

43.

HMPPS (2020b) Security Categorisation Policy Framework, Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1011502/security-categorisation-pf.pdf

44.

HMPPS (2023a) HMPPS Annual Digest, April 2022 to March 2023, Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hmpps-annual-digest-april-2022-to-march-2023#full-publication-update-history

45.

HMPPS (2023b) Searching Policy Framework, Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/searching-policy-framework

46.

HMPPS (2023c) Workforce quarterly: September 2023, Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hm-prison-probation-service-workforce-quarterly-september-2023

47.

HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) (2020a) Breakdown list of the Prison estate and CPAs, Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prisons-and-their-resettlement-providers

48.

House of Commons Justice Select Committee (2018) Boost Inspectorate to reverse decline in prisons, Available at: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/102/justice-committee/news/99536/boost-inspectorate-to-reverse-decline-in-prisons/

49.

Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) (2022) Annual Report of the Independent Monitoring Board at HMP [Clarendon] For reporting year 01 June 2021–31 May 2022.

50.

Ismail

(2022) The English Prison Health System After a Decade of Austerity, 2010-2020: The Failed Political Experiment. Taylor & Francis.

51.

Jewkes

Johnston

(2012) The evolution of prison architecture. In: Handbook on Prisons. Routledge, pp. 204–226.

52.

Kristeva

(1982) Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. NYU Press.

53.

Leder

(2004) Imprisoned bodies: The life-world of the incarcerated. Social Justice 31: 51–66.

54.

Liebling

Arnold

(2012) Social relationships between prisoners in a maximum security prison: Violence, faith, and the declining nature of trust. Journal of Criminal Justice 40(5): 413–424.

55.

Lyons

. (1996) Feminist Articulations of the Nation: The ‘Dirty’ Women of Armagh and the Discourse of Mother Ireland. In Kisbey et al. (Eds.) On Your Left: The New Historical Materialism in the 1990s. NYU Press, pp. 110–150.

56.

McDermott

King

(1988) Mind games: Where the action is in prisons. The British Journal of Criminology 28(3): 357–375.

57.

Merleau-Ponty

(1962) Phenomenology of Perception (Vol. 26) Trans. Smith, C. Routledge.

58.

Ministry of Justice (2021) Prisons Strategy White Paper, Available via: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/61af18e38fa8f5037e8ccc47/prisons-strategy-white-paper.pdf

59.

Ministry of Justice (2023) Safety in Custody quarterly: update to March 2023, Available via: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/safety-in-custody-quarterly-update-to-march-2023

60.

Ministry of Justice (2024) Prisons data. Available at: https://data.justice.gov.uk/prisons/additional

61.

Mohr

(1969) “Phenomenology and criminology” Criminologica Vol. 7, No.2, pp. 2–7

62.

Moran

et. al., (2016) Prison design and carceral space. Handbook on Prisons, pp. 114–130.

63.

Moran

Jewkes

(2015) Linking the carceral and the punitive state: A review of research on prison architecture, design, technology and the lived experience of carceral space. Annales de géographie 702703(2): 163–184. doi:https://doi.org/10.3917/ag.702.0163

64.

Neuber

(2011) Understanding violence in the ‘society of captives’: Sykes meets Bourdieu in prison. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 50(1): 1–16.

65.

Nylander

PÅ

Bruhn

(2020) The emotional labour of prison work. In: Emotional Labour in Criminal Justice and Criminology. Routledge, pp. 69–84.

66.

O'Donnell

(2014) Prisoners, Solitude, and Time. OUP.

67.

Price

(2015) Prison and Social Death. Rutgers University Press.

68.

Prison Officers Association (2022, January) Officers praise parliament prison plans, Available at: https://www.poauk.org.uk/news-events/news-room/posts/2022/january/pr-235-officers-praise-parliament-prison-plans/

69.

Prus

(1996). Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: Intersubjectivity and Human Lived Experience. University of New York Press.

70.

Reisig

Mesko

(2009) Procedural justice, legitimacy, and prisoner misconduct. Psychology, Crime & Law 15(1): 41–59.

71.

Rhodes

(2004). Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. University of California Press. Vol. 7.

72.

Ricciardelli

et al. (2020) Understanding needs, breaking down barriers: examining mental health challenges and well-being of correctional staff in Ontario, Canada. Frontiers in Psychology 11: 1036.

73.

Ross

(2008) Clothing: A Global History. Polity Press.

74.

Schliehe

et al. (2022) Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID-19 in British prisons. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47(4): 880–897.

75.

Schlosser

(2013) Bourdieu and Foucault: A conceptual integration toward an empirical sociology of prisons. Critical Criminology 21: 31–46.

76.

Scraton

P et.al.,

(1991) Prisons under Protest. OUP.

77.

Shalev

(2009/ 2013) Supermax: Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement. Willan.

78.

Sparks

(2002) Out of the ‘Digger’: The Warrior's Honour and the Guilty Observer. Ethnography 3(4): 556–581.

79.

Sparks

Bottoms

(1996) Legitimacy and Order in Prisons. The British Journal of Sociology 46(1): 45–62. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/591622

80.

Sturt

Gooch

(2021) Leading Prison security: Interview with Claudia Sturt. Executive Director for Security, Order and Counter-Terrorism. Prison Service Journal 252: 9–14.

81.

Sykes

(1958) The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum-Security Prison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

82.

Symkovych

(2018) Compromised power and negotiated order in a Ukrainian prison. The British Journal of Criminology 58(1): 200–217.

83.

Tschanz

(2023) “There’s a Tech for That”: Balancing Dignity and Security in Carceral Settings Through Alternative Technology Devices. In: Body Searches and Imprisonment. Springer, pp.241–264.

84.

Wahidin

(2019) Menstruation as a weapon of war: The politics of the bleeding body for women on political protest at Armagh Prison, Northern Ireland. The Prison Journal 99(1): 112–131.

85.

Wahidin

Tate

(2005) Prison (e)scapes and body tropes: Older women in the prison time machine. Body & Society 11(2): 59–79.

86.

Warr

(2021). Fire! Fire!–The Prison Cell and the Thick Sensuality of Trappedness. In Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control. Emerald Publishing Limited, pp.19–33.

87.

Warr

(2023) The Imposition of Power Through Touch: A Sensory Criminology Approach to Understanding Body Searches. In: Body Searches and Imprisonment. Springer, pp.7–25.

88.

Woodfield

Boduszek

Willmott

Webster

(2023) The moderating role of prison personnel years of service in the relationship between trauma and PTSD. European J. Trauma & Dissociation 100333.

89.

Yang

(2022) [Review of the book Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines, by Andrew J. Rotter]. Journal of World History 33(1): 179–181.

90.

Young

(2003) Merton with energy, Katz with structure: The sociology of vindictiveness and the criminology of transgression. Theoretical Criminology 7: 389–414.