Suchergebnisse

This article draws on interview data with women in two prisons in the UK to understand the emotionally nuanced and sensorially attuned relationship between confined individuals and carceral space. The article presents an 'emotional map' comprising: (i) living or 'being' spaces; (ii) free places; and (iii) 'therapeutic spaces' in prisons.This tri-spatial thematic analysis enables us to use Victor Turner's concepts of 'liminality' and 'communitas' to uncover the complex, contradictory and sometimes transient emotions that permeate spaces in prison. This in turn allows us to explore the particular challenges that accompany transitional periods of adjustment to prison life, the environmental constraints that women in prison live with and navigate, and the careful 'spatial selection' strategies they implement in order to seek or avoid particular emotional states.

This article argues that Australian prisons have uncritically emulated American penitentiaries in their architecture and structure. We suggest that simply transporting physical design models from one geographic and politico-cultural setting to another, with little commitment to understanding the context-bound philosophies and conditions that underpin such models, has been highly problematic. The result has been an Australian penal estate that for decades was incompatible with its aims and purpose. Finally, we discuss the eventual introduction of unique, innovative styles of penal architecture in Australia, which are not only appropriate to their culture and context, but represent world-class developments in penal design.

This article considers the contribution that physical environment makes to the pains of imprisonment. Synthesizing concepts and theories from critical organization studies with those that have informed criminological studies of prison design and the lived experience of imprisonment, the article discusses the ways in which the architecture and aesthetics of penal environments might be better understood with reference to the restricted economies of space found in industrial and bureaucratic organizations. It is argued that a grasp of the limits historically placed on the subjective growth of individual workers (workspaces frequently being characterized as 'iron cages' or 'psychic prisons') can enhance our understanding of the physical and psychological confinement of those in custody. Moreover, critical organization studies can inform emerging debates about what future prisons should look like and alert us to the potential fallacy in assuming that 'modern' equates to 'better'. While clean, humane and safe environments are unquestionably desirable for both prisoners and prison staff, and considerations such as natural daylight, access to outside space and aesthetic stimuli are increasingly being incorporated into penal environments around the world, this article will critically interrogate the value of such initiatives arguing that they may, in fact, represent a new and potentially more insidious form of control that bring their own distinctive 'pains'.

Abstract: This article explores the extent to which prisoners in the UK and Republic of Ireland are permitted to leave prison to join their families for the Christmas festivities. It is argued that the willingness to allow such absences provides insights into divergent penal policies and contrasting socio‐cultural attitudes towards prisoners and imprisonment (and, tangentially, the meaning of Christmas). In the Republic of Ireland the use of temporary release (TR) for Christmas – although in decline – has been largely uncontroversial. Even when addressing prisoners who fail to return at the end of their leave, press coverage tends to be discreet and factual. Very different in style and tone are newspapers in the UK which tend only to report prisoner release schemes if the stories can be linked to themes of recidivism, pampered (and dangerous) prisoners and misplaced political correctness. Here the granting of a taste of freedom is characterised by a strong belief in the 19th‐Century principle of 'less eligibility' and the implication that prison inmates are an undeserving underclass who should be shown no goodwill at any time of the year.

Abstract: Many prisoners believe that the restricted access they have to computer‐mediated communication (CMC) technologies and, in particular, the almost total absence of computers and Internet access in prisons is a form of censure that renders them second‐class citizens in the Information Age. This article examines contemporary rationales and historical precedents for denying prisoners the means to communicate (both with each other and with those outside the prison) and argues that the prevention of communication, a pivotal feature of the Victorian and Edwardian prison regime, represents a significant continuity in the experience of prison life in the 21st Century.

Contrary to descriptions of a desensitising situation – with restrictions on movement, monotonous regimes and sparse surroundings – much research highlights imprisonment as sensorially and emotionally powerful. Following work within the 'turn to affect' that focuses on non-verbal, non-conscious and, often, non-human embodied experiences, scholars have attended to how such elements cohere into 'atmospheres'. Whilst the language of atmosphere is synonymous with the prison – a space that is widely anecdotally considered to conjure a particular 'feeling' – discussion of the mechanisms for and experiences of atmospheric production and consumption in this space has, thus far, evaded scholarly attention. Atmosphere is a word often used in prison literature, but it is rarely analytically unpacked. Accordingly, drawing on qualitative research data from individuals designing, and working and living in prisons, we focus on how various components – including aesthetics, olfaction, temperature, and the performances that arise from them – comprise sensory atmospheric affects in prison. In doing so, we find atmosphere(s) emerge – not simply from the materiality of the prison itself, but from cultural constructions of carceral and non-carceral landscapes and in conjunction with personal practice and preference. Accordingly, the prison is tied to particular constructions about what a prison should feel like and how people should (re)act to/in such spaces. In some cases, prison designers attempt to engineer particular atmospheres that cohere with wider political motivations around penal philosophies. However, despite the common reflection that prisons generate some kind of atmosphere, respondents are unable to offer a concrete description of what this may be, and much of our data highlights a definite precarity and changeability to atmospheric affect, which is likely to raise ambiguity around attempts to design carceral atmospheres.

Prior scholarship tracing the origins and architecture of prisons has tended to focus on how and why prisons are built—what they are intended to achieve and their construction as an expression of the punitive philosophies of their age. It does not consider how prisons persist as time passes, perhaps beyond their anticipated operational life span, and into "obsolescence." Focusing on the archetypal Victorian prison, and considering the alteration and inhabitation of such prisons through time, this article critically reinterprets notions of obsolescence in the built environment and explores an enduring cultural attachment to a particular and arguably archaic material manifestation of punishment.