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The coronavirus pandemic swept across the world in 2020, having widespread and dramatic impacts on social life. Prisons in England and Wales implemented a lock down regime for public health purposes that suppressed the spread of coronavirus but continues to have an impact on the quality of life for prisoners. This article is based on a small-scale ethnographic study of prison managers in an English prison. This builds upon studies that have documented the experiences of prison managers in England during 21stcentury. These studies have illustrated that prior to the pandemic, prison management was dominated by the neoliberal practices of managerialism, including an architecture of surveillance through targets, audits and inspections and the nurturing of a more compliant professional culture. The pandemic disrupted managerialism and initially saw the total dismantling of the system of monitoring and an altered relationship between the central and local levels of the organisation. Managers had to operate with greater agency and developed a stronger sense of place, focussing on the internal and local community. As the threat from the pandemic receded, there was a process of 'managerial clawback' with the re-establishing of the managerial architecture and a general acceptance of managerialism as a 'return to normality' in prisons. Yet this process was incomplete as the pandemic left complex problems including the best way to operate prison regimes that balanced ongoing health risks, maintaining order and offering constructive activity. These complex problems could not be resolved through centralised managerialism and instead required localised initiative. The pandemic had disrupted managerialism and although the architecture had largely been re-established intact, space had been created for greater autonomy in responding to the legacy. The emerging 'new normal' is therefore a mixed managerial economy in prison that navigates a path between managerial control and local autonomy.

AbstractAbstract: In late modernity, prison policy and practice have been characterised as being structured by punitiveness and managerialism. Recent research on prison reform has focused on the pervasiveness of punitiveness, but the resilience of managerialism is equally important in understanding contemporary penality. The creation of 'reform prisons' in England, offered an attempt to reimagine managerialism, where prison managers would act with greater autonomy, freed up from centralised policy prescription and monitoring of compliance. The article explores how this reform developed in practice. Particular attention is paid to the retreat from the original intentions and the emergence of a counter‐reformation, reasserting the centralised, managerial hegemony. It is concluded that while attention has been paid to punitiveness, the existence of a carceral habitus, and the process of carceral clawback, managerialism also plays a central role in shaping contemporary penality, and it is important to draw attention to a managerial habitus and managerial clawback.

Race and prisons are deeply intertwined in England and Wales and in other countries. Minority groups not only are overrepresented but also experience the weight and pain of imprisonment more acutely. However, democratic therapeutic community prisons such as HMP Grendon in the United Kingdom offer an alternative to mainstream imprisonment, using communal living as a means to explore psychotherapeutic issues in a humane and effective way. The primary aim of this article is to explore the potential and limitations of prison-based therapeutic communities in responding to individual needs and the wider structural constraints that shape race and ethnicity in contemporary society. The article sets out the context in which these communities operate, in particular the ways in which both prisons and clinical practice are implicated in the flow of racialized power. The article goes on to discuss the features of therapeutic communities that can challenge, confront, disentangle, and reorder aspects of power, inequality, and identity. The article concludes that while therapeutic communities do not provide a utopian answer to the structural problems of race and power, they do offer the potential for a more sensitive internal environment and enable individuals to act with conscious and considered agency in their own lives.

This article examines the representation of release from prison in popular films. The article explores how prison films generally reflect and reinforce conventional views about crime and punishment, and in release from prison films this is seen in the predominant representation of violent, unreformed criminals being released from prisons to offend again. However, the article also identifies that images of reform and redemption appear in films and that this plays a role in maintaining a popular space for an alternative discourse. Two examples of reform-minded films about release from prison are compared and contrasted: Boy A (2007) and The Woodsman (2004). The article draws some conclusions about successful strategies of promoting penal reform through popular films and the difficulties of realizing this.

Abstract: After ten years of Labour government, their penal policies have been extensively examined and reviewed. Recent months have seen the resurgence in popularity of the Conservative Party, but their penal policies have not been the subject of critical analysis. This article aims to provide such a review of Conservative Party policy. It explores the published statements and documents produced on penal policy and identifies that rather than presenting a new approach, the policies mix neo‐conservative or New Right economic policies from the 1980s including the creation of a small State with marketised public services and promoting punitive criminal justice policies that have been staples of the party for more than a decade, with the deployment of neo‐liberal strategies in the social field, particularly responsibilisation. The article argues that whilst there is some mixing and matching of policies and strategies, there is an underlying neo‐conservative ideology. The social consequences of Cameron's policies are discussed, including the expansion of the criminal justice and penal system, the redefinition of the socially excluded as the 'undeserving poor' and the creation of a minimalist State.

Abstract: Generally, people have low levels of exposure to prisons through personal experience and therefore the media plays an important role in informing beliefs and actions. In particular prison films are an important and extensive form of media depiction. However, media depiction of crime and imprisonment has been criticised on ethical, political and social grounds. This article explores how prison films have depicted the relationship between the media, crime and punishment. It argues that this is a significant and integrated part of the prison film genre. It also argues that these representations are important both as a narrative device and in making the media a focus of pressure for reform.

Contemporary prison practices are becoming increasingly professionalized and facing many new challenges. As well as bringing an increased emphasis on skills and qualifications, this development has also introduced new ideas and concepts into the established prisons and penal lexicon. With over 300 entries explaining these terms, this Dictionary will be an essential source of reference for people studying the subject, working in prisons, and working with prisoners.

Little of what we know about prison comes from the mouths of prisoners, and very few academic accounts of prison life manage to convey some of its most profound and important features: its daily pressures and frustrations, the culture of the wings and landings, and the relationships which shape the everyday experience of being imprisoned. The Prisoner aims to redress this by foregrounding prisoners' own accounts of prison life in what is an original and penetrating edited collection. Each of its chapters explores a particular prisoner sub-group or an important aspect of prisoners' lives, and e.