Let me take a vacation in prison before the streets kill me! Rough sleepers’ longing for prison and the reversal of less eligibility in neoliberal carceral continuums

Abstract

In a steadily expanding carceral landscape, rough sleepers are using prisons in unforeseen ways: namely to escape violence, for survival, to access social or medical care, enhance their prospects or regain housing. Like most neoliberal welfare states, the German aid system is dispersed and based on individual responsibility, but in prison it concentrates due to the prison’s duty to rehabilitate which translates into care for the subject position ‘inmate’ but holds politically unwanted unhoused persons responsible to change their fates. Poor and disenfranchised people who use prisons as lifelines turn the carceral grip into an embrace. Their tactics reveal a reverse cycle of carcerality where the streets are the space of detriment and the prison, trough harnessing the productivity of penal power, offers a break or potential escape from carceral livelihoods. Rough sleepers who seek imprisonment to escape the hardship and confinement of the streets challenge the concept of less eligibility and offer new ways to theorise the carceral and to think through prisons and the iron rules of punishment.

‘I do enjoy the work, but I think the wages in the jails are shocking’: Analysing prisoner wages as a pain of imprisonment using Foucault's artifice

“…While the hourly living wage is £9.50 an hour for everyone working in Scotland. https://scottishlivingwage.org/ Two recent articles have addressed the issue of people being 'better off' in jail (Bucerius et al, 2021;Schneider, 2023). Removed from the systems of constraint and employment legislation outside of prison, there is effectively an extra judicial or self regulating environment where national minimum wage legislation are not deemed relevant.…”

Calories, commerce, and culture: The multiple valuations of food in prison

“…These individuals accentuated how prison provided them with regular access to meals. Due to their often precarious life circumstances, they lacked consistent access to meals in the community as their lives were overdetermined by poverty, unstable housing situations, and extensive illicit drug use (Bucerius et al, 2021a;Schneider, 2021). Hannah, for example, noted: many rules in some ways […] But yeah, we're otherwise homeless.…”

“…These individuals accentuated how prison provided them with regular access to meals. Due to their often precarious life circumstances, they lacked consistent access to meals in the community as their lives were overdetermined by poverty, unstable housing situations, and extensive illicit drug use (Bucerius et al, 2021a; Schneider, 2021). Hannah, for example, noted:I for one am homeless otherwise right now, so it's kinda a safe place for me to be […] well I don't talk to too many people in here but the few people I have, which is like a handful at least, they’re pretty much all homeless right now.…”

‘It’s a Gendered Issue, 100 Per Cent’: How Tough Bail Laws Entrench Gender and Racial Inequality and Social Disadvantage

“…Here, the resignation to remand is not an indication of the prison's desirability but women's marked lack of safety and security in the community. In this context, prison can sometimes appear as 'respite' from the chaos borne of the constellating hardships outlined above (Russell and Rae 2020;Schneider 2021). This should not be taken to valorise or legitimise imprisonment for homeless women or victim-survivors (Russell and Gledhill 2012).…”