The prison as a reinventive institution

Abstract

There is plentiful evidence that imprisonment is painful, harmful and criminogenic. However, alongside accounts that emphasize such consequences are alternative narratives, in which some prisoners claim that carceral confinement has been a positive intervention in their life. Drawing on Scott’s idea of the reinventive institution, this article explores these narratives, which—contra Goffman—involve a voluntaristic commitment to the prison, active engagement in the process of identity reconstruction, normative alignment with institutional values and the role of lateral regulation in shaping the prisoner’s new self. Our analysis emphasizes the impact of the prison as an institutional form, and the ways that, in interaction with particular biographical experiences, it produces narratives of reinvention which imply an inversion of its normal destructive processes. Our argument is not a defence of imprisonment, but an attempt to theorize a narrative claim that, although expressed by a minority of prisoners, merits proper analysis.

‘Perfectly individualized and constantly visible’? Lateral tightness in a prison holding men convicted of sex offences

“…Relative to those incarcerated for other offences, they are also less likely to have significant experience of incarceration and thus to have strong loyalties to prisoner culture (Mathiesen, 1965). Many, although by no means a majority, feel that their offences mean that there is something wrong with them and that they need to be punished, leading them to desire intervention and to submit themselves to institutional power (Crewe and Ievins, 2019). Taken together, these factors suggest that these prisoners might be particularly powerless and fragmented, the ‘perfectly individualized and constantly visible’ (Foucault, 1975/1991: 201) objects of Foucault and Bentham’s imaginations.…”

Only One Way To Swim? The Offence And The Life Course In Accounts Of Adaptation To Life Imprisonment

“…For some prisoners, time to think is a significant positive in the prison experience (Schinkel 2014:40-44). But the emphasis here is on cognition severed from its accustomed social context (see Crewe and Ievins 2019), while selfhood is in 'a state of fragmentation' (Liem 2016:99), or in a 'liminal' state similar to being diagnosed with a chronic or terminal illness (Jewkes 2005). The past is torn away, the future cancelled, and sources of meaning, esteem and worth (such as family, work or material consumption) are attenuated or removed altogether.…”

Indefinite stuckness: Listening in a time of hyper-incarceration and border entrapment

“…( Beyond the Bars , CD1, 2017)The impression that prison can ‘save’ people that might arise from an initial listening to Beyond the Bars requires further contextualisation and critical analysis in light of existing research on prison experiences. Drawing on several studies of prisoners in England, Wales, and Norway, Crewe and Ievins (2019) note that for ‘a minority of prisoners’, especially those ‘whose lives prior to their confinement have been dominated by forms of acute deprivation and degradation’, imprisonment can produce ‘narratives of reinvention which imply an inversion of its normal destructive processes’. They explain that these reinventive narratives should not be read as a defence of imprisonment, but ‘placed in the context of truly dismal life experiences: forms of structural and symbolic violence that precede—and wait beyond—the prison’ (Crewe and Ievins, 2019).…”