Abstract
Although there is a growing body of literature that documents prisoners’ experiences of time in custody, and while prison is usually the experience of young men, there are few studies that focus on young men’s experiences of time in prison. Based on findings from a 9-month ethnographic study of a young offenders’ institution, this article addresses these gaps in the literature, exploring how young men’s (aged 18–24) gendered discourses on time in prison shape their prison experience. This is explored through three principal themes: ‘heavy-whacking’, the subordination of those young men who were struggling to cope with their time in prison; ‘time-hierarchy’, the gendered discourses in prison that associated sentence length with toughness; and the ‘Young-Elders’, a group of young men who benefitted from the gendered discourses in the prison and lived relatively free from stigmatisation on the most enhanced landings in the prison.
Highlights
There is a growing body of literature that documents prisoners’ experiences of time in custody (Cope, 2003; Crewe et al, 2017; O’Donnell, 2014; Sloan, 2016; Wahidin, 2006; Wahidin and Tate, 2005), and while ‘prison is usually the experience of young men’ (Jamieson and Grounds, 2005: 53), there are few studies that focus on young men’s experiences of time in prison (Cope, 2003)
The findings included within this article are explored through three principal themes: first, this article examines how some young men’s inability to cope with their ‘whack’ of time in prison resulted in stigmatisation and bullying, with those who could not ‘hack the whack’ being labelled ‘heavy-whackers’
For the young men in Hydebank, time spent in cells was seen to be wasted and it was during these periods that they reflected on the costs of prison in the context of their lives, what they would be doing and what they were missing out on
Summary
There is a growing body of literature that documents prisoners’ experiences of time in custody (Cope, 2003; Crewe et al, 2017; O’Donnell, 2014; Sloan, 2016; Wahidin, 2006; Wahidin and Tate, 2005), and while ‘prison is usually the experience of young men’ (Jamieson and Grounds, 2005: 53), there are few studies that focus on young men’s experiences of time in prison (Cope, 2003). This article explores how certain young men (named ‘Young-Elders’) benefitted from the gendered discourses relating to time in Hydebank, due to being some of the longest-serving prisoners in the institution.
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