Hidden Injuries? Researching the Experiences of Older Men in English Prisons

Abstract

The numbers of elderly men in the prisons of England and Wales has grown significantly over the past decade, and they continue to rise. Based on intensive fieldwork in four English prisons, this article explores the prison experiences of men aged 65 years and over. Some of our interviewees had grown old in prison, some had served previous prison sentences and others (the majority) had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment in later life. These men had no prior experience of imprisonment. We are concerned in this article with the impacts of imprisonment on this prisoner group, and with the 'hidden injuries' generated by the prison regime and environment. Prisoners in this age group have to date received little research attention, and scant acknowledgement in policy debates in the United Kingdom. We will argue that those impacts may be magnified, in practical ways, by this inattention. Our concern in this article is to disclose various problematic aspects of the predicaments of older men in contemporary English prisons. 1 We argue that although the number of such prisoners has risen sharply in recent years their situation has not as yet become the object of explicit policy attention or intervention, at least not in any concerted fashion. We seek to understand why this apparent inattentiveness persists, and to outline some of its prison-level effects. Without wishing to resort too readily to the overworked notion of 'crisis' (a term that, ironically, prisons seem to attract routinely) it seems clear that, on any sober projection of current tendencies, the number of older prisoners will continue to accumulate for the foreseeable future. This presages a multiplication of needs and demands for which little in the way of planning or provision or, less obviously, cultural re-adjustment, is yet evident. There is an intriguing series of questions here in the tradition of studies of the social construction of social problems: Why do some developments seemingly fail to reach the threshold of visibility that would constitute them as a topic for policy? What consequences follow for those concerned from their low visibility? What promptings, or what scandals, would need to happen in order for that threshold to be attained? In the case of elderly