‘King, Warrior, Magician, Lover’: Understanding expressions of care among male prisoners

Abstract

Typologies of prison life in men’s establishments have tended to emphasize the most desolate features of prison life such as aggression, violence, exploitation, and stark displays of individualism. Without seeking to contradict these positions, we suggest that competing narratives of care are also operating in male establishments in England and Wales. Through combining data from two recent, but separate, semi-ethnographic studies of prison life in two prisons (total n = 43), we present a completely different kind of typology based around Moore and Gillette’s (1990) archetypes of masculinity, called: ‘King’, ‘Warrior’, ‘Magician’, and ‘Lover’. This archetypal framework foregrounds the role of care in prison and the different manifestations of communal relations among prisoners. Building on recent developments in prison sociology that have explored the nexus between imprisonment, interpersonal relations and masculinity (see Crewe, 2014), this article argues that care is a fundamental feature of prison life that takes on a wide range of forms, including: paternal roles, intellectual expertise, information sharing and close physical bonds. This complicates linear depictions of prison life that are emotionally stolid.