The shallow end: Understanding the prisoner experience in Iceland's open prisons

Abstract

Prisoners often talk about their prison experience using spatial metaphors such as weight and depth. Imprisonment is frequently described as ‘deep’, with prisoners reporting feeling ‘submerged’ or ‘buried alive’. But what about its opposite? Can we consider a prison experience that not only lacks these experiential qualities but could in fact be felt and described as ‘shallow’? What characteristics would such a shallow prison experience have? In order to investigate this I spent time in Iceland's two open prisons. Both are very small with about 20 prisoners, run with few staff, set in rural, scenic settings and lack most of the features typically associated with imprisonment. In these prisons, I found that in essence, shallowness is both sensorily and interactively experienced. These shallow prisons allow for a range of sensory experiences of which prisoners are typically deprived, and for interactivity in the sense of the outside world permeating the prison in a range of ways. I, therefore, conclude that shallowness comes with its own positive characteristics so that it is more than the absence of depth. In addition, such arrangements are likely to reduce the pains associated with imprisonment considerably.