Coercive Confinement Research Articles

Coercive Confinement and Irish Languages: Ó Cadhain, Behan, Heaney, Okorie

This article explores the consequences that the conditions of incarceration have on the linguistic make-up of literary texts that result from or reflect on them. Due to the island’s colonial history, Ireland has a rich canon of confinement literature, but – largely as a result of this very same history – these literary works have often been studied through a binary cultural lens, reinforcing what Declan Kiberd has termed the ‘quarantine’ of Ireland’s literatures, with English kept on one side of the language fence, Irish on the other. Drawing on Ian O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan’s concept of ‘coercive confinement’ in order to include carceral institutions outside the formal criminal justice system, this article examines four case studies in which Irish writers cross the borders of language quarantine when writing about coercive confinement, focusing on selected works by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Brendan Behan, Seamus Heaney and Melatu Uche Okorie. Just as the conditions of confinement that gave rise to these works differ widely, so too do the literary strategies employed to represent or respond to these situations of incarceration. While Ireland’s literary languages have historically existed in quarantine, we hope to show that this linguistic confinement is often breached by Irish writers responding to actual instances of imprisonment.
 
 Keywords: coercive confinement; language; internment; prison; borstal; direct provision; heteroglossia; translation

Confinement and the Transnational in Emma Donoghue’s Room

This article contends that Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010) generates its transnational effects through its manner of narrating elements of the carceral situation which its central characters, Ma and Jack, survive. Situating Room within Donoghue’s practice as a writer of historical fiction, the article studies the sources she drew on when writing her novel, the spaces the characters inhabit and the things that surround them, as well as the language used by the narrator Jack. It argues that, by focalising this narrative of coercive confinement through the worldview of a five-year-old child, Donoghue creates a text that is transnationally mobile in its approach to language, space and things.@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0cm;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}

Spaces of Racialization: Ireland’s Direct Provision Asylum Centres as Sites of Racialized State Violence

Since November 1999, people arriving in Ireland to seek asylum have been dispersed throughout the country and confined in Direct Provision (DP) accommodation centres. Though initially meant for a six-month stay, by May 2020 7,700 people were living in 85 DP and emergency accommodation centres, many of them for up to nine years. The centres are operated by for-profit private companies who have been paid 1.6 billion euros since 2000, and are mostly sited in remote locations outside cities, on the periphery of society. The confinement of asylum seekers has been disavowed by state and society and continues the disavowal by Irish state and society of the coercive confinement of unwed mothers and poor children in church-run institutions, where women and children were confined and enslaved until late in the twentieth century. This article is based on interviews with and publicly available testimonies of asylum seekers in Direct Provision and on public and social media statements by the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI). It theorizes the DP centres as racialized zones of nonbeing (Fanon 1967: 8) and the DP regime as racialized state violence. The segregation and racialization of asylum seekers in Direct Provision were poignantly demonstrated by asylum seekers’ inability to observe social distancing in overcrowded DP centres during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to a considerable number of them being infected.

'Sligo made me and Sligo undid me’: Mental Health, Coercive Confinement and Repression in Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture

In recent years, the institution of the mental asylum in Ireland has been given much attention. For example, the TV documentary, Behind the Walls (2011), focused on mental health care in post-independence Ireland. It brought up the often gruesome conditions under which the asylum forced the patients, or inmates, to live. It also revealed how the mental health regulations were misused by doctors, priests and families at the local level to get rid of individuals who in various ways did not conform to the community’s norms; indeed, it was not uncommon that once a person had been committed to an asylum, he or she had to remain there for a very long time, sometimes for many decades. This is the fate of the protagonist Roseanne Clear/McNulty in Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture. Towards the end of her life, still in the Leitrim psychiatric hospital after several decades, Roseanne writes her own story. What emerges is that she has been the victim of external forces and harsh sociocultural norms dominant in the Irish Free State. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas in Madness and Civilization, as well as research on Irish mental asylums, this article examines how a repressive system uses mental health and the mental health care system as a tool to excise an individual perceived to be a threat to the social order, an order carefully policed by the Catholic Church, mainly represented by the priest, Father Gaunt.

Quare Memory in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy

This essay adapts David Cregan's concept of ‘queer memory’ – a form of memory defined ‘by exclusion rather than inclusion’ – to the author of The Quare Fellow, analysing narrative gaps in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy in order to better understand its construction of cultural memory. Situating Borstal Boy within a growing canon of Irish writing on coercive confinement, the essay contends that draft versions act as an important component of textual memory, as can be seen by the more explicit portrayal of queer sexuality in Behan's drafts. Both in its transgressive portrayal of queer masculinity, and in the ‘quare’ narrative strategies used to incorporate this material into the published text, Borstal Boy presents an author whose ‘quareness’ is a key part of his literary aesthetic.

‘Coercive confinement’: An idea whose time has come?

This article argues in favour of ‘coercive confinement’ as a useful addition to the criminological lexicon. It suggests that to properly understand a country’s level of punitiveness requires consideration of a range of institutions that fall outside the remit of the formal criminal justice system. It also requires a generous longitudinal focus. Using Ireland as a case study, such an approach reveals that since the foundation of the state, the prison has gradually become ascendant. This might be read to imply a punitive turn. But when a broader view is taken to include involuntary detention in psychiatric hospitals, confinement in Magdalen homes and mother and baby homes, and detention in industrial and reformatory schools, the trajectory is strongly downward. This might be read to imply a national programme of decarceration. (In recent years, asylum seekers have been held in congregate settings that are experienced as prison-like and they must be factored into the analysis.) While some of these institutions may have been used with peculiar enthusiasm in Ireland, none are Irish inventions. It would be profitable to extend the idea of ‘coercive confinement’ to other nations with a view to adding some necessary nuance to our understanding of the reach and grip of the carceral state.

Abortion and Reproduction in Ireland: Shame, Nation-building and the Affective Politics of Place

In 2018, Irish citizens voted overwhelmingly to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution to allow for the introduction of a more liberal abortion law. In this article, I develop a retrospective reading of the stubborn persistence of the denial of reproductive rights to women in Ireland over the decades. I argue that the ban’s severity and longevity is rooted in deep-seated, affective attachments that formed part of processes of postcolonial nation-building and relied on shame and the construction of the Irish nation as a particular, gendered place. The article develops the notion of ‘gendered displacement’ to conceptualise abortion travel in the context of the history of women’s coercive confinement, and provides an affective, feminist reading of the interlinkages between place and nationhood. It also draws on three cases—the X, Y and Z cases—to illustrate the centrality of place and women’s occupation of space to the analysis of Ireland’s abortion ban, which should be read in the wider context of the legacy of what I term the ‘affective politics of place’.

Penal Culture in Ireland

The imprisonment rate in Ireland is low relative to the rest of the common law world and compares favourably with other EU countries. In recent years it has declined. However, it would be misleading to interpret these trends as evidence of a national commitment to leniency or a coherent strategy of penal parsimony. Before we turn our attention to contemporary arrangements a brief historical digression is required. Punishment is about more than imprisonment and, especially during the first half-century after its foundation in 1922, the Irish state made extensive use of institutions outside the criminal justice system to deal with the deviant and the difficult. ‘Coercive confinement’ is the term coined by O’Sullivan and O’Donnell (2007) to embrace the range of sites where men, women and children were held against their will. These included prisons, Borstal, reformatory and industrial schools, mother and baby homes, psychiatric hospitals, and Magdalen homes. While some of these places were supposedly oriented towards treatment or training rather than punishment, they were felt by their inmates to be austere, degrading, and stigmatising.

Beckett's ‘Mongrel Mime’: Politics and Poetics

This article analyses Beckett's unpublished and unperformed prison play ‘Mongrel Mime’, written for ex-San Quentin inmate Rick Cluchey in 1982–83. Drawing on Shane Weller's concept of Beckett's ‘anethics’, Dirk Van Hulle's model of authorial pentimenti and Anne Ubersfeld's semiotics of theatre space, it argues that close analyses of Beckett's manuscripts can give us a clearer picture of the politics of his work. While dominant models of Beckett's poetics focus on his ‘vaguening’ and ‘undoing’ of spatial detail, this article contends that Beckett's creative engagement with spaces of coercive confinement demonstrates a variety of working methods. The key role of carceral space in ‘Mongrel Mime’, an important though underexamined example of Beckett's use of confinement, presents a politics which is far from vague.

Youth Justice in Ireland North and South: Legacies of the Past, Influences on the Present

Youth justice systems and practices in Ireland have traditionally been shaped by the sociopolitical context, impacted by religious and moral imperatives and prolonged political conflict. The criminal justice systems and the response to children and young people in conflict with the law in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have common antecedents and many shared historical legacies – including a shared legislative framework (Children Act 1908) and the reformatory and industrial school system (which has been the subject of recent historic inquiry on both sides of the border). Partition under the Government of Ireland Act (1920) ultimately led to the establishment of two separate jurisdictions. In what was to eventually become the Republic of Ireland, there was a significant period of stagnation in criminal justice policy particularly in the sphere of youth justice, with new legislation to replace the 1908 Act only introduced in 2001 (Children Act 2001). The history of ‘coercive confinement’ in the Republic of Ireland, marked by high rates of child and youth incarceration and the longevity of the institutional template, have been documented (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2007, 2012). The emergence of a children’s rights discourse, particularly in the context of the unearthing of wide scale abuse within state institutions, has had a profound effect on official discourse and the policy response to young people in conflict with the law (Kilkelly, 2006). The development of the state response to young people in conflict with the law within Northern Ireland has broader parallels with other UK jurisdictions (particularly England and Wales) up until the 1960s, but is overlaid by the subsequent security/criminal justice response to civil and political conflict from this period onwards. The effects of the conflict in Northern Ireland on the criminal justice system, including the co-option of the agencies within the system to manage and contain it, has been the subject of a wide literature (e.g. Ellison and Smyth, 2000; Gormally et al, 1993; Tomlinson, 2012). Considerations of the

Coercive confinement in Ireland: patients, prisoners and penitents. Edited by Eoin O'Sullivan and Ian O'Donnell. Pp 288. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2012. £60.

Coercive confinement in Ireland: patients, prisoners and penitents. Edited by Eoin O'Sullivan and Ian O'Donnell. Pp 288. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2012. £60.

Ireland's Architecture of Containment: Concealed Citizens and Sites Bereft of Bodies

With Irish Independence being granted in1922, the Irish Catholic Hierarchy and the Irish Politicians with their new found power embarked on the complex and highly fraught project of forging a new Irish Nationalist identity. In the decades which followed, the officially named “Irish Freestate” became a nationwide network of asylums, reformatory schools, industrial schools, Magdalen Asylums and Mother and Baby homes. A mere two years after the declaration of Irish independence, it was reported that “there were more children in industrial schools in the twenty-six counties of Ireland than were in all the industrial schools in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together,” (Raftery, O'Sullivan: 1999: 69, 72). Likewise, Rafferty and O'Sullivan claim that between 1869 and 1969 approximately 105,000 children were committed to industrial schools and that at its peak, the system consisted of 71 such institutions (1999: 20). This paper will draw on the experiences of my younger brother and I as we spent a combined total of 18 years in four such institutions in the Republic of Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. In the terms of much of the current literature on what is sometimes referred to as “coercive confinement” (O'Sullivan & O'Donnell, 2008: 32) we are amongst thousands of survivors of a state-sponsored and Church-administered system that as An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern acknowledged in his ‘apology’ speech of 1999, all too often “denied children the care and security that they needed”, and worse still, perpetrated “grave wrongs”. With the recent conclusion of our 17 year legal battle with the Irish Catholic church and State and with research I am undertaking for my PhD project, “Remembering and (Re)Presenting Lives Within Care” I will recall the event where my brother and I were taken beneath the Four Courts in Dublin, an airless subterranean trap, and asked to trade away our voices. We have learned that in the face of the most insidious forms of State violence, one doesn't breathe to speak, one needs to speak to breathe. This is the story of our combat breathing.

Mass culture of coercive psychiatric confinement

In Movies on Trial [1], I examine ways in which popular legal culture (especially television, fiction, and film) helps shape American attitudes toward different aspects of legal process and legal system. Among the topics I consider are criminal law, tort law, international law, constitutional law, and comparative law. I am now writing a second book on this subject, Movies on Appeal, and I will be examining a second tier of legal topics or subjects (contract law, property law, the law of war, labor law) and how they are treated in mass culture. Specifically, I will be adding a chapter on law and psychiatry, a course which I have taught to law students for about 20 years. I wish to examine the ways in which popular legal culture helps to shape images (and perceptions) of coercive psychiatric confinement in the United States. Perhaps no other issue in the field of law and psychiatry has captured public attention or the focus of mass culture like involuntary civil commitment. I not only want to compare and contrast images of such confinement in television, fiction, and film, but I want to show concretely what connections exist between popular images and popular perception, and between the latter and professional practice in this field.

Coercive confinement in the Republic of Ireland

In Ireland until recently, a range of institutions other than prisons was utilized to confine those deemed to be deviant. It seems clear that rather than becoming more punitive (if this is estimated by the number of individuals coercively confined) the country has become considerably less so over the past 50 years. In 1951, despite high emigration providing a safety valve, more than 1 percent of the population was behind closed doors in prisons, borstal, reformatory and industrial schools, psychiatric institutions (as involuntary patients) and homes for unmarried mothers. This was eight times higher than in 2002.