Prison Regime Research Articles

Teaching behind bars: Challenges and solutions for creative writing classes in prison

The prison creative writing class offers many benefits for the students and the instructor. Research has found that inmates in writing programs report improved self-image and reduced emotional stress, an increase in literacy, and more post-release opportunities. For the instructor, the reward can reside in the experience of helping prisoners develop practical compositional and coping skills that can lead to publication, performance, and outside study. However, the delivery of writing programs in a volatile, high security environment is a challenging endeavour that requires specific guidance. This paper offers insights gained from implementing and maintaining a creative writing postgraduate program inside an Australian maximum security women’s prison over a period of six years. After opening the discussion with a brief overview of prisoners’ rights to education, it evaluates the nature of prison education and arts education in Australia. This is followed by an identification of the challenges of teaching inside a prison regime and an exploration of how these were resolved.

The rebirth of the prison in Latin America: determinants, regimes and social effects

Throughout the last three decades, almost all Latin American countries witnessed a dramatic growth of their inmate population that is indicative of the rebirth of the prison in the region. This article contextualizes the rebirth of the prison in contemporary Latin America in empirical and theoretical terms. To this end, it offers a discussion of the expansion of Latin American imprisonment, changes in the region’s prison regimes and their embeddedness within wider social and economic contexts, as well as of the impact of institutional histories, larger economic and political transformation processes and globally circulating penal ideas and institutional models, all of which contribute to the growing punitiveness of contemporary Latin America states and politics.

Remaking the prisons of the market democracies: new experts, old guards and politics in the carceral fields of Argentina and Chile

This article explains the evolution of prison policies in Argentina and Chile after the dual transition to neoliberalism and democracy addressing in particular the renewal of correctionalist prison rationalities propelled by human rights and managerialism expertise, their specific articulations and the differential institutionalization in the state. Going beyond objectivist descriptions of prison expansion, I delve into the emergence of a new symbolic order in democratic times that prompted the unexpected revival of rehabilitation programs and increased formalization of prisons regimes and account for their progressive subordination to security priorities. To explain these particular evolutions that contradict predictions of a direct drift toward a purely warehousing prison with greater informality under neoliberalism in Latin America, I engage in a comparative field analysis, analyzing the structure and dynamics within what I call carceral fields to account for the introduction of new rationalities and for their differential institutionalization in prison bureaucracies. After presenting the concept of carceral field and reviewing alternative accounts of prison change in Latin America, I show that the emergence of these rationalities follow the entrance of new experts within the field in democratic times, and account for their differential incorporation in prison policies and regimes analyzing how the interests of prison officers and political agents and increasing overcrowding conditioned the experts’ strategies. This study, based on documentary evidence and interview data, demonstrates that these new legal and economic rationalities do not oppose drifts toward populist punitivism, but give it a progressive face, legitimating punitive policies while providing new power resources to elite prison administrators.

The article 41-bis of the Italian criminal jurisdiction. Indispensable instrument or basis for torture?

The Italian criminal jurisdiction presents a characteristic that differentiates it among the other democratic jurisdictions, represented by the article 41-bis. Introduced in 1986, it has immediately triggered a lively debate concerning the principle of respect for human rights and dignity inside the penitentiary. The aim of this paper is to analyze the reasons advanced by different groups on this topic, reflecting about the real function of the so called hard prison regime.

Suffering and Protest in Rhodesian Prisons During the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle

This article is based on Zimbabwean ex-political prisoners' testimonies and writings, and argues that, although Rhodesian prisons were spaces of racialised abuse, curtailed freedoms, and heightened repression, they were also spaces of struggle, subversion and negotiation. Indeed, prisoners' testimonies and their written accounts reveal the depravity and brutality of prison life. They capture vividly some of the gruesome experiences in the state corridors of silence. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, these testimonies also disclose the ways in which prisoners were not simply victims of state-sponsored penal terror: prisoners told stories of how they struggled, coped and creatively adapted to the harsh prison regimes. I also argue that, by transforming the prison into an arena of struggle for political and social rights, African political offenders undermined the disciplinary, rehabilitative, and punitive intent of imprisonment. Political prisoners are important historical subjects in the telling of the struggle for liberation in Zimbabwe – prisoners' life stories and writings demonstrate the ways in which political prisoners confronted the colonial regime. As political prisoners, they were important symbols of the struggle for liberation, and were also producers of powerful critiques of the colonial regime through their writings.

Resistance or friction: Understanding the significance of prisoners’ secondary adjustments

Scholars examining prisoners’ “secondary adjustments” have often emphasized prisoners’ “resistance” to the prison regime, particularly their agentic acts that frustrate the prison’s rules, goals, or functions. While these agency-centered accounts offer an important corrective to the understanding of prisons as totalizing institutions, they may go too far. I argue that scholars have overused (and misused) the term “resistance” to describe certain prisoner behaviors, creating both analytical and normative consequences. Instead, I suggest the concept of “friction” more accurately describes the reactive behaviors that occur when people find themselves in highly controlled environments.

Hunger: Passion of the Militant

This is a study of the 2008 film Hunger made by the British director Steve McQueen, a film that dramatises events in the Maze Prison in the period leading up to the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strike and death of Bobby Sands. It considers the filmic and artistic practice of McQueen in conjunction with certain concepts from the work of Deleuze and Guattari to develop a productive thinking about how the film addresses this traumatic event. Hunger employs a series of aesthetic techniques that push at the limits of the viewer’s senses and suggest new ways of thinking about the subject. McQueen’s concern to go beyond the clichés of the media coverage of the Irish conflict provides a unique insight into the production of a militant subjectivity generated by the opposition to the prison regime of the Maze in Belfast. Ultimately, however, it is argued that McQueen collapses into a form of religious iconicity that reinforces the Irish Republican mythology of suffering and redemption. Hunger, as a work of cinematic creation, offers a powerful sense of how resistance can be made manifest on screen yet, simultaneously, can become captured by the transcendental unity of identity thinking operating through the image of the romanticised face.

Introduction: women and transnational organized crime

Giulia is a pretty Southern Italian woman in her forties. She has long brown hair, piercing dark eyes, is immaculately dressed in nice clothes and clutches a Louis Vuitton handbag. Francesca is younger, in her thirties, has blond hair, lively blue eyes and lots to say. But they both look sad and uneasy. Their faces reflect the experiences, the sorrow, the hardship of their past lives, what they have left behind and perhaps, their complex present. These two women are “Camorra women”, women who have lived with the Camorra but today are state witnesses. Giulia was the partner of an important boss of the Casertano region whom she met at the age of 13. She was “his children’s mother” and eventually got drawn into the clan’s activities. Because of restrictive prison conditions for Mafia bosses in Italy (art. 41 bis prison regime), she became a vital and active messenger between the boss in prison and his clan on the outside. She was respected as a women but totally subordinate to the men: in her own words, a woman “must do what they say, when they say, what you can do, what you can’t do...” (Allum 2012a). She adds that when she explained her reasons for turning state’s witness to one of her daughters, disapproving of her mother’s decision the daughter replied ‘You are now dead for me’. Francesca, on the other hand, took over the management of slot machines to help her father who was a local boss in Santa Maria Capua Vetere. She became an efficient and fearless manager because as she argues “you might be the daughter of..., the wife of... but after a while you can do it alone, especially when the men are in prison. Why is it that the Camorra is still so strong with all those leaders in prison?” (Allum 2012b). But she explains that she made her decision to collaborate with the State specifically to save her daughter from a criminal life and give her a possible alternative future. These first hand accounts demonstrate how women today are active in a whole range of Camorra activities and roles; from messenger, to enforcer to decision maker. The Italian National Anti-Mafia Directorate (Direzione Nazionale Antimafia) in its 2013 Annual Report acknowledged for the first time the role of women in Camorra activities; in particular, how Trends Organ Crim (2014) 17:1–15 DOI 10.1007/s12117-014-9223-y

Promoting Well-Being and Desistance Through Sport and Physical Activity: The Opportunities and Barriers Experienced by Women in English Prisons

Despite an increased focus on the benefits of participation in sport and physical activity for men in custody, little attention has been paid to its potential role in meeting the specific needs of female prisoners. Qualitative data from female offenders (n = 45) within the English prison estate illustrated that, despite low levels of participation, prison-based sport and physical activities have clear physical and psychological benefits and can be valuable in promoting desistance from crime. Institutional barriers to participation, such as in the provision of activities and the prison regime, coupled with gendered barriers, such as self-presentational and motivational concerns, are identified and explored. Findings are discussed in the context of existing policy and principles of best practice.

Are prisons really schools for terrorism? Challenging the rhetoric on prison radicalization

When governments justify the necessity to segregate and/or isolate terrorist inmates from mainstream prisoners, they commonly raise concerns about their prisons becoming schools for terrorism. Yet, these concerns are often based on limited information about prisoner radicalization, potentially resulting in the mismanagement (both financially and psychologically) of terrorist inmates in many countries. This article challenges contemporary research on prison radicalization and recruitment by highlighting several factors that may hamper these activities to demonstrate why some prison regimes and their programmes for housing terrorist inmates face a greater risk than others. In contrast to other studies, this article concludes that the radicalization and recruitment of mainstream prisoners by terrorist inmates under certain prison conditions is not necessarily a given outcome.

The Trouble with Convicts: From Transportation to Penal Servitude, 1840–67

AbstractThis article makes three points about the death throes of convict transportation. First, the quarrel over transportation shows the double-edged nature of the moral critique of empire in the early Victorian era. Metropolitan criticism of transportation had its roots in the same effort to moralize the empire that was seen in the almost contemporaneous assault on slavery. But transportation was deemed too convenient a means of getting rid of criminals for Britons safely to do without it. Second, the Whig government of 1846–52 sought to save transportation by moralizing the convict before shipping him off. By this point, however, the moral objections to transportation in eastern Australia had become so strong as to make the plan untenable. Third, colonial opposition to transportation ultimately left the British government with no choice but to replace it with penal servitude at home, and the debate over crime and punishment that played out over the next decade revealed a waning of faith in convict rehabilitation that manifested itself in a harsher prison regime. In necessitating the rise of penal servitude, the end of transportation makes it clear that the empire mattered very much indeed to the reshaping of British penal policy in the mid-Victorian era.

Changes in mental state associated with prison environments: a systematic review

To develop an understanding of the stability of mental health during imprisonment through review of existing research evidence relating physical prison environment to mental state changes in prisoners. A systematic literature search was conducted looking at changes in mental state and how this related to various aspects of imprisonment and the prison environment. Fifteen longitudinal studies were found, and from these, three broad themes were delineated: being imprisoned and aspects of the prison regime; stage of imprisonment and duration of sentence; and social density. Reception into prison results in higher levels of psychiatric symptoms that seem to improve over time; otherwise, duration of imprisonment appears to have no significant impact on mental health. Regardless of social density, larger prisons are associated with poorer mental state, as are extremes of social density. There are large gaps in the literature relating prison environments to changes in mental state; in particular, high-quality longitudinal studies are needed. Existing research suggests that although entry to prison may be associated with deterioration in mental state, it tends to improve with time. Furthermore, overcrowding, ever more likely as prison populations rise, is likely to place a particular burden on mental health services.

The Transformation of Prison Regimes in Late Capitalist Societies

Recent studies argue that cultural and political-economic shifts have led to a sea change in penal regimes among modern Western societies, resulting in more punitive social policies in general and a trend toward higher incarceration rates in particular. This is a special case of a wider argument that globalization has led to a decline in state autonomy and convergence on a market-based model of economic and social policy. This thesis has been challenged by the empirical literature on welfare states, which finds persistent cross-national diversity in institutional structures, policies, and patterns of inequality. Focusing on incarceration rates as the outcome of interest, this study evaluates these arguments by applying a Bayesian change-point model to four decades of data from 15 countries. Results show that a regime shift did occur but that incarceration rates increased mainly among countries with unregulated labor markets, decentralized polities, or weak labor unions. Profound institutional differences ...

Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes

This article examines how gender identities are constituted through contemporary practices of imprisonment in the United States and in England and Wales, with particular attention to transgender prisoners. I draw on recent queer theory, transgender studies, and Michel Foucault’s work, including what he refers to in the 1977–78 Collège de France lectures as “a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management.” All three of these techniques of power operate within prisons, from the use of violent sovereign power in physical and sexual assaults to the gendered disciplinary norms involved in rules about prisoners’ clothing and appearance. The management of populations through biopower occurs throughout these prison systems, including in the categorization of prisoners by sex or gender, in their placement in a men’s or women’s facility, and in government statistics about prison populations. I present a brief comparison of gender recognition policies in the United Kingdom and the United States and then analyze the role of the English and American prison systems in constructing sex and gender identities. Gendered power dynamics are particularly evident in the policies and practices toward transgender prisoners in the United States, who are often placed in inappropriate facilities, face high rates of violence and rape, and are erased from official reports and statistics. Just as Foucault used his analysis of the prison to show how disciplinary power operates in broader society, I conclude that contemporary prisons constitute and reinforce binary sex identities, normative gender identities, and violent forms of masculinity.

“Like I Was a Man”: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia

In 1908, Georgia legislators passed a historic prison reform act that eliminated the convict lease system, replacing it with chain gangs. This article examines black women’s exclusion from the category “female” and white women’s protection from Georgia’s prison regime as a condition of possibility for the passage of this law. Criminalized black women were forced to endure torturous conditions on chain gangs, while white women were protected from violent conditions. In 1908 Georgia also implemented a domestic carceral sphere, forcing black women to work as domestic servants while serving the final portions of their sentences on parole. Georgia’s prison regime operated to reinforce the capitalist logic of Jim Crow, as well as to forestall challenges to racial and gender hierarchy from black women and men and from white women. The exclusion of black female subjects from the categories “female” and “woman” during the consolidation of Jim Crow was central to the process of reinforcing white supremacist patriarchal authority. This unexplored history of Southern punishment as a gendered carceral regime reflects both the violence of imprisonment and the violence of gender categorization.

Religious Diversity in Prisons

Prisons are sites of contention for many reasons, but the provision of religious and spiritual care to prisoners has long been regarded as a way of mitigating some of the most contentious aspects of prison regimes. Nevertheless, the growth of religious diversity among prisoners in recent decades has given rise to some new bones of contention which are closely related to questions of equality, justice and human rights. The aim of this article is to examine the relationships between religious diversity and contentious issues in prisons by drawing on interviews conducted with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh chaplains in the prisons of England and Wales in 2010 and 2011. The analysis shows that the growth of religious diversity in prisons is associated with problems concerning the official recognition of religions, the facilities and resources made available for religious purposes, the limitations placed on religious practices, and the status of chaplains. Some of these issues have a gendered dimension and are refracted differently by assimilationist and multicultural policies.

Motivating young people in prison to improve behaviour

PurposeOne of the greatest challenges facing forensic practitioners is motivating offenders to engage in treatment. Possibly one of the hardest groups to engage and comply with prison regimes are young people in prison (YPP) aged 15‐17 years. Whilst there has been research interest in adult offender treatment motivation, little attention has been paid to motivation in imprisoned juveniles. The purpose of this paper is to report the adaptation of the existing adult motivational enhancement tool – the Personal Aspiration and Concerns Inventory for Offenders (PACI‐O) – for use with a YPP population and to explore the motivational effect of the PACI‐O‐YPV (Young Person's Version) on YPP.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 18 YPP took part, with nine participants each in the control and experimental groups. All participants completed the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) and their prison regime status was recorded. The experimental group completed the PACI‐O‐YPV.FindingsResults showed YPP who completed the PACI‐O‐YPV displayed an improved prison regime status, indicating improved behaviour whilst in prison and increased SWLS, compared with those in the control group. These findings support previous results with adult offender samples.Research limitations/implicationsA small sample size necessitates caution in interpreting results. Further research is needed to assess the PACI‐O‐YPV's full potential.Practical implicationsLack of motivation has been identified as a salient concern among both adult and young person offender populations. Comprehensive efforts are required to enhance motivation in forensic populations.Originality/valueThis research addresses motivation enhancement in an under‐researched offender population.

Count-Time: Neoliberalism, Subjectivity, and Jimmy Santiago Baca's Prisoner Poetry

ABSTRACT In the mapping of global struggles for subjective reemergence from state domination and oppression in the neoliberal age, one fascinating form of resistance comes from Pinta/o, or Chicana/o prisoner, poets in the United States. Written from deep within systems of carcéral control, their poetry exposes and contests the ontological, social, political, and material violence of the U.S. prison regime. It is argued that a layered network of violences is constitutive of the state, not tangential to it. Furthermore that violent process of state formation is posited as a function of neoliberal subjectivation. Consequently the prison can be theorized as an important threshold: It becomes both a site and an episteme of neoliberal (re) subjectivation. That is, the prison is a locus for the violence of subjectivation as well as a logic of it. To illuminate and critique such violence, this essay performs close readings of the Pinto poetry of Jimmy Santiago Baca to inaugurate and foreground a specifically poetic argument about the interrelation of subjectivity, neoliberalism, and U.S. carcéral culture.

Hepatitis C viral infection among prisoners

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is an important sociomedical problem worldwide because the chronification of the disease is frequent and the occurance of liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma can be expected. The aim of this study was to determine the way of infection, pathohistological changes of the liver, virus genotype presence and sustained virological response after pegylated interferon and ribavirin therapy in prison inmates. The study included 52 patients with chronic HCV infection classified in two groups managed during 2008-2010. The first group consisted of prisoners (n = 22) and the second one of "non-prisoners" (n = 30). The patients from both groups underwent diagnostic preparation (biochemical analyses, liver biopsy, hepatitis virus detection and genotypisation using polymerase chain reaction issue). The treatment lasted for 24 weeks for virus genotypes 2 and 3, and 48 weeks for genotypes 1 and 4. All the patients were males, approximately the same age (35 +/- 4.1 and 31 +/- 7.6 years). Virus genotype 1 was significantly more frequent in the prisoners (p < 0.05), that demanded longer treatment (48 weeks). At the same time, statistically significant higher number of patients, "non-prisoners", achieved a sustained virological response (p < 0.01). Intravenous drug abuse and tattoos, separately or together, are the most frequent way of infection in prisoners. The dominant presence of virus genotype 1 resulted in lower number of patients with sustained virological response, probably regardless prison environment and regime.

Limits of tolerance under pressure: a case study of Dutch terrorist detention policy

Policy-makers who are confronted with the potential spread of violent extremist ideologies among prison inmates are challenged to design sustainable prison regimes which are suitable to counter prison radicalisation whilst rehabilitating and reintegrating inmates into society. This article outlines a theoretical framework that explains how uncertainty and pressure in the policy-making context heightens the need for structure that induces a shift towards intolerance and stereotypic black-and-white thinking, which leads to the introduction of unbalanced, one-sided prison regimes. We argue that in the long run, these prison regimes are likely to be self-undermining and unsustainable because they undermine long-term security objectives and cause undesired side effects. These propositions are illustrated by an in-depth case study of the Dutch terrorist detention policy.