Ben Crewe, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison
| Date | 01 January 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474511406642 |
| Author | Elaine Crawley |
| Published date | 01 January 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Punishment & Society
14(1) 115–127
! The Author(s) 2012
Book Reviews
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474511406642
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Ben Crewe, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison, Clarendon
Studies in Criminology, 2009; 528 pp.: 9780199577965, £62 (hbk)
It is always a pleasure – for me at any rate – to read a book about prison life written
from an ethnographic perspective. Ethnographies of prison life are relatively few
and far between, which is a pity given the potential of this approach to take us deep
into the heart of a prison, and to illuminate those aspects of prison life so easily
overlooked by other types of research. The Prisoner Society, a painstaking study of
day-to-day life in HMP Wellingborough, an English Category C prison for men, is
a sensitively written, insightful and scholarly book of which its author, Ben Crewe,
can rightly be proud. In his efforts to illustrate the lived realities of prison life
for those in custody, he has managed to weave together successfully questions
of power, politics, adaptation, emotion and culture to create a persuasive and
powerful account of what it means to survive prison life. In the process, the
author also illuminates the challenges and stresses of what it means to work with
imprisoned men.
The Prisoner Society is concerned with the deployment of power within HMP
Wellingborough, both over time and in the period in which he conducted his
research. As Crewe points out, power is not, of course, simply exercised by
those who have it: it is also ‘experienced and reconstituted by prisoners’ (p. 7) in
their attempts to negotiate the dynamics of the social world in which they
have become a part. Relatedly, the book is concerned with the ways in
which prisoners cope with prison life, and it is here that the author really captures
the complexities of prisoner adaptation. As he rightly notes, each prisoner has a
different history from his fellow prisoners; he...
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