Blood on the Walls: Self-mutilation in Prisons
| Author | Abigail Groves |
| Published date | 01 April 2004 |
| Date | 01 April 2004 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1375/acri.37.1.49 |
Self-mutilation in Prisons
Abigail Groves
National Centre in HIV Social Research, Australia
Self-mutilation or self-harm is a recognised problem within custodial
environments in the English-speaking world. This article utilises the
work of Michel Foucault in relation to disciplinary power to provide a
fresh analysis of this problem, locating its emergence within the exercise
of this power. It also examines various strategies developed by custodial
authorities to manage self-harm, as well as the sociological, psychological
and criminological discourses that have emerged around it, in order to
explore their role in the production and persistence of this problem.
Self-mutilation or self-harm made headlines in Australian newspapers during
2001–2002, with repeated reports of self-harm among asylum-seekers held in
detention centres. The Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous
Affairs recorded 264 such acts over an 8-month period. Most spectacular was an
incident at the Woomera detention centre in South Australia, in which dozens of
detainees reportedly sewed their lips together in protest against government
policies. This protest was greeted with some shock and horror. The then Premier of
South Australia, Dean Brown, called it, “barbaric and totally unacceptable in our
community” (Seccombe & Clennell, 2002), while the Minister for Immigration,
Philip Ruddock, said that lip-sewing “offends the sensitivities of Australians” and
was “unknown in our culture” (Jackson, 2002).
But as we shall see in this article, acts of self-harm in prisons are neither new
nor foreign to western culture. On the contrary, the occurrence of self-harm in
prisons is well-documented and occurs across different prison environments and
populations, certainly within the English-speaking world. There is evidence to
suggest that self-mutilation is more common in prisons than in the general
community, though the lack of reliable epidemiological evidence makes such
claims difficult to assess.1 Epidemiological evidence aside, the prison certainly forms
a key site for the production of knowledge about self-harm. This alone makes it a
useful site from which to begin a critical analysis of this knowledge, which is the
aim here. This article explores the precise nature of this problem of self-harm, and
its production and management within the prison.
Address for correspondence: Abigail Groves, PhD Candidate, c/- National Centre for
HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW 2052, Australia.
Email: a.groves@student.unsw.edu.au
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
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VOLUME 37 NUMBER 1 2004 PP. 49–64
ABIGAIL GROVES
Speaking of self-harm as a “knowledge” in this way suggests Foucault, and it is
the conceptual tools provided by his work that I intend to apply in this analysis.
Such a task is virtually impossible without reference to Foucault’s own study of the
prison, Discipline and Punish (1977). Discipline and Punish, of course, is not just a
study of the prison but a “genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern
‘soul’”(1977, p. 29). The term “soul” now seems somewhat archaic, but Foucault
insists that:
It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the
contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the
body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished (1977, p. 29).
Foucault locates the production of this soul in the exercise of punishment,
characterising the specific techniques of punishment that have emerged in the
modern era as “disciplines”. Discipline, he argues, constitutes a specific form or
“technology” of power: it is this technology that produces the modern subject.
Disciplinary techniques operate in all institutions and indeed, throughout the social
body, but can be found at their most intense, not surprisingly, in that institution
specifically designed for punishment: the prison. Foucault argues that the prison:
must be an exhaustive disciplinary apparatus: it must assume responsibility for all
aspects of the individual … Moreover, the prison has neither exterior nor gap; it
cannot be interrupted, except when its task is totally completed; its action on the
individual must be uninterrupted: an unceasing discipline. Lastly, it gives almost
total power over the prisoners; it has its internal mechanisms of repression and
punishment: a despotic discipline. It carries to their greatest intensity all the proce-
dures to be found in the other disciplinary mechanisms (1977, pp. 235–36).
The role of the prison is to effect the transformation of individuals or, in criminolog-
ical terms, their “rehabilitation”; it not only enforces punishment but simultaneously
supervises its “positive” effects. The prison, therefore, functions as a kind of case
study in the operations of discipline. The continuing surveillance of prisoners, the
control of their movements and time, the ranking and classification of individuals,
the proliferation of rules and punishment of minor infractions — these are the stuff
of disciplinary power. These techniques may appear benign in themselves, but this
appearance only conceals their insidious effects: discipline, according to Foucault, is
a “political anatomy of detail” (1977, p. 139). Further, this technology of power is no
less corporeal than those which preceded it, for disciplinary techniques target the
body: “The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks
it down and rearranges it … discipline produces subjected and practised bodies,
‘docile’ bodies’” (1977, p. 138).
This would seem to provide a useful framework for an analysis of self-mutilation
in prisons, and possibly beyond, but it gives little indication of how this analysis
might proceed. It seems clear that disciplinary power targets the bodies of subjects
and that it does so with a particular intensity in prisons, but why would prisoners
mutilate their own bodies? How, or where, is power being exercised here? Is it possi-
ble that the regime of discipline to which prisoners are subjected is so intense and
complete that prisoners actually punish themselves? If this is the case, then self-
mutilation becomes a disciplinary technique in and of itself, and the self-mutilator
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THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
BLOOD ON THE WALLS: SELF-MUTILATION IN PRISONS
becomes an instrument in his or her own subjection, exercising disciplinary power
against his or her own body. This approach resembles that taken by some feminists
in interpreting particular corporeal practices undertaken by women, such as
feminine dress and cosmetics (Bartky, 1988) or cosmetic surgery (Morgan, 1991).
Morgan, for instance, argues that decisions by women to undergo cosmetic surgery
within current regimes of power should be understood as a kind of “coerced
voluntariness” (1991, p. 38).
Acts of self-harm are different to cosmetic surgery, though. This is stating the
obvious, for clearly these practices differ in a number of ways. The most salient
difference here is that while a practice such as cosmetic surgery can be considered
normative self-mutilation is not, even in the prison. Certainly it is true that, in
Foucault’s terms, disciplinary power is not simply a commodity possessed by prison
authorities but is rather exercised in and through the institution, but it is nonethe-
less revealing that self-mutilation is neither encouraged nor condoned by custodial
authorities. In fact, acts of self-mutilation constitute a disciplinary offence in many
prisons, including those for women (Hampton, 1994). Hence it makes little sense
to theorise self-harm as a form of obedience to, or internalisation of, the discipli-
nary regime. If anything, self-mutilation might be better understood as a technique
of resistance to the disciplinary regime: the “protest” of the asylum-seekers, for
instance, invites such an interpretation. If disciplinary power produces this
phenomenon, then it does so in spite, and not because of, the expressed aims of the
punishment regime.
In any case, the main object of a Foucauldian analysis of self-mutilation in
prisons is not to understand why disciplinary power might produce this phenome-
non, but how. An analysis of this kind requires a focus on the prison itself. A
review of procedures for the management of “suicide and other self-harm” in New
South Wales correctional centres completed in 1993 is useful in this regard.
The report, which was never published, raises the issue of self-mutilation in the
following way:
Allied to the problem of suicide is that of self-harm by mutilation. Incidents of this
kind are quite common in the correctional system and present great difficulties of
management to officers … Not least of the difficulties is that of diagnosing whether
the self-injury is mere attention-seeking, or is an indication of the need for substan-
tial intervention, or is a genuine attempt at suicide (New South Wales Department
of Corrective Services 1993, p. 16).
Foucault deliberately used minor documents in his research, and this strategy is no
less useful here, for this brief introduction actually raises a number of issues crucial
to this analysis. Here, self-mutilation is a posed as a “problem”. That it is a
problem seems obvious, but this warrants closer attention. For what, precisely, is
the problem? In what way is self-mutilation a problem in the prison, and for
whom? The Department goes part of the way to answering these questions in...
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