Book review: Coretta Phillips, The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations among Prisoners

Date01 August 2013
DOI10.1177/1362480613485401
Published date01 August 2013
Subject MatterBook reviews
422 Theoretical Criminology 17(3)
Jackson J, Bradford B, Stanko B and Hohl K (2012) Just Authority? Trust in the Police in England
and Wales. Abingdon: Routledge.
Nash K and Scott A (2001) The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing.
Coretta Phillips, The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations among Prisoners,
Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012; 246 pp.: 9780199697229, £65.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Jamie Bennett, HMP Grendon & Springhill and University of Oxford, UK
It is undeniable that some black and minority ethnic groups are significantly over repre-
sented in the criminal justice system in England and Wales (see, for example, Cavadino
and Dignan, 2007). In prisons, the deepest end of the system, the situation is stark. One
in every four prisoners is from black and minority ethnic communities whereas those
groups account for only one in ten of the general population (Berman, 2012). The prison,
therefore, represents both an outcome of the racial dynamics of society more generally
and a particular niche of society where racial diversity is a lived reality. It is against this
background that Coretta Phillips offers an ethnographic account of the contemporary
‘multicultural’ prison.
Phillips opens the discussion by locating the structural mechanisms through which
prison populations are formed. In particular, she elucidates the ‘enduring trialities’ of race,
masculinity and poverty that shape a prison population largely drawn from men at the mar-
gins of society. These power structures are deeply entrenched in capitalism but also within
those societies with a history of institutions exercising racialized power such as slavery or,
as in the case of England and Wales, colonialism. However, the concern of this book is not
solely in these macro-level structural forces, but also in the meso-level responses of the
particular institution, and the micro-level processes of day-to-day social interaction.
On an institutional level, the last 15 years have seen a determined response to deeply
entrenched racial difference in public services. This followed the formal recognition of
‘institutional racism’ in Justice MacPherson’s (1999) report into the murder of Stephen
Lawrence. This charge was also recognized as a factor in the murder of Zahib Mubarek
in Feltham prison in 2000 (Keith, 2006). Subsequent work by HM Inspectorate of Prisons
(2005) and the National Offender Management Service (2008) has maintained a focus on
exposing the fact that minority ethnic prisoners report experiencing greater weight and
pain in imprisonment, and receiving a poorer quality service. This official determination
to expose and address institutional racism has also taken place against a backdrop of the
problematization of Muslim prisoners as a result of the ‘War on Terror’ (Liebling et al.,
2012) and political and public concern about migration (Boworth and Bhui, 2013). There
is therefore an internal organizational dynamic that has tensions and conflicts, where
diversity and multiculturalism are seen both as enabling progressive reform and a poten-
tial risk to the established order.
What is absent from previous studies of race in prisons is attention to the day-to-day
social interactions that pervade such spaces. These are issues that Phillips expertly draws
out using an ethnographic approach, being embedded in two distinct prisons, with a
research colleague, for almost two years. In using such a methodology, Phillips sets out

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