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Book review: Leonidas Cheliotis (ed.), The Arts of Imprisonment: Control, Resistance and Empowerment

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorJohn Kerr
DOI10.1177/1362480613498491
Published date01 May 2014
Date01 May 2014
Subject MatterBook reviews
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Theoretical Criminology 18(2)
Radul J (2011) What was behind me now faces me: Performance, staging, and technology in the
court of law. In: Bull S and Paasche M (eds) Urban Images: Unruly Desires in Film and Archi-
tecture. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 122–137.
Leonidas Cheliotis (ed.), The Arts of Imprisonment: Control,
Resistance and Empowerment, Ashgate: Farnham, 2012; 338 pp.:
9780754675860, £58.50 (hbk)
Reviewed by: John Kerr, University of Roehampton, UK
Connections between the arts and prisons have a long history. The control of what makes
us human is an intrinsic part of the story of prisons, and, while the arts provide a lens
through which societies perceive prisons and can be used to control those inside, they
can also provide an opening for prisoners to feel human.
The Arts of Imprisonment, edited by Leonidas Cheliotis, includes excellent visual
images, prose, poems and lyrics across 17 engaging chapters. In the introduction,
Cheliotis points to the complex role of art in relationship to imprisonment, foregrounding
the problem of prisoner rehabilitation through the arts. As well as questioning the extent
to which societies want to rehabilitate prisoners, he is critical of various aspects of arts-
in-prisons programmes; arguments to the contrary are provided in later chapters that
focus on these programmes. Chapter 1 by Yvonne Jewkes provides fascinating insight
into the importance of space and architecture within the prison system. Jewkes considers
the shift from prisons as historical symbols of power to contemporary ‘an-aesthetic’
designs in which the ‘senses are blunted and depressed’ (p. 30). She highlights examples
of aesthetically pleasing prisons in which it is ‘possible to reconcile justice and aesthet-
ics’ (p. 42), but warns that even when these exist, the prison authorities still want to use
institutions with ‘fuck you architecture’ (p. 32) as a counter balance.
In Chapter 2, Eamonn Carrabine takes the reader on an absorbing...

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