Offender and/or client? Fuzzy institutional identities in prison-based drug treatment in Denmark
| Published date | 01 April 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516635883 |
| Date | 01 April 2016 |
| Author | Bjarke Nielsen,Torsten Kolind |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Punishment & Society
2016, Vol. 18(2) 131–150
! The Author(s) 2016
Offender and/or client?
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Fuzzy institutional
DOI: 10.1177/1462474516635883
pun.sagepub.com
identities in prison-based
drug treatment in
Denmark
Bjarke Nielsen
Aarhus University, Denmark
Torsten Kolind
Aarhus University, Denmark
Abstract
The last 20 years has witnessed a rise in prison-based drug treatment in Nordic coun-
tries. This increase has challenged the prominence of the punitive prison, and created
changes in the roles of both clients and staff. This article explores the development of
two institutional inmate identities: the offender and the client, which have occurred as a
consequence of this shift in prison policy. However, in their institutional narratives and
daily practice both prison officers and counsellors often fluctuate when addressing
inmates as offenders and/or clients. This fluctuation creates a ‘‘fuzzy’’ dynamic.
These institutional identities are characterized, on the one hand, by inmates being
dealt with by counsellors as ‘real people’ and ‘equals’, but simultaneously counsellors
are resorting to the control opportunities allowed by the prison authorities such as
urine tests and the use of isolation cells. On the other hand, prison officers handle
inmates within a disciplinary logic, while concurrently dealing with them as inmates
deserving a fair chance – a view resonant with the drug treatment ideology applied in
prisons.
Keywords
clients, institutional identities, offenders, prison-based drug treatment
Corresponding author:
Bjarke Nielsen, Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, Bartholins Alle´ 10, Building 1322,
8000 Aarhus, Denmark.
Email: bjarke.nielsen@gmail.com
132
Punishment & Society 18(2)
Introduction
During the last 20 years, there has been a marked increase in prison-based drug
treatment (PDT) in the Nordic countries (Kolind et al., 2012; Nylander et al.,
2012; Tourunen et al., 2012) as well as in other European countries (Seddon
et al., 2012; Sto¨ver and Michels, 2010). In some respects, this development indicates
a re-emergence of the previously abandoned treatment ideology, also termed the
penal-welfare regime (Garland, 2001). The relatively sudden growth in PDT can be
seen as a response to increased drug use among prisoners during this period.1
Nevertheless, it should be remembered that national data on drug use in prison
is rare and often not directly comparable (Cools et al., 2009). With the rise of PDT,
prisons increasingly seek to identify and treat prisoners’ personal problems, thus re-
inventing themselves as modern welfare institutions trying to solve a social prob-
lem, in this case, the drug problem. Such a ‘criminalization of drug policy’ (Duke,
2006; Seddon et al., 2012), whereby social problems are increasingly treated within
a penal regime and where the welfare state implicitly becomes a penal state (for
instance when drug problems are (re)framed as crime problems), tends to create a
dilemma whereby prisoners with drug problems are at once offenders and social
welfare clients within the penal regime (see also Lyons, 2013). It has been argued
that the rise of PDT and the presence of treatment-oriented staff inside prison walls
may push prison practices toward more ‘neo-paternalism’ or ‘soft power’, with
prisoners being subject to neo-liberal strategies of empowerment and less to trad-
itional, hard authoritarian power (Crewe, 2011). In line herewith, PDT can legit-
imise the often less prestigious part of officers work, termed ‘emotional labour’
(Crawley, 2004; Nylander et al., 2011). This argument is supported by findings
showing that prison officers and counsellors are often at odds with each other
when drug treatment programmes are implemented and may even attempt to
impede each other’s work (Kolind et al., 2010; Mair and Barton, 2001;
McIntosh and Saville, 2006). Over time, however, and as our study will show, it
may be that they begin to value each other’s work in the general operation of
everyday life in prison.
In line with this argument, but on a more general level, we will argue that the rise
of PDT has generated new institutional identities in Danish prisons: The inmate is
no longer only an offender but is increasingly also seen as a client expected to
participate actively in his or her own (drug) rehabilitation. This view is also articu-
lated in the governmental political discourse on inmates’ rights and the articulation
of inmates as users/consumers of welfare services, e.g. in regard to drug or alcohol
treatment or anger management (Kolind et al., 2012). In this article, we will first
investigate how these new institutional identities, the ‘client’ and the ‘offender’
respectively, can be analysed as central characters in the institutional narratives
(Sandberg, 2010) of drug counsellors and prison officers. We then discuss how such
ideal narrative characters appear rather fuzzy in both counsellors’ and prison offi-
cers’ narratives and in their everyday practices. In fact, the construction and avail-
ability of divergent institutional identities, clients and offenders, open a space
where inmates can simultaneously be viewed as both offenders and clients.
Nielsen and Kolind
133
Our focus on the articulation of institutional identities is not concerned with how
clients see themselves. Rather, we focus on the staffs’ institutional narratives about
inmates and their personal problems and the institutional responses towards these.
That is, the more or less shared staff narratives that seek to understand inmate
problems and channel responses towards these.
Offenders and clients in institutional identity perspective
Our analysis is inspired from research on institutional narratives and institutional
identities (Brookman et al., 2011; Gubrium and Holstein, 2001; Holstein and
Miller, 2007; Ja¨rvinen and Andersen, 2009; Presser, 2009) and by the work by
Donohue and Moore (2009) and Moore (2007) on ‘the offender’ and ‘the client’
enacted as divergent identities in the criminal justice system.
These research perspectives focus on how institutions construct social problems
and understand troubled selves (Loseke, 2007, Valentine, 2007). A key insight of
this research is that when institutions aim at fixing and identifying troubled selves,
a double process is operating. On the one hand, institutionally embedded practices
and constructions of troubled persons are related to larger discursive practices of
the welfare state, such as classifications of certain kinds of people as healthy or
unhealthy, normal or pathological, productive or unproductive, illegal drug (ab)u-
sers or legal users (Hacking, 1999; Presser, 2004). Differentiating people into ‘kinds
of people’ can produce common-sensical categories over time. However, such clas-
sification processes do not simply reflect objective descriptions of reality ‘out there’.
They also constitute what is understood as social problems in need of intervention
(Brookman et al., 2011; Presser, 2004). For instance, people who use illegal drugs
and engage in criminal activities are generally understood as troubled individuals in
need of both help and correction. In this sense, societal discursive representations
form a backdrop for how the social authorities act upon certain kinds of troubles
and social problems (Jo¨hncke, 2009; Sandberg, 2009).
On the other hand, ‘‘social problems work’’2 and the construction of troubled
selves are also strongly related to context. That is, institutional identities are con-
structed in specific organizations and are tied to the concrete practices of institu-
tional actors as well as to a limited space of possibilities. For instance, treatment
services will always be limited in resources, so client problems are constructed so
that they fit institutionally available interventions (Ja¨rvinen and Miller, 2010;
Valentine, 2007). The concept of institutional identities should be understood in
relation to how institutional responses and practices transform the problems of its
clients into ‘more or less distinct troubled identities that match the working logic of
the treatment system’ (Ja¨rvinen and Andersen, 2009: 865). Taking this point of
departure, troubles and the lives of troubled individuals (including the circum-
stances that led inmates into troubles) are understood and acted upon in relation
to organizationally and institutionally recognizable identities (Gubrium and
Holstein, 2001; Holstein and Miller 2007; Ja¨rvinen and Andersen 2009; Loseke,
2001).
134
Punishment & Society 18(2)
In the present analysis, this means that prison officers and counsellors work with
institutional images of typical inmates. Such images frame their understanding of
what make up these inmates’ problems and needs. Even though inmates participat-
ing in PDT have multiple problems, e.g. lack of education, lack of job experience,
disruptive family backgrounds, criminal activities, etc. the responses towards these
diverse problems tend to sort and represent them through a certain institutional
understanding of what kind of person the institution is dealing with. Through the
logic of institutional identity, inmates’ diverse social problems exist because they
are substance abusers. Recognizable institutional identities, i.e. the ‘criminal drug
abuser’, are in this sense used to explain the circumstances that lead inmates into
troubles. In our analysis, we focus on such institutional identities. Our attention
then, is not so much on individual...
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