Restoration, abolition and the loving prison: Jimmy Boyle and Barlinnie Special Unit
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Author | Alan Norrie |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12457 |
Received: 19 April 2021 Accepted: 9 July 2021
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12457
SPECIAL ISSUE
Restoration, abolition and the loving prison:
Jimmy Boyle and Barlinnie Special Unit
Alan Norrie
Professor of Law, University of Warwick
Email:A.W.Norrie@warwick.ac.uk
Abstract
This article revisits Glasgow’s Barlinnie Special Unit
(BSU) in light of the reissue of Jimmy Boyle’s biogra-
phy of his time in Scottish prisons, ‘A sense of free-
dom’. Viewing BSU as expressing restorative values, it
analyses the different meanings of the sense of free-
dom which emerge from Boyle’s account. It finds a
developing dynamic of different meanings of freedom,
from negative resistance through trust and solidaristic
action to love and creativity. Together these represent a
basis for a moral psychology adequate to understanding
human change in a prison context. The article consid-
ers BSU as a restorative and reparative practice which
challenged the prison system’s overall punitive and per-
secutory form – its ‘structure in dominance’. It reflects
on Thomas Mathiesen’s (1974/2015) Politics of Abolition
about the relationship between therapeutic practice and
political development to argue that BSU represented an
abolitionism relevant to prison today.
KEYWORDS
Barlinnie Special Unit (BSU), Jimmy Boyle, love, penal abolition-
ism, reparative, restorative
© 2022 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:103–116. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo 103
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