Space and ethnic identification in a Danish prison
| Author | Torsten Kolind,Mie B Haller |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474517722541 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Punishment & Society
2018, Vol. 20(5) 580–598
! The Author(s) 2017
Space and ethnic
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identification in
DOI: 10.1177/1462474517722541
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a Danish prison
Mie B Haller and Torsten Kolind
Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, Denmark
Abstract
Ethnicity has come to play an increasing role in contemporary Danish prison life. This
development not only reflects the growing number of prisoners in Danish prisons with
ethnic minority backgrounds. It also reflects changes in prison spatial policy and insti-
tutional classifications. Based on seven months of fieldwork in a Danish high security
prison, we investigate how such changes at the institutional level and at the level of
policy have affected prisoner’s everyday ethnic identifications. We focus especially on
the way prisoners reinforce and essentialize ethnic differences by reference to institu-
tional spatial divisions; particularly the division between regular wings and drug treat-
ment wings. We find that ethnic Danish prisoners spending time in a treatment wing are
often viewed as ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ by prisoners with ethnic minority backgrounds in
regular wings, whereas these prisoners in regular wings are in turn perceived as trouble-
makers and chaotic by the ethnic Danish prisoners in drug treatment. We also show
how ethnic categories are at times blurred in actual practice. We conclude by discussing
the implication for policy and practice; especially, we debate whether new spatial prison
policies may unintentionally partake in accentuating ethnic stereotypical thinking.
Keywords
drug treatment, ethnicity, identification, identity, prisons, prison space, typologies
Introduction
Since the birth of the prison institution, prison planners have been preoccupied
with the influence of prison architecture on the prisoners’ moral life and their
processes of rehabilitation. In this way, prison planning reflects societal morality
and the penal philosophy of the time (Jewkes and Johnston, 2007). Today’s
Corresponding author:
Mie Birk Haller, Aarhus Universitet, Bartholins Alle´ 10, Aarhus 8000, Denmark.
Email: mbh.crf@psy.au.dk
Haller and Kolind
581
European prisons, for instance, have increasingly focused on avoiding the
dehumanizing characteristics of earlier century’s prisons and now attempt to
create more ‘positive environments’ (Jewkes and Johnston, 2007). However, new
sensibilities and new ‘pains of imprisonment’ (Sykes, 1958) may also develop in
ostensibly humane prisons (Shammas, 2014), and the ‘soft power’ exercised in the
more humane prison environments may generate new kinds of frustrations, such as
the pains of indeterminacy, pains of psychological assessment, and pains of self-
management (Crewe, 2011b). Attempts to create more positive environments and
attention to the different needs of the prisoner population have led to an increased
departmentalization of many European prisons. Increasingly, we see the construc-
tion of specialized prison wings to house or treat prisoners with drug problems, sex
offenders, and young offenders (Kolind and Duke, 2016; McKeganey et al., 2016).
In this paper, we are primarily interested in the growth of designated drug treat-
ment wings.
In many European countries (including Denmark which is the focus of this
paper), special wings closed off from the rest of the prison have been established
for prisoners in drug treatment programs (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs
and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), 2012; Kolind et al., 2013; Mja˚land, 2016).
Although there are challenges associated with carrying out drug treatment in
prisons (McIntosh and Saville, 2006), research has shown that the staff–prisoner
relation in these specialized wings tends to be less authoritarian than in normal
prison wings (Kolind et al., 2015; Nylander et al., 2011), and prisoners report that
prison life on these wings is less harsh and stressful (Giertsen et al., 2015). On the
other hand, the staff in these wings report new dilemmas related to the entry of new
categories of treatment staff and the introduction of new treatment-related tasks
(Nylander et al., 2011).
Despite the growing research interest in designated drug treatment wings, as
outlined above, no studies have examined the consequences of such new specialised
wings on the practices of identification hierarchies and typologies among prisoners.
In this paper, therefore, we will investigate how prison spaces, like drug treatment
wings and regular wings respectively, are used as symbolic metaphors for ethnic
identification in Danish prisoners’ everyday practice.
Within the last 20 years, Denmark has evolved into a multi-ethnic society. Issues
of immigration and concerns about integration have become increasingly conten-
tious themes in public and political debates (Mouritsen and Olsen, 2013). While
‘ethnic problems’ and notions of ethnicity, as Hall (1996) reminds us, are always
historically, culturally and politically modified, in the present Danish context,
ethnic minority young males have been represented as problematic ‘others’ because
of their seeming involvement in crime, drug dealing and gang activities (Jensen,
2011). These problems have been identified as troubling reflections of the difficulties
of successfully integrating immigrant populations into Danish society (Klement
et al., 2010). At the same time, a growing social exclusion and discrimination of
ethnic minority young people has also been reported in many areas; for instance, in
relation to education, the labour market, residential areas (so-called ‘ghettos’),
582
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social relations, the police, the night-time economy and other social policies
(Kolind et al., 2017).
Moreover, the growth of the ethnic minority populations in Denmark has also
been reflected in crime statistics and in the composition of the prison population.
As in other European countries (Ha¨llsten et al., 2013; Salmi et al., 2015), dispro-
portionally severe sentencing of people from ethnic minority backgrounds is docu-
mented in Denmark (Andersen and Tranæs, 2011). Economic deprivation and
social disadvantage account for a part of this over-representation (Andersen and
Tranæs, 2011). In 2004 (the first year where there was systematic monitoring on
ethnicity and incarceration), 17% of the Danish prison population were of other
than ethnic ‘Danish origin’.1 By 2014, this figure had risen to 27%.2 In the max-
imum security prisons,3 the amount of ethnic minority prisoners not of Danish
origin reaches 44% compared to 24% in the minimum security ‘open prisons’.
Among those prisoners undergoing drug treatment, prisoners with ‘non-Western’
background account for only 12% of the prisoners in the drug treatment wings in
closed prisons, though they comprise 31% of the prisoners in these prisons
(Heltberg, 2012: 54).4 The prisoners with ethnic minority backgrounds originate
predominantly from Lebanon, Turkey, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran and Eastern
Europe (Kriminalforsorgen, 2014, 2015).
In spite of the increase in the ethnic minority prisoner population, increased
media attention, and a growing social exclusion, there is little qualitative research
on how ethnicity is enacted in everyday prison life. In the United States, researchers
were preoccupied with questions concerning race and ethnicity within prisons in the
1970s (see e.g.: Jacobs, 1979). However, this interest has declined in the last two
decades, with only few qualitative studies on this area (Phillips, 2012: 29). As
Phillips (2012: 48) argues with reference to the UK, little is known about the
contemporary dynamics of ethnically diverse prisons, such as the interracial,
intra-racial and cross-national interactions among prisoners.
In this article, therefore, we focus on the relation between ethnicity and prison
spaces in order to show how Danish prison spatial policy – especially with regards
to drug treatment wings – essentializes notions of ethnic differences among pris-
oners. When we refer to ‘ethnicity’ in this article, we are concerned with how
ethnicity is reflected in prisoners’ notions about norms, mentality and attitude.
Thus, ethnicity is not necessarily a matter of race, ethnic origin or official citizen-
ship status.
Analytical background
According to Schutz (1954), all humans experience and understand others in terms
of ideal types of typification. In this phenomenological understanding, typification
is a cultural and social demarcation based on a human repertoire of cognitive
schemes and realms of understanding. Identities, including ethnic identifications,
can thus be understood as the way humans experience others in a typified manner.
Ethnic typifications thus involve the assumptions through which people make sense
Haller and Kolind
583
of their worlds (Jenkins, 2008). Here we will investigate how particular prison
spaces (regular and treatment wings) function as cognitive schemes in prisoners’
ethnic self-definition and ethnic identifications of others. It follows therefore, that
prisoners’ divisions of their surroundings into ethnic natural kinds is what we want
to explain, not what we want to explain things with (Brubaker, 2002). In our
understanding, ethnic identity is a social accomplishment continually constructed
in interaction (Jenkins, 2008). Hence, ethnic groups should not be seen as passive
recipients of acquired cultures, but active agents who construct and negotiate their
lives within given structural conditions (Song, 2003)....
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