The prison as a reinventive institution
| Author | Ben Crewe,Alice Ievins |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619841900 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
841900TCR0010.1177/1362480619841900Theoretical CriminologyCrewe and Ievins
research-article2019
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(4) 568 –589
The prison as a reinventive
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619841900
DOI: 10.1177/1362480619841900
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Ben Crewe
University of Cambridge, UK
Alice Ievins
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
There is plentiful evidence that imprisonment is painful, harmful and criminogenic.
However, alongside accounts that emphasize such consequences are alternative narratives,
in which some prisoners claim that carceral confinement has been a positive intervention
in their life. Drawing on Scott’s idea of the reinventive institution, this article explores
these narratives, which—contra Goffman—involve a voluntaristic commitment to the
prison, active engagement in the process of identity reconstruction, normative alignment
with institutional values and the role of lateral regulation in shaping the prisoner’s new
self. Our analysis emphasizes the impact of the prison as an institutional form, and the
ways that, in interaction with particular biographical experiences, it produces narratives of
reinvention which imply an inversion of its normal destructive processes. Our argument is
not a defence of imprisonment, but an attempt to theorize a narrative claim that, although
expressed by a minority of prisoners, merits proper analysis.
Keywords
Imprisonment, prisoner narratives, reinvention
Introduction
Towards the end of his 2002 article on the curious eclipse of prison ethnography, Loïc
Wacquant (2002: 387–388) comments that:
Corresponding author:
Ben Crewe, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA, UK.
Email: Bc247@cam.ac.uk
Crewe and Ievins
569
it is essential to investigate the varied linkages between the prison and its surrounding
institutions on the ground, as they actually exist and operate, rather than from afar and above,
from a bird’s eye view unsuited to capturing process, nuance, and contradiction. (emphasis in
original)
This point is partly methodological—an insistence on fine-grained empirical analysis;
but is also an argument for viewing the prison not as a standalone institution encroaching
on lives from ‘outside’ normal social space, as it were, but one that, to use Wacquant’s
(2002: 388) words, ‘is woven deep into the fabric and lifecourse of the lower classes
across generations’. Building on this point, Wacquant (2002: 388) makes a more contro-
versial argument that the influence of the prison is not necessarily ‘distortive and wholly
negative’. Rather:
The prison can also act, counterintuitively and within limits, as a stabilizing and restorative
force for relations already deeply frayed by the pressures of life and labor at the bottom of the
social edifice. For example, prisons extirpate abusive men from domestic space; interrupt for a
time spirals of addiction; and provide some health care to derelicts who otherwise receive none.
(2002: 388, emphasis in original)
This argument, that sometimes imprisonment appears to have positive function, is dotted
around the literature, almost always with the same discomfort that is expressed in
Wacquant’s own qualifier (‘counterintuitively and within limits’). We would be surprised
if anyone who has done even a small amount of empirical prison research has not heard
some prisoners—albeit a minority—say that prison has ‘saved them’, been a progressive
‘turning point’ in their life, or words to that effect. Based on research undertaken in
England & Wales with female prisoners, male prisoners convicted of sexual offences and
prisoners with histories of acute drug addiction, the aim of this article is to present a
framework that helps us to theorize these kinds of statements, by foregrounding what it
is that the prison does, in interaction with particular kinds of biographical experiences,
characterized primarily by forms of abuse, shame and addiction. Our objective is to take
these narratives seriously as accounts of the prison experience, as a way of thinking
through the prison as a particular kind of institutional form. We begin by analysing those
elements of the prison literature that indicate and seek to explain prisoners’ transforma-
tive discourses. We then draw on Susie Scott’s (2011) idea of the ‘reinventive institution’
(RI) to highlight the ways that, for some prisoners—whose lives prior to their confine-
ment have been dominated by forms of acute deprivation and degradation—imprison-
ment produces narratives of reinvention which imply an inversion of its normal
destructive processes. We go on to discuss a number of reasons why these narratives,
however sincerely they are felt, might not endure on release and what they tell us about
the life conditions of the people who express them.
Literature
As McNeill and Schinkel (2017) have recently noted, penal policymakers and practition-
ers have held a perennial faith in the reformative potential of prisons. Conversely, penal
scholars have tended to emphasize the destructive dimensions of imprisonment, often
570
Theoretical Criminology 24(4)
deriding the idea that prisons might produce the kinds of positive outcomes that they
seek. Indeed, for prison abolitionists, the essential properties of imprisonment—its fun-
damentally coercive qualities—make it inconceivable that it might have transformative
effects. Certainly, the evidence that prison ‘works’ as a site of reform or rehabilitation is
flimsy; indeed, its overall impact might be criminogenic (Bales and Piquero, 2012;
Nagin et al., 2009). However, as Van Ginneken (2016: 219) notes, ‘[w]hen researchers
examine the impact of prison on people as a group, as they often do in quantitative stud-
ies, the differential effects tend to go unnoticed’, obscuring individual differences in
prison effects, caused by ‘the interaction between the person and the environment’.
Notably, then, alongside accounts of the hellishness of incarceration can be found alter-
native narratives of ‘transformation and transcendence’ (Novek, 2005), in which, under
certain conditions, imprisonment can be a ‘turning point’ in people’s lives (McNeill and
Schinkel, 2017; Sampson and Laub, 2005).
Within the literature are several different accounts of such narratives. Some studies
characterize the prison as a potential site of spiritual growth, political awakening or nar-
rative re-birth. As Maruna et al. (2006: 163) point out, ‘the prison provides a stark and
vivid social context for exploring the conditions that allow for quantum personality
change’, because of the mortification processes involved in entering a total institution,
and the fundamental challenge to taken-for-granted assumptions about life and self that
imprisonment entails. Similarly, an emerging literature on prisons and post-traumatic
growth (e.g. Van Ginneken, 2016; Vanhooren et al., 2018) emphasizes the ways that, fol-
lowing ‘the destruction of previous worldviews and assumptions’ (Van Ginneken, 2016:
211) caused by imprisonment, or by the offence that precipitates it, some prisoners report
positive changes in their lives and self-conceptions.
For our purposes, one of the most significant aspects of this discourse is that it is
predicated on the ability to transcend an initial crisis or trauma. The hellishness of
imprisonment functions as a form of ‘tough love that rescues a woman from her weaker
self’ (Novek, 2005: 293), or steels prisoners for the challenges of freedom. Likewise,
discourses of ‘prison as re-birth’ typically rest on notions that imprisonment represents a
symbolic point of death—the ‘rock-bottom’ moment of a life trajectory (Maruna et al.,
2006: 170). In such accounts, then, salvation and transformation are direct outcomes of
deprivation and pain.
An alternative interpretation of positive testimonies about the prison asserts that, like
a last resort social service, imprisonment offers some form of respite or refuge from
lives in the community that are blighted by addiction, abuse and related degradations
(e.g. Frois, 2017; Johns, 2017; Novek, 2005; Österman, 2017; Schinkel, 2014; Sufrin,
2017; Van Ginneken, 2016). In such accounts, prisoners describe the prison as having
‘saved’ them from ‘some greater harm on the outside’ (Schinkel, 2014: 59), or as a place
of relative stability and structure. Quoting a participant who comments that ‘[i]n here
we are like children again, with a time to eat, a time to bathe, a time for bed’, Frois
(2017: 112) gestures towards the kind of psychoanalytic interpretation offered by
Martha Duncan (1996: 27), which recognizes the ‘similarity between prison and ideal-
ized infancy’. Duncan’s (1996: 30) point is that some prisoners ‘exhibit a regressive
longing to be in a passive, dependent condition’, in which the prison functions almost
in loco parentis. Notably, this state of diminished autonomy—described by Sykes
Crewe and Ievins
571
(1958: 75) as ‘the weak, helpless, dependent status of childhood’—is precisely what
most prisoners experience as acutely painful. Alternatively, Duncan (1996: 23) sug-
gests, some prisoners might experience imprisonment positively as a result of it protect-
ing them from their own ‘irresistible impulses’, including the temptations of alcohol
and more mundane distractions. In such circumstances, aspects of imprisonment, such
as removal and...
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