‘Tightness’, recognition and penal power
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Author | Alice Ievins,Ben Crewe |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520928115 |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
‘Tightness’, recognition
and penal power
Ben Crewe and Alice Ievins
Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
Prison scholarship has tended to focus on the pains and frustrations that result from the
use and over-use of penal power. Yet the absence of such power and the subjective
benefits of its grip are also worthy of attention. This article begins by drawing on recent
literature and research findings to develop the concept of ‘tightness’ beyond its initial
formulation. Drawing primarily on data from a study of men convicted of sex offences, it
goes on to explain that, in some circumstances, the reach and hold of penal power are
not experienced as oppressive and undesirable, and, indeed, may be welcomed.
Conversely, institutional inattention andan absence of grip maybe experienced as painful.
Prisons, then, can be ‘loose’ or ‘lax’ as well as ‘tight’. The article then discusses the
different ways in which prisons exercise grip, and, in doing so, recognise or misrecognise
the subjectivity of the individual prisoner. It concludes by identifying the connections
between this ‘ground-up’ analysis of the relative legitimacy of different forms of penal
intervention and recent discussions in penal theory about the proper role of the state in
communicating censure and promoting personal repentance and change.
Keywords
imprisonment, misrecognition, penal power, ‘tightness’
The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look, a habit
of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality,
of having something to hide. (Orwell 1949, ch. 5)
Perhaps not being watched is even worse than being watched, so terrible that the
insult of perpetual surveillance is itself a fictional defence against something worse,
invisibility before god and man. (Alford, 2000, pp. 132–133)
Corresponding author:
Ben Crewe, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9DA, UK.
Email: c247@cam.ac.uk
Punishment & Society
2021, Vol. 23(1) 47–68
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520928115
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The depiction of institutional power, intrusion and state surveillance as oppressive
and pervasive has a venerable history, from the dystopian literary accounts of
Kafka’s The Trial and Orwell’s 1984, to penological classics such as Bentham’s
Panopticon (see Engelmann, 2011) and Foucault’s (1977) Discipline and Punish.
As expressed in the quotation from Orwell above, such texts consistently depict
the reach and gaze of the state apparatus, or of the penal institution specifically,
as highly insidious. Yet, as Fred Alford suggests – in an article provocatively titled
‘What would it matter if everything Foucault said about prison were wrong?’
(Alford, 2000) – there may be good grounds for probing prevailing assumptions
about the nature of contemporary penal power. Alford’s primary argument is that
The Bentham’s Panopticon was never truly instantiated, and many prisons are
characterised more by coercion and neglect than by the modes of classification
and disciplinary training that Foucault elaborated. Indeed, writing about prisons
in the United States, Alford (2000) declares bluntly that ‘the empirical reality of
prison (not the same thing as the discourses of penology) shows Foucault to be
wrong’ (p. 1250). As the epigraph above suggests, Alford also draws attention to the
possibility that, while invasive penal practices might generate considerable frustra-
tion, they might be preferable to the institutional indifference of the ‘nonopticon’.
For current purposes, this latter critique is more relevant than the former.
In Western Europe, even where prisons have not been designed to the Panoptic
blueprint, penal scholars have noted that their techniques of control and compli-
ance have generated an experience of power that often corresponds with
Foucault’s formulation. One way that this experience has been conceptualised is
through the idea of ‘soft power’ and the metaphor of ‘tightness’ (Crewe, 2011a,
2011b). Such terms are designed to convey the sense of penal power being ‘omni-
present but strangely invisible’ (Alford, 2000, p. 129), exerting an enveloping ‘grip’
upon the self through bureaucratic decision-making, disciplinary regimes of actu-
arial risk assessment, processes of responsibilisation, and invasive forms of psy-
chological profiling and intervention. These qualities and conditions are generally
described in negative terms, as stifling, constraining and repressive, for example,
through metaphors of being in a kind of ‘harness’ or ‘straitjacket’ (Crewe, 2011a).
Prisoners’ own terms – ‘dangling carrots’, ‘moving goalposts’, ‘walking on egg-
shells’ and ‘the power of the pen’ (Crewe, 2011a) – are equally pejorative. They are
consistent with the traditions of a field that has tended to regard all forms of power
with suspicion (McMahon, 1992), and has therefore identified the pains and frus-
trations associated with the imposition of penal power much more than its absence.
Yet the absence of penal power and the subjective benefits of its grip are also
worthy of attention (see Crewe, Liebling and Hulley, 2014). This article begins by
drawing on recent literature and research findings to develop the concept of tight-
ness beyond in its initial formulation. It goes on to explain that, in some circum-
stances, the reach and hold of penal power are not experienced as oppressive and
undesirable. Indeed, as Alford hints, institutional grip may be welcomed, when, for
reasons that can be normative or instrumental, prisoners consider themselves in
need of institutional attention. Conversely, institutional inattention and an absence
48 Punishment & Society 23(1)
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