Prisoner Coping and Adaptation

Ian O’Donnell

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The contours of imprisonment have been reshaped over the past 50 years. This chapter

explores continuity and change in the pains of confinement, highlighting a variety of ways

that prisoners cope with an environment characterised by conflict, disconnection and tedium.

Sentence lengths have increased in many countries and some US prisons now have a hospice

in addition to a death row. In the former, death is certain and comes soon after arrival. In the

latter, execution is far from inevitable and the wait for it is long and fraught. The aim in both

places is bleak: to prevent premature death. Another recent phenomenon in the US, which

leads the world in the incarceration stakes, is the use of prolonged solitary confinement as an

administrative measure. Adverse mental health consequences routinely follow involuntary

isolation, but some prisoners display remarkable resilience and there is much to be learned

from their accounts of psychological survival.

As the numbers in custody have surged, the prisoner society has come under strain. Whatever

bonds of solidarity may have existed in the past have frayed and what brings prisoners

together today is not their shared status as ‘outlaws’ but their allegiance to a faith tradition, a

political ideology, or a street gang; rather than uniting in their opposition to staff, they are

pitted against each other. These divisions are deepened by the drugs culture that permeates

many prisons, and the associated problems of distribution, consumption, and debt collection.

They are reinforced by the introduction of differentiated regimes which enhance prisoner

compliance through small, but by no means insignificant, rewards. In short, prisons have

become more variegated places since the Penal Research Unit, forerunner of the Centre for

Criminology, was established at Oxford University in 1966.

Thinking about ‘coercive confinement’ in general rather than imprisonment in particular

yields a more nuanced perspective on incarceration trends. The implications of such a

conceptual shift will be teased out below alongside some (highly tentative) musings about

possible futures of imprisonment. I will argue that scientific advances – in combination with

humankind’s genius for devising new ways of inflicting pain – create a context for the

decentring of the prison, the customisation of punishment, and the tightening of the penal

screw. Understanding these processes will be the key to mapping the contours of

imprisonment over the next 50 years.

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Changing pains

According to Ben Crewe (2011: 522), the metaphor of ‘tightness’ captures the contemporary

experience of imprisonment better than the ideas of ‘depth’ and ‘weight’ as conceptualized

by Roy King and Kathleen McDermott (1995), who adapted the idea of depth from David

Downes’s (1988) comparative study of Dutch and English penal policy. For King and

McDermott (1995: 90), depth is defined by ‘the extent to which a prisoner is embedded into

the security and control systems of imprisonment,’ while weight relates to, ‘the degree to

which relationships, rights and privileges, standards and conditions serve to bear down on

them’. These variables do not necessarily go hand in hand; life in a high-security prison can

be tolerably light.

Tightness, on the other hand, describes a carceral experience where power is exercised softly,

but grips the prisoner in so many ways that wriggling free of it becomes all but impossible.

This concept adds sophistication to our understanding of the experience of imprisonment. It

allows for situations where the depth is moderate (security measures are not too oppressive),

and the weight is bearable (good relationships and conditions exist), but the prisoner feels

enmeshed. A reduced dependence on coercion is accompanied by a sustained effort to

connect prisoners to the administration of their own sentences. They become caught up in the

protocols that dictate how far, and at what pace, they will progress towards an amelioration of

conditions or an enhanced prospect of release.

Prison life has improved in many material respects, at least in the economically developed

world: hygiene is better; the dietary is more balanced and nutritious; visitation is more

frequent; health care, while perhaps not equivalent to that available outside, is routinely

available; corporal punishment is a thing of the past; capital punishment is almost extinct;

there is a growing awareness of the human rights standards which prison treatment should

satisfy; there is a renewed emphasis on inspection and monitoring by local, national, and

supra-national bodies. Notable among the latter are the Council of Europe Committee for the

Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) and the

United Nations Subcommittee on the Prevention of Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or

Degrading Treatment or Punishment (SPT).

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But when prisoners are recruited as agents in their own transformation they become

vulnerable to insidious and invidious new pressures. Encouraged to believe that they can play

a role in directing their own futures, they become responsible, in part, for decisions about the

privileges they are granted and the timing of their release. This can have a stifling effect as

they attempt to negotiate the layers of regulations according to which they must conduct their

lives. It also divides the prison population according to whether its members wish to comply,

win privileges and ease the passage through their sentence, or remain defiant and accept the

associated costs. Even among the former group there may be differentiation, with several

levels of regime enhancement available. This creates a context where prisoners are

incentivised to make decisions that have adverse implications for social cohesion; individual

advancement occurs at the expense of the peer group. Cleaner, more humane living

conditions are undoubtedly important, but spending longer in them struggling with

labyrinthine rules and procedures (and aware that personal progress contributes to the

disintegration of prisoner solidarity) adds an unwelcome twist to the experience.

There has been a contraction in the breadth of ambition associated with the expressed aims of

imprisonment, a shift from lofty aspirations about creating productive members of society to

performance measures that lend themselves to easy quantification. To some degree this

constriction of purpose was brought about by the disappointing results of penal practice: the

outcomes of rehabilitative programmes were unimpressive and recidivism rates remained

stubbornly high. In addition, it reflects the encroachment of new public management ideas

and a belief that prisons should not be immune from the three Es of economy, efficiency, and

effectiveness (O’Donnell 2016). It could be said that today’s aims reflect imperatives that

relate to the smooth running of the institution rather than the transformation of the prisoner

(and, as a corollary, the improvement of society). The emergence in recent decades of

cognitive behavioural interventions, in tandem with more elaborate approaches to programme

design and better measurement of effects, have renewed confidence in the potential for

imprisonment to catalyse meaningful personal change and to promote community safety. This

is an area where criminal justice research has played an important role.

Time work

Prison life is characterised by stultifying repetition. Successful adaptation involves devising

routines to cope with boredom and finding ways to insert meaningful activities into a

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timetable that is not of the prisoners’ design. Once the tumult of the initial period is past, and

before the trepidation that accompanies release emerges, coping with imprisonment means

devising effective ways to fritter away large amounts of time. For prisoners serving short

terms, there can be weight and depth, and even tightness, but because the temporal dimension

does not come to exercise an oppressive independent presence, it can be handled once the

turbulent early phase is over. For the long-termer, identifying ways to deal with time’s

potentially overwhelming burden is essential for the preservation of mental integrity. Only

when the prisoner has found an effective way of working with time can he or she breathe

freely.

How prisoners deal with the passage of time has attracted scant scholarly attention, despite its

critical relevance to successful adaptation. Elsewhere I have offered the concept of the ‘pain

quotient’ (PQ) as a way of thinking about the interplay between time and imprisonment:

The two key variables involved in estimating the PQ are time to be served (this takes

account of sentence length and point in sentence) and life to be lived (this takes

account of chronological age and life expectancy). The sentence itself, or the amount

of time served, or the prisoner’s age tell us little when considered independently.

They are merely numbers in the penal lottery. It is only when they are viewed

dynamically, and interactively, that these factors can be used to sketch out the

temporal parameters of pain. (O’Donnell 2014: 201-2)

For a prisoner with a lot of life to live and a short time to serve, the PQ is small and time

orientation is relatively unimportant. For a prisoner whose remaining prison term exceeds his

life expectancy it is large, and significant adjustments are required in the interests of

psychological survival. Devising ways to cope with time has always been a challenge for

prisoners and will always remain so. It is of more pressing importance today given the rise,

across many countries, in sentence lengths. Truncating perceived duration is the key to

successful adaptation. If prisoners do not find ways to lighten time’s burden it can become

crushing.

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Maintaining bodily integrity

Some challenges are constant over time and across space. One of these is how to reduce

violence without creating prison regimes that are so deep they breach acceptable minimum

standards. When aggressive and non-conforming young men are gathered together against

their wills, the potential for conflict is obvious. When they place a disproportionate emphasis

on respect and fighting prowess the scene is set for this potential to be realised. Hard drug use

plays a role here also. Prisoners have long been surreptitious brewers and distillers but heroin

has made its presence felt in recent decades (Crewe 2005). In addition to being accompanied

by a risk of lethal infection if the drug is taken intravenously and unsterilized injecting

equipment is shared, the associated trade further divides prisoners and creates a range of new

problems associated with the protection of those who become vulnerable on account of

undischarged debts.

Despite the ubiquitous threat of force and a history of hostile relations between captives and

captors, collective violence is uncommon in the prison systems of developed countries. There

is nothing in recent years to parallel the carnage of the riots at Attica Correctional Facility,

New York in 1971 (43 fatalities) and at New Mexico State Penitentiary, Santa Fe in 1980 (33

fatalities). The trend in interpersonal violence appears to be in the same direction and, as far

as homicide is concerned, prisoners in the US and UK are at least as safe as comparable

groups in the community (Mumola 2005, Sattar 2001). When it comes to sexual violence they

may not be, especially in the US (O’Donnell 2004). There is no doubt that assault, theft and

robbery are common in prisons (Edgar et al. 2012), but whether they are significantly more

hazardous places in these respects than the areas of urban deprivation from which many

prisoners are drawn, and the domestic environments in which they dwell when at liberty, is

less clear.

What we know about prison violence in Africa, Asia or Central and South America leaves no

room for complacency. Extremes include the 111 prisoners at Carandiru Penitentiary, São

Paulo, killed by military police who stormed the prison after a riot in 1992 (Cavallaro 1997),

and the horror of what is known in South Africa as the ‘slow puncture’ of deliberate HIV

infection of one prisoner by another (Luyt 2013). The prison systems of many poor countries

are overcrowded, under-resourced, and controlled by their inmate populations. We know little

about the experience of imprisonment under such conditions, how it has changed, or its

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prospects. As in so many areas our understanding leans heavily towards Anglo-American

perspectives where the scholarship is abundant. A criminology without borders – which the

Oxford Centre for Criminology is well-positioned to foster – has an important role to play in

redressing this imbalance.

An absence of connectivity

Advances in information and communications technology mean that prisons have become

increasingly porous places. Access to telephones is widespread (calls are sometimes made

using devices that have been smuggled into the prison). In-cell radios and televisions are an

option for many. Temporary release and furloughs are sometimes possible. Financial support

may be available for prison visits. Letters are permitted and censorship is less intrusive than

in the past when the permitted volume of correspondence was small and its contents were

read before being passed on. Prisoners often receive small amounts of money from the

authorities and a mechanism usually exists to allow family and friends to transfer funds to

their prison accounts so that they can purchase foodstuffs, tobacco, magazines, and perhaps

even art and craft materials. All of the foregoing relieve much of the monotonous misery that

characterized earlier times.

But prisoners may feel more marooned from loved ones today given the plethora of ways of

keeping in touch, many of which require only rudimentary literacy skills (e.g., text

messaging, emailing, tweeting, sharing photographs and video clips, updating social net-

working sites). Compared to the pen and paper that were the only options until the end of the

twentieth century – and that many prisoners lacked the capacity to use to any great effect –

this is a far greater degree of relative deprivation; the digital divide is wide, and prison

systems have been slow to narrow it.

In a world where communication is defined by instantaneity, prisoners are more cut off than

ever; when company of one’s choosing is only a click or a swipe away, the separation that

prison entails is all the more debilitating. The acceleration of time which technological

innovation has allowed – and the accompanying intensification of experiences – has hardly

penetrated the penal realm. Timetables and daily routines recall the mid nineteenth century

and prisoners exist as ‘cavemen in an era of speed-of-light technology’ (Johnson 2005: 263).

In his classic account of prison life, Gresham Sykes (1958) wrote about the losses of liberty,

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goods and services, sexual relationships, autonomy, and security. To this list it might be

appropriate to add another, namely the denial of connectivity.

The feeling of disconnection is exacerbated when prisoners are a long way from home. Often

this involves urban men held in remote rural prisons whose visitors must undertake arduous

journeys to prevent relationships from foundering. Occasionally national borders must be

crossed. In 2015 the authorities in Norway began transferring prisoners to penal institutions

in the Netherlands in an attempt to cope with overcrowding and lengthy waiting lists for

prison admission. This followed a similar deal being struck between Belgium and the

Netherlands (Pakes and Holt 2015). Videoconferencing offers a partial solution to the

problem of distance but it lacks the psychological engagement of a direct encounter and the

spontaneity allowed by Internet access.

Coping in extremis

Prisoners find ways to adapt to even the grimmest surroundings and their resilience should

not be underestimated. In an exploration of how men and women cope with the rigours of

solitary confinement, including in the supermax facilities that blight the US, I have offered

what I call the seven Rs of survival. While of particular relevance to the long-term isolate

who is segregated for reasons of discipline, protection or perceived administrative necessity,

these stratagems can be adopted by prisoners serving sentences of any length in conditions of

any kind (O’Donnell 2014: 222-55). They are listed next in descending order of popularity

and ascending order of importance. Rescheduling involves using different intervals to gauge

the passage of time. Removal is routine work and exercise, busyness as an end in itself.

Reduction comprises ways of lightening the burden of prison time by ensuring that there is

less of it to deal with, such as by sleeping for longer. Reorientation involves resetting

temporal horizons so that the focus is emphatically on the present. Resistance entails holding

fast against the system through, for example, fighting or litigating. Raptness is absorption in

an activity like creative writing, craftwork or painting. Reinterpretation is when prisoners re-

imagine and re-cast their predicament by finding a framework of meaning and a sense of

common purpose; while rare the potential rewards are substantial.

There may be some who feel that any recognition of successful coping in extreme custody is

a dangerous distraction; that it offers a source of consolation to a state that is complacent

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about the harms it causes. But this kind of academic self-censorship must be guarded against.

The harms of custody are nuanced and anyone who takes prisons and prisoners seriously can

hardly fail to become aware of this. There is no gainsaying that prisons further diminish the

life chances of those who already bear the weight of multiple layers of disadvantage or that

protracted isolation constitutes a significant, and sometimes overwhelming, psychological

burden. However, it is also true that the period of confinement brings stability, removes a

range of threats to life, and can unlock a potential that may have remained hidden in the hurly

burly of life on the street.

One standpoint that remains insufficiently developed is that of the men and women who are

the subjects of attention. While ex-prisoners have contributed to the literature on

confinement, sometimes with penetrating insight, and a few among them have acquired

graduate degrees, the emergence of an organisational structure to promote the work of ex-

convicts within the academy is at an early stage (Ross et al. 2014). The criminological

enterprise could do more to facilitate contributions from the men and women whose lives are

grist to its intellectual mill. Of particular importance are the views of the growing number of

older prisoners, for whom incarceration poses specific social and medical challenges

(American Civil Liberties Union 2012), as well as those who find themselves at the bottom of

the prison hierarchy because the offences they have committed attract the opprobrium of their

peers. Neither must sight be lost of the minority of prisoners for whom any prospect of

release has been removed. These largely invisible groups will have much to say about the

changing pains of confinement.

Putting prison in its place

There is a general acknowledgment – more honoured in the breach than the observance – that

to make sense of trajectories of social control requires the adoption of a framework of

analysis that is historically informed, interdisciplinary, and not exclusively focused on the

criminal justice system. It is necessary to recall that in the mid-twentieth century the deviant

and difficult were held in an array of institutions of which the prison was a minor player.

Accordingly, any attempt to use the rate of imprisonment as a proxy for a country’s level of

punitiveness is fraught with difficulty. To chart the contours of confinement requires a

widening of the analytical lens.

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Taking Ireland as a case study, consider that in the late 1950s the country held around 400

prisoners, but more than 30,000 of its citizens were involuntarily detained in psychiatric

hospitals, reformatory and industrial schools, mother and baby homes, and Magdalen

asylums. This resulted in an aggregate rate, of what Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell

(2007) term ‘coercive confinement’, that exceeded 1,000 per 100,000 population (all the

more remarkable given the high level of emigration at the time). The conditions in these

institutions were austere and, while some of them may ostensibly have been orientated

towards the welfare of their inmates, they were experienced as degrading, stigmatising and

punitive places (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell 2012). Adopting this broader frame of reference

reveals that increasing prisoner numbers in the latter half of the twentieth century do not

necessarily imply a punitive turn and must be viewed against a background of

deinstitutionalisation – particularly of women and children – that has gone largely

unremarked. The pattern is of the carceral reach narrowing but its grip intensifying.

Reformatory and industrial schools, or their functional equivalents, were common across

Europe, Australia and the United States. So too were Magdalen asylums and mother and baby

homes. The detention of the mentally ill was widespread. Given the international relevance of

these institutional forms, the rubric offered by O’Sullivan and O’Donnell might prove useful

to researchers outside Ireland in terms of remembering the past, understanding the present

and imagining the future. At the very least it highlights the limitations of any analysis of

penal change that is restricted to short-term trends and equates punitiveness with

imprisonment.

Decentring

In Punishment and Welfare, David Garland described how the penal-welfare complex that

emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth caused the

partial displacement of the prison. The creation of specialist institutions to deal with habitual

inebriates, juveniles and the mentally deficient, together with the establishment of a

professional probation service meant that: “… the prison was decentred – shifted from its

position as the central and predominant sanction to become one institution among many in an

extended grid of penal sanctions” (Garland 1985: 23; italics in original). This is the history of

the prison when we think in terms of coercive confinement (see above) and it may be the

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future of the prison when we think in terms of incarceration delivered in community settings

(see below).

When Garland wrote of decentring what was at issue was the place of the prison within the

overall apparatus of social control; it was but one of many sites of coercive confinement, its

scale and significance varying over time. When I write of decentring what is at issue is the

consolidation of imprisonment accompanied by the dispersal of penal discipline, a blurring of

boundaries between the prison and the domestic environment. Technological change plays a

vital role and electronic monitoring will accelerate the decentring process by allowing the

individual’s usual place of residence to be reconstituted as his or her place of confinement.

This heralds a return to widespread coercive confinement but without the massive physical

infrastructure that was formerly required. Under these new arrangements the buildings

become less important, the relationships between keeper and kept evaporate, and control is

maintained dispassionately – and continuously – through electronic surveillance and swift

application of penalties for any detected violation. Certainty, celerity, and severity join forces

as never before.

My argument is that the wheel of penal change may be about to begin another revolution.

Having been decentred, the prison moved centre-stage in the closing decades of the twentieth

century and now it appears that another phase of decentring may lie ahead. As happened

during the first phase, it is likely that the waning of the prison will be accompanied by a rise

in the numbers under some form of control. The institution will become less dominant as

people are incarcerated in their own homes and monitored from afar, rather than gathered

together behind fortified perimeters under the gaze of professional gaolers. A dwindling need

for humans to carry out the surveillance function may be accompanied by the further erosion

of discretion, of advising, assisting and befriending; a stripping away, in other words, of the

humanity that can soften the impact of harsh punishment. Modern technology allows a

studied indifference to offenders; they command less personal attention and this reinforces

their status as socially redundant as well as morally repugnant.

The rationale underpinning Bentham’s panopticon was that prisoners would comply with the

regime’s requirements because they could not be sure at any given moment whether they

were being directly observed by an attentive watchman. Today there is no ambivalence in this

regard – the technology has evolved to such a degree that all prisoners can be tracked at all

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times. The offender wearing a tag around his or her ankle (or, in future years perhaps,

carrying a subcutaneous implant) cannot escape being monitored; any attempt to tamper with

the device will trigger an immediate alarm. When surveillance is total the panopticon is

redundant.

Tagging, redux

Thus, one scenario suggested by a glance to the future is of a prison system that occupies a

less central space in the landscape of punishment because prisoners are incarcerated in their

own homes with GPS-enabled electronic monitoring being used to enforce curfews, track

movements, and trigger alarms (e.g., notifying potential victims if an exclusion zone is

entered). To date, electronic monitoring has been deployed mostly as a condition of probation

or parole, or to allow remands on bail rather than in custody. Its use as a sanction remains

underdeveloped although monitored home detention has, on occasion, been substituted for

prison custody. The US is to the fore in taking advantage of the possibilities offered by

electronic monitoring to tighten surveillance, reinforce social exclusion, gather data, and

generate profit for the private sector. Nine US states have gone so far as to introduce life-time

GPS monitoring for certain categories of sex offender (Kilgore 2015: 28).

The tags that allow electronic monitoring have the potential to be more than simply

surveillance devices. They can be used to gather biometric data, create an audio or video

record of the wearer’s activities, or check alcohol consumption via transdermal testing. Tags

have not been used to inflict pain and such usage is prohibited by the Council of Europe

(2014). Nonetheless, it would be unduly optimistic to think that their potential to do so will

never be exploited. Some elements of the public (and their political representatives) would no

doubt support the introduction of a device that could deliver a debilitating electric shock

should a known paedophile stray too close to a school, or a domestic abuser too close to an

ex-partner’s home, or should an offender quit their place of confinement during curfew hours.

(If an attempt to escape from prison custody in the US can be met with lethal force it would

hardly be considered disproportionate to respond to an escape from home confinement with

pain delivered through a tag.) Given the huge costs of prisons and their obvious harms, and

widespread antipathy towards offenders, who can be certain that electronic monitoring will

not morph into electronic custody or even electronic punishment?

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One of the inventors of the tag believed that it had the potential to empty the world’s prisons

(Schwitzgebel 1970). This potential has not been realised. Indeed, Nellis (2014) observed that

electronic monitoring has not had a transformative effect on penal practice in any of the

numerous jurisdictions where it has been introduced. He noted that across Europe where

monitoring has been underpinned by human rights principles, embedded in state agencies,

and used to support the delivery of community sanctions, it has served to complement

rehabilitative efforts. When offered as a stand-alone measure, or a tracking device, or a

method of home confinement, its use is more ethically, and administratively, problematic.

When there are commercial pressures to expand usage, these problems are exacerbated.

Private sector involvement in the penal system brings in its wake another novel feature,

namely the creation of shareholder value out of human suffering, with profitability becoming

an essential goal of punishment. This was unheard of fifty years ago.

Those who are subject to electronic monitoring are required to pay a setup charge and daily

tariff in addition to meeting the recurring costs of their confinement including food, shelter,

heat and light (Kilgore, 2015: 20). As well as taking responsibilisation to an extreme level

these user fees generate a significant revenue stream for the operators. If the profit margin

associated with decentring the prison and dispersing its inmates is greater than for the

existing model of institutions that must be built and staffed and whose occupants must be

sheltered, fed and kept occupied, this will no doubt act as a stimulus for further ‘progress’ in

this direction.

Personalising pain

Another prediction for the coming fifty years is that greater attention will be devoted to

individual differences in the subjective experience of punishment. It has long been recognised

that prison sentences do not have a uniform impact, their effects varying according to the

antecedents, disposition, age, and physical condition of the offender (Kolber 2009). From

time to time, solutions have been offered to this threat to equitable treatment. Jeremy

Bentham, for example, was concerned that the administration of corporal punishment could

vary according to the strength and inclination of the man wielding the whip as well as the

ability of the afflicted person to pay for softer treatment. To solve this problem he proposed

the following:

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A machine might be made, which should put in motion certain elastic rods of cane or

whalebone, the number and size of which might be determined by the law: the body

of the delinquent might be subjected to the strokes of these rods, and the force and

rapidity with which they should be applied, might be prescribed by the Judge: thus

everything which is arbitrary might be removed. (Bentham 1830: 104)

More recently, Graeme Newman (1983) advocated electric shocks as an alternative to

imprisonment because they were cheaper, did not rupture family ties or leave scars, and were

fairer. By controlling the intensity and duration of the shock, each offender would feel the

same amount of pain. A machine which allowed shocks to be calibrated to take account of

individual differences in the offender’s physical robustness would eradicate disparities in the

felt experience of punishment. Newman (1983: 139) argued that for some violent criminals,

where it was deemed appropriate to add humiliation to the punitive mix, public whipping

should be considered.

Neither Bentham’s whalebone rods nor Newman’s shocking (in every sense of the word)

machine became part of the penal imaginary and it is unlikely that traumatic bodily

punishments will regain a foothold in countries where they are recalled as barbaric curiosities

that belong to less civilised times or places. But advances in neuroscience and brain imaging

create a context for measuring pain in an objective way that might be congruent with public

sensibilities as long as the mode of administration of the associated punishment is not deemed

cruel or excessively degrading.

It is possible to imagine a twenty-first century scheme of punishment where pain is

administered so that there is equality of impact (as measured through neuroimaging rather

than self-report) even if the amounts delivered vary. Wager et al (2013) describe how

individuals have their own ‘neurologic signature’ for physical pain and this can be read from

patterns of activity across specific regions of the brain. While this work is at an early stage,

and there are serious concerns regarding the reliability and validity of neuroscientific findings

in general (Perlin and Lynch 2016), progress is rapid and the identification of a reliable

biomarker for pain intensity would allow the administration of punishment to be

individualised as never before. This creates the opportunity for a new sanction, an alternative

to prison that, because it does not damage the body, will not be equated with the crude forms

of corporal punishment for which public acceptance is unlikely to be forthcoming. (A non-

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lethal injection, perhaps? Or exposure to intense heat, light, or sound?) Further advances

might also allow for the more precise quantification of the pains associated with

imprisonment so that sentence lengths could be varied in order to equalise their effects.

Conclusion

If a shift away from incarceration in institutions and towards remotely-monitored home

captivity gains momentum, what are the implications for prisoner adaptation and coping?

Clearly the role of the prison subculture will wane further if geographical separation from

other prisoners becomes the norm. The degree to which the experience of electronic custody

is a solitary one will depend on whether the offender shares his or her living space and

whether there are opportunities to receive visitors or travel outside for the purposes of leisure

or employment. If little in the way of meaningful human engagement is permitted, mastery of

some or all of the seven Rs of survival will be necessary.

Electronic custody will mean that offenders are not exposed to a threat from other prisoners

but they may be vulnerable to attack from community residents or cohabitants. Time will

pass slowly without the distraction provided by other like-situated individuals or the numbing

effects of a rigid timetable which, however unwelcome, adds structure and momentum to the

day. If Internet connectivity is allowed this will lighten the burden of incarceration and

provide a way of whiling away time. In short, the pains of confinement will not be eliminated

but they will be different.

A new problem will arise if punishments are calibrated to take account of individual

differences in resilience. If the punishment is repeated, and the individual has learned to cope,

the dosage will be increased so that the level of pain – as assessed by reading the individual’s

neurologic signature – is kept constant. Considering imprisonment specifically, the

imposition of terms that vary according to their impact on the offender, rather than being

proportionate to the harm done and the individual’s intent, will raise thorny jurisprudential

questions about the propriety of aligning penalties with their subjective effects. It also means

that successful adaptation will become elusive, if not impossible.

Is there anything that criminologists can, or should, do to address such a turn of events? Are

we content to be cartographers, plotting the various upheavals on the penal landscape or

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should we be attempting to shape the environment that is central to our concerns? Some of

the attendant risks seem obvious. There is a clear danger of penal expansionism given the

huge financial advantages associated with the decentring of imprisonment, especially if

prisoners are required to carry the costs of their own sentence administration. One challenge

for the academy is to identify appropriate safeguards to place around new and emerging

technologies so that the net of penal control is not widened or its mesh thinned. This is where

an Oxford criminology, characterised by thorough empirical work, cautious interpretation of

findings, attentiveness to policy impact, and integration into networks of influence, surely has

a role to play.

Finally, and returning to Crewe’s idea of ‘tightness’ as an apt metaphor for the contemporary

experience of imprisonment, it might be plausible to suggest that if the prison is decentred

along the lines suggested the result will be a carceral experience that is shallow and light but

suffocatingly tight.

References

American Civil Liberties Union (2012) At America’s Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the

Elderly, New York: ACLU.

Bentham, J. (1830) The Rationale of Punishment (edited by J.T. McHugh, 2009), New York:

Prometheus Books.

Cavallaro, J. (1997) Police Brutality in Urban Brazil, New York: Human Rights Watch.

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