Ben Crewe On The ‘Kafkaesque’ Carceral Experience
By: Annotating Criminology
Tags: Criminology, Crime, Justice, Sociology, Prison Reform

Dr Ben Crewe

‘…pains of confinement can be reduced, pain is intrinsic to imprisonment, and it is much easier to alter its form than to eliminate it from the prison experience.’

In ‘Revisiting The Pains of Imprisonment’, Ben Crewe has highlighted how the ‘pains of imprisonment’ have evolved with the change in modern penal practices. From physical mistreatment to a form that seems closer to the Foucauldian model of disciplinary power, Crewe explains how the carceral experience has shifted from ‘depth’ or ‘heaviness’ of punishment to that of ‘tightness’.

The paper begins with exploring the developing literature on identifying and explaining the pains of punishment — works of Gresham Sykes, McDermott & King, Jessica Mitford, Edgardo Rotman, and others.

These works have highlighted three sites of the pain of imprisonment: uncertainty and indeterminacy, psychological assessment, and self-government. All these forms of pain are not manifested through apparent and temporal physical torture but through psychological frustration caused by a system that is alienating, indeterminate, and all-encompassing. He says:

‘Here, Foucault’s (1977) prognosis resonates: power is diffuse and decentralized, operating in a manner that is ‘light’ but anonymous. It is demanding without seeming coercive, everywhere but nowhere.’

These three categories of pain reflect frustration, or ‘depth’ and ‘heaviness’, caused to prisoners through indeterminacy of discretionary style of governance, psychological assessments that deprive prisoners of control over their own identity, and enforcing discipline through ‘self-governance’ measures that expect prisoners to monitor and mould their behaviour as per the standardised norms — making them an agent of their own incarceration.

‘Depth’ and ‘heaviness’ are seen as a vertical form of oppressiveness which makes the sentence feel like an actual burden on the shoulders of the prisoner.

Crewe argues that while depth and heaviness do capture the carceral experience of pain, they give a partial account of modern penality. The better word to use, then, would be tightness:

‘A better metaphor is ‘tightness’. This noun gives a sense of the way that power is experienced as both firm and soft, oppressive yet also somehow light. It does not so much weigh down on prisoners and suppress them as wrap them up, smother them and incite them to conduct themselves in particular ways… It conveys the way that power operates both closely and anonymously, working like an invisible harness on the self. It is all-encompassing and invasive, in that it promotes the self-regulation of all aspects of conduct, addressing both the psyche and the body.’

Crewe highlights that while reducing the possible spaces for exercising autonomy to a greater extent, both spatially and psychologically, modern penality operates as what can be called ‘neo-paternalism’ or ‘authoritarian governmentality’. He says:

‘Prisons offer paternalistic, almost protective support, stopping the prisoner from succumbing to inertia, steering and inducing him or her towards ‘sensible options’ (as defined by the authorities), and appealing to his or her ‘better self’. In many respects, it offers decency, care and assistance certainly more than in the past — which prisoners appreciate. But it is more pushy than caring and more prescriptive than liberal. If prisoners do not want to be rehabilitated through the forms prescribed by the prison, if they choose not to conform to institutional demands, or if they cannot recognize their ‘best interests’, then punishment and constraint are not far away.’

This authoritarian grip over the prisoners’ lived experience alienates the prisoners from their own sense of identity, indirectly coerces them to conform to normative imperialism of the authority — giving them an identity that they have to carry for the remained of their sentence. Crewe says:

‘The carceral experience is less directly oppressive, but more gripping — lighter but tighter. Instead of brutalizing, destroying and denying the self, it grips, harnesses and appropriates it for its own project. It turns the self into a vehicle of power rather than a place of last refuge. In leaving prisoners in a state of ontological uncertainty, and in tying them into their own subjection, it resembles the dystopian projections of Orwell and Kafka.’

Complement this with Stanley Cohen on Vision of Social Control, and Gwen Robinson and Ian Crow on Offender Rehabilitation.