Abstract
At the centre of this paper is the question of how selves take on durable forms within transient and unpredictable environments. Drawing on material culture studies and Science and Technology Studies, this paper explores the ways in which durable objects and commodities contribute to the construction of stable adaptive states. Drawing on 30 interviews and 9 months of ethnographic observation in a men's local prison, the paper explores the ways in which the properties and use of objects serve as a way of enduring the ‘liminal’ stages of imprisonment. Within the distinctly transient and unpredictable context of the local prison, objects can take on a range of important roles, providing a form of adhesion around which ways of living can be formed.
Introduction
At the centre of this paper is the question of how selves take on durable forms within transient and unpredictable environments. Drawing on material culture studies (Ingold, 2011; Miller, 1998) and science and technology studies (DeNora, 2000, 2012; Latour, 2005), this paper explores the ways in which durable objects and commodities contribute to the construction of stable adaptive states. It is argued that the properties of these objects serve as an important structure on which attitudes, habits and ways of living within the prison can take form and persist.
This argument responds to recent discussion on the constitution of the self within the discipline of criminology, with calls for more fluid (Phillips, 2017), embodied (Chamberlen, 2018; Wahidin, 2002) and encompassing (Laws, 2022) conceptualisation of selfhood emerging in recent years alongside an increasing sensitivity to the sensory and affective (Herrity et al., 2021) dimensions of lived experience in carceral spaces. Laws (2022) has observed the tendency within criminological scholarship to over-emphasise the ‘reflexive’ aspects of subjectivity over the subconscious, and experiential dimensions of self-change. In his critique of narrative criminology, Laws argues that the experiential aspects of subjectivity should be brought into ‘closer dialogue’ with other theories of self-change because it is this experience which serves as the ‘fodder’ for identities arrived at through reflection and narrativisation. Laws’ work encourages us to consider adaptation in a more holistic way, giving closer attention to the interaction between cognition, experience and subconscious in the formation of self. Building on this approach, this paper seeks to explore the role that the material environment plays in the formation and continuation of subjective adaptations. Although the subconscious aspects of the self are not discussed in this paper, the aim here is to examine the connection between experience and cognition to provide more detailed description of their interconnected character in instances of self-change.
This research is based on an ethnographic study of a men's local prison (Waller, 2020), which examined the role of music in the daily lives of prisoners over a period of nine months. By foregrounding the materiality of music (cf. DeNora, 2000, 2013), the study examined the ways in which objects and commodities structured daily life for prisoners within the local estate. Durable objects are defined here as usable things that afford multiple uses, and these serve as the principal focus in this paper.
The following section outlines a theoretical approach to material culture in prison before detailing the research site and methodology. The empirical sections begin by examining the ways in which materials form cognitive strategies of adaptation, demonstrating the continuity between environment and self. Here the paper demonstrates how attitudes, plans and strategies form through engagement with the material world, highlighting the ways in which ‘reflective identity’ is closely bound to these aspects of lived experience. From discussion of access to material resources, the paper then moves on to the use of these objects, considering how the ways of living within the prison form through their skilful application to a range of challenges. Drawing on DeNora's (2013) concept of ‘refurnishing‚’ this section considers the ways in which durability is constituted not only by the properties of objects, but also through the skills learned through their use. Finally, the paper returns to the relation between objects and the self, examining the cognitive strategies required to maintain access to material resources within the transient environment of the local prison.
Material culture in prison
Since the middle of the 20th century, prisons in England and Wales have become materially more diverse, as previously unavailable commodities can now be accessed through the institution's formal economy. The introduction of the prison canteen, incentives and earned privileges (IEP), in-cell televisions and telephones have all shaped the experience of imprisonment, rendering it, in Crewe's (2011) terms, less ‘heavy’ and ‘deep’, but also contributing to the ‘tightening’ of everyday life (cf. Herrity, 2014; Jewkes, 2002). Although the flow of objects and commodities into the prison is tightly (though not exhaustively) controlled, the material culture of the contemporary prison estate reflects an important but largely overlooked feature of prison life.
Aside from the development of the prison's formal economy, an equally significant shift within prisons in England and Wales happened in the informal economy as the importation of new types of drugs contributed to drastic changes in the social, cultural and political organisation of prisoner societies. The replacement of cannabis with more physically addictive drugs such as cocaine and heroin in the 1980s occurred alongside shifts in the management and demographics of prisons, leading to increased fragmentation and distrust within the prisoner population (Crewe, 2005). With the rise of ‘synthetic’ or ‘new-psychoactive’ drugs such as Spice, Mamba and Annihilation, Gooch and Treadwell (2020) have documented the intensification of these trends as prison markets merge increasingly with those in the community. As the authors show, the physical properties of synthetic drugs have also facilitated their proliferation within prisons. These substances can take the form of a liquid, allowing them to be sprayed onto other licit objects such as letters or pamphlets before being torn up and distributed. The fluid property of synthetic drugs, which allows smugglers to evade detection, reflects an important material underpinning the ongoing changes in prisons across England and Wales.
Although the significance of these objects cannot be reduced to their physical properties, the tendency for objects to be subsumed by systems of symbolic and economic value in prison research often overlooks the capacity for materials themselves to enable forms of agency (Ingold, 2011; Latour, 2005). This approach requires attention to the ways in which objects are used by prisoners, recognising both the meanings applied to these things and also the range of actions that they ‘afford’ (DeNora, 2000; Gibson, 1979). The concept of ‘affordance’ derives from the ecological psychologist James Gibson (1979) and describes an organism's possibilities for action, shaped by its capacities and the environment. This interaction between agency and capacity is particularly significant in prisons where the environment is designed to inhibit action. For this reason, we must be attentive to how prisoners use these items and the skills required.
Carceral geography and sensory penalties are important fields for theorising the ways in which the material environment of the prison is negotiated. The examination of prison boundaries (Allspach, 2010; Baer and Raveneberg, 2008; Moran, 2013; Moran and Keinänen, 2012; Turner, 2016) has challenged prevailing conceptions of imprisonment deriving from Goffman's (1961) concept of the ‘total institution’. Moran (2013), for instance, refers to the ‘permeability’ of the prison, describing the flow of ‘material things’ such as ‘people’ and ‘supplies’, as well as ‘intangible things’ such as ideas and ‘emotional attachments’ across the prison walls. Sensory studies of carceral space (Herrity et al., 2021; Hemsworth, 2016; Rice, 2016) have contributed further to our understanding of the prison as a ‘fluid’ (Ingold, 2011) environment in which sounds, smells and feelings can penetrate through the spaces where human bodies cannot. These studies have built a conceptual sensitivity to the skill required by prisoners to negotiate the sensory environment, articulating the ways in which agency is achieved by developing heightened perception of the sensory and affective dynamics of the prison. Herrity's (2024) recent work articulates the centrality of sound to the experience of imprisonment. Her study focuses on numerous aspects of the material environment such as keys, locks and doors that persist in prisoner's sensory registers even after release. She uses the concept of ‘attunement’ to describe the gradual process of sensory adaptation that prisoners and staff undergo as they inhabit the institution. Attunement involves a sensitisation to the auditory characteristics and rhythm of the prison, serving as a basis for forms of knowledge and agency.
As numerous studies have shown, access to goods and services is significant both from the institutional perspective of ensuring compliance and from a prisoner perspective of coping and survival. Goffman (1961) identified the role of personal possessions as props, which are stripped from inmates as they enter the institution to inhibit the performance of civilian identities. Furthermore, access to clothes (Chamberlen, 2018; Jewkes, 2002), food (Valentine and Longstaff, 1998), media (Herrity, 2014, 2018; Jewkes, 2002; Knight, 2015; Hemsworth, 2016; Rice, 2016) and drugs (Crewe, 2005; Gooch and Treadwell, 2020; Walker, 2015) constitute important tools for prisoners to undertake practices of coping, adaptation and emotional regulation (Laws and Crewe, 2016).
Crewe et al. (2020) have referred to ‘jailing’ to describe how early-stage prisoners on life sentences tended to engage in social and economic activities to carve a ‘world’ out of the prison (Irwin, 1970). Jailing often involved illicit practices to acquire material resources and achieve greater comfort and status. Crewe et al. (2020) suggest that the willingness of early-stage prisoners to engage in activities that risked punishment reflected an adaptive state of ‘lucid indifference’ (Camus, 1954, cited in Crewe et al., 2020) which aimed to manage the feelings of fear and uncertainty. The illicit economy allowed prisoners to access ‘creature comforts’ (Crewe et al., 2021) and high-status objects, helping some to gain agency and achieve a greater level of comfort within their bleak and often novel situation.
As various studies have illustrated (Baer, 2005; Jewkes, 2002; Jewkes and Laws, 2021; Marti, 2023; Schliehe and Crewe, 2022), the alienating character of the prison cell can be brought under some level of control by reconfiguring the material environment. Prisoners described reorganising their space by rearranging their furniture and personalising the cell with mementos, commodities and colourful decorations. Jewkes and Laws (2021) refer to objects as ‘prosthetics’ (Gonzalez, 2005, cited in Jewkes and Laws, 2021) that extend the sense of a prisoner's self throughout the cell to ‘evoke’ desirable feelings. The authors show how subjective shifts are heavily mediated by the material context in which prisoners reside, framing their exploration of carceral spaces around the process of adaptation. A feature of early-stage imprisonment, this liminal state is ‘a period of instability or chaos’ in which prisoners feel a sense of subjective indeterminacy as they enter a new environment that dramatically undermines their previous sense of self and status. Although complexities and challenges can persist and re-emerge, passing through the liminal stages of imprisonment opens the possibility of harnessing the material environment in ways that engender positive outcomes.
The role of objects and commodities appears in these accounts to operate alongside social relations to render the world of the prisoner stable and ‘familiar in the face of threatening novelty’ (Toch, 1977). Through alteration and exploitation of the environment, prisoners create a niche. However, for Toch, the niche is reserved for ‘marginal copers’ for whom it might facilitate ‘survival’ but rarely ‘happiness’. Like Goffman's ‘removal activities’ and Irwin's ‘jailing’, these practices are understood to provide resources for prisoners to ‘survive’, ‘cope’ and ‘distract’, rather than to construct durable modes of living or ‘adaptation’. While Toch (1977) suggests that some niches may engender ‘growth’ in subjects by providing ‘self-understanding’ and strategies for coping with stress, his examples of these types of niches are ‘special learning programs’, tailored for the needs of specific categories of prisoner. Building on Goffman's (1961) work, DeNora (2013) conceptualises ‘removal’ as ‘a form of retreat from the environment’, while the concept of ‘refurnishing’ refers to a form of investment in one's surroundings: When actors engage in any form of refurnishing, singly or together, they are acting upon and in their environments and in ways that affect those environments, whether materially or symbolically. They are recreating, engaging literally in re-creation, replenishing, refurnishing their environments in ways that, in some way, make them more habitable. (51)
Methodology and research site
This paper draws empirically from an ethnographic study of a men's local prison (HMP South Hill 1 ) in the South of England that focused on the use of music in daily life. The study took place between 2017 and 2018 over a period of nine months. The research was approved by His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service and access to the institution was facilitated initially through contact with the prison governor and then through the head of resettlement. Drawing on my background in cultural criminology and social theory, the project took shape in the backdrop of the ‘material turn’ within prison studies as the field of carceral geography came to prominence. Owing to the relative scarcity of research examining music as it was used by prisoners in their daily lives, carceral geography's focus on the relationships between the human and physical features of the prison was seen as an important lens through which to explore the use of music and build a richer picture of its various roles.
Drawing on the work of Latour (2005) and DeNora (2000) the project took a materially sensitive approach to music. This epistemological approach highlighted the interdependence between people and their material environment and allowed for study of the affective characteristics of prison life alongside the physical and economic dimensions. The use of music to achieve emotional regulation (Laws and Crewe, 2016), facilitate conversation or exclude unwanted noises, for instance, all relied on access to certain technologies (radios, headphones, televisions, stereos, etc.) as well as the capabilities of these objects in relation to the environment in which they were deployed. It was these observations that drew my attention to objects and commodities more broadly.
The material culture of the prison was explored through observation and interviews. Each prisoner respondent was asked to describe the material resources they had access to, how that access was achieved, and how they used them. Although music technologies were the focus of the project, a key theme that emerged from the data was that musical practice rarely involved just one form of non-human agency, but rather served as a meeting point between different subjects, spaces, objects, practices and skills. Discussion of in-cell life provided insight into the material culture of the prison and the ways in which objects formed part of a relatively stabilised structure of coping and adaptation. Although access to prisoner's cells was restricted, there were occasions on which I was invited by respondents to enter or look into their living spaces. These instances provided an important source of observational data. In addition, undertaking observation during association 2 provided some insight into the economic life of the prison, as prisoners would tend to use this time to buy or trade commodities ahead of the long evening and night spent locked in their cells.
I interviewed 26 prisoners and 4 prison officers. The sample of prison officers was split evenly between men and women aged 25 years and below and aged 35 years and below. The limited size of the sample meant that the research could not adequately represent the demographic profile of the prison, as the prisoner sample sought to do; therefore only prison officers identifying as white British were interviewed. The sampling strategy for the prisoners aimed for a range of sentence lengths and stages as well as different ages, ethnic backgrounds and residential areas in the prison. Respondents’ ages ranged from 20–61 years with the majority falling between 20 and 35. Twelve identified as white, seven identified as black and four identified as mixed heritage. In this sample, eight respondents were serving short sentences of less than a year (including two on remand and one on recall), ten were serving mid-length sentences of between 1 and 5 years, and six were serving long sentences of more than 5 years. Ten respondents were at early stages in their sentence having served less than a year of their tariff; six were at middle stages, having served more than a year of their sentence; and ten were at later stages either having served most of their tariff or anticipating release.
The data presented within this paper reveal how the distinctly temporary nature of life in a local prison confounds adaptive practices of prisoners across sentence types and stages. The high turnover of prisoners made it hard for stable and trusting social environments to develop (Riccardelli et al., 2015) and the present possibility of transfer or release undermined attempts by many prisoners to establish routines and access work or education. However, at the time of the fieldwork, South Hill was transitioning to a category C training prison that houses prisoners at later stages in their sentences and aims to prepare prisoners for resettlement in the community. Thus, while the character of the institution was shaped by generalised contingency of the local prison, opportunities to examine adaptive practices across a range of sentence types and stages was made possible as prisoners coming towards the end of long and mid-length sentences were also increasingly housed there. There are limitations to the generalisability of this data set owing to the distinct nature of the local prison; however, this context provides valuable insight into the significance of objects and commodities as sources of stability in unpredictable circumstances. The following section provides some description of the material resources available at HMP South Hill, before examining the ways in which objects featured as part of prisoner's adaptive strategies.
Thinking with objects
For prison staff at HMP South Hill, the circulation of goods via the formal economy was an aid in ensuring prisoner compliance, while cell-searches, property cards and volumetric control limits sought to constrain the flow of illicit items. The canteen list, from which prisoners would make weekly orders, was populated by predominantly single-use, or consumable commodities. Durable commodities, and particularly those characterised as luxuries such as stereos, DVD players and games consoles, were less common and much harder to attain given the highly regulated nature of the prison's formal economy. Prisoners in work or education could earn a weekly income of £10–20 in addition to their personal ‘spends’ (largely received from family and friends), which varied between £10 and £25 a week depending on their sentencing level on the IEP at the time of the research. IEP is a system that incentivises compliant behaviour and engagement with the prison regime by establishing three tiers of entitlement: basic, standard and enhanced. Prisoners entered on the standard tier and could achieve enhanced, which granted more weekly spends, time out their cell, visits and a wider range of goods from the canteen list. Enhanced sentencing was earned through consistent compliance and involvement in work or education, whereas the basic tier could be used as punishment for the infraction of rules, stripping prisoners of entitlements such as in-cell television and providing statutory levels of access to visits and time out their cells.
Weekly spends attained from work, education, or family members were required to cover the costs of hygiene products, rental of in-cell television and telephone credit, and therefore did not permit easy access to more expensive items such as durable commodities. As Steve (long-length, early-stage) suggested, prisoners would often supplement their meals with food ordered from the canteen because many felt that the quality of their statutory meals was inadequate. As he explained, access to durable commodities would often have to be balanced against these necessities: ‘the food's not great, so we buy food off the canteen (laughs), so if you want a CD you’re going without food to get your CD’. With these pressures, as well as the pervasive sense of unpredictability, those on short- and mid-term sentences were often disincentivised from saving-up for expensive goods: You can get shipped out any day. So […] if you’re here and you order [a radio] and you put your money forward to get one and it takes [time to order] and then for the money to come out of your account and then it takes like a month or two to get it … it could be on its way, in delivery, and you get shipped out and go to another jail. Then it lands in this jail, and they'll think ‘ah fuck this geezer, he's not here’. And you lose it. (Elias, short-term, early-stage) You know people get moved out of here fairly regularly … so I just don’t want to get too comfortable because at some point I’ll be getting a knock on the door from someone saying ‘right, pack your stuff up’. And the more you’ve got to pack up, the more inconvenient it is. And you see people struggling to get […] off the wing with plastic bags – which is all we get. You can imagine having plastic bags and clothes and anything else that you've got and your guitar … and nobody helps you! […] There's this very unsettled feeling that we all have at the moment, that you don’t know when you might be shipped out and therefore you don't want to acquire too much just for the inconvenience of moving it. (Charles, mid-term, early-stage)
As Jewkes and Laws (2021) suggest, the prison cell can be experienced as a ‘liminal space’ and several respondents articulated their feelings of displacement and indeterminacy in their immediate surroundings. However, rather than seeking to order or decorate their cell (cf. Baer, 2005; Jewkes and Laws, 2021; Marti 2023), Harvey and Charles, who had recently entered HMP South Hill, described an intentional disinvestment from their cells. People [have] come into the cell going, ‘oh you ain’t got no bedsheets’, they’ve looked at the sink and they've gone, ‘how do you live like this?’ Geez, this is prison yeah? Don’t start questioning how I’m living because I’m not living, this is not my home. Okay? This is a temporary pit-stop. If you wanna class your little cell your home, and you wanna clean it up spick and span–do that mate. Don't judge me on the prison cell that I’m in. Harvey (mid-term, early-stage) [My cell is] not a home, it never will be, and as soon as I get out the better and, you know (laughs), when I see it disappear in the rearview mirror hopefully that will be the last time. Uhm, so there is a very conscious decoupling going on here … this is temporary, it won’t last. (Charles, mid-term, early-stage)
These stances can be seen in terms of Schmid and Jones’ (1991) concept of ‘suspension’, wherein prisoners on short-term sentences seek to retain a distinct and untarnished ‘preprison identity’ to negate the influence of imprisonment on their sense of self. By disinvesting from their material surroundings and refusing to accept the prison as home, Charles and Harvey tangibly enacted the idea that their authentic preprison selves had not been affected by the experience of imprisonment, allowing them to imagine a seamless resumption of their lives on release. For Edward, who was nearing the end of his sentence, maintaining a set of unworn clothes to wear on release served a similar purpose. The ‘fresh’ and untarnished character of these possessions provided both a symbolic and a practical function in mediating the transition out of prison life and concealing his identity as a former prisoner: I got brand new trainers in my cell in the box still, Adidas ones, brand new ones what I ain’t even worn yet. So I’m gonna put them on to go out with, I’ve got another brand-new tracksuit what I haven’t worn yet so I’m gonna wear that out of the gate […] So when I walk out I’m looking fresh. People won’t think I’ve been in prison. (Edward, mid-term, late stage)
Despite his unwillingness to order his cell at the time of the interview, Harvey was working towards his ‘enhanced’ IEP level so that he could purchase a games console. He described finding it easy to pass the time in prison owing to his ‘militant’ personality and praised the IEP system as a ‘brilliant incentive’: ‘I’ve been here for three months now, I haven’t done anything wrong for the simple fact that I want to get a PlayStation and I wanna have DVDs.’ His wish to attain a games console was reflected a desire to create a stabilised routine: Time's flying for me at the moment, so when I get this PlayStation, it's just gonna be even more easy. I gotta go to work – I won’t be here either I don’t think, I wanna move prisons though. I’ll be coming back from work, 5 o’clock, 4 o’clock, have dinner, PlayStation on, music at night, another day gone, d’you know what I mean? So it'll help me a lot in here. (Harvey)
Like many others at HMP South Hill, Harvey expected to be transferred to another prison soon. For this reason, the games console provided greater advantages for him over any investment in cell decorations. It was a portable device which, when added to his property card, would follow him to whichever prison he was relocated to. In addition, it was a multi-media device that would allow Harvey to play music and DVDs, as well as games. This commodity represented an effective and reliable tool for making the time pass smoothly, owing to its properties of portability, durability and versatility. As the quote above illustrates, the varied affordances of the console allowed Harvey to imagine a structured way of life in which removal served as part of routine alongside work and association.
Jack, who was in the early stages of a life sentence, exhibited a pronounced adaptive stance. He described becoming accustomed to the ‘enormity’ of multiple decade sentence, with his mindset and goals bearing similarities with respondents in Crewe et al.'s (2020) study in the middle and latter stages of imprisonment. Here long-term projects of self-improvement and expression took on significance as prisoners sought meaning and purpose: [T]ucked away in this corner where we are, you know? It's absolute bliss! You know, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re warm, you’re clothed, you’re fed, you know, you’ve got hot water, electric light. Telly, you’ve got a phone. You’ve got access to books, and […] I’m just thinking I’ve got to use that [to] make it worth something, you know? Write a life-changing book, you know? That you can retire on when you get out of prison you know? Why not? Because there's no distractions… (Jack, early-stage, long-term)
The considerations outlined here reflect a strategic approach to furnishing one's material environment drawing on calculations not only about the affordances of technologies, such as games consoles, radios and books, but also about their correspondence with the goals, temperaments and circumstances of their owners and the dynamics of the environment in which they were held.
Although fitting within terms such as ‘jailing’ (Irwin and Cressey, 1962) ‘removal’ (Goffman, 1961) or ‘niche’ formation (Toch, 1977), which tend to register the role of objects as temporary and insubstantial distractions, the accounts outlined above suggest that they play various roles in the construction of adaptive stances. They demonstrate the ways in which objects and materials occur within the processes of adaptation, and evidence a close correspondence with the cognitive aspects of ‘self-change’ (Laws, 2022). In the cases of Jack and Harvey, we see a purposive and considered desire to alter the environment through the incorporation of durable, and therefore reliable, sources of ‘removal’. The material properties of the games console, for instance, served as a means of imagining a structured and sustainable way of life within the prison, while the possibility of accessing books, guitars, pens and paper provided a basis on which Jack's reconfigured life goals could exist.
As this section has sought to show, one's identity and self are bound up with the material environment as objects and spaces come to articulate not only the conditions in which one exists, but also the potential for how one might exist through the forms of agency they ‘afford’ (DeNora, 2000; Gibson, 1979). This is not to give primacy to the role of materials in determining the form that adaptation takes, but instead, to open the concept of adaptation to include greater acknowledgement of the role of our material surroundings in affecting what we can do, and therefore how we think.
Skills for living
This section draws on DeNora's (2013) concept of refurbishment to examine the skilful application of objects to the construction of durable ways of living within the prison. Owing to the difficulty of attaining durable commodities via the formal economy of the prison, the informal economy provided a more convenient, if albeit more costly alternative. Radios and hi-fi's could reach up to ten times their high-street value via the informal economy, reflecting both the scarcity and demand for these resources. Owing to their value, electronics tended to survive within the informal economy for many years and respondents would refer to battered, patched up and modified items that would flow from owner to owner, before eventually disintegrating and becoming disassembled for spare parts. Radios, for instance, were often modified to pick up signals in cells with poor coverage by extending the aerials with pieces of metal wiring, while some respondents described repairing their electronics using materials taken from other objects such as broken headphones and speakers. These examples suggest that successfully navigating prison life required the acquisition of new skills, drawing our attention to the role of the body within processes of adaptation.
The versatility of media technologies was a key driver of demand, because these objects could be used to achieve both removal from unwanted stimuli and more sophisticated strategies of refurbishment.
While many respondents referred to the value of being about to block out noise, media technologies also offered a means of situating oneself within the social and affective dynamics of the densely populated environment. Tom and Shaun would listen to music played in the adjoining cells, allowing them to imagine themselves within a community of shared feeling. Tom (mid-length, early-stage) described the relief of hearing familiar music across the wing, allowing him to define himself as a ‘normal guy’ in relation to the complex and changing social constitution of the prison. Similarly, Shaun would listen to the music played by his upstairs neighbours, describing the socially constitutive effect of this information: I said to my cellmate the other day, I said ‘he's playing some old-school house music, some real old classics’, and he's only young. I bet you most of these songs was out before he was born, and I can hear him singing away so he's probably grown up with his parents listening to that song. (Shaun, short-term, mid-stage)
The formation of ‘acoustical agency’ (Rice, 2016) in this way, relies on the attunement (Herrity, 2021 in Herrity et al., 2021, 2024) of the self to one's acoustic surroundings through the acquisition of skilful modes of listening. To listen for individual sounds amid the complex ‘soundscape’ (Hemsworth, 2016) of the wing required a capacity to order these noises alongside those produced in the immediate environment of the prison cell. Shaun and Liam described arranging their media-technologies in a way that allowed them to distribute their attention between their television, radio and the sounds outside the cell simultaneously by muting the television and responsively controlling the volume of the radio. If a more interesting song or shout from a nearby cell was perceived, this configuration allowed them to immediately attend to it. Controlling the acoustical output of these objects allowed participants to attune themselves to a wider range of auditory stimuli, maintaining attention to the social and affective dynamics of their wider environment as well as the television schedule, and the songs played on the radio.
Distributing one's attention in this way allowed a greater scope of agency by being able to choose the most interesting or affectively concordant direction for one's attention at any given time. For David, this practice allowed him to keep abreast of social life on the wing, which served as a source of ‘entertainment’, while Marcus described harnessing the diverse soundscape to practice meditation. I can meditate with lots of things going on. Cos I can meditate deliberately using sounds, innit? It's called mindfulness innit? Right now, we’re only aware of what's happening in this conversation, but like, if you really do listen yeah can hear all the other sounds going on. (Marcus, short-length, early stage) I used to be in with my first cellmate and all he done, could you imagine this? He's come to prison and all he watched was Police Interceptors. Police fucking…24 h with police, on the telly. So the rule here is, if you’re second in the cell, the first cellmate, it's his cell. So you get the top bunk and he watches what he wants on the telly […] I’d had enough of this telly, I can’t watch the Police Interceptors anymore, so I wrapped the speakers around my head and just wrote and drew pictures to my wife. I drew pictures for the kids and I wrote to my wife. (Steve, long-length, early-stage) Erm, I could hear the noise outside the door and it's difficult because it's a hollow wing. It's echoey in here as you can see now as we’re talking. This [place] just echoes and echoes and echoes […] I just thought ‘fuck ‘em’. Turn the radio up, wipe the sides over […] (Edward, mid-length, late-stage) We put the radio on. We played a game of chess, we switched the TV off. So we played chess while we listened to music and mate, two or three hours just flew by. (Liam, short-term, mid-stage)
The considerations here illustrate how the action possibilities engendered by certain objects and technologies are mediated by the skills available to their users (DeNora, 2013). Through repetitive engagement with objects and technologies, a sensitivity to their capacities within the prison emerges enabling prisoners to secure comfort, routine and sources of emotional regulation. Crucially, it is the capacity for these skills and sensitivities to build and endure over time that renders them significant to the discussion of adaptation. although these skills cannot be described as adaptation on their own, they do shine light on the link between the ‘experiential’ and ‘reflective’ dimensions of the self (Laws, 2022), revealing a more granular process of self-change in which attunement (Herrity, 2021, 2024), perception (Menary, 2008, cited in Laws, 2022; Ingold, 2011), and skill acquisition (Ingold, 2011) emerge alongside and in mutual facilitation of reflective self-change. Through DeNora's (2013) concept of ‘refurnishing’ we see behaviours that may be regarded as ‘removal’ or ‘coping’ evidencing a purposeful desire to render the environment durably more ‘habitable’.
Maintenance
The previous sections have sought to illustrate the continuity between environment and self by illustrating the various ways in which objects formed part of the adaptive processes undertaken by prisoners. In this section, I return to the theme of maintenance and durability, considering again the relationship between cognitive attitudes and material resources to examine the work required to maintain durable adaptive stances.
George (long-term, late-stage) described having moved through 17 prisons. As one of the most materially wealthy of the respondents in this study, he ensured that each of his possessions was on his property card so that he would have them wherever he was transferred to. I make sure I have everything I need. So that if one day – this isn’t my home – if one day they come to my door and they say, ‘pack your stuff, you’re leaving’, the next place I get to, I’m ok. That's how I make sure I’m ok. (George)
As he explained, the desire for a consistent living environment, which possessions such as his DVD player, hair clippers and stereo allowed, also fostered a unique relationship to other prisoners and staff: ‘[If I] leave this prison and go to another prison, I don’t have to ask a member of staff or another prisoner for anything. I have everything I need’. As various accounts have shown (Ricciardelli et al., 2015; Schlehe and Crewe, 2022), the social dynamics of the prison can provide a source for both stability and contingency. For George and Terry, being independent from the uncertainty of the illicit and informal economy or the vicissitudes of the prison staff ensured the security and reliability of their possessions. Some people don’t understand how to maintain their things. For instance, somebody might smoke weed or smoke spice, or take some form of drug, or need burn or need something from somebody and [they] might give their items up to gain something. I’d never do that. There's nothing anyone in this jail could offer me for my property. (George) When I first got the stereo […] friends of mine were trying to borrow [it] at first … ‘can I have it tonight?’ Then someone else wanted it the following night. I was like ‘when am I going to listen to my own stereo?’ So now I had to get a bit tough with it and say, ‘right, that's it now. No one's gonna listen to it’, because otherwise they'll all want to listen to it. (Terry, short-term, late-stage)
George's account articulates DeNora's (2013) distinction between ‘removal’ and ‘refurnishing’. While drug taking can provide a reliable source of removal by allowing prisoners to temporarily avoid troubling thoughts (cf. Crewe et al., 2020), they are ultimately returned to their previous state after the effects have worn off without having affected any durable change to their environment. ‘Refurnishing’, may also allow for the removal of adverse conditions, but involves either durable shifts in one's environment, or a greater capacity to endure these conditions. As the previous section showed, managing the long hours of confinement involves the skilful distribution of attention across a range of materials and technologies, harnessing the properties of these things to ensure a comfortable way of passing the time. Yet as George illustrates, the capacity to retain one's material resources forms an equally important part in achieving stability within the uncertain environment of the prison.
For Carl, who was serving an indeterminate (Imprisoned for Public Protection) sentence, access to goods and services was mediated, conversely, by a network of associates with whom he had built up trust in other establishments. Having acquired a stereo and DVD player at a previous prison, Carl had subsequently been ‘security moved’ to HMP South Hill, and his possessions had not been transferred with him. Security transfers often occur because of non-compliant behaviour and Carl inferred that the loss or delay of his possessions was a punitive arrangement on behalf of the previous establishment. And now I’m here trying to get an app through to the governor, because I’ve got my mum and son coming up at the end of May. And I was gonna ask, when I get my clothing exchanged, can I have my stereo and that again? (Carl, Imprisoned for Public Protection)
Contrasting Carl's account to George's, we see different capabilities in dealing with contingency. These men had spent similar amounts of time in prison with both having accumulated the material wealth at various points. George, who was coming to the end of his sentence, had developed a distinct strategy towards his possessions to ensure that they would weather the contingency of life within the short and mid-stay prison estate. By contrast, Carl, whose sentence was indeterminate and who evidenced many of the characteristics of ‘liminality’ (Jewkes and Laws, 2021) was unable to avoid the destabilisation of his material resources. As Warr (2020) suggests, indeterminate sentences place additional challenges on the formation of self, owing to the ambiguous state in which these prisoners reside. In the cases of life and indeterminately sentenced prisoners it is likely that greater weight is placed on the ‘reflective self’ (Laws, 2022) to navigate the profoundly life-altering change that prison represents. However, as this paper suggests, this does not negate the role that objects and commodities play as part of adaptive strategies both at early and later stages of imprisonment.
Conclusion
This paper has sought to examine how the self takes on and maintains new forms in the face of changing circumstances and ‘liminality’ (Jewkes and Laws, 2021). By examining these experiences through the lens of material culture, the findings suggest that the properties of durable objects and commodities play an important role within the processes of prisoner adaptation. In an environment where one's scope of agency is limited, the affordances of objects and their skilful use take on greater significance as a means of negotiating the unpredictability of prison life.
The first empirical section demonstrated the ways in which materials exist in close correspondence with the cognitive aspects of adaptation, allowing prisoners to imagine different ways of being within the prison and set longer-term goals. Although narratives played an important role in many of these accounts, they often formed in conversation with the material resources available to prisoners. Through these accounts we gain insight into the processes by which cognitive structures such as attitudes, strategies and adaptive identities take form in relation to the lived experience of imprisonment and the capacity to act within it. This perceived capacity to act is mediated by the tools and skills available to us both in the present and the future, contributing to the ways in which we plan and respond to our environment. It is the capacity of durable objects to persist over time that makes them significant to the discussion of adaptation in prison. The empirical sections of this paper demonstrate the structuring effect that these resources have across the cognitive and experiential dimensions of self (Laws, 2022).
DeNora's (2013) concept of ‘refurnishing’ provides a valuable frame through which to consider the material dimensions of prisoner adaptation and the accounts outlined in the previous section expand on this idea by providing greater empirical description of these processes and strategies. Here it is not just the durability of the objects themselves that is of significance, but also the ways in which prisoners learn to use them through ‘engagement’ (Ingold, 2011) and ‘attunement’ (Herrity, 2024) with their environments. As DeNora (2013) suggests, ‘removal’ (Goffman, 1961) differs from ‘refurnishing’ because the latter enables enduring shifts within a subject's environment that can be built on and returned to. Forming ways of living within the prison thus requires prisoners to develop sensitivity to their environment, including the material resources at their disposal, to skilfully deploy them in ways that change their environment.
The focus on durable commodities has sought to articulate the significance and diversity of objects and commodities in terms of the actions and mentalities they can facilitate. However, durability within the context of the local prison requires ongoing, skilful work, building on an understanding of one's environment. Furthermore, these practices require the formation of durable attitudes and values that, in turn, maintain the persistence of a particular way of living within the prison. What emerges from these accounts is a mutually reinforcing relationship between one's self and material environment in which material resources serve as an adhesive. Where concepts of adaptation have tended to underplay the importance of objects and commodities within the prison environment, the data presented here suggests that the material culture of the prison serves as an important resource for prisoners at various stages of the process of self-change.
The scope of this research is limited to men's experience of adaptation within local prisons and future research on the role of objects and commodities within the women's estate would provide a greater depth of understanding of the gendered nature of adaptation as well as potential differences in approaches to material resources. In addition, closer examination of adaptation at different stages of prisoners’ sentencing would enrich the findings presented here; further research should explore different categories of prison, in particular, those where prisoners serve the longest portion of their sentence.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My gratitude goes to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and incisive suggestions. Their comments were extremely helpful and greatly improved the manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the support of Federica Rossi, Tracey Davanna, Caitriona Beaumont, Chloë Rogers and Morwenna Bennallick for their thoughts and guidance on this paper.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by Royal Holloway University as part of a PhD Teaching Scholarship
Royal Holloway, University of London.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability
Data cannot be shared due to participant consent agreement.
Ethical considerations
The Ethics Board at Royal Holloway University of London approved my interviews (Project ID 489) on 7 December 2017. Respondents gave written consent for review and signature before starting interviews. Respondents were informed in the consent form that their data would be used in reports and gave their consent for publication.