The depth of imprisonment revisited

Abstract

Drawing on a range of studies and research literature, this article reflects on and develops the concept of the ‘depth of imprisonment. Its aim is to clarify some of the complexities and co-ordinates of depth, set out how experiences of different forms of depth can vary, illustrate how subjective experiences of depth do not always correspond with objective levels of depth, and offer some suggestions for further exploration of this aspect of imprisonment.

In 2022, as part of a longitudinal study of people serving long life-sentences from an early age (see Crewe et al., 2020), I re-interviewed a man – Irvin ¹ – whom I had first interviewed almost a decade earlier. In the intervening period, he had contacted me occasionally to update me on his progress and request that I send him any research articles that I thought might be of interest to him. He was a very bright and articulate man, and provided unusually insightful feedback on what I posted through. In person, I asked him whether, for him, the ‘real world’ was still ‘the world out there’. He responded affirmatively – ‘absolutely’. I reflected back to him that many other participants had commented that, over time, they had come to feel that the ‘real world’ was prison, and that they barely existed anymore in the community. Drawing directly on the article he had absorbed on the ‘depth of imprisonment’ (Crewe, 2021), ² Irvin deliberated on why there might be variation in the views of our participants regarding the normality of the prison environment:

I think that probably is tied, I guess, to life histories, right. If you think about the depth of imprisonment, the ‘plummet’, if you like – or to some it might not be a plummet - the transition from life outside to life in prison is going to be different for different people, depending on your life history and your previous traumas. So there are situations where actually coming into prison, you’ll see probably a peak, in a way, that they’ve gone from a low point in their life to an alleviation of a lot of those sufferings and past traumas, because they are relieved from the situation, whether that's addiction, whether that's being in an abusive relationship, whether that's a sense of marginalisation or disenfranchisement that they had in the community where they lived before. That may not be felt as severely in prison, so the transition from the past into the prison is going to have a different impact. So the depth of the imprisonment might be much shallower. Whereas for me, yeah, I was lucky. I had opportunities in life as I was growing up, that meant that I wasn’t burdened by a lot of those problems or traumas. And so, for me, the fall has felt great and significant because it feels like I’ve lost a great deal. So I would argue that depth of imprisonment, in my situation, is greater or feels greater as a result.

Later in our interview, I returned to this theme of normality, asking him how ‘normal’ the prison world now felt to him. Irvin's response was again instructive:

Well, what do we mean by normal? Normal by what standard? That normality must be relative to something – what's it relative to? If it's relative to life outside then hell, no. It's not normal at all. If it's relative to itself… [laughs].

Both in elaborating the idea of ‘the plummet’ and in probing the meaning of ‘normality’, Irvin was pushing at important ideas relevant to the ongoing conceptualisation of ‘depth’, in particular, the extent to which it can be understood only in relation to other places or states of being and awareness. Indeed, as this themed issue suggests, it might be argued that forms of imprisonment, such as the ‘exceptional’ prison conditions associated with the Nordic nations – and the more punitive pockets within them – can only ever be understood relative to other systems and experiences.

In the article that follows, I offer some further reflections on the concept of the ‘depth of imprisonment’, which I hope add both some structure and some nuance to existing discussions of this concept. In doing so, I draw mainly on recent literature that has directly employed the idea of depth, accounts of prisons in the Global South, and some examples from my own original research projects. My aim is to clarify some of the complexities and co-ordinates of depth, set out how experiences of different forms of depth can vary (including in settings beyond the Global North), illustrate how subjective experiences of depth do not always correspond with objective levels of depth, and offer some suggestions for further exploration of this aspect of imprisonment.

The ‘depth’ of imprisonment

Since earlier publications (Crewe, 2015, 2021; Crewe et al., 2023) have already provided fairly detailed reviews of the development of the concept of depth, there is little reason to fully rehearse them here. Put briefly, early attempts to conceptualise depth focussed mainly on its objective and measurable qualities (Downes, 1988; King and McDermott, 1995), in particular, the forms of security and control that prisoners most closely associated with a sense of being in ‘deep end custody’ (King and McDermott, 1995, p. 89). My own discussions of depth (Crewe, 2015, 2021; Crewe et al., 2023) have expanded this definition to include other ways in which prison regimes – to use Hayes's (2023) excellent summary – ‘consume’ or ‘swallow’ the people held within them, and to encompass the way that the essential aspects of imprisonment i.e., the deprivation of liberty, and the removal of the individual from the community are subjectively experienced. Defined broadly as ‘the distance or polarity between the prison and the outside world’ (Crewe, 2015, p. 24), depth therefore entails matters such as the extent to which imprisonment feels ‘normal’, restrictive, and removed from the community, as well as the material and interpersonal elements of control and security.

Such work has emphasised a number of aspects and complexities of depth, some of which are of particular relevance for this article. First, it is possible for prisoners held on short sentences (i.e., for whom release is not especially distant), near to their homes and social networks, or in relatively low-security institutions to feel ‘deeply’ confined (Crewe, 2021). This might depend on the degree to which the regime and culture of the prison feel ‘abnormal’, or the extent to which prisoners feel properly ‘in touch’ with the communities they care about outside, for example. Second, there are important distinctions between different elements of depth, in particular what we might consider ‘surface’ and ‘land’. As I noted in an earlier paper, ‘it is possible for prisoners to feel close to the world outside in terms of contact, but – like a snorkeller, close to the air [i.e., surface], but stranded in the open sea – to be many years from the landfall of release [i.e., land]’ (Crewe, 2021, p. 343). Conversely, a prisoner who is on the verge of release might be held in conditions of extreme isolation and restriction (e.g., supermax). Third, the experience of depth – whether it is described somewhat positively, as a ‘bubble’, or more negatively, as a ‘coffin’, for example – relates to people's life circumstances prior to imprisonment and the futures that people in prison anticipate: in this case, whether the prison provides a kind of refuge from dire circumstances in the community, or whether prisoners can envisage any kind of life beyond the depth of their current conditions and outside in the community. I expand on these ideas below.

Security and control

The definition of depth in relation to formal aspects of security and control (constraints on movement, searching practices, and so on) aligns it with the way that many prison systems are organised. In England & Wales, for example, prisoners are categorised according to the risk they would pose should they escape and the likelihood they might try to do so, and are held in conditions designed to minimise those risks. In this regard, based on measures such as the level of situational control (e.g., the height and density of any perimeter security; the frequency and intensity of searches; the closeness and intrusiveness of staff supervision), prisons can be classified in terms of their objective level of depth. These are important matters, not least because the loss of liberty is such a fundamental deprivation that it is generally accepted that the people on whom it is imposed should not be held in conditions that are more secure and restrictive than is necessary.

Given that the deprivation of liberty is the essence of imprisonment, it is striking that it is probably the aspect of imprisonment that has been explored least directly – almost taken-for-granted as an ‘an obvious and accepted side-effect’ (Drake, 2018: 5). As Sykes (1958) noted, prisoners must live in ‘a world shrunk’ to the footprint of the institution, ‘and within this restricted area [their] freedom of movement is further confined’ by limits on where they are permitted to go – indeed, whether they are allowed to leave their cell (p. 65). ‘In short, the prisoner's loss of liberty is a double one – first, by confinement to the institution and second, by confinement within the institution’ (p. 65) (italics added).

This distinction between ‘removal’ and ‘restriction’ marks two rather different elements of depth. It means that, as King and McDermott (1995) highlighted, there is not always complete correspondence between a prison's security level – i.e., the strength of its practices of containment – and the degree of its depth (see also Crewe, 2020). Indeed, the various components of security and control can permutate in multiple ways, so that parsing these different elements can help differentiate between quite different models, experiences and objectives of deep confinement. To give the example that features most often in empirical accounts of imprisonment, a prison can be highly secure in terms of the scale and (in)vulnerability of its exterior boundaries, but can grant prisoners a high degree of freedom within. ³

Examples of such institutions abound. In England & Wales, the ‘Radzinowicz model’ for high-security prisons of a ‘liberal regime within a secure perimeter’ held out the promise of a reasonably high degree of everyday autonomy for prisoners, at least in some domains of life (see King, 2018, p. 371; Liebling et al., 2022). Moreover, as a growing literature from Latin America has documented (see, for example, the various contributions in Sozzo, 2022; see also O’Donnell, 2023, for an example from Ethiopia), in many prisons and prison systems, while guards ensure that the perimeter security is not breached without permission, within the walls prisoners are subject to relatively few institutional restrictions. In what Birkbeck (2011) calls a model of ‘internment’, formal control is sporadic and perfunctory, and the prison interior operates as a vibrant and often convivial self-governing community (see Darke, 2018a; Bracco Bruce, 2021; see also O’Donnell, 2023, Ch. 4), enabled by the easy flow of goods and services into the prison from the community. In its most extreme version, prisoners with status or resources have almost free rein to impose their preferences on the environment, and live in conditions that mirror and reflect their exterior wealth. Thus, as Ariza and Iturralde (2022) describe, exceptionally influential figures such as Pablo Escobar are able to reconfigure – to literally knock down and construct aspects of – the physical structure of the prison, have ‘access to the control panel of the prison's electric fence’ and alarm systems (p. 73), and install a games room and family cinema. More typically, prisoner collectives, sometimes in the form of gangs, engage in processes of co- or self governance alongside the authorities (see Skarbek, 2016, 2020).

In such circumstances, the depth of imprisonment is a complex matter. First, to a much greater degree than in prisons in the Global North, levels of autonomy and normality among prisoners within the same prison will vary (see Sozzo, 2022). Drug barons and gang leaders can operate with much more freedom than the typical prisoner; and the permeability of the institution to ‘the structures and dynamics of free markets’ (Ariza and Iturralde, 2022, p. 79) produces (or reproduces) a range of inequalities regarding access to goods and services, allowing some individuals to customise their living conditions in ways that correspond somewhat with their lifestyles in the community. Depth, then, becomes highly hierarchical. Second, in such institutions, many of the aspects of depth that, in the Global North, are imposed by the state and its representatives are instead delegated to or simply taken over by prisoners (Skarbek, 2016). Darke (2018), for example, lists a range of roles in Polinter prison in Brazil that are undertaken by inmate trustees, including the surveillance, guarding and handcuffing of other prisoners, the locking and unlocking of doors and gates, and strip-searches following visits. Here, then, depth is ‘extra-legal’ (Skarbek, 2016, 2020).

In this and other ways, the form of depth associated with ‘interment’ or pure detention – a highly securitized boundary wall, behind which state control is largely relinquished – harbours prisoner experiences that are vastly different from those found in most prisons in the Global North (where, to return to Birkbeck's (2011) formulation, control within the institution is imposed much more assiduously). Likewise, in his account of a prison in Ethiopia, O’Donnell (2023) notes that, despite the institution failing Western human rights standards, many prisoners ‘followed active, purposeful lives’ (p. 166), with considerable freedom of movement and had ‘a great deal of autonomy in how they dealt with their own affairs’ (p. 168). ‘While the conditions of confinement were poor, the lived experience was rich’, he summarises (p. 166), contrasting such circumstances to the ‘lethargy, despair and cruelty that can characterize prisons in the US’ (p. 167). Elsewhere, the combination of separation from the outside world and relative autonomy within can offer the possibility of social reconfiguration. As Bracco Bruce (2021) explains, for female prisoners in Peru, being removed from patriarchal arrangements and gendered violence in the external community alongside the possibility of convivial and emotionally supportive peer relations within the institution produced a highly ambiguous site (or, to use the language of this themed issue, a relatively non-punitive ‘pocket’): a place where liberty was lost, but in other respects recaptured.

Shallowness

As King and McDermott (1995) observed, ‘Although the notion of deep end custody implies there is also a shallow end, prisoners in the lowest security prisons were less likely to use that imagery’ (p. 89). In my research experience, this remains true. Nonetheless, growing attention in recent years to open (i.e., low-security prisons) has begun to foster empirical and conceptual understandings of ‘shallowness’. In his study of two open prisons in Iceland, for example, Pakes (2023) uses the term ‘shallow’ to describe the various ways these institutions granted prisoners a relatively un-restricted existence. In one of the two establishments, he notes, ‘the notion of security is almost ridiculed: whilst there is a cattle grid to keep sheep on the premises there is virtually nothing to keep prisoners in or unwanted visitors out’ (p. 7). In both, the boundaries of the prison were almost invisible – ‘innocuous to the point of almost non-existent’ (p. 8) – and there were very few constraints on internal movement. Access to visitors, technology, means of communication, nature, and a range of physical activities and sensory experiences likewise made the distinction between the prison and the community far less definitive than is typical. Pakes concludes that shallowness was most strongly associated with institutional ‘permeability and non-conspicuous boundaries’ (2023, p. 12), rather than opportunities to leave the establishment temporarily, or the possibility of in-person visits.

One implication of Pakes's analysis is that prisons can be permeable – and therefore ‘shallow’ – in different ways: by letting the outside world in, or by letting their inhabitants out. There are different components to each of these directional flows. In the former, as in Pakes's (2023) account, the outcome is that the prison feels like a more ‘normal’ environment. The entry of people and organisations into the institution can produce relationships or ‘emotion zones’ (Crewe et al., 2014) that can resemble the dynamics of the wider society. This is made easier when prisons are located near to urban centres, or where prisoners are confined close to their home communities. Alternatively, as in the relatively remote institutions that Pakes (2023) studied, shallowness may be produced by the availability inside the prison of forms of technology such as mobile phones and the internet, which provide prisoners with ‘a high degree of virtual presence in the lives of some of their loved ones’ (p. 9) and give the outside world a ‘semi-permanent presence’ (p. 12) within it. Whichever the case, these in-flows diminish the extent to which the prison environment feels cut off and distinct from the outside world.

In the latter, the sluice works in the opposite direction, letting prisoners exit the prison temporarily to work, spend time with loved ones, or engage in leisure activities in the external community. These out-flows make the experience of imprisonment shallower not by influencing the prison itself, but by permitting prisoners to circulate outside the institution. Indeed, the institution itself might theoretically remain a relatively deep experience. For example, prisoners held even in the most secure conditions within the Norwegian prison system – those serving indeterminate (‘forvaring’) sentences in Ila, for example – are granted occasional forms of temporary release, to commune with nature or eat in a restaurant, in the interest of offsetting some of the negative impact of deep conditions (Crewe et al., 2023). In England & Wales, prisons of a comparable security level do not allow such departures, but open prisons see a morning exodus and an evening return, as prisoners cross the threshold between prison and community.

The relationship between objectively shallow conditions and subjective feelings of institutional oppressiveness or depth is somewhat unclear and contested. In a recent article, Mjåland et al. (2023) report that – as might be expected – prisoners held in open prisons rated their experiences more positively across a range of dimensions than those held in closed institutions, finding them ‘less restrictive, safer, and less harmful’ (pp. 1651-1652). When prisoners in both kinds of conditions were asked to assess various problems that they might encounter, problem severity was found to be greater in closed compared to open conditions, though the specific problems that were identified as the most severe among both groups (i.e., closed and open) were ‘almost identical’ (p. 1652). In conclusion, the authors note that there was ‘little in our survey data that supports the idea that open prisons produce a distinct set of pains’ (p. 1657), although they were careful to call for ‘further research, as well as (methodological) debate’ rather than claim that their findings refuted existing work documenting the ‘pains of freedom’ (p. 1658).

Here, they were referring to qualitative accounts of open prisons that have consistently suggested that such conditions produce a distinctive set of challenges and forms of distress. Shammas (2014), for example, details a number of frustrations caused by being almost-but-not-quite free, in a liminal position between contrasting worlds, but still subject to considerable power (see also Maier, 2020; Neumann, 2012). The apparent inconsistency between such findings alerts us to the complexities of assessing how depth is experienced, including its connection to prisoners’ expectations and temporal trajectories. In Crewe et al.'s (2020) study of life-sentenced prisoners, for example, when in the initial years of their sentence, participants talked about open imprisonment not just as the final phase of their confinement, but a kind of endpoint: the stage at which they were effectively free. ‘When I go to cat D’, ⁴ one man commented, ‘I class that as being at home’. Once in such conditions, however, many came to see this time as a false dawn, the most psychologically difficult point of the sentence. Harold, for example, described his open prison as a ‘gilded budgie cage’, and explained what he called ‘the torment’ of open conditions:

By Christ, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through, Cat D. […] It is all I can do not to just get shipped out and back to closed conditions, and I very nearly did that myself. I said ‘Look I can’t put up with this anymore. […] I am sick of chasing that carrot’.

But you are so close…?

I’m not! i am not. And that's the torment. It is torture. […] You can’t see the bars, but I can

In some respects, Harold was identifying the interaction between ‘depth’ and ‘tightness’. ⁵ That is, in many jurisdictions, open prisons shift the responsibility for security and control from the institution to the individual – requiring prisoners, in Neumann's (2012) terms, to build ‘inner bars’ (p. 148) or risk being returned to deeper conditions. But he was also signalling the kinds of psychological difficulties that Shammas identified – the sense that freedom was tantalisingly close, after so many years, yet still potentially unreachable.

The temporal dimensions of depth can be illustrated through another example from this study. Prisoners serving short sentences tend to describe prison as ‘not real’, a ‘space of non-life’ (Ievins, 2024, p. 943), or, to use Augé's term, a ‘non-place’ (Augé, 2020; and see Crewe et al., 2020). Non-places are spaces – like airports and shopping centres – in which our presence is transient, and where we have little investment in creating meaningful relationships. For many of Crewe et al.'s ‘lifers’, a key psychological transition involved a shift from seeing the prison as somewhere non-real, and the outside world as real, to the opposite (though, as the introduction to this article suggests, not all prisoners described this shift, with some, like Irvin, keen to resist the sense that their lifeworld was now contained within the parameters of the institution). This inversion – a kind of acceptance that the prison was their long-term home, or what O’Donnell (2014, p. 207) calls a ‘temporal adjustment’ to imprisonment – unfolded gradually, as prisoners typically became more distanced from the free community and more embedded in the penal system. But, since, over time (as their risk was deemed to have reduced), prisoners tended to be held in less secure conditions, this feeling of being ‘consumed’ (Hayes, 2023) by the prison system did not correspond with the more formal qualities of depth. O’Donnell's point, that it is natural, during the course of a long sentence, to settle into a psychological ‘rut’ (albeit one that can feel more like a ‘groove’), to ‘ease the passage of time’ (2014, p. 207), is instructive here.

That is, initially, despite being in high-security – i.e., ‘deep’ – conditions, the outside world still felt vivid and tangible, because prisoners could mentally recall the outside community and remained well connected to people within it. In contrast, when they described their prison experiences, they used metaphors of hibernation, of life being ‘frozen in time’ or ‘on hold’. Ten years later, the passage of time meant that, despite being in conditions that were shallower, with fewer forms of situational control and restrictions on mobility, their relationship with the world outside had become more distant, and they tended to feel more deeply immersed in the prison system. Memories had dulled, relationships had dwindled, and they had come to realise that psychological survival required them to make prison their ‘world’ and suppress their thoughts about life beyond their current circumstances (see Crewe, 2024). When they reflected on whether they continued to exist beyond the prison, some represented themselves as a spectral version of their previous self, implying a process of social death, as though their sinking further into the penal system was accompanied by a fading of their visibility and presence above the surface. I turn to this and related concepts in the section that follows.

Surface, land and home

As a spatial metaphor, ‘depth’ has meaning only in relation to other aspects of time and place. In particular, the idea of depth presupposes the idea of a surface, beneath which the individual is located or submerged. Typically, this surface is considered to be the free community or outside society from which people in prison have been removed, and with which they will be reunited at the point of ‘release’. Recent scholarship directs us towards a much sharper understanding of the ways in which this formulation requires further consideration.

A useful example is provided by Ugelvik and Damsa, in their (2018) analysis of Kongsvinger prison, an institution in Norway holding foreign national prisoners due to be deported back to their country of origin. Objectively speaking, Kongsvinger was ‘in many respects, a ‘shallow’ prison’ (Ugelvik and Damsa, 2018, p. 1034) – a medium-security institution, which granted prisoners regular opportunities to sample life outside via forms of temporary release, and whose minimum-security wing was surrounded simply by a low fence that could be easily scaled. However, as Ugelvik and Damsa note, the distinction between distance from freedom and distance from life – that is, from people and places of significance – meant that, despite being in a prison that was not especially controlled or constrictive, many prisoners felt themselves to be ‘captured deep beneath the surface represented by the life of families and loved ones far away’ (p. 1034). Contact with such family members was often difficult, and ‘life’ – meaning the aspects of life that they cared about, rather than the more abstract flow of events outside the prison – felt very distant (see also Ievins, 2024). Most importantly, for current purposes, the surface that mattered was not always ‘the freedom waiting just beyond the prison wall’ (p. 1034), but somewhere far beyond Norwegian society. It was deportation, rather than just the moment of being discharged from custody, that would represent a return ‘home’.

In contrast, for the men who had settled in Norway for many years, and had no meaningful relational ties in the country to which they would be returned, release and deportation meant being distanced from the world that mattered most to them. Sometimes this included spouses and children who were Norwegian citizens, with whom contact would in many ways become harder once they were free but repatriated. In such situations, ‘Being released means being further removed from the life you want to live’ (Ugelvik and Damsa, 2018, p. 1035). In alternative terms, ‘freedom’ might launch people into a new, extra-penal form of depth.

Just as depth implies a surface, it also suggests the presence of some kind of floor (see Taxhjelm and Crewe, under review). This is best conceptualised not as the endpoint of confinement (i.e., release), but the ultimate point of depth itself. Most prison systems have some kind of terminus (Sparks, 2002): units or conditions where levels of security and restriction are particularly intense, beyond which there is nowhere further to descend (perhaps other than through execution or exile). Some men in such conditions – serving long or whole-life sentences, in highly oppressive environments – use metaphors of death or transcendence to describe their circumstances (see Crewe, 2020). Others, though, find some psychological comfort in reaching the bottom. At the very least, they know that there is nowhere worse for them to be sent. Indeed, it might be more painful not to know how much more depth there is to come – how much deeper the prison experience might get, and when one might hit the extremes of seclusion and constraint. In Taxhjelm's study of prisoners in Denmark who were voluntarily isolated, for example, it was the sense of being unable to envisage emergence from such conditions that led some men to experience acute distress. Lacking the solid ground of psychological certainty, they were profoundly impacted by a feeling of limitless suffering and perpetual descent (Taxhjelm and Crewe, under review).

Moreover, men in such circumstances also described a growing feeling of distance not only from the prison and free communities, but also from themselves. That is, the impact of a particular form of solitary confinement was to produce what might be thought of as ‘internal depth’ – a sense of becoming separated from or an unrecognisable version of oneself (Taxhjelm and Crewe, under review). Kris, a prisoner being held in long-term segregation in the England & Wales prison system, described similar sentiments, linked to acute mental health problems exacerbated by restrictive isolation. Asked ‘Are you able to be yourself in here?’, he responded that he did not ‘really know who I am’, explaining that he felt ‘buried and lost’, and at risk of losing his ‘bearings’. In such situations, some of the anxiety that prisoners expressed reflected a feeling of existential terror that, even once in less constrained conditions, or when released from custody, it might not be possible to recover a recognisable state of selfhood. To put this another way, a sense of distance from normality might endure, not in relation to external reference points or objective conditions so much as one's subjective and interior life. ⁶

There is some risk here of metaphorical overload here, and of trying to subsume too many issues into a single concept. But, in my view, these distinctions – release (‘land’), the community (‘surface’), what matters (‘home’), the lowest point of depth (‘floor’), and a distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ forms of alienation – might be highly productive in describing and distinguishing between prison regimes, and advancing our ability to capture the subjective experience of imprisonment.

Depth and ‘the plummet’

Irvin's reflections on ‘the plummet’ highlight a further element of ‘depth’. While the majority of the men in our study described lives of marginality, in which the police and criminal justice system were familiar protagonists, a handful had relatively comfortable backgrounds in which they had been untroubled by such institutions. Like Irvin, such men had ‘lost a great deal’ as a result of their imprisonment, in terms of the plunge in their lifestyle and the loss of a future they had assumed would reproduce the privilege of their upbringing. Here, then, they experienced a significant social descent, sometimes expressed as a kind of shock at losing their prior sense of status.

Moreover, on starting their sentence, they had found prisoner subculture highly alien and had stood out in terms of accent, demeanour and other manifestations of social and cultural habitus (Bourdieu, 1977). They had experienced terrifying incidents of bullying and violence which they attributed, at least in part, to their middle-class backgrounds and social naivety (one had been stabbed; another had been made aware of a very serious threat of assault). In this sense, the plummet – and the sense of subjective depth – entailed being submerged into unfamiliar waters, i.e., a world in which, compared to prisoners who had particular forms of street-smarts or carceral capital, they were at risk of drowning: ‘It's a completely different society’, said Thomas. ‘It is just putting like a goldfish amongst a load of sharks’. As such men pointed out, for many of their peers, prison might not have been a normal social environment, but it was culturally legible and in some respects might not require such a significant cultural adjustment. ⁷

Yet, for men with more privileged backgrounds, the experience of depth was offset to some degree by their other resources or forms of capital, including a capacity to represent themselves effectively in formal communications, an ease in dealing with managerial and specialist staff, and other competencies acquired in childhood. Discussing a member of staff with whom he had bonded, Alasdair noted their shared cultural reference points: ‘I got on with her not because of her role or her character but because we have a similar background, similar interests, you know, middle class, whatever you want to call it, you know’. Clive had coped with his sentence by throwing himself into musical performances and prisoner committees – activities which relied on capabilities embedded in his life and education prior to imprisonment. Robin recognised that, although the early phase of his sentence had been brutally alienating, his social and economic resources offered life-lines of support and life-rafts of hope that many other prisoners lacked:

Imagine if you come into prison, you lived on the streets or you haven’t got a family member just for a phone-call to talk to. Prison must be so hard for them – no visit, no phone-call, nothing. That must be really hard. And I think what's helped me is a very supportive family who’ve always been like ‘When you come out, you’ve got a home and you’ve got a job’, blah blah blah, so it makes prison life easier because you can see that hope is there. […] I’m extremely fortunate and I’ve realised that. ⁸

Alternatively, for some prisoners (often those repeatedly given short sentences), life in the community may have many of the qualities of depth that are normally associated with incarceration. As a number of recent studies have highlighted (Bucerius et al., 2021; Crewe and Ievins, 2020; Knight, 2024), for people whose biographies have been blighted by coercive control, addiction and abuse, imprisonment may engender less constraint and more autonomy than ‘freedom’. This inversion of the normal impact and experience of imprisonment upends how the concept of depth operates: confinement allows such people to surface briefly, and gulp in some air – sober up, reconnect with family members, escape dangers’, and so on (Bucerius et al., 2021, p. 532) – while release represents the point at which they are dragged back under. That is, despite sincerely stated narratives of personal reinvention (Crewe and Ievins, 2020), people often quickly return to the habits, lifestyles and relationships that intern their life potential outside (Ievins, 2024).

Conclusion

It is worth briefly restating several aspects of depth that may now be more evident. First, depth has a number of dimensions that are not always aligned with each other, meaning that deep confinement can take very different forms. Second, matters of time and place are highly relevant to how deeply submerged someone might feel, shaped by: the amount of time already spent in prison; the amount left before release; and the prisoner's sense both of where the essence of their life is located and what kind of future awaits them. Here, O’Donnell's (2014) concept of the ‘pain quotient’ – the ratio of time left to be served in prison and time left to be lived overall – helps make sense of the deep despair that prisoners feel when their sentence covers the period they consider to represent the best years of their life (see Jarman, 2020). Third, the experience of depth is mediated significantly by prior life experiences. That is, the extent to which confinement feels oppressive and restrictive is influenced by what prisoners feel distanced from, the steepness of their social fall, and the degree to which their life outside felt un-confined and un-restricted (see Knight, 2024). Fourth, while it is possible to describe some features of depth objectively, this does not necessarily correspond with how it is subjectively felt.

With regard to further research, I want to highlight three areas that seem potentially productive. First, might there be such a thing as moral depth, defined as something like the extent to which a prison, or prison system, allows or extinguishes forms of moral selfhood and development? Given the focus in some recent scholarship on the ways in which prisoners experience and express themselves as moral agents (see Ievins, 2023; Jarman, 2020), it could be highly fruitful to explore how different penal environments shape these possibilities, and the conditions under which moral projects formulated during periods of imprisonment endure or disintegrate following release (see Ievins, 2024). Second, how might forms of technology, such as CCTV, electronic monitoring, and bio-identification, reshape the nature and experience of depth? Third, could there be value in developing a political-economy of depth, to try to explain variation in the restrictiveness, normality, and permeability of prisons and prison systems, including those in different areas of the Global South? It seems obvious that such differences are connected to broader social inequalities and cultural values, but also to matters such as colonial and other historic legacies, and attitudes towards the family, which might themselves be connected to religious and other ideologies. No doubt there are many other ways to excavate the concept of depth.