Jason Warr - Forensic Psychologists: Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability

BY

JASON WARR

De Montfort University, UK

United Kingdom North America Japan India Malaysia China

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

2021 Jason Warr

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83909-961-8 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-960-1 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-962-5 (Epub)

This book is dedicated to all those who were kind enough to take part in the study.

To Dr Ruth Mann, the first of the nine, who died on 25/04/2020. In her absence Forensic Psychology is diminished.

To those dynamic educators who got me started on this path Yvonne Hurlow, Bill Macdonald, Alan Smith. If not for you this road would not have been walked.

To those Criminologists that I met at the Cropwood Conference on the Effects of Imprisonment in 2004 who encouraged me to this career, and those who have supported me ever since. Special mentions to Shadd Maruna, Jo Phoenix, Barbara Owen, Fergus McNeil, Bethany Schmidt, Borah Kant, and Alice Ievins.

To my Doctoral supervisors, Adrian Grounds and Ben Crewe. Your patience, kindness, support, advice, friendship, and patience(!) saw me through. Thank you.

To my Doctoral examiners Alison Liebling and Odd Lindberg your advice and guidance made this a much better book than it would otherwise have been.

Most importantly, and as ever, to Dr Kate Herrity (the Sound Lady Under the Stairs) for everything.

List of Figures

Glossary

About the Author

Dr Jason Warr is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at De Montfort University, UK. He has a wide range of research interests which include penology, sociology of power, sensory criminology, and the philosophy of science. He has conducted research in a number of criminal justice settings and has written on the emotional geographies of prison, the pains of imprisonment, prison staff, and narrative criminology.

Preface

Its funny, someone like you, interviewing someone in my position.

Psychologist during this study

Prisons often act as impenetrable fortresses. Behind their stony edifices lie hidden worlds of social life, organisational practice, and working realities. To this day, after hundreds of years of thought and word, after examination and description, the lived and occupational realities that occur within these Leviathans is still marred with an agnotologic air. They remain mysterious and, to some extent, barely known. We, the outsiders, remain largely ignorant of what these places of punishment, these places of control, do, how they are constructed, what makes them tick. We only occasionally become aware of the horrors and deprivations, the pain and suffering, the trauma that exists within. We know even less of the joys, triumphs, victories, humour, and camaraderie that also defines these hidden worlds. This shrouded reality makes them essential sites of research, of inspection. Yet herein lies a fundamental problem. Prisons have traditionally been, and remain, bloody difficult places to access. As Alisa Stevens (2019) notes, for researchers, gaining access to prisons has never been an easy enterprise but has become, sometimes, a Sisyphean task.

A number of factors have conspired to move this abstract impenetrability into a palisaded reality. There exists in this epoch of penal risk and image control both a politicised penal and carceral fetish as well as a desire to hide the reality of the institutions in which that fetish is embodied. This overt political charge has created a situation in the last two decades whereby gaining access to the Prison Service in England and Wales to conduct any sort of research is fraught, and can sometimes elicit Ministerial wrath. It also, now much more so than ever, involves a careful negotiation of a bureaucratic labyrinth, at the heart of which lies the much feared (and oft maligned) National Research Committee. The research project upon which this book is based suffered, as many others have suffered, the same trials that is now common to the prison research milieu. However, there were two compounding variables that rendered this research somewhat more difficult. Firstly, the fieldwork for this project began during a period when psychological services within Her Majesty's Prison Service (HMPS) were under a further burden of heavy criticism from prisoners, prison reform campaigners, and legal advocates. This combination of institutional pressure and professional critique resulted in a population and a service that were embattled and defensive. This compounded the problems of gaining access, securing trust, and recruiting an adequate sample. Secondly, there was the small problem of my background as a former Life/HMP sentenced prisoner who had been subject to the power, assessment, and reportage of forensic psychologists working within the prison service.