Details
- A major ethnographic study of prison life based on interviews with prisoners and staff, covering their life histories and prison experiences
- Provides a detailed analysis of penal power and its impact on prisoner adaptation and social life, including interpersonal relationships, hierarchies and everyday culture
- Clearly written and thoroughly researched, the book explores new dimensions of prison life in an engaging and scholarly way
- Takes full account of prisoners' pre-prison biographies and identities, as well as the managerial and institutional context
While the use of imprisonment continues to rise in developed nations, we have little sociological knowledge of the prison's inner world. Based on extensive fieldwork in a medium-security prison in the UK, HMP Wellingborough, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prisonprovides an in-depth analysis of the prison's social anatomy. It explains how power is exercised by the institution, individualizing the prisoner community and demanding particular forms of compliance and engagement. Drawing on prisoners' life stories, it shows how different prisoners experience and respond to the new range of penal practices and frustrations. It then explains how the prisoner society - its norms, hierarchy and social relationships - is shaped both by these conditions of confinement and by the different backgrounds, values and identities that prisoners bring into the prison environment.
Readership: Academics specializing in Criminology, Sociology, and related fields, plus practitioners in the Prison Service. There should also be interest amongst Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Sociology students.
1: Introduction2: The Penal Context and History3: Institutional Culture and Power in HMP Wellingborough4: Power5: Adaptation, Compliance and Resistance6: The Prisoner Hierarchy7: Friendship and Social Relations8: Everyday Social Life and Culture9: Concluding CommentsAppendixNotes on the Research Process;
Ben Crewe, Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge
"a rich, important, and frankly, excellent study" - Jodie M. Lawston, Social Forces
"I have no doubt that The Prisoner Society will come to be seen as a classic text in the international canon of prison studies. Meanwhile, it should be read by everyone concerned with penal justice" - Pat Carlen, British Journal of Criminology
"An engaging and beautifully-drawn account of the prison's social and cultural 'innards' which are normally hidden from view. The book is rich in texture and detail, theoretically sophisticated and - perhaps unusually for such a lenghthy book - never dull" - Gwen Robinson, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice
"The Prisoner Society is a triumph of prisons sociology. In this thoroughly researched, elegantly written, immensely rewarding book, Ben Crewe achieves his stated ambition of revisiting and renewing the tradition of prison ethnography, It will surely swiftly attain the status of a modern classic, and confirm Crewe's reputation as an outstanding prisons scholar." - Alisa Stevens, The Sociological Review
"there is no better recent investigation of prisoner adaptation to the modern penal environment." - Robert Hauhart,
"clearly energetic and resourceful [...] The book is scholarly, with every assertion tested and referenced, [...] well laid out, beautifully written and compellingly readable." - Christopher Padfield, Monitor Book Review
"This book is highly recommended and deserves to be read widely by prison professionals and will also undoubtedly be a source of reference for academics for years to come." - Jamie Bennett, Govenor of HMP Morton Hall, Prison Service Journal
"This impressive volume in the highly regarded Clarendon Studies in Criminology series represents a major contribution to the tradition of sociological studies of the prison...a significant investment...it will not disappoint" - Gwen Robinson. The Howard Journal .
