Remote Control

Television in Prison

V. Knight

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137443908
• eBook ISBN: 9781137443915
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In-cell television is now a permanent feature of prisons in England and Wales, and a key part of the experience of modern incarceration. This sociological exploration of prisoners' use of television offers an engaging and thought provoking insight into the domestic and everyday lives of people in prison - with television close at hand. Victoria Knight explores how television contributes to imprisonment by normalising the prison cell. In doing so it legitimates this space to hold prisoners for long periods of time, typically without structured activity. As a consequence, television's place in the modern prison has also come to represent an unanticipated resource in the package of care for prisoners.

This book uncovers the complex and rich emotive responses to prison life. Dimensions of boredom, anger, frustration, pleasure and happiness appear through the rich narratives of both prisoners and staff, indicating the ways institutions and individuals deal with their emotions. It also offers an insight into the unfolding future of the digital world in prisons and begins to consider how the prisoner can benefit from engagement with digital technologies. It will be of great interest to practitioners and scholars of prisons and penology, as well as those interested in the impact of television on society.

1

Research Foundations

This book is about the role of in-cell television in a male adult closed prison. Its focus is to capture the experience of television use by prisoners within the prison context.

1.1Introduction and rationale

1.1.1Research origins

The impetus for this book arose from work on the consumption of mass communications in a closed male young offenders’ institution which I completed in 2001 followed by a focused study on television (Knight 2012). British studies, Jewkes’s (2002a) and my earlier research in 2001 came at a time when in-cell televisions were just being introduced to prison cells in England and Wales. The introduction of television in prisoners’ cells, following New Labour’s announcement by the Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1998, revealed some interesting effects on the prison environment. The British research could not systematically document these effects, as in-cell television at this time was only available to ‘privileged’ prisoners. In-cell television is now firmly fixed into the prison environment. This introduction took 12 years to complete from its official launch to the last prison receiving television in cells in 2010. Installation was not straightforward and many cells had to be modernised to receive electricity. There were, however, approximately 1000 prisoners who benefited from in-cell television from 1991 and this disparity in availability of in-cell television called for an official review (Ministry of Justice [MoJ] personal correspondence 2011). The research that was carried out provided a snapshot of its early introduction and its effects were limited to those prisoners who complied with current behaviour management strategies. The Incentive and Earned Privilege (IEP) system, introduced in 1996 (PSI 11/2011), following a review of disturbances at HMP Strangeways by Lord Justice Woolf in 1990, sought to manage prisoner behaviour much more robustly. Policymakers were tasked with ensuring that prisoners complied with the prison regime. Incentives were needed in order to motivate prisoners and in-cell television became a key incentive to enable prison staff to encourage compliance. Along with other incentives such as access to goods and services, visits from friends and family, time out of cell and access to work and education, the IEP system sought to organise prisoners based on their compliance and behaviour. Within limits, the more prisoners complied with the prison regime the more access they were allowed to goods and services. Non-compliance could lead to privileges being withdrawn and prisoners placed on a ‘basic’ regime. The introduction of in-cell television and other privileges received highly contested focus in public discourse, as an index to broader concerns about the penal system going ‘soft on’ criminals and losing its direction. In defence of this, in-cell television became framed in political rhetoric. In-cell television was therefore positioned as an earnable privilege for ‘deserving’ prisoners; for example, those who proved to be drug free (Hansard Vol. 314, 1998). The Prison Service employed television to directly manage behaviour, a method which is directly mirrored in many households with children (Silverstone 1999a).

Tracing the introduction of mass communications into British prisons is difficult, as scarce public historical or policy documents report their introduction. Staff and prisoners anecdotally related¹ that early access to mass media was originally through newspapers and magazines. It was common practice for staff to read out news in chapel every week. By 1954 prisoners could directly access radio and newspapers, under supervision. Radio was broadcast onto prison landings, shortly followed by prisoners’ opportunity to buy their own transistor sets. Films were sometimes shown in communal areas like the chapels or gyms on a weekly basis. Communal television sets were introduced to ‘association’ areas where prisoners spent leisure time out of their cells in some prisons from the 1970s, but this was never formally standardised. Prisons, therefore, are media-poor environments.

Only one prison contributed to a formal evaluation of in-cell television (McClymont 1993), which outlined concerns about the decline in prisoners attending associations and other activities; a theme also echoed by Jewkes (2002a). It was also noted that in-cell television had an influence on the atmosphere in the pilot prison, where it was observed that prisoners appeared calmer (Jewkes 2002a). Despite claims to ‘monitor closely’ (Hansard Vol. 314 1998) its introduction to prisons, no official evaluation has been carried out by the Ministry of Justice (Home Office² ). This study therefore marks the only independent evaluation of in-cell television since its official introduction.

1.1.2Research foundations

The sociological perspective underpinning this book departs significantly from the recent trend in prison research based on measuring ‘what works’ agendas and assessments of prisons as ‘performing’ enterprises (Raine and Wilson 1997; Liebling 2004). The dominance of performance-related research has eclipsed the sociology of imprisonment (Simon 2000; Wacquant 2002; Liebling 2004). These changes have resulted in the prison culture and its prisoners and staff becoming increasingly lost, even invisible, in managerialist discourse (Liebling 2004:203). Access to prisons to conduct sociological research is difficult, as prisons’ resources are locked into key performance targets, as well as managing high numbers of prisoners with limited resources. Furthermore, pressures to reduce reoffending and a move to foreground victims’ rights are also evident (Williams 2002). Many offenders come to prison with a range of complex physiological and psychological needs (Prison Reform Trust 2009; Scott and Codd 2010). In addition, a significant proportion of prisoners return regularly back to prison (Padfield and Maruna 2006). The cost of incarceration, set at £45,000 per year per prisoner, highlights the cost of using prison as a punitive instrument; for some, this is too much for the tax payer to bear (Prison Reform Trust 2010). Prisons are therefore under extreme pressure to perform and the sociological dimensions of prison life are not a priority. The sociological paradigm brings the human experience to the fore and is a mirror image of the policy and strategies that are routinely implemented (Simon 2000:288). As Jewkes (2002a:x) observes, audience research in prison is limited, yet provides a curious site for audience investigation. Gersch (2003:53) highlights the ‘uses and gratifications’ which can generate peculiar effects in the prison environment:

The notion of ‘escape’ gains special meaning in the prison context, where the media are one of only a few links for inmates to the outside world.

Researchers of prisoner audiences have been uncomfortable with the frameworks and typologies of audience behaviour derived largely from research on audiences in domestic settings. One example is Jewkes’s modification of the ‘uses and gratifications’ model defined by McQuail et al. (1972) to account for how the structural features of the prison can impact on prisoner agency and their responses to their incarceration.

Her work moved away from the deterministic typology of uses and gratifications model to highlight how prisoners’ motivations can capture the role that media has in their lives. Through conversation she was able to document the ways in which the male prisoners interpreted and made sense of their experience and also of themselves. The meanings they reported provided a view of their subjectivity and how it is negotiated within the prison setting. In a similar way, Vandebosch (2000) highlighted that prisoners had ‘media related needs’ and increased degrees of dependency on media use. A common finding across most of the prison audience, including my earlier research, is that prisoners actively draw upon media resources in powerful and active ways during incarceration. All of the studies challenge the view that prisoners are passive both to the system and to the messages they consume through mass media. As much broader research on audiences has shown, media consumption is an active phenomenon in which audiences negotiate power, meanings and identity (Silverstone 1999a). Media can also transform time and space and provide an insight into how public and private life is negotiated and resisted by audiences (Moores 1995a). Prisoner audience research has found that these features take on heightened meanings for people in prison.

My earlier work (Knight 2005c) raised some important questions about the role of media consumption in relation to its time-passing qualities. Media use helps to fill time with meaningful activity. Broadcast media can help to minimise boredom, and at this stage I interpreted this in relation to the inescapable ‘empty’ time that prisoners routinely endure especially behind their cell doors. Upon review of prisoner audience studies, boredom and the experience of the prison cell remain underexplored. These studies had not sufficiently mapped time and space in relation to media use or the kinds of ‘excursions’ (Moores 2006) prisoners were making. In light of overcrowding, prison cells that were once intended for single occupancy are now mostly accommodating two or more prisoners (PSI 2750); these dynamics impact significantly on the management of time and space by prisoners. Other than Gersch’s (2003) insight into communal viewing and the hierarchies of access and selection based on race in US prisons, little is known about the dynamics of sharing cells. Therefore, the everyday living arrangements between cell co-occupants remains an enigma and more generally are a relatively unexplored feature of prison life. Cell-sharing received much attention when Zahid Mubarek was murdered by his racist cell-mate, Robert Stewart, at HMYOI Feltham in 2000. This brought about a policy review to risk-assess cell-sharing. Now that all cells in England and Wales have the capacity to have in-cell television as standard, this dynamic deserves attention.

These prisoner audience studies have consistently fallen short of interrogating the feelings engendered by media reception. Jewkes (2002a) demonstrates how the ‘pains’ of incarceration are managed (or not) through media use with implicit reference to emotion. Vandebosch (2000) also discusses the therapeutic qualities of media use but does not report sufficiently on the nature of media’s effects on well-being. Garland’s (1991) thesis on the use of punishment highlights that emotionality is central to the ways in which punishment, like imprisonment, is both managed and experienced by its stakeholders (see also Crawley 2004). To this effect, according to Garland, emotionality is actively controlled by penal agencies or the ‘rationalisation’ of punishment (1991:177). As Hochschild (1983) found, organisations or settings demand composure of emotion. These ‘feeling rules’ are also valid in the prison setting (Crawley 2004). Crawley found that in this context certain feelings are tolerated and accepted and others are not. The ‘inmate code’ is also thought to be a powerful force on the ways in which prisoners interact and do their time in prison; ‘prisonisation’ or prison socialisation (Clemmer 1958). The regulation of emotion is therefore part of socialisation. In a landscape where some, if not most, emotions are purposefully masked, the salience of media, especially broadcast media, has been identified as psychologically nourishing (Zillman 1988). It is claimed that television has ‘care-giving’ qualities and is a particular site for achieving ‘ontological security’ (Silverstone 1999a). This begins to indicate that media use stretches beyond pure functional and environmental features (Lull 1990, 1988). Silverstone’s work has paved the way for a fuller exploration of the kinds of emotive relationships audiences have with television, and prisoner audience research should not be excluded from this. The sociology of imprisonment continually points to the pains and harms of the incarcerating experience and yet these have not been fully developed to account for specific forms of emotionality and how they become, or the extent to which they are registered as, painful. The deprivation models developed by Sykes (1999) and Goffman (1991) are significant, but their models of deprivation do not cater for the emotional dimensions of institutional life. Goffman’s (1991) discussion of a ‘civic death’ on entering an institution is powerful, yet lacks the emotional vocabulary to deal with how incarceration is felt by inmates. Even alternative models such as prisonisation and importation models may also be accused of the same omissions (Clemmer 1958; Irwin and Cressey 1962).

These aspects of prison life, with television firmly rooted within it, present ever pressing challenges. The government’s response to the green paper Breaking the Cycle (MoJ 2011) sets out a series of aims whereby time in prison should be better spent or ‘purposeful’. Historically this has been an aim; with the mission statement to get prisoners to ‘lead a good and useful life’ (Prison Rule 1), this is now becoming intensified. Achieving purposeful activity has been an instrumental and guiding target for prisons for some time (PS7100, PS4350), yet the current claims to engage all prisoners in work and training are now for the first time going to be linked to the ‘payment by results’ policy. Here prisons will compete to deliver provision and support for prisoners in order to achieve the aims and objectives set out in the government response. Prisoners’ use of time is therefore a renewed issue and scrutiny of their time is about to enter the debate much more fiercely than in the past. Secretary of State for Justice Kenneth Clarke added to this response:

too many prisoners are able to pass their time in prison in a state of enforced idleness, with little or no constructive activity. Prisons must become places of hard work and training, where prisoners are expected to work a 40 hour week, with money from their earnings deducted to support victims’ groups.

(MoJ 2011:1)

This perspective highlights how the Prison Service is criticised for allowing prisoners to ‘sleep through their sentences’ (London Evening Standard 2011). How in-cell television is framed within these discussions remains uncertain, but it is likely that television viewing by prisoners will be attributed, as it has been historically, as a passive and nonproductive activity. Yet rhetoric about making prison ‘hard’ and where prisoners will be expected to make reparation or ‘payback’ and take up ‘treatment’ may not necessarily position the current incentives system too favourably. Jewkes (2002a:x) explains that this ‘sits awkwardly alongside the prison service’s self-proclaimed aim to engage prisoners in purposeful activity’ (ibid.:x). The anxieties about watching television, especially within the prison environment, hark back to concerns about the ‘effects’ model. Here viewers, particularly the disenfranchised and vulnerable, are susceptible to the unrelenting enticement and powerful messages that mass communication delivers. Jewkes argues that this perspective ‘misses the important point that media resources fulfil a wide range of motivations and gratifications and desires, many of which are felt acutely among the confined’ (ibid.:xi). As Jewkes and others (Vandebosch 2000; Gersch 2003) have demonstrated, media use by prisoners is an important route to power and control; it is one of the few activities and aspects of their lives where they can make choices for themselves. The purposeful negation of autonomy and choice that prisons actively construct may contradict the current government’s aim to get prisoners active in meaningful ways.

Rose, in his discussion on governance, shows that the state’s project to cleanse society of pathological groups requires a ‘neo-hygienic strategy’ (1999:188). Inculcating the individual in this project ‘it is necessary and desirable to educate us in the techniques for governing ourselves’ (ibid.:221). Therefore the extent to which prisoners are expected and encouraged to self-govern can also be traced within the prison setting (Pryor 2001; Bosworth 2007). If the government plans for ‘payback’ are going to be ratified, ‘vocabularies of the therapeutic … [need to be] deployed in every practice addressed to human problems’ (Rose 1999:218). The prison regime, now with in-cell television, currently provides prisoners with an additional site to ‘look inwards’ (Rose 1999:227). The extent to which forms of self-regulation are mobilised with communication outlets like television remain an unexplored dimension in prisoner audience research.

1.2Research on prisoners and audiences

This book is based on a qualitative study, which uses an ethnographic research strategy to explore the role of in-cell television in prison. The foundations of this study are informed by Layder’s (2005) theory of ‘domains’ and his ‘adaptive’ approach. Together these theories have provided a conceptual and practical guide to the research process. An ethnographic strategy was selected to operationalise the research, by employing television-use diaries as well as semi-structured interviews with prisoners and staff. The research was conducted in a single prison (local adult male closed). Decisions to employ this methodology are informed by qualitative traditions of research carried out with prisoners and media audiences. This short section provides an overview of some of those influences and how they have shaped the design of this study. This takes into account the role of the ethnographic approach, methods for capturing data, accessing and reaching the prisoner audience and the ethical implications of undertaking this type of research.

1.2.1Ethnography

Moores (1996) as well as others (Silverstone et al. 1991; Gray 1992; Jewkes 2002a; Bird 2003) have adopted ethnographic strategies in their work on audiences of mass communications. Although methods of data collection and immersion in the field may differ from ‘traditional’ ethnographic strategies, audience reception studies can also share the same intentions (Moores 1993a:4). These include Moores’s (ibid.) own work on satellite television and Jewkes’s (2002a) study of male prisoners’ media use. The critical ethnographic approach³ adopted by Moores (1993a) ‘is committed to critically analysing culture as well as describing it’ (ibid.:4). Moores asserts critica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Research Foundations
• 2. Perspectives on Prison
• 3. Prisoner Perspectives
• 4. Audiences of Television
• 5. Making Room for In-Cell Television: Access, Availability and Points of Use
• 6. Personal Control: Television, Emotion and Prison Life
• 7. Situated and Mediated Control: Managing Souls with In-Cell Television
• 8. Concluding Discussion
• Appendix 1: Prisoner Interview Respondent Portraits
• Appendix 2: Staff Interview Sample
• Appendix 3: Comparison of Average Television Viewing for Prison Site and UK National Average (BARB)
• Appendix 4: Example of Number of Hours of Television Watched Each Day for Diarist C
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index