The criminal justice system in the media: the prison
In Chapter 6, we began our analysis of media representations of the criminal justice system, focusing on the police. In this chapter, we turn to yet another major criminal justice sector, the prison. Media discourses and images around prison abound, although very few people seem to be aware of the actual realities and routines of prison. This is odd given the fact that England and Wales have one of the highest incarceration rates in Western Europe (154 per 100,000 head of population). But people’s familiarity appears to be based more on the ‘symbolism of the prison’ (Levenson, 2001: 14), which is provided by portrayals of prisons and prisoners in newspapers, broadcast news, television and film. In the news media, the sensationalist nature of prison-related stories, particularly in the popular press, demonizes offenders and labels prisons as too ‘soft’. Criminologists and media scholars have noted how the news media in particular reflect and reinforce the current punitive approach to offenders, acting out the prevailing political discourse of law and order in contemporary Britain.
We first consider the existing literature on media representations of prison and then analyse examples of newspaper reports, aiming to show how these reflect and promote the populist and punitive penal policy of the government. We then move on to popular and factual portrayals of prison on TV, conducting a multimodal analysis of a prison documentary. We also explore the question of whether these representations, which form an important counterpoint to newspaper reporting of prisons and prisoners, can stimulate public awareness and debate about penal reform.
The practice of imprisoning people as a form of penal sanction began only about 200 years ago. Before that, prisons had the sole function of holding people before trial. Punishment itself tended to be public and harsh, depending on the severity of the crime. With the decline of public corporal punishments in the second half of the eighteenth century, and with the end of penal transportations to America and Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, imprisonment became the normal form of punishment. One important commentator on these changes in punishment was Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault (1977) investigates the shift from corporal to carceral punishment. His explanation for the prison was that it became understood in the new industrial order that placing people under surveillance was more efficient and profitable than subjecting them to an exemplary form of punishment.
This emergence of punishment behind prison walls meant that it became ‘wrapped in an impenetrable veil of secrecy’ (Cohen, 1985: 57) and that the public since then has had to rely on the media for its understanding of prisons and how they function. This understanding, however, is rather limited. Fed on a constant diet of media sensationalism, which covers only the most extreme incidents in prisons, such as riots or deaths, the general public knows very little of what actually goes on in them. For example, newspaper readers may only be aware of the suicides of ‘high-profile’ cases, such as Fred West and Harold Shipman and the attempted suicide of Ian Huntley, as prison suicides tend to go largely unreported. Prisoners are constructed within a discourse of fear, dangerousness and brutality (either from other prisoners or staff), and prisons are presented as little more than ‘holiday camps’ (see, e.g. Mason, 2006a). But people who work with prisoners, such as prison governors, point out that daily life in prison is far removed from either of these extremes (e.g. Coyle, 2005). These distorted media representations have the capacity to shape people’s opinions about prisons, so much so that they not only take prisons for granted, but are also reluctant ‘to face the realities hidden within them’ (Davis, 2003: 15). Most press coverage of prisoners therefore ‘merely serves to inflame the readers’ moral outrage and confirms their prejudices’ (Jewkes, 2005: 26). One reader’s comment to an article in the Daily Mail Online about a prison ‘riot’ at Ford open prison in January 2011 (‘Ministers were told riot jail was understaffed weeks before it was torn apart’, 14 January 2011) is perhaps illustrative of this:
Dear Mr Clark, Please listen to a few honest and well tried suggestions. A prisoner should be allowed 1. (one) straw filled mattress (such as the soldiers were issues with in the last war) 1 (one) bucket. 1 (one) iron bowl, to wash in and feed from. 1 (one) spoon. 1 (one) ten minute slop out all on his own. Food, just to preserve existence and as much exercise as he wants in his 6’x 8’ cell. NOT the Savoy treatment now dished out
Many criminologists (e.g. Mathiesen, 2000; Jewkes, 2004; Mason, 2006a, 2006b) have commented on the media’s contribution to the rise of this penal populism. Mathiesen (2000) argues that the nature of the public debate around crime and punishment is no longer based on the prison’s legitimation but driven by political opportunity in which the media construct the prison as the only solution:
In the newspapers, on television, in the whole range of media, the prison is simply not recognized as a fiasco, but as a necessary if not always fully successful method of reaching its purported goals. The prison solution is taken as paradigmatic, so that a rising crime rate is viewed as still another sign that prison is needed. (Mathiesen, 2000: 144)
The majority of the mainstream media in Britain create support for the penal system through their constant over-reporting of violent and sex crime and their representing offenders as the dangerous ‘other’, which is something we have observed throughout this book. Criminologists Scraton and McCulloch (2009: 16) note that sensationalist media coverage combined with political opportunism are behind the contemporary ‘war on crime’, in which the language of criminal justice has become ‘infused with military metaphor’ and those who were previously defined as ‘at risk’ have now become ‘the risk’ to be monitored, controlled and imprisoned for the sake of the law-abiding citizen. They regard these shifts in contemporary criminal justice and a more general ‘genealogy of violence and incarceration’ as having their historical roots in the colonial past of England and other European countries and the violent treatment of indigenous people in Australia and America. The massive increases in imprisonment in these states – particularly in the United States, but also in England and Wales – since the 1990s evidences an over-representation of the poorest and most marginalized, which according to Scraton and Mculloch works ‘to maintain social hierarchies and hide the structural violence of global and domestic capitalism by “disappearing” its victims’ (2009: 15). Prison abolitionist Davis goes as far as saying that the prison has become ‘a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited’ (2003: 16).
We will now illustrate our argument with an analysis of several examples of mediated discourses on prison. Three are taken from national newspapers and one from a TV documentary about an English prison. A study by Mason (2006a) revealed two main discourses through which prisons and prisoners are constructed: one, prison as a soft option, and two, prisoners as an uncontrollable danger to a fearful society. Alongside representations of this kind, Mason also noted an absence of reporting in both print and broadcast media of major prison issues, such as the underlying reasons for overcrowding, that is, more recent criminal justice policies introduced by the Conservative and Labour governments. As a result of these, the number of people given a custodial sentence at magistrates’ courts has risen from 25,016 to 63,396 between 1995 and 2006, with the number of incarcerated women doubling over the same period (Mason, 2006a: 261).
Below, we provide an analysis of two newspaper articles which have these two dominant discourses as their theme.
Prison as a soft option
The first dominant media discourse about prisons is their construction as ‘liberal’ regimes, lacking any real punishment and as places where prisoners’ rights are given precedence over victims’ rights. The following article from the Daily Mail Online (3 August 2008) can be seen is a typical example of this discursive construction of prisoners:
Pampered prisoners supplied with £221,726 of PlayStations
Prisoners across the country are being supplied with computer games consoles costing thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money.
The Prison Service has spent £221,726 on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo systems and software to keep jailed criminals entertained. Ministers have previously admitted spending only £10,000 on the machines.
An audit carried out last month on Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s orders turned up 12,948 game consoles in prisons and young-offender institutions in England and Wales, showing how widespread their use is among the 83,600 prison population.
While most of them were bought by inmates themselves, a total of 1,715, costing between £100 and £300 each, was provided by the Prison Service.
The Ministry of Justice recently announced restrictions on the use of the games but critics said this was because the extent of their use was going to be made public.
Officials at the department admitted that there was nothing to stop violent 18-rated games being played on taxpayer-funded machines and
Figure 7.1 Pampered: a prisoner plays a PlayStation game in his cell (Source: Mail Online, 3 August 2008; Image: Rexfeatures)
conceded that prison authorities may have purchased violent titles for some inmates.
Tory MP Nigel Evans, to whom Mr Straw disclosed the figures in a letter, said: ‘Does being sent down for five years of hard PlayStation playing serve as rehabilitation or punishment?
‘This is rewarding criminal behaviour with equipment which many victims of crime could only dream of affording for their children. People will be outraged by this revelation.’
Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Herbert said: ‘While Ministers protest that there is no money for prison places or rehabilitation schemes, they waste taxpayers’ funds on luxuries which prisoners shouldn’t have’.
‘Offenders should be learning and preparing for the world of work, not idly playing Grand Theft Auto and preparing to return to crime.’
It was disclosed recently that thousands of inmates have access to Sky TV and computers, and last week it was revealed that more money is spent on food for prisoners in police cells than for NHS patients.
Prisoners are allowed to play 18-rated games such as Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt, which are notorious for their extreme violence.
However, from October, 18-rated titles will be banned in prisons altogether and the use of consoles will be restricted to only the best behaved prisoners or those on suicide watch.
In his letter to Mr Evans, Mr Straw claimed he had not known of the arrangement until recently. He wrote: ‘I was unhappy when I first heard [in April] that public money was being spent on games consoles, and ordered a review of this policy’.
‘I have now decided that, with immediate effect, no public money will be spent on games consoles.’
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said decisions about purchasing consoles for inmates had been made on ‘a prison-by-prison basis’.
The article above is clearly highly critical of prisoners having access to game consoles in prison. However, as Jewkes (2002) points out, privileges such as in-cell TVs are normally part of strict incentives schemes designed to ensure good behaviour and they are at least as beneficial to the prison regime as to the inmates themselves. However, the article does not consider the consoles as part of managing prisoners in overcrowded conditions, in which many will be spending 23 hours a day in cells. Training and rehabilitation are mentioned in passing but without consideration as to what, exactly, these mean. The content of the article itself is based on a letter to the newspaper by a conservative MP that describes and comments on a report commissioned by the Labour Justice Secretary Jack Straw.
This article uses a number of linguistic strategies that convey the discourse of prison as a soft option and implies that prisoners should be subjected to a stricter regime. In the first place, we can see how the text works ideologically at the level of social actor analysis. These social actors fall into three categories: the recipients of the consoles, that is, the prisoners, the public and the officials. We must recall here that discourses are comprised of a number of components: participants, settings, times, values, ideas and sequences of activity (van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999) and, crucially, that any one of these can signify other components in a discourse. So choices in the representational strategies of social actors alone will in itself signify a particular set of association of ideas, values and sequences of activity.
The dominant social actors in this article are the officials. As Table 7.1 shows, they are both nominated, as in ‘Nigel Evans’, ‘Nick Herbert’ and ‘Jack Straw’, and collectivized as ‘ministers’ and ‘officials’. They are also functionalized, as in ‘MP’, ‘Shadow Justice Secretary Ministry’ or ‘Justice Spokesman’, using honorifics. The information in this article is represented through the viewpoint of the authorities and officialdom. The main social actors in this article are therefore both anonymous and individualized government and political authorities. This helps to communicate a discourse of facticity. We can ask what kinds of officials are absent, for example, social
workers, prison officers and prison reform workers, who are also involved in the supervision of prisoners, and who may also have been able to explain the reasons for some people being given game consoles. Van Leeuwen (2008) draws our attention to those areas in which micro-processes are glossed over by broader concepts and abstractions. ‘The Prison Service’ is personified as an agent, as in ‘The Prison Service has spent £221,726’, although it is not an individual agent, but a broad and diverse set of institutions, with people performing different roles.
The next set of social actors are the recipients of the consoles. These are collectivized as ‘prisoners’, ‘offenders’, ‘criminals’, ‘inmates’ and the ‘prison population’. None are individualized or nominated, and it is worth noting that three different terms are used. Why not simply use one of these terms, such as ‘offenders’?. The story could have informed the reader about particular cases in which consoles were given to particular prisoners and why this is considered important and useful by the prison managers.
In these representational strategies, we find only the generic category of ‘criminal’. There are no longer nominal groups used to specify types of offenders and sentences. We are not told if it is mainly young offenders in low security prisons who are given consoles or if this applies equally to violent offenders in high security facilities. As such, the article encourages the reader to think about all people in such institutions as being the same. There are no differences and certainly no explanations, such as that young offenders, caught selling drugs, are now in low security, preparing for probation, during which time it may be best for them to be more integrated into normal, daily life activities. The discourse in this article is one in which prisoners are constructed as feral criminals who are being ‘pampered’.
Important in the discourses communicated by this article is the image of a prisoner playing on a console (Figure 7.1). Although he is represented as an individual, in that there is only one person in the photo, he is also anonymized through the cropping of the top of his head. He is also made generic through the presence of the tattoo on his upper arm, which is reminiscent of the stereotypical representations of prisoners we sometimes see in films and which visually represents the barrier that separates ‘them’ from ‘us’. Just as with the stereotypical images of young people (‘hoodies’) we discussed in Chapter 4, this image does not so much document than symbolize a prisoner. It is odd that he is represented as posing without his shirt. On the one hand, this could be so that the tattoo is displayed. But this could also connote an atmosphere of relaxation rather than strict discipline, portrayed through the presence of personal belongings, including a TV, and the bright setting with a curtained window. This does not connote a particularly harsh prison life.
The last social actor category is the public. Here, too, we find overlexicalization, with ‘taxpayer’ being used three times: in ‘taxpayer-funded machines’, ‘thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money’ and ‘taxpayers’ funds’. The public are not represented as a society that is concerned about the future of these inmates but only as ‘taxpayers’ who might be outraged to find their money being misused by the government to ‘pamper’ prisoners.
Finally, the absence of a social actor through the use of a passive verb construction in the following sentence is also significant: ‘Prisoners across the country are being supplied with computer games’. We are not told who is doing the supplying, although the article states that most of the consoles were bought by the prisoners themselves. We learn that the Prison Service spent the money, but not who specifically gave the consoles to the prisoners. This is an important omission. Are they being given the consoles by prison guards, by social workers, by psychologists? We are later told that ‘The Prison Service has spent £221, 726’, but we could have been informed who exactly is responsible for this. Was it those involved in rehabilitation or some other kind of management? And what exactly was this strategy?
The representation of social actors in this article signifies a discourse in which criminals, having an easy life, waste taxpayers’ money and are all presented from an official point of view involving information about the actions or comments of the ‘Prison Service’, the ‘Prison Authorities’ and the ‘Ministry of Justice’, along with important political actors, who are nominated (‘Justice Secretary Jack Straw’, ’Tory MP Nigel Evans’, ‘Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Herbert’). It is around this discourse that other details are placed.
In the first place, much effort is put into creating a sense of how out of control this phenomenon is. We are told that it involves ‘Prisoners across the country’, that it is taking place ‘in prisons and young offender institutions in England and Wales’. What is omitted is the extent to which types of prisons this applies most. We are told that their use is ‘widespread’ among the 83,600 prison population, that ‘the extent of their use was going to be made public’ and that ‘thousands of inmates have access to Sky TV and computers’. Here we find what van Leeuwen (1996) calls ‘aggregation’, the representation of social actors in terms of numbers and statistics, which is again meant to demonstrate the sheer numbers of prisoners having access to these ‘luxuries’. Van Leeuwen notes that aggregation is often used to manufacture consent opinion, in this case that too many prisoners enjoy amenities they do not deserve.
Importantly, the information in this text is presented as something that has been deliberately concealed from us. We can see this in the first place in the use of quoting verbs, which are an important device through which the utterances of social actors can be evaluated by an author:
Officials at the department admitted
Officials at the department conceded that prison authorities may have purchased
Mr Straw claimed he had not known of the arrangement.
Quoting verbs such as ‘admitted’ and ‘conceded’ suggest that the information was given unwillingly and had been previously hidden. The quoting verb ‘claimed’ suggests that Straw is most likely not telling the truth. We can illustrate this if we replace them for other more neutral or assertive quoting verbs:
Officials at the department said there was nothing to stop violent 18-rated games being played.
Mr Straw announced he had not known of the arrangement.
This choice completely removes any sense of something being hidden. On the one hand, journalists must strive to make their information unique, or of special interest, and present it as being revealed to the reader through the skills of the reporter. But here the concealment is evidence, in the first place, of the inadequacy and untrustworthiness of the government, who are clearly not acting in the interests of the taxpayer. In contrast, the opposition politicians do show their concern. In each case, their comments are represented through the neutral quoting verb ‘said’.
We also find this sense of deceiving the taxpayer in the following sentences:
Last week it was revealed that more money is spent on food for prisoners in police cells than for NHS patients.
The report turned up 12,948 game consoles.
In the first sentence, food costs are ‘revealed’ and the report ‘turned up’ the consoles, as if all had been concealed. It is of note that in the first instance, costs associated with the upkeep of prisoners are often used as one justification for non-custodial sentencing.
Finally, later in the article, we do find reference to what actually should happen to people when they are in prison:
Tory MP Nigel Evans said ‘Offenders should be learning and preparing for the world of work, not idly playing Grand Theft Auto and preparing to return to crime’.
In fact, those who have served custodial sentences are highly likely to re-offend, and it appears that they are generally given little in terms of improved possibilities. In this article, a link appears to be made between playing a video game and criminal behaviour.
What the article could have informed us about is the use of consoles in the management of the behaviour and morale of those in prison. It could have related this to kinds of prisoners, institutions and sentences. It could also have included different kinds of official sources, such as social workers or prison teachers. It could have referred to the broader social interest of rehabilitation and the running of prisons and use of resources rather than only the interests of the taxpayer. The article demonstrates no interest at all in these very important issues. The production of a discourse about ‘feral’ prisoners who live at the expense of the taxpayer, is the aim of this piece, as can be seen from the evidence of its linguistic and visual choices.
Prisoners as a danger to a fearful public
Mason (2006a) found that the prisoner is consistently constructed as a social threat in three principal ways: by employing lexical choices such as ‘thug’, ‘lag’, ‘beast’ and ‘killer’; by highlighting the most dangerous offenders; and by creating a fearful public with stories of escapes, lax security and early release.
The article below from the Daily Mail Online (13 March 2007) reports on the possibility that women’s prisons might be shut down in the future. We find this is presented in terms of the most dangerous female offenders in the country and an insufficiently harsh approach to them. The story is based on the suggestions made by Labour MP Baroness Corston in a Home Office report, informed by criminological research on women prisoners. According to this research, two in three women prisoners have mental health problems, at least half report being victims of childhood abuse or domestic violence, and 40 per cent have tried to kill themselves. When Labour came to power in 1997, the female prison population in England and Wales stood at 2,675. In 2006, it had risen to 4,392, although there was no corresponding rise in the number of women committing more serious crimes. Nine out of ten women are convicted of non-violent offences, and most women in prison are mothers (Benjamin, 2006). Most of these women will have left school before the age of 16 and will have no formal qualifications, and many will have been diagnosed with mental illness (Sim, 2009). Corston’s suggestions follow from a tradition of thought that sees women’s prisons as destructive and serving to punish women who have already experienced abusive and difficult lives. What we see is that the article, while dealing with some of Corston’s reasons, recontextualizes the events by focusing on dangerous offenders and criminals escaping punishment.
Women’s prisons ‘should all close within a decade’.
Only the most dangerous female criminals should be kept behind bars, a controversial Government report has said.
Thousands of women currently sentenced to two years or less would escape jail.
And those who are such a threat to the public that they must be sentenced to custody would no longer go to one of the country’s 15 women’s prisons which would all close.
Instead, killers such as Rose West serving life for the murder of ten young women and girls would be sent to ‘homely’ local custody units.
There they would be allowed to live as a ‘family unit’ with between 20 and 30 other women prisoners, organizing their own shopping, budgets and cooking.
The units would also allow them to stay close to their families.
The radical proposals are made by Labour peer Baroness Corston, in a report commissioned by the Home Office.
She said there are far too many vulnerable women in jail, many serving short sentences.
Instead of being imprisoned, the vast majority of the 4,300 behind bars would be ordered to attend new community centres during the day.
They would be given help to kick any addictions they have, and to stop committing crimes such as shoplifting, before returning home at night.
All the women’s jails would shut within the next decade, and could instead be converted into prisons for men.
John Reid is facing chronic overcrowding in men’s prisons, forcing him to take the drastic step of begging the courts to jail only the worst offenders.
Closing the women’s jails would help the Home Secretary to hit his target of finding 10,000 extra prisons places over the next five years, which is expected to cost £1.5 billion.
But allowing thousands of women criminals to walk free would also be politically awkward for Mr Reid, who is desperate not to appear ‘soft’ on crime.
Lady Corston, formerly chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, sought to justify the shake-up by claiming custody is ‘disproportionately harsher’ on women.
Many female criminals are victims of abuse such as domestic violence, she said. Sending them to jail means they lose their home and children.
The report claims: ‘Women and men are different. Equal treatment of men and women does not result in equal outcomes’.
Lady Corston said that as a starting point only women given two years or more should be kept behind bars with community punishments ‘the norm’ for non-violent offenders.
Women should also never be sent to jail to ‘teach them a lesson’.
Lady Corston said small custody units were already operating in the US and Canada.
Other proposals include an end to the routine strip-searching of women in prison, and better jail sanitation.
The report, commissioned following the deaths of six women at Styal Prison, Cheshire, called for action on its findings within the next six months.
It was seized on by penal campaigners, who have long insisted too many women are jailed.
But Home Office officials privately questioned whether the political will exists to adopt some of its most controversial ideas, or whether cash is available to build the new community centres and custody units.
Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland said: ‘I very much welcome this report and have given an undertaking that the Government will look carefully at the issues it raises and the recommendations it makes’.
Vulnerable women who are not a danger to society should not be going to prison.
At first glance, the headline ‘women’s prisons “should all close”’ could be understood as this suggestion being supported by the Daily Mail. However, the inverted commas indicate that the paper actually distances itself from the proposal and is merely quoting Baroness Corston. And while the latter part of the article does reveal some of the actual issues regarding the vulnerable nature of most women who find their way into prison, this is relegated to the end of the article after a number of strategies have been used that serve to recontextualize these suggestions into the discourses described by Mason (2006a).
Below the headline, the first thing the reader sees is an image of smiling child killer Rose West and, further below, a picture of Baroness Corston, also smiling, accompanied by the caption ‘Killers like Rose West would be sent to a “homely” local unit according to radical proposals made by Baroness Corston’. Although neither the report nor Corston mentions Rose West, the article uses her as a way to frame the item. That the image of Rose West is placed above the one of Corston, and that it features at all in an article on what is a very serious prison issue, is significant. It serves as an immediate delegitimation of Corston’s proposal, which is called ‘radical’, because ‘thousands of women currently sentenced to two years’ would ‘escape’ jail.
The article also mentions ‘overcrowding in men’s prisons’ but remains uncritical about recent criminal justice policies under New Labour which have caused this very increase in the prison population:
John Reid is facing chronic overcrowding in men’s prisons, forcing him to take the drastic step of begging the courts to jail only the worst offenders.
This statement appears to be in support of a discourse which advocates the building of more prisons, otherwise the Home Secretary would have to release all but the very worst offenders. The outrage here is emphasized by the fact that he would have to be ‘begging’ courts to carry out this request. As Home Secretary, Reid would, in fact, have power over the courts and not have to beg them. Rather than question the current trend of increased incarceration for both women and men, the article above constructs the topic through a ‘victim-driven discourse of dangerousness’ (Mason, 2006a: 255) which runs through the whole text. This is underscored by the language choices that help to emphasize the danger to the public. To begin with, we find that
[. . .] the vast majority of the 4,300 behind bars would be ordered to attend new community centres during the day
Thousands of women currently sentenced to two years or less would escape jail.
But allowing thousands of women criminals to walk free [. . .]
Here again we find the strategy of ‘aggregation’. The exact number is not given; the aggregation gives the impression of dealing with facts, while the numbers are, in fact, vague. Is it two thousand or four thousand women? Stating that it will be a ‘vast’ majority of incarcerated women who will be sent to those units, also sounds like an overwhelming number.
Any oppositional and anti-prison discourse is smothered by the (visual) suggestion that high profile prisoners such as Rose West would pose a security risk and social threat, should the suggestions be turned into practice. The narrative not only draws on the ‘public fear’ motive but is also infused with the ‘prison as soft option’ agenda, since women would be allowed to live as ‘a family unit’, even ‘killers such as Rose West’. The same message is communicated early in the article, when we are less than helpfully told,
Killers such as Rose West serving life for the murder of ten young women and girls would be sent to ‘homely’ local custody units, ‘allowed to live as a family’, ‘stay close to their families’.
What we can see here is that a serious issue is recontextualized in terms of a notorious mass killer rather than in terms of the vulnerable women who would benefit from the government’s change to its prison policy. In fact, what we find here is exactly the opposite of what the government report is arguing.
We also find the use of ‘structural oppositions’ (van Dijk,1998), where opposing classes of concepts are built up around participants. As we have pointed out in previous chapters, one concept may imply its opposites without them being overtly stated. Here, ‘killers’ are described as going to ‘homely units’, ‘families’ and ‘community centres’. The word ‘killers’ sit in opposition to ‘homes’ and ‘families’, with their connotations of safety and comfort. Killers should not be placed in ‘community centres’.
We are also told that the women prisoners would ‘escape jail’ and ‘walk free’. The government report, in fact, recommends that vulnerable and mentally ill women should not be sent to prison at all. But the verbs ‘escape’ and ‘walk free’ suggest a lenient prison regime and laxity on behalf of the authorities. As with the previous article on pampered prisoners, we find a discourse of society being soft on criminals. This is given away immediately in the article, when Corston’s proposal is delegitimized as ‘radical’. One could argue that most controversial and radical is the policy of sending such vulnerable women to prison in the first place. While working on a project on mental illness for the Home Office, one of the authors of this book interviewed women ‘offenders’ in Holloway prison, in police stations and courtrooms in London. It appeared as unjust and unproductive that people who had such difficult and tragic lives, who had through abuse and poverty fallen into patterns of minor offending, should be given prison sentences. This fact is mentioned in the news article itself:
She said there are far too many vulnerable women in jail, many serving short sentences.
Many female criminals are victims of abuse such as domestic violence.
But crucially, this appears only after the recontextualization through mentioning ‘Rose West’, ‘killers’ and that ‘thousands of women’ would ‘escape jail’.
Of note in the article is the way that certain facts which could have been used in support of Corston’s proposal are mentioned only in passing. The article refers to ‘the deaths of six women at Styal prison’ as the reason behind the Home Office reports, but remains silent on the cause of their deaths, which was suicide. This is typical of the way that nouns (‘deaths’) and nominalizations can be used to silence agents, causality and temporality. Instead of ‘deaths’, a verbal constructions such as‘. . . after six women committed suicide’ could have been used. And there could have been discussion of the fact that because of understaffing and poor training of officers the prison failed not only these women, but also their families. Instead we are informed that the Home Office report ‘was seized on by penal campaigners, who have long insisted too many women are jailed’.
To sum up, our analysis of these two articles appears to confirm Mason’s (2006a) argument that the popular press rarely report on prison issues in an informed way. Instead, its coverage often serves to further stigmatize a population that is already at the margins.
It would, however, be inaccurate to state that all mainstream UK newspapers have a ‘pro-prison agenda’. Generally, the ‘quality’ press tends to bring ‘unpopular’ prison problems to the fore. Jewkes (2002) points to the Guardian in particular for bringing issues such as overcrowding, drug addiction, mental illness, suicide and racism among inmates and staff to the public’s attention. We have therefore decided to look at one newspaper article from the Guardian (14 January 2011) about the ‘riot’ in Ford prison in January 2011. Ford is a category D open prison which prepares prisoners who have moved there from higher category prisons to be prepared for their eventual release. We consider only the first few paragraphs of the article below, which was on the Guardian’s front page, and then move on to its ‘special report’ about Ford inside the paper.
Ministers were warned about riot prison
Security shortcomings exposed days before inmates went on £3m rampage
Justice ministers were warned of serious security shortcomings at Ford open prison just two weeks before balaclava-clad inmates reduced parts of the jail to ashes in a drunken New Year rampage.
A report delivered to the justice secretary, Kenneth Clark, on 16 December warned that a ‘minimal number’ of junior staff were left to patrol the jail at night, even though they had only limited training.
In the early hours of New Year ’s Day, 40 of the 500 prisoners at Ford, near Arundel, West Sussex, caused £3m damage after staff tried to breathalyse some of them. The level of violence was unprecedented for a minimum-security jail.
The report by the prison’s Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) showed that searches of the prison using sniffer dogs over the past three years had found an extraordinary amount of illicit goods, including mobile phones, drug paraphernalia and 51 litres of alcohol.
At first glance, some of the lexical items chosen to report on the ‘riot’, such as ‘balaclava-clad inmates’ and ‘drunken New Year rampage’ look like examples of the language commonly used in the popular press. The article also presents only the official view, provided by the IMB. However, the Guardian’s special report in the same issue provides a far more critical account told by ex-prisoner Erwin James, who visited open prison North Sea Camp to interview some of its inmates, and the Governor about North Sea Camp, Ford and open prisons in general. Below we quote excerpts from this article (Guardian, 14 January 2011, p. 17):
Rebuilding trust, or getting off lightly? The truth about life in an open prison
In the wake of the Ford riots, ex-convict Erwin James visits North Sea Camp
[. . .]
Distorted media reporting of open prison life often gives the impression that such places offer little punishment. Lurid stories of parties with smuggled-in booze and other headline-grabbing regulation breaches feed images of open prisons as holiday camps and call into question their relevance or necessity. Though without precedent, the riot at Ford open prison in Arundel on New Year’s Day, which caused about £3m damage, was indeed directly linked to smuggled-in alcohol.
[. . .]
I asked Paul for his thoughts on the Ford riot. I’m not going to lie to you. Open jails have a mixed clientele, if you like. You’ve got long-term prisoners who have a serious perspective of jail because they know what is at stake. [. . .] For me, open jails should just be for people who need to be resettled and need help to get used to the idea of getting out. The people who started the riot at Ford probably just had a few weeks or months to do and just didn’t care.
Ali, serving four-and-a-half years, was transferred from Ford to North Sea Camp a few weeks before the riot. I asked him what life was like at Ford. Was it really awash with alcohol? ‘To be honest there were lots of drugs and lots of alcohol there – excessive amounts’, he said. ‘But I think it was that, coupled with staff attitudes, that probably what caused the riot. [That] their attitude was despicable is the nicest way I can put it. Hardly any prisoners were allowed out to do community work and only a very small number were actively being resettled. The system wasn’t geared to getting people back out and functioning in the community. I wasn’t surprised about the riot.’
[. . .]
In his office I meet the governor, Graham Batchford, who began his career as a prison officer and over 26 years worked his way through the Prison Service ranks. [. . .] ‘If you think how much the world changes in 10, 15 or 20 years, we’ve got many people who have been inside longer than that. Those are the prisoners that open prisons serve best. It’s about reintegrating them back into the community, breaking them back into society gently.’
The Guardian’s special report is a far cry from the usual misinformation that is spread about (open) prisons. For a start, it is critical of ‘distorted media reporting’ of prison as a soft option. It then privileges the views of an ex-prisoner and several other prisoners about conditions in open prisons and their experiences with them. We also learn that staff attitudes may have been one reason behind the ‘riot’ at Ford. While Ali, a former inmate at Ford, concedes that there were ‘excessive amounts’ of drugs and alcohol in the prison, he also states that ‘staff attitudes towards inmates were despicable’ and that only a minority of prisoners were allowed into the community, which after all forms an important step in the process of their reintegration into society. Another important feature mentioned by inmate Paul is that the problem might have been short-term prisoners who have no ‘stake’ in behaving well and that prisons like Ford should only be for prisoners nearing the end of a longer sentence. These are all important considerations which the public should know about. It is perhaps significant that the ‘official’ views given by Ian, the gate officer, and Governor Graham Batchford are placed at the end of the article and echo the views of the prisoners who are allowed to speak out first. In this article, the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967), that is, the likelihood that professionals’ opinions on controversial issues are given prominence, appears reversed. In mainstream media coverage on ‘riots’, the views and comments of prisoners are not necessarily believed and the prevailing argument is one of prisoners out of control (see Scraton et al., 1991). As Scraton et al. point out, although the prison ‘riot’ is ‘manifestly an expression of violence, usually directed towards the fabric of the prison’, it also carries ‘a rational, conscious dimension. It is intended as a vehicle of change’ (1991: 67; our emphasis).
The analysis we have provided here is but a ‘snapshot’ of the news coverage on prisons, and the evidence we present of the mainstream papers’ ‘pro-prison’ agenda (with the exception of the Guardian) is therefore slim. It would take a far more extended qualitative and quantitative analysis to corroborate our small-scale qualitative linguistic analysis. However, our view is supported by research conducted by the Prison Media Monitoring Unit (PMMU) in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies [JOMEC]) at Cardiff University. The aim of PMMU and their monthly bulletin is to ‘highlight errors, misinformation and distortion about prison issues’ which it believes ‘may have a significant effect on government policy and public attitudes towards prison, punishment and social control’ (PMMU, 2006: 2). The findings of the Unit’s analysis of 19 UK national newspapers in February 2005 were that 87 per cent of stories about prison did not offer any criticism of the penal estate in the United Kingdom, except for some, half of which appeared in the Guardian and only one in a tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, which together with the Daily Telegraph reported on a report by the Howard League of Penal Reform calling for an end to strip-searching for children in prison. The PMMU February 2006 Bulletin concludes:
It is predictable that the tabloid newspapers, given their pro-prison agenda as this bulletin shows, should choose not to offer any criticism of the prison system but it is of great concern just how Britain’s newspapers choose to report penal issues. This bulletin has illustrated both quantitatively and qualitatively how British prison and its prisoners are constructed as largely dangerous and a constant threat to the tax-paying public, enjoying soft regimes with privileges their crimes and suffering victims dictate they should not have. The reliance on government, criminal justice and punitive-minded sources simply serve to reinforce this partial, and often false, media-constructed landscape of what prison is and who prisoners are. (PMMU, 2006: 24; emphasis in original)
At the outset of Chapter 7 and Chapter 6, we pointed out that the public’s perception of the criminal justice system is just as much influenced by its representation on television and film, and even literature, as it is by news reporting. These factual and fictional representations in the broadcast media form an important counterpoint to newspaper reporting of prisons, and there has been some discussion among criminologists about whether they may have a role to play in advancing penal reform (e.g. Mason, 2003; Wilson and O’Sullivan, 2004; Jewkes, 2006). Prisoner autobiographies may have a similar potential, although they reach a much smaller audience (see Nellis, 2002). Before we analyse the TV prison documentary Wormwood Scrubs (May 2010), we consider criminological and media studies research that has dealt with the contents and possible reform functions of these programmes.
The prison in the popular media
The world of prisons and prisoners has featured extensively in most television genres, such as the sitcom (Porridge), entertainment dramas (Bad Girls, Within These Walls, Prisoner Cell Block H), more ‘serious’ prison dramas (Buried, Oz), reality TV programmes (The Experiment, The Real Bad Girls) and the prison documentary (e.g. Strangeways, Lifer: Living with Murder, Jailbirds, Holloway). Prisons have also featured extensively in film (e.g. The Shawshank Redemption). While some (e.g. Wilson and O’Sullivan, 2004) have argued that the role of these popular TV programmes and films is to educate as well as entertain and to advance the cause of penal reform, others (e.g. Mason, 2003; Jewkes, 2006; Jarvis, 2006) are more sceptical. Jewkes does not question that some of the TV prison programmes (e.g. Bad Girls) have the potential to raise the audience’s awareness of the grim realities of prison, but she doubts that they can actually set an agenda for penal reform and change people’s perceptions about prisoners and prison. If we take a look at the Bad Girls website we can see that the programme producers do take prison issues seriously, but also that they straddle fact and fiction:
Bad Girls has set out since its first series to raise awareness of what happens in women’s prisons and to highlight the issues women in prison face. Those involved in its production have gone to great lengths to try to make it as accurate as possible, but it is a drama series and life in prison is not always so exciting, so it would not be fair to think that everything Bad Girls shows us actually happens on a regular basis. (www.badgirls.co.uk/library/wip-1.html)
The series’ story lines have included the same issues and problems that beset the Prison Service in real life, such as drugs and alcohol abuse, self-harm, protest, bullying, AIDS and suicides, and broader political issues such as prison privatization and the rising number of female prisoners and mothers in prison. The website offers information not only on the episodes themselves but also on ‘real’ women’s prisons, which is provided by criminologists and psychologists at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, King’s College London. We learn that 47 per cent of women prisoners have no educational qualifications; that 25 per cent have been put in public care; that 75 per cent have mental problems and illnesses; that half have been the victims of domestic violence; and that at least a third have suffered sexual abuse. Despite the very commendable efforts to reflect on these issues in dramatic form and to attempt to inform the public, the question remains as to whether programmes such as these can actually change people’s perceptions of prisoners. We come back to this point below.
The prison film
Despite the best efforts of prison reformers to convince the public that prison is inhumane and expensive, the prison population in Britain and across the Atlantic continues to grow. Wilson and Sullivan (2004, 2005) argue that it is precisely because the prison film frequently depicts prison as a brutal institution that it has the potential to raise public awareness and debates about penal reform, perhaps more so than academic criminology ever could. They suggest that Hollywood prisons films (e.g. the Birdman of Alcatraz) have always sought to humanize the offender, but do concede that, for example, the Shawshank Redemption, a film many Americans cite as their favourite, has done little to raise their awareness of and empathy for ‘real’ prisoners.
A number of critical filmic accounts of British penal institutions produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s (A Sense of Freedom, Scum, McVicar) which are anchored in prisoner autobiographies, certainly signalled the need for prison reform. More recent films based on prisoner autobiographies, such as Chopper (Australia) and Bronson (Britain), trade more on the prison ‘hardman’, glamorizing the ‘celebrity criminal’ as a cool popular culture icon, yet still manage to present prison as an insane, inhumane and damaging institution and their protagonists’ life of crime as ultimately futile (see Mayr, forthcoming). Ultimately, however, the reform functions of the prison film may be rather limited (e.g. Nellis, 1982; Mason, 2003b, 2006b; Jewkes, 2011).
It appears that the prison documentary, with its more explicit agenda to depict prison experience, may be more successful in informing the public about the ‘pains of imprisonment’ (Sykes, 1958) and possibly changing their perception. Although some prison documentaries are simply voyeuristic, there have been a number of critical and thoughtful British prison portrayals (e.g. Strangeways, Lifer: Living with Murder, Jailbirds, Holloway). However, as Jewkes (2011) cautions, like any other media form, the documentary has a mission to entertain as well as inform. We can see these two conflicting aims at work in the prison documentary Wormwood Scrubs (ITV1, May 2010), which we have chosen for analysis. What we see is that prisoners and prison officers are treated as individuals with personal concerns and problems. However, the prisoners in particular tend to be represented at the same time as generic types, such as the ‘prison hardman’, and the entertainment requirement intersperses more reflective moments with those of relentless violence, restraint of inmates and other disturbances – which may not be entirely reflective of the everyday extreme tedium and pointlessness of prison life. Subtle interpersonal dynamics are less present than high emotion and conflict. Most notable, in the documentary tradition of Direct Cinema, is the reliance on lingering shots of inmates reflecting, even in silence. While these connote veracity and the fearlessness of the camera, they are able to gloss over actual sociological-type truths. While the documentary certainly appears successful in representing the lives of inmates as tragic, it is questionable how much sociological insight is actually conveyed. We get a sense of these individuals simply existing in this context, which is, in fact, a result of specific political and legal decisions, many of which have their origins in populist discourses and fly against evidence provided by government research itself.
The documentary was made by Wild Pictures, who also produced an acclaimed ITV1 documentary series on the women’s prison Holloway. Wormwood Scrubs was shown in two hour-long episodes on 10 and 17 May 2010. It was watched by 4.98 million people, or a 21.7 per cent share of the 9 to 10 p.m. audience (www.digitalspy.co.uk). Here we analyse excerpts from the second episode (17 May 2010).
The aim of the documentary is to show what life inside this particular prison is like, presenting the views of both inmates and staff. Wormwood Scrubs (locally known as ‘the Scrubs’) is an inner west London category B men’s prison which accepts men over 21 years of age from the courts within its catchment area. The voice-over informs us that it is ‘one of Europe’s largest jails holding up to 1280 prisoners’, whose ‘main function is to hold inmates on remand or until they move on to other jails’ and that ‘repeat offenders pass in and out of these gates with an alarming regularity’.
The second episode (parts of which are transcribed and analysed below) focuses mainly on the accounts of three prisoners (seen in the opening scenes) and several prison officers. A great deal of the footage was shot in the segregation unit (‘Seg’) of the prison.
The first few minutes of the episode have no comment, but consist of a compilation of images of prison life interspersed with images of two female opera singers performing to inmates in the prison chapel. Some of these images reappear later in the episode. This constant shifting between the ‘sublime’ world of art and the ‘dark’ world of the prison makes for arresting viewing. The operatic music is used to communicate a sense of tragic pain to the otherwise brutal sequence.
During this opening sequence, we see a close-up of part of a handcuffed prisoner’s back; a prisoner being restrained and carried away by four officers; officers running across the prison yard; a close-up of two prisoners in the chapel listening to the singers; another blurred close-up of a prisoner looking through a cell door window; a prisoner being wrestled to the ground by four officers; a female officer cuddling and comforting an inmate who has just self-harmed; and officers in riot gear. Life in prison is introduced in the first place not as one characterized by tedium, stillness and emptiness but as relentlessly eventful.
This sequence is followed by close-ups of the three prisoners who later talk about themselves: the first one looking slightly ‘lost’ off frame; the second one in a side shot smoking, looking thoughtfully out of window; and the third one looking into a mirror. At this stage we do not yet know their names, but by showing them in medium and close shots, they are visually individualized. We also see them in intimate moments of self-reflection which, like mental processes in linguistic representation, help to give a sense that we are being offered access to the mental world of the participant. These are different from the close-ups of an offender we described in Chapter 6, in which the repeated showing of a sex-offender’s mug shot in a Crimewatch reconstruction was used to create a sense of menace and threat in the viewer.
Before they are allowed to speak, all three prisoners are introduced by their full names through the voice-over, and the nature of their offences and their names appear as a caption on-screen as the prisoners begin to speak: they are ‘42 year old recovering drug addict’ Neil McCarthy’, whose sentence is for burglary; ‘prison hardman’ Jason Cox, in prison for GBH; and ‘first-timer’ Jason Rock, who is a ‘dangerous driver’. They are therefore nominated semi-formally and categorized. Categorizations like these, according to van Leeuwen (1996), label people not in terms of being an individual but as a generic type. In this sense, these people may never really become more than prison types.
We then learn about what are presented as these men’s life histories and daily existence in prison. They are allowed to speak with little interruption from the interviewer, who is never seen and who avoids morally loaded questions. We are informed about the first two prisoners’ problematic upbringing. Neil McCarthy, who ‘was born and bred on a council estate in West London’, was left by his mother and brought up by his grandmother, whose death may have contributed to his descent into criminal behaviour, as the voice-over implies (‘McCarthy started thieving soon after his grandmother died’).
| McCarthy: | The longest I’ve been out in 20 years is 11 months. I had a great childhood as far as I am concerned. My granny she washed me she fed me I loved her dearly still do she died in 84 it seems like yesterday it’s still very touchy. |
The voice-over then introduces ‘prison hardman’ Jason Cox as McCarthy’s ‘best mate’, who ‘like McCarthy, has spent most of his adult life in jail’. This is his account, interspersed with the voice-over:
| Cox: | I’ve been coming here fucking years and years and years. All my life I’ve never had family . . . in and out of care and the from the age of 16–17 I’ve been in and out of prison. This is my family. All these people here are my family I don’t have no other family except for them this is my home. | |
| VO: | Cox has found it almost impossible to survive outside prison, but inside his hardman image has earned the respect of other inmates | |
| Cox: | I feel comfortable to be here at this present moment I’ve got a nice life in prison. Safe, got a roof over my head you know I came to prison weighing 10 stone now I am nearly 14 stone I ain’t got nothing to worry about. |
The voice-over then comments on ‘24-year-old first timer Jason Rock who seems to be deeply traumatized by having caused the death of his best friend through dangerous driving’ (‘that’s a sentence in itself losing my best friend’). He tells the viewer:
| Rock: | I crashed a car and my best friend died and eh I got a five-year sentence for him death by dangerous driving. I know it is down to my actions really and I . . . but that’s just . . . that’s a sentence in itself losing my best friend like. He was my best mate so that’s hard. |
Giving prisoners uninterrupted conversational space allows the viewers to feel empathy for them, as they reveal tensions in their lives which can be seen as extenuating circumstances, although the voice-over still provides the overall frame for the prisoners’ autobiographical stories. However, these accounts are interspersed with dramatic scenes of violence and mayhem that create the impression of prison life as relentlessly explosive and unpredictable., which may mitigate against a sympathetic understanding of prisoners.
One criticism of the use of ‘conversational space’ in this way, through long takes in which inmates reflect, is that it suggests, through the lingering space and the lack of urgency, that nothing is concealed, and therefore that this is ‘actuality’ that we are experiencing (Nichols, 1991). This use of longer takes was a tradition pioneered in documentary by Frederick Wiseman in his ‘Direct Cinema’, which has been criticized for its supposed voyeurism and selective edit. In the documentary, these lingering takes play an important part in the representation of the vulnerability and tragic circumstances of the inmates.
Later in the episode, prison officers speak about their daily work and the problems they face. We learn from Dina Officer, the senior segregation officer seen in the opening scene comforting a self-harmer, that she has a son who is brain-damaged after an attempted suicide. Here she tells us about her frustration with the problems she faces in the segregation unit:
| Dina: | We’re having a lot of problematic prisoners. It’s all drug-related gang-related they’re flooding in kicking doors ehm behaving like idiots. |
As the audience witnesses the restraint of an inmate by four officers, one prison officer offers his reasons for restraining the inmate:
| Officer: | You wouldn’t be human not to feel ehm intimidated at times in that sort of situations. He invaded my space ever so closely shouting at me. For my own safety I took the decision to restrain him at that point because I felt it was imminent that I was about to be assaulted. |
Another, younger segregation officer, Garry Hurst, explains the problems in the segregation unit on one day:
| Garry Hurst: | [. . .] seven prisoners we’ve got down here [?] so there was obviously a lot of tension and this has carried on till this morning. |
Like the prisoners, the prison officers are shown in mid- and close-shot, again allowing the audience to get closer to them. And like the prisoners, we get an insight into their mental world. But as one watches the documentary there is a frustrating sense that the constant restraining by officers of inmates who appear to be in prison for non-violent offences is not dealt with. It is here that the Direct Cinema approach falters and calls for commentary. Neither the prisoners nor the staff provide any comment on these coercive control measures. There is an overwhelming sense that we are watching a collection of tragic individuals in a situation that is out of the control of any particular agent. The prisoners are ‘damaged’ characters who act only in an emotional and unpredictable way, to which the officers react with professionalism. The politics and ideology of imprisonment are therefore backgrounded. On the one hand, we might say that the film implies such injustice without giving commentary. But the Direct Cinema editing and the dramatizing techniques work to mitigate such readings. For example, as we watch three male officers restraining a prisoner, Governor Phil Taylor offers the following comment:
Violent action can erupt at any time it can be quite extreme and it can be perpetrated towards anybody . . . the officers have to be highly trained they have to be adaptable they have to be flexible they have to be prepared to put up with a lot from individuals who are damaged who are difficult who are vulnerable and deal with that in a responsive professional way.
The point, however, is that violence in prison does not just ‘erupt’ but very often happens with a reason. Although many violent incidents in prison are cases of prisoner on prisoner violence, caused and sustained by a culture of masculinity which idealizes physical dominance, prisoners also react in this way because of the many injustices imposed upon them by the prison system (Scraton et al. 1991). In this documentary, however, both the voice-over and the Governor use the metaphor of prison as a ‘smouldering’ or ‘erupting volcano’, where problems are simply ‘brewing’ and need to be tackled by ‘highly trained’, ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’ staff. Sympathy for the prison officers is created through the favourable representation of their work which they do‘ in a responsive professional way’, emphasizing its demanding nature. It is of course important to acknowledge the officers’ work, just as creating empathy for the prisoners’ situation is. However, there are no comments on critical issues regarding prison officers, such as standards of recruitment, possibly indaquate training and allegations of harrassment and brutality.
A closer look at the representational strategies for these two groups of social actors demonstrates the way that we are encouraged to see the prisoners as individuals. Although they are also visually and linguistically collectivized as ‘prisoners’ and ‘repeat offenders’, they are mostly individualized, nominated and categorized, as we saw above. Officers are also collectivized as ‘staff’, but again mostly individualized by being nominated and functionalized:
Phil Taylor, Governor
Dina Officer, Senior Segregation Officer
Gillian Forbes, Bio-Hazard Officer
Tracy Price, Dog Handler
Garry Hurst, Segregation Officer
This constant individualization and personalization, both linguistically and visually, serves to heighten the viewer’s sense of connection to rather intimate moments in the daily activities of both sides. The film and editing techniques have a similar effect. When inmates are being restrained by officers, the camera follows them in a way that looks like amateur footage, again drawing on the Direct Cinema conventions of immediacy; this can also be observed when the camera ‘eavesdrops’ on conversations among prisoners or prison staff. The ‘fly on the wall’ camera technique communicates to the audience that they are able to follow events as they unfold and to witness ‘real-life’ tensions between inmates and staff. Through these linguistic and visual techniques, the viewer is offered a sense of the intimate truth of the dangerous, volatile and unpredictable world of prisons, and invited to witness life as prisoners and prison officers experience it and how they react to it.
Looking at social action and transitivity patterns, we see that prisoners
arrive daily; pass in and out; currently serving four and a half years; started thieving; has spent his life in jails; is nearing the end of his sentence; has crashed a car; end up in segregation unit; has smeared excrement all over his cell; has been detained for immigration charges; causes havoc; struggle to remain on the straight and narrow.
Most of these material processes, apart from ‘has crashed a car’ and ‘has smeared excrement over his cell’ are goal-less or ‘non-transactional’ (i.e. without a concrete material outcome). In terms of relational processes we find
has been in and out of jail most of his adult life; has psychological problems; is two years into a five-year sentence; is frustrated; is stressed out; I’m not a kid, I’ve got a daughter; can’t be a dad to her’; are damaged; are difficult; are vulnerable.
These describe the prisoners’ states and identities and can present as ‘facts’ what may be opinions, such as ‘has psychological problems’, ‘is stressed out/damaged/difficult’. There may be valid reasons for the prisoners to be difficult or damaged. Would prisoners classify themselves in these terms?
Importantly, there are also a number of mental processes:
wants a transfer to an open prison; has decided to go on a dirty protest; is losing his plot; miss kids and family; think about my daughter a lot; love her dearly; want to turn round his life; is missing his children; has found it almost impossible to survive outside prison.
There are a small number of verbal processes:
admits to an obsessive compulsive disorder; pleaded guilty; protesting about conditions.
We could argue that these mental and verbal processes, the former of which, especially, can have a humanizing effect, in some way act like Wiseman’s awkward close-ups and lingering shots. Through revealing emotions they provide a sense of veracity, which however glosses over the lack of deeper insight we might have gained had the documentary been more critical of the legitimacy of the prison as an institution.
In terms of transitivity patterns for the staff, we find that the officers’ material processes are typical examples of what van Leeuwen (2008) calls ‘reactions’, which are provoked by the ‘unpredictable’ behaviour of prisoners:
deal with problems; having to manage individuals; having to manage anger, having to manage things like self-harm; random cell searches performed; restrain; deal with that in a responsive, professional way.
The relational processes all express obligation:
have to be highly trained/adaptable/flexible; have to be prepared to put up with a lot from individuals.
The same relational processes and qualities such as being ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’ are not attributed to the prisoners, who are for the most part represented as tragic, helpless, if threatening, rather than as strategic and lucid. The use of professional-type actions such as ‘manage’, ‘respond’ and ‘be adaptable’ maintain a sense of order and structure to what appears visually as the madness of suppressing the crazed frenzy of men kept in closed rooms for up to 23 hours a day. Terms like ‘highly trained’ help to maintain some dignity to the situation and may sound reassuring to the viewer.
A smaller number of mental processes is used for the officers, such as ‘be human, feel intimidated; I felt’, which allow insights into their minds and feelings. Overall, the transitivity patterns used to describe the officers serve to represent them as professional and rational, not as ‘faceless’ staff. However, it is clear that they behave on one level with little reflection on the actual nature of the prison system, and that their jobs appear to mainly involve the restraint and subjugation of difficult and volatile men and that they therefore have every right to feel immense frustration.
As we have pointed out so far, much of the commentary and visuals are concerned with the disciplinary measures to which inmates are subjected and the officers carrying out these measures. Visually, the content is very much focused on punishment, restraint, confinement and loss of liberty, although there are also scenes when prison officers act compassionately, for example when one female officer comforts a prisoner who has just self-harmed . There is, however, a predominance of prison iconography with an emphasis on the claustrophobic atmosphere of the prison through close-ups of perimeter fencing, razor wire, barred windows and heavy clanging doors. There are also the usual shots of landings, stairwells, and prisoners moving about, some with digital squares on their faces to obscure their identity. Other stock shots stress more mundane prison activities, such as prisoners lining up for food and prison officers going about their daily routines of escorting, searching and locking prisoners up. These scenes are accompanied by the voice-over providing the authoritative comment on what happens.
To sum up, on the one hand, Wormwood Scrubs does depict the inhumanity of incarceration, thereby providing an opportunity for the viewer to question the legitimacy of the prison as an institution. And the documentary should be credited for attempting to create empathy for both prisoners and staff. But on the other hand, through the ‘scoptophilic treatment of violence’ (Mason, 2006a: 257), this documentary could be charged with reinforcing the prison’s legitimacy, even if this is not intentional. No political context is provided to the ‘management’ of threatening men with chaotic lives. The ‘truth’ on offer here is achieved through mental processes, represented both visually and linguistically, rather than proper analysis of prisoner and staff conditions. Of course, we might view Wormwood Scrubs as nevertheless countering other media representations of prisons, which routinely demonize offenders and evoke demands for retribution and revenge. In fact, former prisoner Erwin James (2010) has said that the documentary ‘highlighted the frailty of those in prison and the system that fails them’ and
instead of healing the open emotional wounds of its inhabitants, the stark concrete and steel fabric of Wormwood Scrubs aggravates and exacerbates them. This documentary showed a prison that any prisoner anywhere in the country would have recognized. And the makers did a brilliant job of demonstrating precisely why our prisons fail so badly.
This very favourable comment by a prisoner-turned journalist is however offset by the following viewer reactions to the programme, which have been posted on Orange TV blog (http://blogs.orange.co.uk/tv/2010/05/wormwood-scrubs-prison-documentary-itv.html). The question asked was, ‘Did Wormwood Scrubs change the way you think about our prisons?’
I agree the programme was shocking it was a right eye opener for me, but got to say the staff do a good job, the system stinks needs to be harder on the crims and you 100% agree with the death sentence or hanging, anyone in there for more than 10 years the uk should do away with them, save us tax payers!
The programme has not made me feel sorry for the inmates at all, in fact it has made me more angry that as a nation, we are paying to house such vile people at an average cost of over £27000 per prisoner per year. I can understand how it reaches such a cost, when they are self harming and trashing cells, seeing psychologists and all the other medical staff they hav[sic] running around after them most of the time seemingly for attention.
The lags who were interviewed seemed to have lost track of how ‘normal’ people behave and regarded the Scrubs as a home away from home. Like Norman Stanley Fletcher [. . .] they viewed imprisonment as an occupational hazard.
I have spent the last 19 years legitimately going in to all categories of Prisons and I was pleased to see this programme showing the reality of Prison Life for serious offenders and the problems facing Prison Officers on a day to day basis. Efforts are made to try and rehabilitate Offenders but the General Public should realize that the majority do not want to be rehabilitated. Crime for them is a way of life and like Fletcher in Porridge being in Prison is just a hazard. [. . .] The public should also realize that they only hear of the Deaths in Custody. They never learn of the very much larger number of Prisoners whose lives are saved by vigilant Staff. Well done to the Prison Service for giving the Public a sight of life inside since most of them have no real idea. Bread and Water it is not but neither is it a Hotel.
If these online comments are anything to go by, the programme has inflamed some viewers’ negative attitudes towards offenders rather than the opposite. In some of the 20 comments that were posted on this site, prisoners were referred to as ‘hateful’, ‘vile’ and ‘scum’, for whose keep the ‘taxpayer’ has to foot the bill. While there was some praise for prison officers’ good work (coming from prison officers themselves, as in the third comment above) and an acknowledgement of the difficult nature of their jobs, not one comment was really sympathetic towards offenders. What we also find in two comments above is the reference to ‘Norman Stanley Fletcher’ the main character in the prison sitcom Porridge, a career criminal. These references (‘Like Norman Stanley Fletcher [. . .] they viewed imprisonment as an occupational hazard’) are used by the bloggers in support of their negative view of prisoners
This brings us back to the point made above about the potential of prison programmes, factual and fictional, to act as vehicles for changing the public’s negative perceptions of prisoners. Jewkes (2006: 146) points to evidence from media ‘effects’ and audience research (e.g. Hall, 1973; Kitzinger, 2004) which points to the complexities involved in the audience’s ‘decoding’ of the ‘preferred meaning’ of a text. So while the maker of Wormwood Scrubs, Paul Hamann, a miscarriage-of-justice campaigner who headed the BBC’s documentaries and history department from 1994 to 2000, certainly intended to show a thought-provoking prison programme, audiences still may take an oppositional position or resist the producers’ intended message outright. What is more, research by Gillespie and Mclaughlin (2002, 2003) suggests that tabloid newspapers, with their pro-prison agenda and discourses, are much more likely to shape public attitudes towards prison than are TV programmes and films.
Conclusion
Existing academic literature on prisons and the media have pointed to the dominance of the view of prisons as a ‘soft’ option and of the prison population as dangerous and volatile. In this chapter, we have shown how linguistic and visual analysis of a number of newspaper texts draws attention to the way in which news media use language to treat institutions and offenders as one homogenous group when it suits them to conceal details of policies and practices. We found that some linguistic and visual strategies serve to delegitimize prisoners and legitimize the stance of prison authorities. These also serve to negatively represent issues of rehabilitation and prison reform and to reinforce the idea that politicians who are not in favour of more prisons and longer sentences are ‘soft’ on crime. We also found that in our example of prison documentary footage, while both linguistic and visual techniques may encourage a more sympathetic view of prisoners, there were no coherent alternatives or even critical discourses articulated that could question the legitimacy of prisons.
