Eleanor March – 29/9/2020

Eleanor March is a PhD researcher in English Literature at the University of Surrey, funded by the University of Surrey Doctoral College Studentship Award, working on an interdisciplinary study of contemporary short stories written by UK prisoners. She previously worked in marketing communications for over a decade, in the public, private and charity sectors. She volunteers on writing programmes at HMP Send and HMP Downview, and on prison writing competitions organised by Koestler Arts and the Prison Reform Trust.

Defining carceral space

Prison keeps prisoners in a defined space, and controls their movement within that space. Carceral space is compartmentalised into “nested pods of space” (Moran, 2015, p.76) comprised of a cell, in a prison building, within the prison walls. This spatial arrangement plays a fundamental role in the disciplinary apparatus of the prison, which partitions prisoners into cells, distributing them in space (Foucault, 1977, pp.141-149).

This blog post examines how this spatial experience of imprisonment is depicted in prisoner writing, focusing on the use of prison jargon in short stories written by prisoners.

The language of prison

Prison has its own language, comprising three main areas: prison jargon, prisoner slang, and orality. Jargon can be defined as “a private or technical vocabulary peculiar to a trade or profession” (Cuddon & Habib, 2013, p.376).

For prison officers, jargon aids in the construction of a professional persona, and helps to create a shared “occupational culture” (Crawley, 2004, p.39). Prison jargon fulfils a “dehumanising” function that allows staff to treat prisoners as objects (Brown & Walker, 2010, p.265), while the use of euphemisms protects staff against distress when discussing “unspeakable” subjects such as suicide (p.264; pp.267-268). At the institutional level, prison jargon represents a deliberately veiled “dual language”, as the institution presents prison life in line with the ideology of the carceral system, employing “translated ideal phrasing” (Goffman, 1961, p.49).

Partitioned prison space

The partitioning of carceral space is codified in prison jargon, as is evident in the spatial jargon terms present in prisoner writing. A number of terms are used to describe the levels of carceral confinement, such as “cell”, “landing”, “spur”, “wing” or “block”. In the story Maybe Tomorrow, the narrator explains that he has been placed in “Block 2, wing B, cell 17, a single” (18K0253, 2018, p.15), the progression from “block” to “wing” to “cell” exemplifying Moran’s idea of “nested space”.

Similarly, the narrator of the story Charly’s Brother describes his movement from “the fours” (the third floor landing) to “another spur”, so that he can have a “single” (one-person cell) rather than a “double” (two-person shared cell) (Krishnamma, 1994, pp.3-5). The terms “single” and “double” are reminiscent of the language of a hotel, and appear uncannily familiar, juxtaposed with the unfamiliar terminology of the “fours” and the “spur”. These writers use spatial prison jargon in their writing without giving an explicit translation of the terminology, requiring the reader to decode both the foreign jargon and unfamiliar geography of the prison, in order to comprehend prison space.

Navigating carceral spaces

These texts depict spatial prison jargon as inherently linked to the power of the prison regime, as is evidenced in the opening paragraphs of the story The Listener:

The Wing was quiet save for the odd droning TV and a distant church that sang its ten o’clock lament. The Officer and con walk single file along the second level landing, stopping outside cell seven, the officer dwarfs the man with matted hair whose purple polo shirt has ‘Listener’ emblazoned on the back.

The Officer unlocks the heavy door and returns the bunch of keys to his pocket with the speed of a gunslinger, allowing the door to open slightly and the Listener steps inside the single cell.

“alright on your own son?” asks the officer, eyebrows raised.

“No worries.”

The door slams behind him and the Officer’s face appears briefly in the narrow glass at the top. “Okay son, you know where the buzzer is if….well y’know.”

(PRT11/7, 2011, p.1)

In this extract, a prison officer escorts a Listener, a prisoner who offers peer-support to other prisoners, to the cell of someone who is experiencing a mental health crisis. The prison officer and Listener move through the layers of carceral confinement, again defined using the terms “wing”, “landing” and “cell”. The nocturnal setting highlights that the Listener’s voluntary role affords him mobility, as he can pass out of his cell and onto the wing, while the other prisoners are confined in their cells.

At the same time, this movement between spaces is controlled by the officer, who holds the keys that facilitate mobility, and who “dwarfs” the Listener, physically dominating the space. The extract ends with the Listener contained within the cell of a fellow prisoner, observed from outside by the officer, who has the power to confine prisoners and the freedom not to remain confined himself. The juxtaposition of these three unfamiliar elements – prison jargon, carceral space, and institutional power – demonstrates how the prison system both defines the language that describes the prison space and controls the mobility of the prisoner within that space. The use of spatial prison jargon within these texts thus acts as a synecdoche for the confining power of the prison.

Punitive spaces

Alongside these references to accommodation spaces, several stories employ prison jargon to refer to specialist spaces within the prison, including “healthcare” (the prison medical facility), and the “segregation unit” or “seg” (solitary confinement).

Crucially, these writers reveal the reality obscured by this official language, as is seen with the term “healthcare”. The narrator of Inside Out comments that an elderly prisoner with dementia “needs to be in Healthcare” rather than locked in a cell (PRT18/2, 2018, p.4), while the suicidal prisoner Jonesy in the story The Listener is discharged from healthcare and goes on to kill himself (PRT11/7, 2011, p.2). While “healthcare” should be a therapeutic place, these negative outcomes suggest that it is yet another damaging carceral space that has been presented as positive by prison jargon – an example of the “translated ideal phrasing” discussed previously.

This is reinforced by Jonesy’s comment that he had been transferred to healthcare because the authorities “couldn’t handle me in the Seg’” (PRT11/7, 2011, p.2), signalling a continuity between the supposedly restorative space of healthcare and the restrictive space of the seg. These writers thus adopt official prison terminology but also challenge its idealised meaning by presenting the reality that is signified, revealing the punitive nature of carceral space.

Prison jargon in/as translation

This brief survey of prisoner writing reveals how prison jargon serves as a tool of carceral control, codifying the spatial restrictions of prison, and constructing carceral space. Prisoner-writers incorporate spatial prison jargon within their writing, as a way to describe carceral space for the reader. The unfamiliar jargon is seldom translated explicitly, requiring the reader to infer its meaning from the context, navigating an alien language and the bewildering carceral space that it describes. Prison jargon therefore firstly functions in these texts in translation, as an unfamiliar language that must be decoded for and by the reader, via processes of translation.

Crucially, these writers not only adopt prison jargon in their writing, they also rework it –revealing the realities of prison life that are obscured by this “translated ideal phrasing”. By appropriating the official language of prison on their own terms, and providing a back-translation of the true meanings of prison “healthcare”, these writers expose the punitive nature of carceral space. Prison jargon therefore also functions as translation, playing a pivotal role in depicting the carceral world, and thereby translating the experience of imprisonment for the non-prisoner reader.

References

  • 18K0253 (2018) Maybe Tomorrow. London: Koestler Arts archive.
  • Brown, G. & Walker, J. (2010) ‘Prison language as an organisational defence against anxiety’, in Wilson, S. & Cumming, I. (eds.) Psychiatry in prisons: A comprehensive handbook. London: Jessica Kingsley.
  • Crawley, E. (2004) Doing Prison Work: The public and private lives of prison officers. London & New York: Routledge.
  • Cuddon, J.A. & Habib, M.A.R. (2013) Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th edn. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
  • Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Sheridan, A. London: Penguin.
  • Goffman, E. (1961) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. London: Penguin.
  • Krishnamma, S.R. (1994) ‘Charly’s Brother’, Prison Writing, 5, pp.19-23.
  • Moran, D. (2015) Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration. London & New York: Routledge.
  • PRT11/7 (2011) The Listener. London: Prison Reform Trust archive.
  • PRT18/2 (2018) Inside Out. London: Prison Reform Trust archive.
  • Smith, N.R. (2015) The Criminal Alphabet: An A-Z of Prison Slang. London: Penguin.