Browsing by Author "Warr, Jason"

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    Abstraction, Belonging and Comfort in the Prison Classroom
    (Sage, 2022-12-25) Little, Ross; Warr, Jason
    Prison education, at the institutional and policy level, is too often about the use value of qualifications, rather than the exchange value inherent in the experience of learning. This article explores how abstract discussion can be used to resolve this problem by facilitating the production and exchange of pedagogical capital in a prison classroom. The development of pedagogical capital, a form of symbolic capital related to learning, enhanced the sense of belonging and comfort experienced by students. The classroom comprised learners from university and prison, participating in informal discussion emanating from abstract questions. Based on interviews with, and feedback and reflections from, students participating in an eight-week course located in a higher security Category B training prison in the midlands of England (‘HMP Lifer’), we discuss how pedagogical capital was produced and maintained. Firstly, it supported teachers to create a trustworthy learning space to discuss abstracted concepts and challenge each other – at an appropriate construal distance – without the discussion becoming too emotionally charged or exposing potential vulnerabilities. Secondly, it enabled students to use their own historical knowledge and experiences (narratives), creating a more equitable contributory space and reducing the risk of judgement. Thirdly, these elements combined to facilitate an iterative process of dialogical investment and exchange. The findings strongly suggest that the pedagogical approach was crucially important in creating a safe, trustworthy, equitable learning space in which students felt sufficiently at ease to exchange their thoughts and ideas as part of group discussion. We conclude that this pedagogical approach has wider implications for enhancing student resources, and fostering a sense of belonging in other, non-penal contexts, including higher education institutions.
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    ‘Always gotta be two mans’: Lifers, risk, rehabilitation, and narrative labour
    (Sage, 2019-01-30) Warr, Jason
    All prisoners have their identity stripped from them and, ultimately, reconstructed by the institutions in which they are incarcerated. However, for life and indeterminately sentenced prisoners the effects of this process, reinforced over extended periods, creates a particular set of burdens. For it is this population, above and beyond that of other prisoners, who need to address the implications of an imposed carceral identity in both navigating the day-to-day life of the prison and securing release. The four core burdens are firstly, an ambiguity on what identity indeterminately sentenced prisoners were supposed to have. Secondly, reconciling an imposed identity that they did not necessarily feel adhered to their pre-established sense of self. Thirdly, recognition that in order to operate or perform within the prison they needed to adopt an institutionally acceptable form of their self. Fourthly, that they had to manage how their performance of self was judged and recorded by the prison. This article aims to contribute to the growing body of work on Narrative Criminology by arguing that these burdens results in what I define as narrative labour.
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    The deprivation of certitude, legitimacy and hope: foreign national prisoners and the pains of imprisonment
    (Sage, 2016-07-01) Warr, Jason
    At the end of March 2015 there were 10,481 foreign nationals (defined as non-UK passport holders) held in prisons in England and Wales, representing 12 per cent of the overall prison population. The latest published figures from December 2014 also indicated that there were a further 394 immigration detainees also being held in various prisons, rather than Immigration Removal Centres, across England and Wales. Although Sykes’s deprivation model with its associated ‘pains of imprisonment’ has been exhaustively explored by penologists, this article argues that there are a new range of ‘pains’ uniquely faced by foreign national prisoners in England and Wales who come under the scrutiny of the Home Office’s Immigration Service. Drawing on quasi-ethnographic fieldwork in a Specialist Foreign National Prison, this article discusses the new pains relating to a lack of certitude, legitimacy and hope with regard to both their carceral and post-carceral lives.
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    The emotional geography of prison life
    (Sage, 2014) Crewe, Ben; Warr, Jason; Bennett, Peter; Smith, Alan
    Accounts of prison life consistently describe a culture of mutual mistrust, fear, aggression and barely submerged violence. Often too, they explain how prisoners adapt to this environment—in men’s prisons, at least—by putting on emotional ‘masks’ or ‘fronts’ of masculine bravado which hide their vulnerabilities and deter the aggression of their peers. This article does not contest the truth of such descriptions, but argues that they provide a partial account of the prison’s emotional world. Most importantly, for current purposes, they fail to describe the way in which prisons have a distinctive kind of emotional geography, with zones in which certain kinds of emotional feelings and displays are more or less acceptable. In this article, we argue that these ‘emotion zones’, which cannot be characterized either as ‘frontstage’ or ‘backstage’ domains, enable the display of a wider range of feelings than elsewhere in the prison. Their existence represents a challenge to depictions of prisons as environments that are unwaveringly sterile, unfailingly aggressive or emotionally undifferentiated.
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    Expansion in an age of contraction: does prison size matter
    (Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2014) Warr, Jason
    This article is an adaptation of a lecture given at the HM Prison Service's annual Perrie Lectures 2013. The article explores how the Hobbesian notion of diffidence can infest and impact on large prison environments, staff responses to a prison and toxic behaviours amongst prison staff. The article also offers a critique of the extant 'Titan' and economies of scale ideology that is dictating the investment into increasingly larger prisons despite all the evidence highlighting the dangers of such prisons.
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    Forensic Psychologists
    (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020-11-23) Warr, Jason
    This book explores how forensic psychology has come to inhabit a central unifying discursive presence in the life world of modern carceral institutions. Providing a sociological and qualitative account of forensic practitioner psychologists, the author looks both in, and alongside, the work of such practitioners to explore how they simultaneously occupy positions of power and vulnerability. Focusing not only on how practitioners themselves come to embody a pervasive system of disciplinary expertise, but also on how they experience other forms of penal control, the book offers a novel and complete exploration of forensic psychology, the modern prison, and power. This is an accessible text for prison practitioners, criminological and sociological researchers and forensic psychologists on the nature and reality of forensic psychological practice in the contemporary prisons of England and Wales.
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    An Introduction to Criminological Theory and the Problem of Causation
    (Palgrave Pivot, 2017-02) Warr, Jason
    This text offers a novel contribution to the literature on core criminological theory by introducing the complex issues relating to the structuring and analysing of causation. This text traces the paradigm shift, or drift, that has occurred in the history of criminology and shows how the problem of causation has been a leading factor in these theoretical developments. This short book is the first of its kind and is an introductory text designed to introduce both seasoned criminologists as well as students of criminology to the interesting intersections between the fields of criminology and the philosophy of the social sciences. The problem of causation is notoriously difficult and has plagued philosophers and scientists for centuries. Warr highlights the importance of grappling with this problem and demonstrates how it can lead to unsuccessful theorising and can prevent students from fully appreciating the development of thinking in criminology. This accessible account will prove to be a must-read for scholars of criminal justice, penology and philosophy of social science.
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    The Prisoner: Inside and Out
    (Routledge, 2016) Warr, Jason
    The prison is a peculiarly abstracted space which inhabits society's collective conscience. Yet without first-hand experience the information that society receives about prison, its practices and effects are beset by agenda and value-laden media representations as well as political rhetoric which rarely, if ever, corresponds to the reality of prisoner’s lived experiences . This chapter aims to redress this dissonance by explicating how imprisonment can affect the individual psychologically, emotionally and physically throughout their carceral life and beyond. The purpose here is to move the discussion on the pains of imprisonment beyond the focal point of the prison, and to explore how these pains may be generated before entrance to the institution, as well as how they may pertain beyond the physical boundaries of the walls. This chapter is informed by both my own history as an academic and as a former prisoner as well as work conducted on behalf of a third sector organisation during a number of projects based in various prisons and with former prisoners in the community
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    Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control
    (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021-02) Herrity, Kate; Schmidt, Bethany; Warr, Jason
    Sensory Penalities reflects an explosion in explorations of the sensory and disrupts conventional expectations of both form and focus by expanding anthropological practices and craft into the field of criminology and criminological research. In providing accounts of physical/sensorial experiences within sites of surveillance and control, the authors in this edited collection bring elements of research experiences (often absent from existing work) to the fore; the impressions and sensual experiences which remain forever in field notes. In so doing they carve out spaces to consider these places and the ways in which they are theorised anew. The book aims to explore what sensory aspects of experience mean to those engaged in such research, and how they can shape our criminological thinking. What are the sensory textures of these experiences? What do they tell us? How do we communicate them? Finally, what does consideration of these elements tell us about penality? This timely volume challenges and remakes assumptions about what criminology is and should be; more accurately reflecting the post-disciplinary nature of the field.
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    Transformative dialogues (re)privileging the informal in prison education
    (Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2016-05) Warr, Jason
    Prime Minister David Cameron noted in his speech about prison reform that education in prison should be something that it is given priority in terms of penal and rehabilitative practice. Whether or not this welcome rhetoric results in effective change in practice remains to be seen. Nevertheless, in order for education in prison to be effective there are a number of issues that need to be acknowledge and addressed. As such this paper will argue that the delivery of education in prison, beyond the basic provision of Numeracy and Literacy levels 1 and 2, is desirable, essential and necessary. However, I will also argue that in order for prison education to work efficiently and to serve the interests of the prisoners, the institution and the wider public we need to move away from the current disciplinary practices and ideologies that exist within prison education and instead re-privilege those skills that arise when learning occurs for learning’s sake