Welcome Blog
Welcome to the COMPEN Blog
Welcome to the website for the COMPEN research programme, a five-year project funded by the European Research Council, whose full title is: ‘Penal policymaking and the prisoner experience: a comparative analysis’.
Julie Laursen Blog 1
The case of the missing keys
We are currently doing large amounts of fieldwork in prisons in England & Wales and in Norway and we carry keys in all prisons - a privilege and a source of quite a lot of anxiety for me. In England & Wales, we sit through long key-talks, demonstrate our ability to securely open and lock gates in front of staff, and are thoroughly advised on how to carry the keys.
Alice Ievins Blog 1
Tropes
For those of us who spend a lot of time in prison, there will be certain phrases which are so familiar that we almost stop listening to them. ‘In here, the best way to do your time is to keep your head down.’ ‘The officers are only like that because they were bullied at school.’ ‘The best thing about this job is the camaraderie.’ ‘I treat them with respect, and they treat me with respect.’
Anna Schliehe Blog 1
Carceral mobility
Carceral mobility and analysis of what this means for individual prisoners is a topic that I have long been interested in from both a geographical and sociological point of view. Doing most of my fieldwork in England & Wales, prison mobilities have mostly carried connotations of restrictive regimes, questioning small-scale movements and possible agency within that.
Ben Crewe Blog 1
Condiments and comparisons
Many prisons in Norway have communal dining areas, in a way that relatively few prisons do in England & Wales. We were in one of these dining areas recently, in Bjørgvin prison, on the West coast of Norway, giving out surveys to a small group of prisoners.
Kristian Mjåland Blog 1
The sound of prison
In this research project, we are comparing imprisonment in a country I know well, Norway, and countries I know less well, England & Wales. To explore the same issues in both familiar and unfamiliar contexts is one of the many advantages of comparative research like this: the unfamiliarity makes you reflect on aspects that you otherwise would have taken for granted, or simply not recognized.
Anna Schliehe Blog 2
Missing people and the pains of entry in the UK
When researching entry into and release from custody in prisons in England over the last 10 months, one aspect of entry into custody surfaced in many interviews, and that is how people in police custody become 'missing people'.
Anna Eriksson Blog
Designing dangerousness: Interviewing prisoners in Norway and Australia
I am sitting on the couch, my back to the window and the coffee table between me and the person I am interviewing. He’s sitting opposite me on a chair, his back to the door and effectively blocking the exit. I am sipping a cup of black coffee, the fourth for the day, kindly prepared and given to me by the interviewee. This is Ila prison, a high security prison in Norway that houses some of the most dangerous prisoners in the country.
Julie Laursen Blog 2
When your next of kin is a professional
The entry/exit/post-release sub-study is quite ambitious because we try to interview the same people upon their entry into custody, again just before their release from prison (which are often not the same as they entered) and then post-release from prisons in England & Wales and Norway. This blog post is about interviewees’ contact information and what this tells us about their levels of deprivation prior to, during and after imprisonment.
Alice Ievins Blog 2
SOTP: The view from the inside
In June 2017, the Ministry of Justice published an evaluation of the Core Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP), the main accredited programme provided in English and Welsh prisons for the treatment of men convicted of sex offences. [1] The report – which featured heavily in the Daily Mail and was one of the leading stories on BBC News – found that the programme did not reduce reoffending among sex offenders, and may in fact have increased it.
ESC Conference in Cardiff
Preliminary findings: The research team present papers at this week's ESC Conference in Cardiff
For almost a year, we have been busy doing fieldwork in prisons all over England & Wales and Norway. This week, however, we grant ourselves a pause from fieldwork, and head to the ESC conference in Cardiff to present preliminary findings from our research so far.
Guest Blog by Thomas Ugelvik
Distance from freedom, distance from life
Thomas Ugelvik – University of Oslo, Norway
All prisoners at Kongsvinger are supposed to be either transferred to prisons in their home countries to serve out some proportion of their sentence there, or rearrested at the end of their sentence and deported back to their countries of origin by Norwegian immigration police. Several of the prisoners I had already talked with resisted deportation as best they could.
Ben Crewe Blog 2
Gardening, growth and deep-end confinement
In my book, The Prisoner Society, I noted that the prison ‘was a place of mirth and warmth as well as misery’ (2009: 334). In a number of other publications, I have tried to highlight practices and pockets in prisons that enable forms of hope and humanity. These shards of sunlight can be found even at the terminus of the prison system.
Guest Blog by Keir Irwin-Rogers
Role conflict in Approved Premises and post-prison supervision
In 2013, I spent a period of six months visiting three APs, conducting periods of observation and interviewing residents and members of hostel staff. The research generated a number of interesting findings, one of which concerns a fundamental role conflict that threatens to severely undermine the legitimacy of APs and post-release supervision, particularly in light of current resource pressures.
Saying no by Kristian Mjåland
Saying no
In a much-cited article, Mary Bosworth (2005), together with four of her research participants, asked why prisoners volunteer to be interviewed by researchers. They argue that wanting to help the researcher, being heard, making good, and correcting wrongs are some of the important aspects that motivate prisoners to take part in prison research. These motivations resonate very well with our own experience from interviewing prisoners in England & Wales and Norway.
Guest Blog on Comparative Penology
Methodologies for Comparing Experiences across Diverse Institutions
When scholars hear “comparative penology,” they often think of comparing similarly categorized individuals across different contexts (prisoners in low security prisons with those in medium security prisons with those in high security prisons), or comparing similar institutions across different contexts (deportation regimes in the United States with deportation regimes in the United Kingdom with deportation regimes in Scandinavia, for instance).
Risk and rapport by Alice Ievins
One of the strangest things about prisons research is that even the most intimate conversations can take place in institutions in which very little is private, and they cannot help but be shaped by the priorities of the establishments in which they take place. Take a recent interview I conducted with a man in an English medium-security prison holding men convicted of sex offences.
Translating power, trust and risk
Translating power, trust and risk
Translating all this material has been exciting and challenging work (and let us not even talk about the complicating factor of me being Danish rather than Norwegian), but we have been fortunate enough to have Norwegian and Danish colleagues reading through the translations, and commenting, editing and challenging us. We’re grateful for their help, especially in relation to the three words in particular which have caused us a great deal of difficulty, namely: power, risk and trust.
Guest Blog by Jason Warr
Quid Pro Quo in Prison Research by Jason Warr
I have been, in my time, both a participant in a prison research project and a prison researcher. I have seen both sides of the coin, as it were. I was a participant in Ben Crewe’s research in Wellingborough prison and feature in his book The Prisoner Society. I have also participated in other research projects as a prisoner, as a student, and as a researcher.
Negotiation of geographies of power
Inventive techniques in the negotiation of geographies of power
Spending time in a medium-security prison holding mostly long-term prisoners convicted of sex offences recently, I heard many stories of the complicated nature of staff-prisoner relationships and the strategies employed by prisoners to negotiate every-day mobilities within the prison.
Guest Blog by Francis Pakes
Speaking freely: use of a shared native language in a prison setting
There are some 2,600 Dutch nationals held in foreign prisons (Hofstee-Van der Meulen, 2015). Many of these are Dutch native speakers, as I am. During my prisons visits which I have undertaken in numerous countries, I sometimes meet a Dutch prisoner. When this happens, an interesting dynamic unfolds that relies on both of us speaking a different language to others.
Guest Blog by Gareth Evans
How can he sleep after what he has done?
“He must be knackered to just fall asleep like that.”
“People, if that is what he is, like that don’t care about what they do. They’d sleep as well as we would after a nice workout in the gym”
Two custody officers do the rounds in a dingy police cell ‘suite’. On the night that I’m arrested they chat as if they’re privy to an exclusive soap opera and never give a thought to the fact that they’re part of this nightmare. They are extras in a twisted biopic that very few people will see and even less will understand.
Guest Blog by Professor Yvonne Jewkes
Normal or nurturing: what should prison designers aspire to?
The word ‘normalisation’ has become ubiquitous in discussions of prison reform. At the recent annual conference of the International Corrections and Prisons Association (ICPA) – a six-day gathering attended largely by managers from the private and public sectors, prison planners, architects and (on this occasion, as it was held in London) senior personnel from HMPPS – it seemed that hardly a paper was given without grand claims being made about custodial environments becoming more ‘normalised’ and therefore, it was said, more likely to rehabilitate offenders.
Guest Blog by Liam Martin
Prisonization and the Problems of Reentry
At the halfway house where I lived as an ethnographer, Ty Kelley often slept on a couch in the TV room. It seemed a strange place to rest: a large archway made him visible from the dining area and kitchen, and other residents often grumbled at the public sight of his sleeping body. In an interview, I asked Ty why he did not sleep in his bedroom.
Guest Blog by Kate Herrity
The prison at night
Unaccustomed to being reliant on staff to let me on and off the wing, I was reminded of my disadvantage with every jangle-free step. I’d been at HMP Midtown since February. Now at the tail end of a sticky August, I had grown accustomed to the familiar din of the men, animated in greetings from the landings, conducting business in corners, engaging in daily life or dawdling and dragging their feet in efforts to avoid it.
Guest Blog by Ryan Williams
Trompe l’oeil (‘trick of the eye’)
How does imprisonment problematize the self? What practices, forms, and techniques do people use to better themselves? To what ends, and with what challenges, do people strive towards some vision of the ‘good’? Whilst serving time in prison, people ask the questions of philosophers and theologians around how they can live virtuous lives – to be better fathers, to live right and well with others, to struggle and strive to ‘make good’
Guest Blog by John Todd
When penal populism meets Scandinavian exceptionalism
Scandinavian countries, and perhaps in particular Norway, have often been highlighted as a redoubt against the rise of penal populism in other parts of Europe and the United States. Of course, the nature and trajectory of this exceptionalism has been debated, including here on this blog. Even ‘celebrity prisons’ like Halden and Bastøy can be painful places to serve a prison sentence. But, as the COMPEN research programme is investigating, the contours of the penal field in Norway are unusual.
Guest Blog by Victor Shammas
The slow erosion of Scandinavian social democracy
There are three central narratives about Scandinavia today. First, there’s the story about Nordic penal exceptionalism, which is familiar to sociologists of punishment: prisons in countries like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are small and humane, crime rates are low – and the incarceration rate even lower.
Guest Blog by Ben Laws
Loitering with intent: shadowing male and female prisoners is a methodological mixed bag
As part of my research on emotions in prison in HMP Send and HMP Ranby, I decided to shadow my participants around the prison for a day. After the shadowing, I interviewed each participant in some detail. My decision to shadow, or ‘loiter with intent’, resulted in a mixture of feelings: it was sometimes boring, but also surprising, sometimes awkward but typically comfortable, it raised ethical quandaries and revealed a few moments of genuine illumination.
Guest Blog by Ann-Karina Henriksen
”Will it matter what you say?” – reflections on what motivates interviewees to participate in research
A year ago I was engaged in fieldwork in Danish secure institutions. On and off during a year I spent a few days in different secure care units, where I participated in everyday life and interviewed staff and young people about gendered practices and experiences of being confined.
Guest Blog on Challenging life imprisonment
Challenging life imprisonment by Catherine Appleton and Dirk van Zyl Smit
Life imprisonment is a harsh sanction that gives the state the power to imprison individuals for the remainder of their lives. It is a punishment used in many countries, yet very little is known about how it is imposed and implemented across different jurisdictions.
Guest Blog by Vanessa Barker
Penal Nationalism
Our social world is being rapidly transformed by one of the most powerful forces sweeping across affluent societies in response to globalization and mass mobility: nationalism. Resurgent nationalism has the power to disrupt conventional right/left politics to place national interests, national sovereignty, nationalized resources, and national identity above all else.
Guest blog by Berit Johnsen
Nordic exceptionalism and politics
Over the last decade or so, there has been increasing interest in Norwegian prisons among academics, journalists, prison staff and others from all over the world. John Pratt’s two articles on Scandinavian or Nordic Exceptionalism in the British Journal of Criminology (2008) and Michael Moore’s documentary programs from Bastøy and Halden prisons have been central to this interest.
Guest Blog by Guy Hamilton-Smith
Oscar Wilde, writing from his cell in the Reading Gaol where he was imprisoned for homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century, observed that "society reserves for itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.”
Does work stress change personalities?
Does work stress change personalities? Working in prison as a personality-changing factor among correctional officers
By Nina Suliman and Tomer Einat
Studies focusing on prison staff in general and correctional officers in particular reveal a link between the working environment in prison and stress and burnout. These factors are linked to correctional officers’ physical and mental health, rates of absenteeism and intention to quit, and attitudes toward the workplace.
Life after Death?
Life after Death?
What thoughts do these words invoke within our minds? Many may perceive them in a spiritual sense - a hope that there is something more to come; a hope maybe, of a resurrection or reincarnation, after our corporeal journey has ended.
For me, as an ex-offender of maybe the most feared and stigmatised kind, they mean something different in many ways. I believe there are ways to die that are not physical in nature, although I sincerely hope and pray that both victims and offenders can find ways to carry on living.
Autonomy in prison: So close?...Yet so far
Autonomy in prison: So close?...Yet so far
By Annie Bunce
For my PhD research, I have qualitatively explored prisoners’ motivations to participate in an innovative programme that brought together young people (aged 13-17) at risk of, or already involved in, criminal activity with serving prisoners within the prison estate.
Look to Norway?
Look to Norway? Well …
The Norwegian Correctional Service has been highly reputed for its well-equipped prisons and well-educated prison officers with good opportunities for rehabilitation work. Now there is a new political order. For several years, there has been a drive to cut costs and maximise efficiencies. This year’s budget claims that six lower security prisons are to be closed down – and replaced by Electronic Monitoring (EM). We want to point at two serious consequences following these budget cuts...
Loneliness by Julie Laursen
Loneliness
By Julie Laursen
Loneliness has emerged as a consistent and pressing theme in both jurisdictions and in all of the sub-studies in the COMPEN project. We have not deliberately probed interviewees to talk about loneliness, but some have talked at great length about feeling socially isolated, alone, and unable to connect or reconnect with friends and family...
Bad men by Kristian Mjåland
Bad men
By Kristian Mjåland
Coming towards the end of a 7-months long ethnographic fieldwork in a Norwegian women’s prison, I would like to reflect on what this piece of research has taught me about being a male researcher. The women I met and interviewed during these months had highly varied backgrounds and experienced their time in this prison in very different ways. One of the things the women in this prison had in common, however, was bad experiences with men.
Thinking through water
Thinking through water – elemental metaphors in carceral environments
By Anna Schliehe
The connection between water and prisons is by no means straightforward, and even my own COMPEN colleagues have asked me what I could possibly say about this subject. However, over the course of our fieldwork in England & Wales and Norway, many associations with water have arisen from the interviews and informal conversations we have had with prisoners and staff. Reading Jen Turner and Dominique Moran’s recent paper, titled Careful Control: the infrastructure of water in carceral space (2018), has inspired me to collect some of our own material on water in carceral environments.
Why Does Prison Social Order Vary Around the World?
Why Does Prison Social Order Vary Around the World?
By David Skarbek, Brown University and Courtney Michaluk, R Street
Popular stereotypes often portray prisons in one of two ways: either overcrowded, violent, and chaotic places, like those found in some parts of America, or small, peaceful, and well-organized, like those found in many Nordic countries. It turns out that life behind bars actually differs in many more ways...
The prison trail and the benefits of walking it
The prison trail and the benefits of walking it
By Julie Laursen
‘I’ve gone backwards in my sentence: from E to D, to Y wing to Z wing and finally to X wing’ (Sebastian).
These words and letters are probably difficult to decipher for the reader, and neither would they have made any sense to me two years ago. Thanks to a very large amount of fieldwork in 10 different prisons especially in Norway, but also in England & Wales, I am now better equipped to understand the meaning behind this interviewee’s statement...
Discrimination against women sentenced to prison in Norway is a myth
Discrimination against women sentenced to prison in Norway is a myth
A Google search on the internet for women’s prison conditions in Norway results in more than 7000 Norwegian articles, the majority of them suggesting that conditions in prison are worse for women than men.
By Ragnar Kristoffersen
Exploring the Pains and Possibilities of Waiting for Imprisonment
‘It’s Like a Sentence Before the Sentence’ — Exploring the Pains and Possibilities of Waiting for Imprisonment
‘There is no connection between…you just wander around in a trance, you cannot plan anything, you can’t, time just goes, and you don’t care about a damned thing because there is no point in trying to build anything when you know you’re going to prison anyways’ (Albert, waited 3 years to serve a 10-months sentence).
Coding: An Information Trail without Walking the Prison Trail
Coding: An Information Trail without Walking the Prison Trail
By Sarah Doxat-Pratt
I joined the COMPEN team in February this year, tasked with coding interview data from the Entry-Exit-Post-Release research. The EEPR study involved following the journeys of prisoners through the criminal justice system, interviewing them soon after entry to prison, shortly before release, and in the community a few months after their release. The study aimed to deepen understanding of the experience of prison, but also to focus on the significance of transition moments in and out of prison – and so interviews covered details of the whole sentence, from before the arrest to life post-release. Coding is not the most glamourous aspect of a research project, either to do or to reflect on, but I hope here to provide some reflections from my experiences which will illuminate the process.
Knowing me knowing you: Order and Relationships in an Open Prison in Iceland
By Francis Pakes
There are five prisons in Iceland; two of these are open. In the summer of 2018 I resided for two weeks in these open prisons. I had explained to the prison authorities in Reykjavík that I wanted to assume the role of a quasi-prisoner: I wanted a room, and to eat, sleep and engage in the daily activities that prisoners normally undertook. I have visited many prisons in numerous countries but never experienced a working prison like this, from the inside.
The Comparative Penology Group is led by Dr Ben Crewe and his research team who, since 2016, have been working on a five-year project titled: 'Penal policymaking and the prisoner experience: a comparative analysis'.
