The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations among Prisoners

267 Pages·2013·0.79 MB·English

by  Coretta Phillips

THE MULTICULTURAL PRISON
CLARENDON STUDIES IN CRIMINOLOGY
Published under the auspices of the Institute of Criminology,
University of Cambridge; the Mannheim Centre, London School
of Economics; and the Centre for Criminological Research,
University of Oxford.
General Editor: Lucia Zedner
( University of Oxford )
EDITORS: MANUEL EISNER, ALISON LIEBLING, AND
PER-OLOF WIKSTRÖM
( University of Cambridge )
ROBERT REINER, JILL PEAY, AND TIM NEWBURN
( London School of Economics )
IAN LOADER AND JULIAN ROBERTS
( University of Oxford )
RECENT TITLES IN THIS SERIES:
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Wikström, Oberwittler, Treiber, and Hardie
Tough Choices: Risk, Security, and the Criminalization of Drug Policy
Seddon, Williams, and Ralphs
Discovery of Hidden Crime: Self-Report Delinquency Surveys in
Criminal Policy Context
Kivivuori
Serious Offenders: A Historical Study of Habitual Criminals
Godfrey, Cox, and Farrall
Penal Abolitionism
Ruggiero
The Multicultural
Prison
Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social
Relations among Prisoners
C ORETTA P HILLIPS

1
1

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First Edition published in 2012
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General Editor’s Introduction
Clarendon Studies in Criminology aims to provide a forum for out-
standing empirical and theoretical work in all aspects of criminol-
ogy and criminal justice, broadly understood. The Editors welcome
submissions from established scholars, as well as excellent PhD
work. The Series was inaugurated in 1994, with Roger Hood as its
fi rst General Editor, following discussions between Oxford Univer-
sity Press and three criminology centres. It is edited under the aus-
pices of these three centres: the Cambridge Institute of Criminology,
the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of
Economics, and the Centre for Criminology at the University of
Oxford. Each supplies members of the Editorial Board and, in turn,
the S eries General Editor.
The Multicultural Prison revisits the theoretical models devel-
oped in classic writings on the sociology of prisons in the USA in the
light of major changes in the life of the prison and transformations
in racial politics. It opens with a fascinating analysis that draws
together the infl uence of globalization, migration, and racial poli-
tics on the political economy of modern punishment. It then builds
on the best traditions of prison ethnography to address the daily
negotiation of race, culture, and masculinity in prison. T he Multi-
cultural Prison answers challenging questions about the interior
life of the prison. Its major contribution is to explore and expose
the racial and political dynamics of prison life.
A fi ne, disarmingly honest, and highly revealing methodological
chapter—which should be compulsory reading for all those con-
templating doing research in prisons—precedes three chapters that
describe and analyse the resulting data. These explore the internal
dynamics of prisoner society and address, in particular, the role of
racial identities in social relations within prison. The fi ndings derive
from detailed observation and extended interviews with prisoners
in two selected prisons undertaken by Coretta Phillips and research-
er Rod Earle. The material presented in these chapters is rich,
informative, and thought-provoking. It throws new light on pris-
oner identity, faith, and cultural practices, on inmate relations
vi General Editor’s Introduction
within prison, on the exercise of power, and the ways in which
inmates evolve adaptive strategies. In so doing it makes a substan-
tial contribution to our understanding of inmates’ experiences of
prison life and the ways in which ethnicity, culture, religion, and
masculinity inform and affect inmates’ interactions with one
another and their ability to cope with the pains of imprisonment.
The ever present menaces of violence and racism, vividly evidenced
in the interview material and researcher observations, paints an
upsetting picture of social relations that stands in tension with the
vibrant multiculturalism, which is also shown to be a feature of
prison life.
Coretta Phillips has a well-established and well-deserved reputa-
tion for her work in the fi eld. She has published widely, especially in
the fi eld of ethnicity, race, and criminal justice. In addition to her
extensive research and publications, she has long experience work-
ing within the Home Offi ce as a researcher. She has also acted as
consultant to the United Nations, the Home Offi ce, Her Majesty’s
Prison Service, and as a member of the National Offender Manage-
ment Service (NOMS) Independent Equalities Advisory Group.
Her fi rst-hand knowledge and practical experience combines with
an evident talent for ethnography that has resulted in a sensitive
and genuinely illuminating analysis.
This welcome addition to the Clarendon Studies in Criminology
Series fi lls a signifi cant gap in ethnographic studies of prison life
and, as such, it is an important contribution to criminological
knowledge. It will be of interest to criminology, law, and social
policy students at undergraduate and postgraduate level, to prisons
scholars and to those working within the prison service or on issues
of race and ethnicity in the criminal justice system more generally.
The Editors welcome this new addition to the S eries , not least
because it exemplifi es the ambitious mix of theoretical and empiri-
cal work for which the S eries was originally founded.
Lucia Zedner
University of Oxford
September 2012
Preface
The topics researchers choose to study are almost always a ‘combin-
ation of personal factors, disciplinary culture, and external forces
in the broader political, social and economic climate’ (D avies 1999 :
27; R einer 1998 ). This was certainly true in my case and explains
well the genesis of the study on which this book is based. I had long
been interested in understanding how the contemporary complexi-
ties of multiculture play out. Intellectually, my engagement with the
discipline of social policy has always been more than a fl irtation
and I have remained wedded to the discipline’s principal concerns
of inequality and social justice, particularly with regard to race and
class. Yet my professional interests have been dominated by crim-
inological concerns in the fi eld of ethnicity, race, and criminal
justice. This study represents a coalescing of these interests in an
examination of race, multiculture, and inequality in the social
world of the prison.
Political debates have skirted the issues of race for many years
but the prevailing political climate in England and Wales in the fi rst
decade of the 21st century has been far more attuned to questions
of race and racism than any other in my lifetime. The political
watershed was, of course, the Macpherson Report (1999) follow-
ing the public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police Service’s failed
investigation of the racist murder of black teenager Stephen
Lawrence in 1993. This brought a receptiveness to hearing about
and challenging racism and religious discrimination in British soci-
ety. In the prison the shocking racist murder of Zahid Mubarek by
his white cell-mate Robert Stewart in Feltham Young Offenders’
Institution in 2000 marked a fundamental shift towards main-
streaming race equality. The ensuing years have seen a self-critical
inspection of the dynamics of race (and less so, faith) in prisons and
other criminal justice institutions. The progressive changes in legis-
lation through the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 and later
the Equalities Act 2010 cemented a range of protections in prisons
as well as other public bodies, providing mechanisms for ensuring
action against discrimination, victimization, and harassment.
viii Preface
At the same time there has been a faltering in the progress towards
equality, as Britain has faced the implications of the racialized
disturbances in several Northern towns in 2001, the horrifi c 9/11
and 7/7 bombings, and most recently the summer riots in England
in summer 2011. These events have prompted a familiar yet unre-
solved colloquy about minority ethnic criminality, police-minority
ethnic relations, and racism in the criminal justice system, but also,
particularly with regard to the terrorist attacks by British Muslims,
the meaning and nature of Britishness. Under the spotlight are issues
of culture, heritage, national belonging, and community cohesion,
coupled with fears of disunity, segregation, and exclusion. The
nature of integration, or lack thereof, and the challenges of multicul-
ture also rear their heads in a variety of cultural domains from celeb-
rity TV shows1 to national sporting events. At the time of writing,
two incidents involving alleged racism in football have raised some
interesting questions about the limits of multiculture in British soci-
ety, amidst a perceptible climate of fear about the terms of racism in
the 21st century. This is not without irony given that this is the year
of the Olympic Games in London, and Britain’s successful bid to
host the games was at least partly on the back of ‘an image of vibran-
cy based on harmonious multicultural diversity’ ( Falcous and Silk
2010 : 170). Whether we look to England player and Chelsea foot-
ball club captain, John Terry, who has been charged with the racist
abuse of a black footballer, Anton Ferdinand, under section 28 of
the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, or to the angry reaction of the
Scottish Football Association to claims of racist abuse by Brazilian
soccer striker Neymar in March 2011, it is abundantly clear that the
stakes of race are high indeed. 2 Both Terry, who has vowed to clear
his name, and the reaction of the Scottish FA Chairman to being
wrongly accused of having racist fans, highlights how being identi-
fi ed as a racist is something to be staunchly defended against; it no
longer holds any positive purchase in British social life.
1 The BBC, for example, received complaints after press reports that S trictly
Come Dancing’s professional dancer Anton Du Beke had called his celebrity dance
partner Laila Rouass a ‘Paki’ in an off-air exchange. The show’s compère and
national treasure, Bruce Forsyth, contributed to the furore by rejecting such com-
plaints as humourless.
2 Terry stands accused of calling opponent Anton Ferdinand, a ‘fucking black
cunt’ in October 2011. Neymar cited a banana being thrown onto the pitch amidst
racial chants from Scottish fans during a match with Brazil; a Metropolitan Police
investigation found a German student to blame for the banana-throwing.
Preface ix
Collectively such issues strike at the heart of what it means to be
a multicultural society in Britain in the 21st century. Fortuitously, I
was able to explore these cross-disciplinary issues through the Eco-
nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded I dentities and
Social Action research programme (2004–9) with an exclusive
focus on a peculiar multicultural society—the late modern prison.
As such, the book provides a lens through which to say something
about the ‘country’s racial temperature’ (G ilroy 2 004 : ix), in the
context of the continued overrepresentation of minority ethnic
individuals in the prison populations of England and Wales.
Elsewhere Rod Earle and I have argued that race, class, and gen-
der always matter in prison (P hillips and Earle 2 010 ), but this, of
course, does not mean it is the most pressing issue facing prisons in
the second decade of the 21st century. Other scholars have bril-
liantly illuminated critical concerns such as legitimacy, the old and
new pains of imprisonment, overcrowding, and issues of human
rights in prison. Perhaps disappointingly for some readers, that is
not what this book is about and it only touches on these issues at
the periphery.
Instead, the book begins in C hapter 1 by exploring the political
economy of punishment and its racialized dimensions, historically
and in the contemporary period. It establishes the context of dispro-
portionality in prison populations based on class, gender, and race.
The role of globalizing forces of production, consumption, and
migration, on the nationality profi le of Western prisons and the
symbolic politics of racialized incarceration are also discussed.
Moving from the macro level to the meso level, this chapter ends
with an examination of the institutional environment of the prison.
This dissects and ultimately rejects the tendency to extrapolate from
the racial dystopia of US imprisonment but holds on to an engage-
ment with the sociological models of prisoner identities and social
relations originally formulated there. It situates this discussion
within a sociological literature (with a hint of cultural studies) ana-
lysing the complex and shifting dynamics of race and ethnicity from
modernity to late modernity in Europe. Chapter 2 also charts the
development of ‘race relations’ policies in the prisons of England
and Wales from the 1980s to their reconstitution as race equality
and diversity policies in the 2000s. The backdrop to these changes
has been the political and civic recognition of, and the claims-making
by, minority ethnic groups. Chapter 3 outlines the mechanics of
how the study was conducted in HM Rochester Young Offenders’