TY - JOUR
AU - Earle, Rod
AB - In prison studies, ‘depth’, ‘tightness’ and ‘weight’ are terms that are now frequently deployed to account for the stagnant pressures and cruel stupors that characterize prison life (Crewe 2011). They are suggestive of life deep underwater and the cover image of Sensory Penalties succeeds in evoking the swirling waters of immersion in a penal darkness. What this book asks of readers and researchers is to discard some of their faith in the conventional exploratory armour of social science, it’s methodological aqualungs, face masks, wet suits and oxygen tanks that are donned to plumb the penal depths so that, in doing so, they might encounter the tightness, sense the weights and feel the spaces of punishment more as the free-diver does the water and it’s currents. The words that greet the reader on the first page of the book convey the real threats of such an approach: in prison ‘The air itself can become punitive … can be an agent of slow violence’. Alison Leibling’s (p. xv) Foreword quotes this observation from elsewhere in the volume (from Jewkes and Young’s Chapter 11) to set the scene for ‘a sensory journey—through Tunisia, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, North America, Scotland and … England’. This gives an indication of the global reach of the collection’s 14 chapters and Leibling’s liberal use of theologian Rowan Williams in the Foreword provides insights into some of its humanistic concerns. My own preference is for Raymond Williams’ (1961) gentle Marxism that looked for ‘new ways of thinking and feeling … and the vital imaginative life’ that would be adequate to challenges of the modern world and capable of securing it a better future. I mention this distinction because of the book’s ambition to drag criminology to its senses, ‘to invigorate a conversation about the role of sensory experience in the production of knowledge’ (Eds, p. xxi), a conversation that criminology has largely been missing from. The editors wisely point to the heritage and legitimacy of this conversation in other disciplines and make their case with the urgency it deserves. Punishments are better at hurting than repairing and this ‘inherent sensory component’ (Eds, p. xxiii) of penality has receded, they argue, as the discipline has flourished. Calling, in their Introduction, for a ‘sensory turn’ in criminology, they welcome the contributions of Brown and Carrabine (2019), among others, who also recognize the value of such a turn for criminology. They are in good company. In social theory and philosophy, Achille Mbembe’s increasingly essential work (p. 86/7) exposes how ‘technologies of destruction have become more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial’. Mbembe’s (2019) analysis of ‘necropolitics’ is central to the kinds of conversation this book is trying to open and it was refreshing to see Jason Warr’s chapter bringing Mbembe’s work to the table. I confess to being present at the 2018 conference panel in Sarajevo where Warr presented a paper on his feelings of trappedness as he was roused from a drowsy cell torpor by the smell of smoke. A fire in the prison is spreading. Say no more, you might say, as the nightmare fictions bubble toward you. But his experience is real. He lived through it. Now he tells it again, his chapter capturing the revelatory power of a presentation that offered new ways of making sense and propelled the editors toward this collection of like-minded analysis. Warr reports his experience by insisting on a deeper appreciation of its meaning, for himself and others who encounter directly or indirectly some of the hidden injuries of imprisonment. In sharp contrast, if I said I laughed out loud when I started reading Victoria Canning’s chapter, Sensing and Unease in Immigration Confinement: An Abolitionist’s Perspective, I hope she would not be offended. Out of the darkest of research experiences, she clasps and shares moments of humour. In doing so she emulates the survival skills of people trapped at borders woven around the planet by white nations and colonial powers. Her resistance to the conventional abstractions of academic conduct produce an activist alliance that refuses to ‘other’ and insists on feeling fellowship. The legal nets dragged along borders are careless of the human suffering they generate among the people detained at the nation’s edges, but Canning invests in their stories, relates to their experiences and develops solidarity through her scholarship. All is not lost while such conversations are possible. The editors have compiled a rich collection of diverse authors and divide the contributions into four sections: ‘Making Sense of the Sensory’, ‘Sensing the Field’, ‘Subverting the Senses’ and ‘Sensory Reflections’. A short review such as this cannot do justice to the range of innovative and creative scholarship in this relatively slim but expansive book. How and why, e.g., does Ian O’Donnell (Chapter 13) have English premiership football results reported to him by men imprisoned in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Regional State of Ethiopia? What does Herrity (Chapter 1) hear in the common carnal features of prison work and pub work? I was surprised that my preferences for Raymond Williams are shared by only one contributor, Ali Fraser (Chapter 14), whose ethnographically rich descriptions of youthful street freedoms and predicaments build persuasively across a wide range of theoretical sources. In a book whose contributors draw from an astonishing range of scholars, it may seem churlish to rue the relative neglect of Raymond Williams. Although he writes of the past and from the past, his approach has much to offer the future of Sensory Penalties. If the sensory turn has ‘the most potential to challenge deep seated epistemological assumptions’ (Carrabine, p. 231), it will need to engage with the dilemmas of articulating the ‘structures of feeling’ that so often lie just out of reach, out of sight, sensed but obscure and definingly present. Raymond Williams’ helpful, but incomplete, characterization of these elusive features of society as ‘dominant’, ‘emergent’ or ‘residual’ might challenge the growing sensory penalities community represented in this collection to historicize its ‘culturalist’ (see Hall 1980/2021) interests and methods, consolidate its presence and offer a new vocabulary to account for our dependency on the pains of imprisonment. Take a deep breath, these editors invite, keep a thin skin and jump in. REFERENCES Brown , M. & Carrabine , E. ( 2019 ) ‘The critical foundations of visual criminology: The State, crisis and the sensory’ , Critical Criminology 27 , 191 – 205 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Crewe , B . ( 2011 ) ‘Depth, weight, tightness: revisiting the pains of imprisonment’ Punishment and Society 13 ( 5 ), 509 – 29 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Hall , S ( 1980/2021 ) ‘In Defence of Theory’ in McLennan , G. (ed) Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Marxism , London . Duke University Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Mbembe , A . ( 2019 ) Necropolitics. London : Duke University Press Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Williams , R . ( 1961 ) The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth : Penguin . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Sensory Penalties: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control. By Kate Herrity, Bethany E. Schmidt and Jason Warr (Emerald, 2021, 296pp., £70.00 Hbk)
JO - The British Journal of Criminology
DO - 10.1093/bjc/azab082
DA - 2021-08-21
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/sensory-penalties-exploring-the-senses-in-spaces-of-punishment-and-2CHuXKVHaK
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -