book review - power, discourse and resistance

http://crj.sagepub.comCriminology and Criminal Justice

DOI: 10.1177/146680250600600109 2006; 6; 150 Criminology and Criminal Justice

Rod Morgan Strangeways Prison Riot

Book Review: Power, Discourse and Resistance: A Genealogy of the

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Eamonn CarrabinePower, Discourse and Resistance: A Genealogy of the Strangeways PrisonRiotAldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 217 pp. 50.00 ISBN 0754621723 (hbk)

Reviewed by Rod Morgan, Chair, Youth Justice Board, UK

The opening chapters of Eamonn Carrabiness monograph, on prison dis-content and prison sociology and social theory, are well done, concise,stimulating, innovative and incisive. He draws together the work of Foucault,Laclau and Giddens and gets to grips with such prison classics as Jacobs(1977) study of Stateville in the USA and the more recent work of Sparks et al.(1996) in the UK. He brings a new voice to what is arguably a rather tired,social policy terrain, old penal campaigners mostly having retreated from thefield, exhausted and disillusioned by what is being termed the stubbornlypersistent prison (Emsley, 2005).

Yet when one has got to grips with Carrabines approach and settled forwhat he terms the genealogical discourse analytic methodwhich, at bottom,means dissecting how participants interpret the course of events at the timethey happenthe core question is whether he sheds any additional light on theevents at HM Prison Manchester in April 1990. Though the contemporarystudent of prison history will likely find this study a helpful alternative towading through the 598 un-indexed pages of the 1991 Woolf Inquiry Report,and the small cluster of Strangeways-related publications that followed in itswake, my conclusion is that he does not. This has something to do with thelimitations of his approach, but probably more to do with the modest scope Isuspect he had for putting it into operation for this text has a strong whiff ofdoctoral dissertation midnight oil about it.

In April 1990 Strangeways Prison, then and now the largest in the UK,erupted and nightly held millions of TV viewers mesmerized, while the prisonauthorities pondered what to do with the rioters who paraded on its wreckedroof. Such were the shock waves that rippled through the body politic andpenal systemincluding major disturbances at five other prisonsthat ajudicial inquiry was appointed. The report of that Inquiry could have focusedquite narrowly on security issues but Woolf chose a wider view, whichCarrabine claims now to extend.

I do not think he succeeds. His discourse method places undue reliance onvery few interviews with persons some of whom, in the light of subsequentevents, are keen to re-interpret the past in the light of the part they played in it.Further, Carrabines few quarrels with Woolfs analysis stem principally fromdifferent mandates: Woolf sought to understand, in order to prevent, whereasCarrabine has no such responsibility. Thus, for example, his discussion of howsenior Strangeways officers did or did not respond to warnings from prisonersthat something was about to go off, is ultimately unilluminating. He wants torestore some of their inactions to their social and cultural context where such

Criminology & Criminal Justice 6(1)150


warnings were not unusual. Which is not, he agrees, to deny that individualsmake mistakes. But, he argues, decisions that, retrospectively, are viewed ascalamitous errors of judgement become less so when . . . restored to the worldview of the actor (p. 143). Fine. But this, I am afraid, says everything. WhatCarrabine finds genealogically interesting is in fact the product of high-riskconditioning, which for prison managers is critical.

Carrabine is not unaware of the various traps into which his informants leadhim. For example, given that Strangeways was supremely rated an officersnick, his reliance on aged informers, prisoners and staff, results in far too muchprominence being given to stories of governing governors and the differencesbetween them. Carrabine anticipates the obvious critique. I do not wish toadvocate a Great Man version of historical change nor imply a strictly topdown understanding of power (p. 116). But that, I am afraid, is the analyticterritory into which he none the less strays. All of which renders his twodimensional discourse matrix: 19651990 (p. 102) less than persuasive.

Finally, there is the problem as to how wide should be the analytic contextin which prison disorders are set. Carrabine adopts a commendably wide penalframe. He focuses on the relationship between the ends which imprisonmentostensibly serve, the means adopted for achieving those ends and the prevailingdiscourses which characterize their conjunction. His discussion is valuable. Butnowhere in his account is there reference to the fact that on the day precedingthat on which Strangeways kicked off, there took place in London a mo-mentous, explosive riot against the poll-tax. The rioting prisoners that Iinterviewed as part of the Woolf Inquiry in the weeks after the prison wasretaken had all listened to their radios and knew that riot was in the air as didtheir fellow prisoners in the very different institutions that followed theStrangeways precedent. But Carrabines informants apparently forgot theseconjunctions. Strangeways, I think, was about penal means, ends and dis-courses but also something more.

References

Emsley, C. (ed.) (2005) The Persistent Prison: Problems, Images and Alter-natives. London: Francis Boutle.

Jacobs, J. (1977) Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society. Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press.

Sparks, R., A.E. Bottoms and W. Hay (1996) Prisons and the Problem ofOrder. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Woolf, Lord Justice (1991) Prison Disturbances April 1990: Report of anInquiry by the Rt Hon Lord Justice Woolf (Parts I and II) and His HonourJudge Stephen Tumim (Part II). Cm. 1456. London: HMSO.

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