Lies, Distortion and What Doesn't Work Monitoring Prison Stories in The British Media - Paul Mason

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Crime, Media, Culture
DOI: 10.1177/1741659006069558
2006; 2; 251 Crime Media Culture
Paul Mason
media
Lies, distortion and what doesnt work: Monitoring prison stories in the British
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MASON PRISON STORIES IN THE BRITISH MEDIA 251
Lies, distortion and what doesnt work:
Monitoring prison stories in the British media
PAUL MASON, Cardiff University, UK
Abstract
This article argues that the populist and highly punitive penal policy in the UK is promoted
by media discourses around prison. The combination of over-reporting of violent and sexual
crime in the media and ctional constructions of imprisonment has been a highly signicant
factor in the growth of the prison population in late modernity. Providing a discourse
analysis of one months UK media output on prison, it argues that through a discourse
of dangerousness delivered to a fearful public, prison is constructed unproblematically as
a solution to crime, echoing the what works mantra of New Labour. The meaning of
prison, it argues, is shifted from a place of pain delivery to one which treats and trains. The
article further contends that media discourse of the prisoner precludes any rational debate
about alternatives to prison. Media representations of incarceration as an institution full
of murderers, rapists and paedophiles precludes a long overdue debate about prison
suicides, the erosion of prisoners rights and the rising number of women and children
incarcerated.
Key words
abolition; criminal justice; journalism; media; prison
INTRODUCTION
On 9 February 2006, the UKs Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, announced the
governments ve-year strategy to stop reoffending, which included increasing the use of
non-custodial sentences under the Communities Payback Initiative. It was underpinned
by the nal admission, known to most of us for a very long time that (t)he idea that
prison works in stopping reoffending is demonstrably wrong (Today, BBC Radio 4, 9
February 2006). With a prison population at over 77,000 and costing the government
an average of 99,839.20 per prison place since 2000 (Prison Reform Trust, 2005), this
CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2006 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 2(3): 251267 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659006069558]
ARTICLES
252 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(3)
is perhaps no great surprise. Measures which include high-visibility jackets for those
carrying out unpaid work in the community and prisoners to sign a contract pledging
not to reoffend are also a predictable element of the new measures. As the former Chief
Inspector of Prisons, Lord Ramsbottom noted, such a policy is both empty and gimmicky
(Guardian, 2006).
Criminal justice policy in Britain will continue to incarcerate children, women and men,
and remain wedded to the intransient and popular(ist) view that prison still works for
many offences. As Ryan and Sim (2006) point out, the prison has achieved a hegemonic
status that has made it virtually impregnable to sustained ideological and material attack.
Less than three months before the Home Secretarys announcement, Home Ofce Minster,
Fiona McTaggart, expressed bewilderment at the current prison population: we didnt
expect the increase to be as sharp as it was. It is hard to see what the Home Ofce was
expecting as it continued to engage in social control measures amounting to crueller,
more emotive and grandiose acts of punitive display (Garland, 2001) justied by a what
works agenda. The governments latest glossy initiative merely attempts to rebrand this
policy, diverting attention away from what remains populist, cruel and usual punishment.
Much has been written about the shift towards a populist criminal justice policy in
late modern society (Johnstone, 2000; Pratt, 2000; Garland, 2001; Roberts et al., 2002;
Hutton, 2005; Loader, 2005; Ryan, 2006) where media-driven public insecurities about
crime and the criminal are addressed through highly visible, hollow initiatives, and
prisoner pledges are simply the latest. But as I have noted elsewhere (Mason, 2006),
although criminology regularly notes the contribution of the medias intervention in the
rise of populist punitivism,
1
it fails to explore it in any meaningful or systematic way. Only
the work of Thomas Mathiesen (1995, 2000, 2001, 2003) has offered any signicant
thoughts on how media discourses around crime and prison may intervene in the criminal
justice debate, and these, compared to his other work on prison, are relatively brief.
Mathiesen (2003) posits that the nature of public debate around crime and punishment
has altered, no longer predicated upon principled legitimation (p. 3) but driven by political
opportunity. He suggests that media reporting magnies violent and serious crime such
that prison is constructed as the only solution:
In the newspapers, on television, in the whole range of media, the prison is simply
not recognised as a asco, but as a necessary if not always fully successful method
of reaching its purported goals. The prison solution is taken as paradigmatic, so
that a rising crime rate is viewed as still another sign showing that prison is needed.
(Mathiesen, 2000: 144)
There are then two important matters here: the inuence of media discourses of crime
on public attitudes to criminal justice, representations of the penal industrial complex in
particular, and their consequent impact on debates around the aim and role of prison. It is
this latter aspect that I wish to discuss here.
While the media continue to create conditions for the support of the penal system
through over-reporting of violent and sexual crime (Surette, 1998; Reiner et al., 2003),
and representing transgressors of the law as other (Greer and Jewkes, 2005), the
discourse around prison offers an important intervention into the debate about its very
existence (Mason, 2006d). Yet it is more than merely an intervention. It is my contention,
in alignment with Thomas Mathiesen, Nils Christie (2000) and others, that the prison
population is not created by crime but by political decisions inuenced, in part by
inaccurate media (mis)representations and silences. The media construct the prison as
the essential cornerstone of criminal justice, echoing New Labours notion of a working
prison, through its discourses around dangerousness and fear, the perceived soft touch
liberalism of prison regimes and increases in prisoners rights. At the same time media
representations shroud the reality of prison as an instrument of pain delivery and ignore
the collateral damage to prisoners families (Carlen and Worrall, 2004).
I will illustrate my argument through an analysis of media representations of the British
penal estate across one months British media output: October 2005. This forms part of
a much larger media monitoring project of prisons,
2
and presents what Carabine (2001)
has termed a snapshot of the medias treatment of penal issues during that month.
Such an approach offers an exploration of the ways in which prison and prisoners are
constructed socially, culturally and politically at a particular moment. Thus, my aim here is
to exemplify, through a discrete study of media output, how the British media construct
a penal discourse which not only normalizes prison as the solution to crime, but actively
seeks its expansion and increased use
I have used several elements of discourse analysis here, mindful of Iedemas (2001)
contention that such analysis is a socio-political relevance, not some theoretical abstraction
(p. 186). I am examining the media as a discursive and representational practice at a
particular moment, drawing upon Foucaults (1972) notion of discourse as that which
constructs knowledge and meaning. As Hall (1997a) has suggested, discourse governs
the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about (p. 15).
Consequently, meaning is always xed and rexed (Shapiro, 1989) by discursive and
representational practices at particular moments, by what Foucault (1972) termed the
episteme. I have adopted this position to explore how the media produce and contribute
to a discourse of imprisonment through their power to represent prison and the prisoner in
a particular way. In Foucaults terms, the media are a regime of representation, producing
a discourse on imprisonment such that the meaning of prison/ers is limited to that
construction. Thus, while objects exist outside of discourse, it is only through discourse
that knowledge and meaning are produced.
In the printed press analysis, I have also incorporated a critical discourse analysis (CDA)
epistemology (Fairclough, 1992, 1995; Fairclough and Chouliaraki, 1995; Wodak and
Meyer, 2001). CDA is concerned with discursive strategies which legitimize and naturalize
meaning. It seeks to investigate what could be termed the taken for granted perspective of
the world. Specically, this concerns the lexical and linguistic choices made in constructing
prison and the prisoners. As Fowler (1991) explains:
News is a representation of the world in language; because language is a semiotic
code, it imposes a structure of values, social and economic in origin, on whatever is
represented; and so inevitably news, like every discourse, constructively patterns that
of which it speaks. (p. 4)
My sample comprised UK media output for October 2005. This I dened as 19 national
newspapers as listed on the LexisNexis database; television news bulletins from the BBC
Six OClock News, ITN Early Evening News and Channel 4 News; and television drama,
documentary and lm on the nine free-to-air terrestrial channels. Newspaper reports were
gathered using the search terms prison, prisoner, jail, punishment, inmate and
detention. The terms were applied to three Lexis Nexis criteria words appearing in the
headline, a major mention or three or more times in the article. It is entirely possible that
some stories may not have been picked up using these terms and criteria, but it is unlikely
that very many prison stories would not have used any of the terms chosen.
MISREPRESENTATION, DISTORTION AND SILENCE
Across all media during October 2005, prison and prisoners were narrowly constructed
within a discourse of fear and dangerousness, and prison as a soft option. Equally
important was the silence in the media coverage of penal issues, especially in the printed
press which I shall return to later.
Prisoners as an uncontrollable danger to a fearful society
In newspaper coverage of the British penal estate, the prisoner is consistently constructed
as a social threat. This occurs in three principal ways: through lexical choices, limiting and
labelling a prisoner as murderer, killer, thug and so on; highlighting the most violent
offenders and offences rape and murder in particular and creating a fearful public
through stories of escape, lax security and early release.
On 7 October 2005, the governments appeal against a ruling that had found prisoners
automatic ban from voting in elections to be a violation of Article 3 of the Human Rights
Act 1998, was denied. The ex-prisoner who had brought the case, John Hirst, was a self-
taught prison law expert who had originally been sentenced to 15 years for murder, but
actually served 25 years. Most of the daily newspapers carried the story. The Daily Mail
headline read Killer Wins Vote for Prisoners (2005a), later describing Hirst as a 54-year
Old Axe Killer (as did the Daily Mirror, 2005b). The Times (2005), Daily Telegraph (2005)
and the Independent (2005) also referred to Hirsts conviction and the murder weapon.
Hirst killed his landlady with the handle of the axe, not the blade. Axe killer may well be
an accurate description of Hirst someone who kills someone else using an axe but the
phrase draws upon a more specic trope, reminiscent of serial killers and horror lms, of
using the blade rather than the handle and of seriality: committing axe murders more
than once. Thus a landmark case in prisoners rights which nally recognized the breach of
human rights in the civic death of prisoners under the Forfeiture Act 1870, reconstructed
and reduced the narrative around a discourse of violence and fear.
A Channel 4 News story, which appeared four days before the European Courts
decision, followed John Hirsts case, outlining his background and legal education but
also stressed the ex-prisoners dangerousness. Newsreader Jon Snow introduced the
piece, describing Hirst as a convicted killer and how his case has brought torment to his
victims relatives. The early part of the report continued with this narrative a self-taught
legal expert with a violent past. Interviews with Hirst discussing his legal expertise were
juxtaposed with an interview with Nina Burton-Harris, the victims daughter. Early on in
the lm, she said, For me hes not changed; if anything he got worse. This is a puzzling
but also unsubstantiated statement since Burton-Harris had no contact with Hirst since the
trial in 1981. This victim-driven discourse of dangerousness was accentuated throughout
the lm. Channel Fours Home Affairs Correspondent, Simon Israel, regularly adopted
aggressive language to describe Hirsts case against the government, using phrases such
as waging a war, ghting the system, law a potent weapon to beat the system with,
and he too indulged in speculation and uncorroborated statements: John Hirst has now
forced the government to the point where it may have no choice but to give all prisoners
the right to vote. But what he did in 1979 left his victim and her family with no rights.
Note here the emphasis on reluctance the government may have no choice rather
than reporting that the governments position may be untenable, illegal or unlawful. It is
also inaccurate to suggest that the victims family have surrendered all their rights. What
rights is Israel referring to and what act of total forfeiture has the family suffered? The
undermining of Hirst is very clear in the cuts between Hirsts journey to the European
Court and Burton-Harriss interview.
The discourse of violence employed to cast doubt on the legitimacy of prisoners rights
was also present in most of the newspapers that carried the story on 7 October 2005.
Several mentioned who would not get the right to vote: rapists, murderers and armed
robbers (Daily Mail, 2005a); killers and rapists will remain barred (The Times, 2005); and
Dominic Grieve, Shadow Attorney-General was quoted as saying, If convicted rapists and
murderers are given the vote, it will bring the law into disrepute (Daily Telegraph, 2005).
The humorous article in the Financial Times (2005) about the right to vote in prison relied
upon this discourse to caricature prisoners:
Canvassing MP: Er hello, are you prisoner 4631Z?
Prisoner: You can call me Slasher.
Canvassing MP: erm, what are you in for?
Prisoner: Attempted murder and GBH.
On the same day as the European Court ruling, the Daily Mirror (2005a) ran a story
underlining the headline Prisoners Jail Frenzy, briey reporting on a disturbance at
Hindley Young Offenders Institution in which prisoners refused to go back to their cells,
ooding parts of the jail and setting re to other areas. The story bears little relation to
the headline, especially given the nal line of the report: no staff were injured but some
juveniles suffered supercial damage. It is interesting that the Daily Mirror chose to run
this story the day of the European Court decision, strengthening its representation of
prisoners as violent, uncontrollable and undeserving of the right to vote.
Alongside the construction of dangerousness in news reports of prisoners, and
inseparable from it, is the discourse of risk and fear. This was particular prevalent in the
news that the Home Ofce were seeking to extend the eligibility of prisoners for home
detention curfew from those with four and a half months left on their sentence to those
with six months remaining. The Times ran the headline Time in Jail May Be Slashed for
Prisoners (2005b), reporting that thousands of prisoners will be released (emphasis
added). Again here, the article chooses to use violent language time is not reduced, it
is slashed. This also seems something of an exaggeration given that the move suggests
a change from four and a half months to six months. The Daily Express screamed Outcry
over Early Release for Yet More Prisoners(2005b) supported by the Daily Mails Prisoners
May Do Less Than Half Their Time (2005c). This was echoed by the BBC Six OClock News
on 13 October which reported that prison governors are worried that some prisoners will
have to be released early with electronic tags. These stories constructed the consideration
of the extension from fourandahalf to six months as both certain and with hyperbole.
The Home Ofce were still considering the proposal which would have created an extra
1000 prisoners on home-detention curfew. The reports use of thousands and released
are both inaccurate and misleading. This narrative not only draws upon a public fear of
more violent offenders walking the streets, but is also framed within a prison-as-soft
option, victims rights agenda:
Crime victims reacted with disbelief last night to Government plans to release thousands
of convicts because jails are overcrowded. Hundreds of prisoners are being held in police
cells. So Home Secretary Charles Clarke wants to put electronic tags on many offenders
and free them six months early. Victor Bates, whose wife Marian was murdered at her
jewellery shop by a criminal who had cut off his tag said, The system is a shambles.
(Daily Express, 2005b)
The Daily Mail and Daily Express invoked outraged opposition parties and victims groups,
carrying dominant resistant voices, rather than those who may have offered or supported
the move. These included Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, Victims of Crime Trust
Director, Norman Brennan, and Victor Bates, a high-prole victims rights spokesperson,
all of whom supported penal expansion: They should invest in building new prisons rather
than making even more excuses to let prisoners out Brennan was quoted as saying.
These reports, while noting the relationship between the home-detention plans and
the increased prison population remained uncritical of the criminal justice policies that
have created the latest overcrowding crisis in UK prisons. Rather than question the current
reliance on a policy of increased incarceration, the news narrative reconstructs the story
not as one of the failure of a mass incarceration policy, but one about the need for longer
sentences and more prisons. This lies rmly within New Labours prison works discourse
which has built
an edice of punishment which appears to be both unshakeable and unyielding in
the ongoing conict to maintain law, restore order and reduce risk to communities
beleaguered by the activities of feral atavists who, according both to the New Labour
government and their Conservative opponents, are either unwilling or unable to
responsibilise themselves and participate in the multifarious benets offered by twenty-
rst century, globalised, consumer capitalism. (Ryan and Sim, 2006)
Such a position was further bolstered by the Letter to the Editor pages in several articles
on this issue, suggesting the pro-prison discourse of the reporting reected readers
opinions. Thus the letters to the Editor serve as an ideological link between the article
and its readership (Wahl-Jorgensen 2002a, 2002b; Conboy, 2006). Under the headline
Early Release Makes a Mockery of Prison Sentences, reader Ron Kirby wrote in the Daily
Telegraph, Its about time the 20-year-old problem of jail-overcrowding was resolved in a
sensible manner. Start building more prisons (Daily Telegraph, 2005b). On the same page,
S.T. Vaughan suggested that prison is about giving law-abiding citizens a chance to go
out, knowing that their street is a little bit safer from the criminal. S.T. Vaughan clearly
was outraged, for in the Express on Monday 17 October 2005, another letter of theirs was
printed, again arguing that early release is not an option. It was left to the Guardians
editorial to offer the only counter-discourse:
There is one clear lesson from earlier prison overcrowding crises. They cannot be
resolved by a building programme. That approach has been tried by both Conservative
and Labour administrations with disastrous results the solution lies outside prison
walls in better drug treatment programmes, mental health care, and cuts to
unnecessary remands and recalls to prison. (Guardian, 2005a)
There were also examples of the discourse around dangerousness and fear in documentaries
and lms in Octobers sample. Shock Docs: Stabbed to Death (Five, 1 October 2005)
was a repackaging by Channel Five of a Marc Levin lm, Gladiator Days: Anatomy of a
Prison Murder (2002).
3
The documentary purports to be about prison violence, which the
opening caption suggests [is] a fact of Americas prisons. It tells the story of the racial
murder of prisoner, Lonnie Blackman, in Utah State Prison by two other prisoners, Troy
Kell and Eric Daniels, beginning with the CCTV of the stabbing and interviewing prison
ofcers, the victims families as well as Kell and Daniels. Like so many lms about prison,
and as Fives title suggests, the graphic exploitation of violence in Stabbed to Death was
depicted voyeuristically and remained severed from any abolitionist or reformist context.
While scenes of explicit brutality may present opportunities to challenge the very existence
of the penal estate, through exploration of the futility and inhumanity of incarceration,
and present opportunities to raise the prole in public debate and mobilize opinion
towards reform and abolition of the prison industrial complex, any oppositional discourse
was subjugated to the lurid mise en scene of brutality. This, despite supercial attempts
to justify its use through vague suggestions of expos or journalist critique of the prison
industrial complex.
This is exemplied in Stabbed to Deaths extensive CCTV footage which punctuated
the lm, but also in slowed-down scenes of a prison disturbance from the prison ofcers
perspective, who remained behind reinforced glass while prisoners attempted to smash it.
Thus, the audience too is threatened with violence from prisoners whose facial expressions
are distorted by the grainy slow-motion of the CCTV cameras.
Such a scoptophilic treatment of violence in prison, regularly depicted in lm, over the
last 10 years in particular,
4
was challenged by the documentary My Death Row Lover,
which despite the dramatic title, explored the relationships of three women with prisoners
on death row. This transcoding strategy (Hall, 1997b) opposes the existing discourse of
dangerous and violent prisoners, and replaces it with another: prisoners as people needing
and experiencing love:
Even though youve been accused or convicted or whatever of supposed atrocious
crimes, it still does not negate the fact whether you did this or not that youre still
a human being with the capacity to love, with the capacity to feel, with the capacity to
reciprocate that love and those feelings. (Prisoner JC in My Death Row Lover, ITV1, 1
October 2005)
Prison as a soft option
The replacement discourse offered by My Death Row Lover, challenging the representation
of inmates as violent others, was in sharp contrast to not only the great majority of texts in
the analysis, but also the second theme prevalent in the news sample: that of the liberal
regimes in Britains prisons and the imbalance between prisoners rights and victims rights.
The newspaper coverage of prison issues continually constructed prison as a place lacking
in real punishment, offering little comfort for victims of crime. Typical was the Expresss
story on 1 October 2005:
Inmates at one of Britains supposedly toughest jails have said life there is more like
staying in a hotel. In a damning indictment of softtouch [sic] Britain, new arrivals at
Holloway womens prison eat in a bistro-style dining room, sleep in comfortable beds
and have befrienders to help them settle in. (Daily Express, 2005a)
The story quotes one new inmate at Holloway as saying, Its very comfortable like youre
sitting in a hotel. One can only surmise as to what the ellipses in the quote may have
contained, but I can be more certain about the distorted representation of HMP Holloway
here. The report refers to the First Night Centre at Holloway, a local womens prison in
North London. Holloway has a notorious reputation for prisoner suicides and self-harm. In
January 2005, Liberal Democrat MP, Sandra Gidley, quoted the Guardian report that ofcers
at Holloway prison are cutting down ve women a day from nooses (Hansard, 2005).
There have been up to 52 agency nurses on suicide watch at any one time (BBC Radio
Five Live, 1930; Five Live Report, 5 September 2004). The First Night Centre was set up to
address the early suicide risks when women enter prison, equipped with counsellors to deal
with risk of self-harm. The Express (2005a) report, however, ignored any of these facts and
constructs HMP Holloway as a soft-touch prison, questioning its reputation as one of
the supposedly toughest jails but implicitly suggesting that such a reputation would be
a positive characteristic of a prison. This is further emphasized by associating a soft touch
with comfortable beds and forming relationships while in prison. While the report quotes
an inmate referring to a hotel, the opening line refers to inmates (emphasis added),
suggesting that the view is widely held. There are further inferential jumps from one
comment about the First Night Centre to much wider references to Holloway as a whole.
The Expresss representation of Holloway is framed in a wider context of softtouch [sic]
Britain echoing tabloid constructions of Britain as an easy target for asylum seekers,
refugees and immigration (Kaye, 1988; Cohen, 2002; Conboy, 2006)
A similar story ran in the Daily Mail (2005b), the same day as the European Court
decision on prisoners right to vote. My Prisons Too Soft reported that prisoner, Jay
Bishop, escaped from HMP Springhill, a category D prison, and then asked to be returned
to HMP Bullingdon, a category B prison where he had previously been serving his
sentence. The story was actually about the prisoners drug use, and how the availability
of drugs in Springhill was hindering his drug treatment, as a former heroin addict. The
story constructed prison as a place for treatment, quoting the prosecution in the case:
he wants to continue his process of rehabilitation. Here, prison is constructed as a place
that works, again echoing New Labours working prison, underpinned by a discourse of
therapy: prison is the place to sort out problems drugs, unemployment and so on. Thus
social problems being individualized is part of the responsibilization strategy of New
Labour (Sim, 2006).
Bound up in the news discourse about supposed soft prison regimes, are the rights
of prisoners. I dealt with this earlier in the reports on the European Court decision on
prisoners voting rights, but it was also evident elsewhere. The Daily Stars article on 28
October read:
Dozy prison chiefs have taken the drastic action to cope with overcrowding by giving
inmates the keys to their cells. The lucky lags are in giant sheds because jails are bursting
at the seams. But because the Portakabin style huts are wooden and a re risk, inmates
must be able to escape if there is an emergency. (Daily Star, 2005)
The report constructs the story as revolving around a notion of a lax and easy regime
where prisoners rights now include having keys to their cells, implying some notion of
freedom and choice while also implying security issues. The construction of prisoners as
lags and of the Home Ofce as dozy prison chiefs evokes a cosy, comic notion of
knockabout farce evocating Porridge and British prison lms like Two Way Stretch and The
Pot Carriers. The Suns Bad Boy Badgers Take Over Prison story also relied upon similar
comic stereotypes (Fowler, 1991) the black and white tough nuts had tunnelled under
the fence having mounted a vicious attack on a prison guard.
However, the story about safety and overcrowding was mentioned only in passing
overcrowding remains, once again, unproblematized, merely reconstituted as a nancial
issue lags will be shifted into police cells at a cost of up to 362 a night 300 higher
than the cost of a normal cell. This was in contrast to the same story in the Guardian
the next day whose headline was Prisoners Given Keys to Their Cells Because of Risk
of Fire, which concentrated on the safety of prisoners, and the high level of bullying
and intimidation in the units. There were other examples in the sample I do not have
room to explore further here, including the Express reporting that a prisoner was bringing
legal action after being permanently scarred after a fall in HMP Perth, under the headline
Inmate Demands 10k for Cut to Leg (2005e). The Daily Mail also reported Prisoners Free
to Practice Witchcraft in Their Cell (2005e) and earlier in the month it suggested that
Prisoners to Get Flu Jabs First (2005d). This latter report began: Prisoners will be given
priority for vaccine against bird u over the general public if the killer virus hits Britain,
and then quoted the Prison Security Group several paragraphs later saying that such a
move is likely (emphases added).
Finally the People (2005) ran an investigation on 30 October 2005 into HMP Ford,
a category D open prison, suggesting that prison was awash with drugs and alcohol,
and with minimal security. This report illustrated many of the discursive aspects of prison
constructed in the media that I have discussed thus far. It highlighted the dangerousness
of inmates, despite their being at the end of their sentences. The Peoples reporter,
(r)ubbing shoulders with convicted killers and violent robbers, gained access to cells and,
quoting an ex-prisoner, he reports: some of them have killed already so they wouldnt
bat an eyelid at doing it again. This narrative, of ostensibly carrying out a public service
by highlighting security aws, is reconstituted as a scoptophilic gaze into the prison,
revelling in suggestions of violent inmates as brutal other: Although classed as a low-risk
D category open jail, Ford is home to a number of hardened criminals including schoolboy
killer Learco Chindamo who stabbed to death headteacher Philip Lawrence. The violent
tropes here are borne out of speculation rather than any evidence. Learco Chindamo has
currently served 10 years of a 12-year sentence, having been convicted at the age of 15.
His transfer to a Category D prison is to assist him in adjusting for his eventual release.
The People offers no evidence of Learco as a hardened criminal, but the article makes
a number of speculations about HMP Ford: (a)nyone could walk into that jail carrying a
knife or even a gun, the report suggests.
The article also juxtaposes what it sees as a prison full of dangerous criminals with the
lax regime HMP Ford subjects them to. The undercover reporter saw the luxury conditions
many inmates enjoy including televisions and computer games in their rooms, newspapers
and magazines, posters on the walls and stereo systems and was allowed to stroll into
the hi-tech gym with thousands of pounds worth of equipment. Luxury is dened
here within the Peoples agenda, to include posters on walls and televisions, echoing the
Expresss report about the soft beds of Holloway prison. The construction of prison in
the People article exemplies the discursive regime of prison throughout the sample: of
dangerous and violent inmates enjoying a positively lavish existence, with the threat of
their escape looming large. This is reported in incredulous tones by tabloid newspapers
in particular who consistently structure the prison narrative within a victims rights/tax-
paying law abiding citizen agenda, which as Conboy (2006) notes is predicated upon an
authoritarian populism.
Silence, absence and clich
Alongside constructions of prison and prisoners in this light, are the absences in media
discourse about prison. This is apparent in the content but also in the amount of space and
time allotted to prison issues. There were only six prison stories reported on television news
during October 2005, three of those on Channel Four News, two on BBC1 and just one on
ITVs Early Evening News. There were a total of 65 news stories in the national newspapers
during October 2005, which may appear to be a signicant number. However, there were
a number of very short stories in that sample (13 under 100 words) and October 2005
was an important month for prison and prisoners. As well as the stories already discussed,
there was a government leak revealing plans to privatize the probation service, and the
publication of The Prison Reform Trusts Bromley Brieng (2005) which, among other
things, highlighted that the number of people given custody at magistrates court has
risen from 25,016 to 63,396 over the last 10 years and that the number of women in
prison has also doubled over the same period; that the average cost of each prison place
built since 2000 is 99,839.20; and that research by the Prime Ministers Strategy Unit
stated that a 22 per cent increase in the prison population since 1997 is estimated to have
reduced crime by around 5 per cent during a period when overall crime fell by 30 per cent.
None of these ndings was reported in the sample. A total of 65 stories in 19 newspapers
across 31 days starts to look rather scant.
I have already alluded to the failure of most
5
of the printed press to explore the underlying
reasons for prison overcrowding, or offer any critique of current penal policy. In the prison
lms broadcast on television too there was a failure to challenge and a consequent
normalizing of punishment. In the TV lm, Last Rites (ITV1, 1998) for example, a botched
execution leaves prisoner Jeremy Dillon with the apparent ability to solve future crimes.
However improbable the narrative was, it supports Sarats (2002) argument that despite
the attempts by such lms to demonstrate that the death penalty is wrong, the discourse
is not one of abolition, nor does it challenge its rationale within the criminal justice system.
This occurs in two ways, rst by limiting the exploration of the use of the death penalty
to whether or not the protagonist is deserving of it. In Last Rites, this revolves around
whether or not he is faking his new powers? And through what Sarat calls the calculus of
desert (p. 213), namely whether the death penalty is the appropriate penalty for the crime
committed: the helpful remorseful Dillon with no recollection of the three murders he
committed. Thus, what may appear to be a discursive challenge to state killing, through
a sympathetic portrayal of the condemned, is fundamentally a narrow representation
which avoids broader questions about the use of executions in contemporary societies
(Greer, 2006). Second, the execution itself is xed at a denotative level. Thus the scenes
immediately before Dillons (supposed) death are concerned with process, administration
and system. In echoing Sarats (2002) memorable phrase, fetishizing the technology of
death (p. 237), straps, buckles and probes are attached, death warrants are read out
and switches are icked. The absence of the horror of an execution is replaced by ritual,
procedure and bureaucracy which, once again, locate the discourse of the death penalty
within a framework of legitimacy and necessity.
In other prison ction, the lms Brokedown Palace (ITV1, 1999), Reform School
Girl (BBC2, 1994), Last Rites (ITV1, 1998), Life (BBC1, 1999), and the drama Diamond
Geezer (ITV3, 2005) present clich and stereotype, drawing on the heritage of prison lm
narrative and characterization. Reform School Girl borrows heavily from the women in
prison exploitation lms of the 1970s, with shower and sex scenes and a nal victory over
the system, new prisoner Donna Patterson defying the corrupt governor by deliberately
losing a relay race echoing The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and The
Longest Yard (1974). Brokedown Palace, the story of two backpackers in Thailand duped
into smuggling drugs and consequently sent to the prison of the title, offers a racist view
of the Thai justice system and Thailand in general (This trial is a shitty third world joke,
These innocent young American girls must be free). It is Midnight Express (1978) done
by Disney. Cardboard cut-out characters are prevalent throughout these dramas. Life, the
story of two friends on a prison farm in the deep South of the United States, features
the familiar gaggle of stereotypes: the dumb giant, the transvestite, the snitch and
the fast-talking spiv; while the David Jason vehicle Diamond Geezer serves up another
helping of Porridge, with the fresh-faced young inmate under the guidance of the old
timer escaping from the stern, harsh prison warden.
While there is little new in any of these prison ctions, the discourse of the prisoner
they construct is important. Incarceration is experienced through the eyes of a newly
convicted prisoner, who is constructed sympathetically from the outset. This is achieved
either through wrongful conviction (Brokedown Palace, Life, Reform School Girl) or offering
mitigating circumstances for the offence, such as young Phils background and family life
in Diamond Geezer. Such a sympathetic portrayal of the protagonist(s) once again offers
the possibility for prison narratives to explore the injustice and cruelty of incarceration.
Through the eyes of an innocent, harshly treated woman or man, the penal system could
be exposed. Instead, empathy is offered through representation of the rest of the prison
population as dehumanized monsters and animals. While the prison hero/ine is afforded
some, albeit limited, character, emotional development and agency, the rump of the jail
is mere cardboard cut-out and clich. Consequently, prison is constructed as necessary, to
keep these psychotic deviants caged and incapacitated. Despite its empathetic portrayal
of, on occasion, several prisoners, the meaning of prison is once again framed around
danger and fear, thus underscoring the apparent necessity for prisons very existence.
For example, prisoners are shown cheering and taking bets on the time of execution in
Last Rites; in Diamond Geezer, Phil is told, the upside is youll be wined and dined by
the sausage jockeys on E Wing. There are references to, and reduction of the prison
populations to rapists, murderers, animals and so on. The othering of prisoners,
through xing them to their crimes, appearance and difference to the prison hero/ine
leads to the construction of a pro-prison discourse. With its population constructed as
predominantly highly dangerous, morally bereft and beyond redemption, the prison
becomes the only institution capable of offering a solution. Further, the representation
of the heroic, often innocent, inmate appears to offer the possibility of a reformist or
abolitionist discourse, but like the depiction of violence, this opportunity is used for the
reverse.
CONCLUSION
I began by suggesting that the populist and highly punitive penal policy in the UK is
supported by media discourses around prison. As Mathiesen (1995) has posited:
penal policy has become much more of a commodity than was the case a few decades
ago. Penal policy today is governed much more by news that is saleable for the media
and by what is marketable political opinion in the media. (np)
Thus it is the combination of over-reporting of violent and sexual crime as well as the
media constructions of prison itself that have been crucial in the growth of the prison.
My sample of Octobers media output on prison issues exemplies this view of a media
discourse that not only supports the use of prison but in many cases seeks its expansion.
Through a discourse of dangerousness delivered to a fearful public, prison is represented
as an institution failing to contain societys evil, who, in the news media at least, luxuriate
in an hotel-like environment with rights and privileges out of kilter with their victims and
victims families.
Prison is largely constructed unproblematically as a solution to crime, reproducing the
what works mantra of New Labour criminal justice policy. Media representations of the
prisoner preclude any rational debate about alternatives to prison. While the public is led
to believe that prison is full of murderers, rapists and paedophiles and is left uninformed
about prison suicides, the erosion of prisoners rights and the rising number of women
and children incarcerated, a long overdue debate will never penetrate the public sphere.
Perhaps we should not expect much from ctional representations: the agenda of lm
and television is, after all, about prot and entertainment. Prison drama rarely provides a
condemnation of the penal system, preferring instead to revert to its generic stereotype
and revel in the stabbings, rapes and beatings between, and of, prisoners, whom it
constructs as psychotic, violent and beyond redemption. News coverage however has
much more to answer for. It is simply nave to expect wide and balanced coverage of
prison issues in the printed press as my analysis as highlighted. But what one does not
expect is unashamed distortions of the facts. I have illustrated this briey through the Daily
Express story about the First Night Centre at Holloway prison, but I wish to use another
from several in my sample.
On Monday 26 October, the Scottish Executive published the HM Chief Inspectorate
of Prisons Report (2005) on its website. It was a 52-page report about a range of prison
issues: population, security, management, prisoner health and so on. In Section 8, Care,
the issues around Home Leave were discussed. The report expressed concern that prisoners
received only 7 to cover the three days leave, which put a great nancial pressure on
their families. It suggested that a realistic payment should be made to prisoners to meet
the expenses incurred during Home Leaves (p. 35). The subsequent paragraph in the
report went on to discuss the further difculties for prisoners:
While for most travel is relatively straightforward, some travel to the South of England.
SPS only arranges and pays for bus or train travel not budget airlines which can offer
signicant savings in time and money. If prisoners choose to use the airline option for
long journeys, some might be disadvantaged as it is their families who are required
to book and pay for such travel. The reason given is that the Prison does not have a
credit card which is necessary for such airline bookings. All prisoners should have equal
access to the most appropriate travel arrangements. (p. 35)
The next day, the Express (2005d) ran the following story:
Inmates from Scottish jails should travel home to visit their families on budget airlines,
says a prison watchdog. The move could see families and lone women travellers
unknowingly squeezed side by side with convicted murderers, rapists and other serious
offenders on budget ights across the UK.
Clearly the Express story is misleading, but it is also untrue. The report does not say that
prisoners should use budget airlines to travel home but points out the difculties if prisoners
were to use this option. The report also notes, just one page previously, that assessment
for Home Leave is both rigorous and frequent. These prisoners are in open prisons, often
at the end of their sentences, and the Home Leave scheme is part of re-establishing links
with the community. Once again, the discourse of fear and dangerousness around a
notion of vulnerable victims on a plane full of deviants owes more to Con Air (1997)
than it does to reality. As with many of the news reports already discussed, the Express
article reconstructs the story within the discourse of escape and lax security, suggesting
the number of failures to return in Scottish open prisons was high. The story ends with a
quote from an easy Jet spokesperson who says that (t)he safety of passengers and crew is
paramount and we will be looking into the implications of this. This correlation between
security, fear and dangerousness merely conrms my earlier contentions, but it also serves
as a stark illustration of the misleading, inaccurate and downright false reporting on prison
that passes for journalism.
Analysis of this kind often raises a number of objections and criticisms. There are,
of course, a number of competing discourses around prison, personal experience for
example, but I would argue that media representations are the most dominant discourse
of prison given its largely invisible nature. With prison wrapped in an impenetrable veil
of secrecy (Cohen, 1985: 57), the media become all the more potent as opinion shapers
and formers for the public, and consequently for the state. But where is the public in this
account? Discourse analysis is often criticized for making assumptions about the reception
by audiences, or worse, that it looks for what it wants to nd (Schegloff, 1997).
I would suggest that public opinion may well be irrelevant in this process that it is the
relationship between media discourse and the governments subsequent reaction to it that
matters. Thus, the state must be seen to be taking into account public opinion but that
opinion is one that is constructed by, and represented in the media. Lewis et al.s (2005)
ndings also support this contention. In their study of US and UK television news over a
ve-month period, they found that 95% of the claims about citizens or public opinion
contain no supporting evidence (p. 135). I accept their further point that there may be
more supercial engagement with citizens by the news media, and Ryans (2003, 2006)
argument that there has been a decline in public deference from an elite directed to an
elite challenging activity, illustrating the possibility of a communicative rationality in the
public sphere of penology. However, I would argue that it is the mainstream media more
often than the public, that offer support for the governments mass incarceration policy
in contemporary Britain.
Notes
1 While the argument may be prevalent in criminology, it also remains contested (Hutton, 2005;
Matthews, 2005; Pratt et al., 2005; Ruddell, 2005; Zemring and Johnson, 2006).
2 The Prison Media Monitoring Unit, Cardiff University produces monthly bulletins on media
inaccuracy, silence and misrepresentation. Bulletins are available from February at http://www.
jc2m.co.uk/pmmu.htm.
3 Levin has made several other lms about the US prison system including the documentary Prisoners
of the War on Drugs (1996) and the feature lm, Slam (1998). The title Gladiator Days was also
used recently by Tanika Gupta in his play about the death of Zahid Mubarek, who was murdered
in Feltham Young Offenders Institution in 2000. The title refers to the practice of incompatible
prisoners being allocated cells together to spark off violence which, in Zahid Mubareks case, led
to his death.
4 See for example Animal Factory (2000), Down Time (2001), Fortress II: Re-entry (1999), Mean
Machine (2001), Prison Song (2001) and Undisputed (2002)
5 The Guardian (2005a) did offer some critique in its leader column on 14 October.
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University, UK. Email: masonp@cardiff.ac.uk

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