Shaping Hope: Spatial Autonomy and Desistance in the Barlinnie Special Unit

• In Event: Beyond the Label Offender: Prisoners' Reflections About Prison Programs

Abstract

The challenge of how to manage the small but disproportionately disruptive minority of persistently violent prisoners is an enduring dilemma for any prison system. In the Scottish context specifically, a unique network of small units was instituted in the second half of the twentieth century, providing a number of alternative custody arrangements outside the mainstream. This work considers the case of the Barlinnie Special Unit (BSU), arguably the most innovate, anomalous and controversial of these units. The BSU established a radically participative model of management whereby prisoners were given a meaningful stake in defining the terms of their own imprisonment. In this way, whilst broadly congruent with many of the core principles of more traditional ‘therapeutic communities’, the BSU was distinct. It is argued here that by paying closer attention to the precise design, aesthetics, and functions of this unit, but most importantly, to the degrees of personal engagement with (and control over) each of these elements, our understanding of how the desistance process is experienced within penal environments might be enriched. To make this case I mobilize the concept of ‘spatial autonomy’, drawing on philosophical accounts of autonomy, as opposed to sociological accounts of agency.

Author

• Jessica Bird, University of Illinois at Chicago