Risk and self-governance: moral communication with English life-sentenced prisoners through the medium of risk management

• In Event: Prison Working Group: Needs, care and risk in the prison context: Challenges and implications

Abstract

The 'ruling concept' through which English prisons communicate with prisoners about the moral obligations associated with their punishment is risk. Risk thinking and risk talk pervade the management of lifers and prisoners generally, and the management of risk is a primary conduit for the operation of power. This has been said to produce distinctively 'tight' prison pain, for those governed through risk. This paper, based on PhD research interviews with 48 life-sentenced prisoners in two English prisons, reviews how risk factored in the sample's ethical lives: how they made sense of the concept, or in some cases, dismissed it as a bad-faith imposition. It summarises official documents to describe risk assessments for the sample, which broadly suggested that the participants were ordinary and 'easy-keeping' lifers: compliant, mostly self-governing, adapted to imprisonment, and posing few risks to others in custody. This, the chapter argues, means they were subject to discontinous, and varying, kinds of 'grip', with 'tight' conditions prevailing for some, but 'loose' and 'lax' conditions for others. It produces a typology of ethical responses to moral communication about risk, and suggests what an ethical approach adds to our understanding of risk governance and of the moral communication delivered by punishment.

Author

• Ben Jarman, Birkbeck, University of London