‘I never saw it as something for me before’: the role of affordance perception in changes in prisoners’ book reading practices in two English prisons.

• In Event: Prison Working Group: Prison perceptions, experiences, and transcendence

Abstract

Reading is widely regarded as a valuable activity for prisoners, offering educational, therapeutic, cultural and moral benefits. However, the prison population of England and Wales is characterised by low levels of literacy and education, and made up largely of those least likely to engage in book reading as a leisure activity. In a study in two medium security men’s prisons, most of the 50 habitual readers interviewed had developed the practice of leisure reading, or engaged in it as adults for the first time, only since coming to prison. Book reading is a highly complex practice, requiring forms of cultural knowledge and inclination as well as literacy and other capabilities. The idea of ‘affordance perception’ offers a theoretical framework for analysis of the complexity of changes in reading engagement in prison. Originally a theory of the perception of the possibilities offered by physical objects in relation to the interests of human and other animals, the concept of an affordance has since been extended within anthropology and other disciplines, providing a way of holding together the objective properties of a thing and the subjective perception of its relevance to a concern, within a social, physical and cultural setting or lifeworld. The findings showed how prisoners’ perception of books shifted as their possibilities were recognised in restricted and resource-impoverished prison environments. Distinctly prison-shaped needs arising from the nature of prison time, separation from family, the desire for power, identity and status, gave rise to changes in perception of what books offered, with changes in reading engagement. The research advances understanding of an under-researched and under-theorised aspect of prison life. The findings provide a holistic account of the activity of reading in prison that reflects the complex entanglements of individual psychobiographies and prison lifeworlds.

Author

• Judith Gardom, University of Cambridge