The Moral Vocabulary of Prison Homicide and Non-Fatal Violence

• In Event: PWG - Violence, self-harm, and safety in prison settings

Abstract

The number of prison homicides in English and Welsh prisons doubled in the decade from 2010-2019. In addition, the rate of serious prison violence trebled. Typically, explanations for prison homicide and serious violence are framed by the importation-deprivation debate. However, such discourse often fails to capture the impact on changes to the moral, cultural, social and economic quality of prison life, and overlooks the moral vocabulary of prison violence. Drawing on 54 interviews with prisoners who have killed or tried to kill in prison, and wider ethnographic and qualitative research on prison violence, this paper focuses on the logic of prison fatal and non-fatal violence, and the ways in which such violence are – in part – designed to rectify, resist or protest perceived deficits in the morality of the prison.

Author

• Kate Gooch, University of Bath