Social History

One of my many peeves is the idea that prisoners are excluded from society. Prisons are like small villages; they may be remote from the Big City but we still have electricity!

The cultural shifts, ideologies, the currents that shape the wider society are as prevalent here as they are out there. Or so says the old 'importation' theory of prisoner culture. Whilst there is truth in it, to the extent that everybody in prison was first shaped outside, new factors must be included.

Prisons have a complex social structure, politics, power, and an economy. All that gives meaning to live outside also exists here. Although not in replica. Prisons are places of great material, political, emotional and economic shortage, all of which plays its part in moulding the culture. These scarcities imply that the importation of some new resource can have a disproportionate effect, as can the loss of some long standing feature.

Prison societies, though, are much neglected by sociologists and criminologists. I say this in the full knowledge of the mountain of material that has been produced, much of it of a quality I can only dream of aspiring to.

The neglect I speak of results from the motivations of researchers to date. They tend to be examining specific problems, mostly related to order, discipline, riots, violence and suicide. Excellent though this work may be, it is rather narrow in its scope.

No one is going back to the very fundamentals - just looking to see how prisoners’ society works. How we cooperate, have relationships, create economic alliances... Just as the original

generations of psychologists and sociologists took a wide scope of society to form initial 'laws', the same could be done for prisons.

My particular interest in this is social history. Having been here for a few decades, I have a historical perspective on our little society and the changes that have accrued.

A few years ago it struck me that it may be a useful sociological resource to have lifers like myself record our experiences. These could then be stored away in some university basement until the day comes when it may be of use to some historian or sociologist.

Such an oral history is all that there is. Much of what prisoners do, their interactions with each other, are semi-secret from the institution. And so, unlike a normal history, there are no documents, no diaries, no letters for the future to refer to. Our memories are all that there is and as each generation grows old and dies, that history is lost forever.