Paper Short Abstract:

Based on ethnography in English prisons, this paper shows how prisoners’ traumatic life histories & social locations have become subsumed into accounts of their criminal risk. It invites scholars to consider how critique is repurposed to make and remake carceral subjects and institutions.

Paper Abstract:

Psychiatric practice in prison has often been read deterministically: one is trapped in carceral logic, read pathologically, and undone as an individual. For some years, attention to prisoners’ life histories and social location has been presented as a way out of this trap: an emphasis on social deprivation, traumatic experience, and individual acts of subversion have been put forward as a way to humanise, fuel resistance, and ameliorate the situation of those categorised criminally sick.

This paper problematises this strategy. It does so by considering the recent integration of trauma-talk in the vast mental health infrastructure of the British prison estate. Grounded in ethnographic research with former prisoners, prison staff, and Parole Board documents, the paper traces how discussions of trauma, social deprivation, and oppression have been subsumed into classificatory practices that assess prisoners’ risk, categorise them as pathological, and assess their prospects for release.

Focusing on prisoners’ tactical navigation of such practices, the paper demonstrates how clinical life histories which emphasise trauma and oppression have actually come to constitute an extension of confinement - intensifying surveillance and shaping medico-penal practice. To make sense of this, I utilise theory on ideology and the legal form to understand how clinical personhood and carceral categorisation work together. Ultimately, the paper asks what anthropologists might find when we think about how carceral institutions constitute personhood, institution, and ideology together - especially when they do so with tools appropriated from radical critique.