Power and Pain in the Modern Prison: The Society of Captives Revisited
Author: Ben Crewe, Andrew Goldsmith, and Mark Halsey (editors)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2022. 419 pages.
Reviewer: Ethan Higgins | September 2024
Pain and Power in the Modern Prison, by Crewe, Goldsmith and Halsey, is an edited collection that focuses on revisiting Sykes’s foundational work, The Society of Captives. Sykes’s (1958) seminal qualitative study—which involved an ethnographic investigation into a maximum-security prison in Trenton, New Jersey in the 1950s—explored the prison as a structural-functional, autonomous social system. His analysis unpacked the complex nature of power and social control within prison, and how there might necessarily be a balance struck between officers and the incarcerated to maintain equilibrium. Perhaps, Sykes’s (1958) most famous contribution, and how this work is often remembered, is found in deprivation theory. The act of incapacitating removes a person’s liberties and promotes the pains of imprisonment—such as the deprivation of liberty, of goods and services, of heterosexual relationships, of autonomy, and of security—which come to characterize prison life and necessitate adaptations to navigate them. This basic theoretical principle from Sykes (1958) has become the impetus for an incredible corpus of scholarly studies that have considerably expanded the postulate (Haggerty & Bucerius, 2020).
Although we might tend towards reducing Sykes’s work to this contribution, Crewe, Goldsmith and Halsey (2022) edited collection makes the case that this belies the nuance of the original work. In turn, the objective of the volume is to “revisit” Sykes’s work; or, as the editor’s note, “pay tribute to Sykes’s astonishing work (p. 7)” but also to expose “some of its shortcomings” (p. 309). The edited volume offers a robust collection of chapters in a stout 373 pages. Chapters are organized into four parts, which include a range of contributed chapters by well-established prison scholars. The volume opens with compelling set pieces that include a foreword by Francis Cullen and personal correspondence between Gresham Sykes and Ben Crewe that provides insight into personal motivations around Sykes’s work.
First, the volume presents four chapters that situates Sykes’s work in context. These chapters aim to place Sykes’s work in context by exploring Trenton State prison in New Jersey, Sykes’s use of quasi-ethnographic method, how Sykes’s study can be understood as a byproduct of a structural-functionalist paradigms prominent in social science in the 1950s. Second, the collection provides four chapters that revisit the pains of imprisonment. These chapters pose theoretical and empirical complications to Sykes’s original formulation. For example, the chapters demonstrate the need to provide nuance to the pains of imprisonment framework as Sykes overestimated them to be solidarity-building deprivations, that pains can be felt across all types and qualities of confinement, and that there are unique pains across demographics—such as age, gender and race.
Third, the edited collection investigated variations in Sykes’s conception of prison culture, where the incarcerated use culture as a resource to adapt cohesively to the carceral environment. Part three offers four chapters detailing findings that differentiate with Sykes’s version of prisoner culture. These include variations—including the debased status of certain types of offenders (e.g., sex offenders are implicated with a unique moral “stain”), the individualism that emerges alongside the illicit prison economy as undermining trust for personal gain, and how Sykes’s personal and scientific values of the era might have shaped his tendency to paint prisoner culture as homogenous. Fourth, the volume poses three chapters on order and authority in the prison. This final part investigates the authority of custodians and the sociology of prison corruption. These chapters include the differing ways to understand how staff power shifts and balances between staff and the incarcerated, an extension of Sykes’s corruption of authority whereby he suggested that officers may only preserve control by giving up some of their formal authority.
More broadly, the primary argument in the volume considers how revisiting seminal texts—like Sykes’— “in and out of context” (p. 309) proves useful. Revisiting is meant to celebrate seminal work but also to demonstrate gaps made apparent by the modern era. For example, the collection illustrates that although we often treat Sykes’s findings as universal, his conclusions are complicated by the fact that they emerged in a particular context. For instance, multiple chapters explored Sykes’s theoretical contributions on international grounds, such as in Norway where his work has taken on a specific character in the context of “Norwegian criminolog[y]” (Ugelvik, p. 72), or when read through Danish law, where Scharff-Smith (p. 299) depicted how Sykes’s suggestions on prison corruption (e.g., intimacy between staff and the incarcerated) can align with basis of legal objectives in other contexts.
In a similar vein, revisiting in and out of context indicates how The Society of Captives missed an opportunity to analyze racial dynamics as a fundamental part of the prison’s social system. For example, Haney scrutinizes Sykes’s work as lacking context of the social environment outside prison walls which made “it easy to ignore the racially charged atmosphere inside” (p. 30) the prison. Likewise, Gundar and Kavish remarked how Sykes’s study took a “color-blind approach, that serves as a device to homogenize the carceral experience that Sykes documents in his book, was typical of scholars of the time” (p. 238). These authors effectively illustrated how revisiting original texts provides an opportunity to read them with a critical eye and to expose how their normative values might shape conclusions that have become ubiquitous.
Thus, a salient thematic example in the volume is found in remembering how these unique contributions emerged in a unique social scientific context. That is, an implicit question posed in the book considers whether Sykes’s unique work—a landmark study that has fundamentally shaped prison sociology—would have even been possible today with multiple pressures that shape science differently? That is, Sykes was part of a functional-structuralist scientific paradigm prominent in the 1950s with arguably less pressure towards mass production of fast-science and less restrictive institutional practices. As Halsey notes: “Sykes’s ‘method’ worked because he did not have to make it fit the overly-medicalized and psychologized (heavily positivist) frames subsequently used by IRBs for judging appropriate versus inappropriate research” (p. 43). Thus, in this context, Sykes’s semi-ethnography method, served to provide “witness to people’s lives and to the processes that govern such lives” (Halsey, Goldsmith and Crewe, p. 313), and existed in opposition “to the positivist proclivity for large sample sizes, experimental designs, and the search for patterned behavior” (Halsey, p. 44).
Expressed in variant forms throughout the chapters, authors illustrated the value of “slow science” represented in Sykes’s work and their voices represented a chorus of lament on the increasing difficulty associated with this type of work in the contemporary social scientific enterprise. In this case, ethnography provided distinctive insight to the social dynamics and nuance of social life in Trenton Prison, but in revisiting this original work authors illuminated a tension in that Sykes’s accomplishment in The Society of Captives reminds us of a “method” that may no longer be possible; that is undermined by institutional and disciplinary pressures toward popular fast-science methods in the modern scientific era. Thus, my sense throughout the book was that although there has been much development since Sykes book released in 1958, arguably none of it has really been of the same kind. Perhaps, this is why it feels as though the authors’ echoes throughout the volume insinuate such a grieving despair, because, to some extent, Sykes’s project is a ghost story—an anachronism from a time long gone.
Overall, this edited volume imparts an importance around reappraising Sykes’s seminal work to recontextualize his findings with alternative contextual lenses and to take stock of new scientific developments. If I were to provide any criticism, in my eyes there are two places for it. First, if the goal of the book is to convince me that revisiting Sykes’s work is an important endeavor (and seminal works more broadly) and that I might convey this importance of revisiting to others, I believe it succeeded. Yet, I am less certain to which audience I might recommend this book. Although the book provides much compelling context with unique anecdotes from prison scholars, it finds itself in a strange place where I might suggest to others to revisit Sykes’s work more directly and to recontextualize the work on one’s own terms.
Second, though the argument concerning how Sykes’s original work offers much nuance that is often forgotten, and has since sustained considerable empirical development, comes through strongly, the title-centered concept of power in the prison feels much less explicit throughout the chapters and less centered than Sykes’s original work. My initial sense before reading was that the book would grapple with how power (and pain) manifests in contemporary prisons. Although there are chapters that tackle power in prison explicitly—such as Crewe’s chapter on penal power as “demands and expectations,” Sparks’s endeavor to contextualize order and power, and Liebling who examines “traumatic effects of different kinds of power vacuums on prisoners and staff” (p. 255) in high-security prisons—I found this to be auxiliary to the endeavor to recontextualize and (re)ground Sykes’s original work.
Nonetheless, the authors have convinced me of the value of revisiting Sykes’s The Society of Captives to remind myself of what I have forgotten, and the authors have helped me reground this work as a seminal but nuanced piece in the historical landscape of penology and carceral studies.
References:
Kevin D Haggerty & Sandra Bucerius, The Proliferating Pains of Imprisonment, 1 Incarceration 1 (2020).
Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (1958).
Ethan Higgins is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
