Thinking the Prison Affectively: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Official Prison Reports from Three English Prisons

This thesis explores the theoretical and methodological possibilities for understanding the prison as an affective institution. Central to this affective exploration of the prison is to challenge the idea of the rational institution that assumes rationality to be non-affective. On this basis, the prison is often officially narrated as a pacifying and benign institution of state punishment and, as such, is reflected in the official reports of inspection into the contemporary prison in England and Wales. In contrast, this thesis seeks to re-read these officially sanctioned prison narratives using an affective framework, and feminist and imaginative epistemologies. Drawing on Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis, prison reports of three English prisons, HMP Birmingham, HMP Liverpool and HMP Pentonville, over a 40-year period (1982-2019) are investigated. This thesis presents a reading of these reports as textual and visual artefacts of official state discourse. The Critical Discourse Analysis of them enables a tracing of affect in a threefold analysis. First, the affective exploration of the prison proceeds from the discursive basis of affect in the textual body of prison reports. Second, the thesis interrogates the imagined prison that transpires through the researcher’s imagination and their creative engagement with prison reports. Third, the discursive analysis engages in a critical visual reading of official state photographs of the three prisons. The analysis aims to establish a critical counter reading of prisons in England and Wales through an affective lens. Theoretically, this thesis is situated in Durkheimian and cultural affect studies which form the basis for the conceptual framework, or what I call the affective moral fact. Establishing this concept seeks to offer an explanatory framework that renders affect more visible in the life of state institutions like the prison. Integral to this tracing of affect is the epistemological foundation in standpoint feminist scholarship that embraces a critical sociological imagination, with the aim of including creative and imaginative ways, for affectively researching the prison and emphasising the situatedness of knowledge. The thesis works towards the conclusion that the prison can be researched and theorised affectively through the critical deconstruction of official prison narratives. Related to the affective moral fact, the rational prison can be seen as promoting a form of state power that is affect-saturated and driven at all times; as a sociocultural representation of dominating affect and values specific to time and place. A central outcome of this thesis is a stress on the importance of research that embraces imagination and emphasises the significance of affect for more nuanced understandings of the rational power and violence of the prison institution