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The City That Won’t Let You Sit: Sensory Criminology and Urban Pain

Luisa T. Schneider

What does a city demand of a body when it refuses to let that body stop moving?

Exclusion, displacement, and hostile urban governance come together to regulate and criminalize through law, policy, and space. The effects of this governance on those targeted are lived sensorially. They accumulate in bodies over time and are enacted not only symbolically, administratively, or practically, but also through pain.

Learning from houseless people’s sensory navigation, and from sensory criminology’s attention to how punishment and control operate through the senses (see Herrity et al. 2021 [sensory penalities]), reveals that Western cities govern houselessness through what I conceptualize as deliberate nociception. There is a pervasive, intentional production of sensory pain that functions as a mechanism of regulation. This governance is not primarily enacted at the level of spectacular punishment, but through mundane, everyday encounters that keep people on their feet, in their shoes, and on the move.

From hostile architecture to deliberate nociception

Urban design disciplines and excludes through hostile and defensive architecture. Work on The London spikes controversy by James Petty (2016) or by Roland Rosenberger on Callous Objects (2017), among others, shows how benches, spikes, dividers, and sound deterrents communicate who belongs in the city and who does not. These analyses tend to frame hostility as deterrence, moral signalling, or behavioural modification.

If we follow where those who are so “deterred” go, however, we realize that hostile architectures and associated regulations are not simply about discouraging presence. They are about hurting. Pain is not a side effect of urban governance; it is the technique.

How does this work? In Leipzig, where my research took place, people experiencing houselessness are systematically prevented from sitting, lying down, or remaining still for extended periods of time. Public order regulations criminalize “lingering,” “camping,” or Lagern which includes sitting on a jacket, rearranging space for comfort, or resting in place. Benches are segmented, surfaces slanted, sprinklers installed, and classical music is blasted for hours near transport hubs. Together, these practices form an urban environment that produces pain through enforced standing, walking, and sensory overload. Because there are no alternative places available, houseless people are forced either to keep moving or to endure these architectures despite the pain they cause. This is governance through nociception: regulation enacted by targeting the body’s capacity to rest, recover, and withdraw from stimuli.

Limbs as sites of governance

Theoretically, I move away from the abstract notion of “the homeless body” toward limbs as the primary site of governance. Feet, legs, backs, arms, and hands are not metaphorical here; they are infrastructural. They are the means through which people move, carry belongings, access resources, and maintain a fragile sense of home wherever they are (forced to) go. For people experiencing houselessness, home is embodied, mobile, and continually under threat. Home exists in backpacks, shopping bags, and on the body itself. As a result, limbs become overburdened, injured, swollen, infected, and exhausted. The city’s regulatory apparatus targets these very capacities. By prohibiting sitting, discouraging stillness, and enforcing constant movement, urban governance undermines the bodily conditions that make survival possible. This produces a particular form of spatial violence that goes beyond exclusion from space or participation but encapsulates structural violence and denial of bodily possibility. The right to rest, to take off one’s shoes, to withdraw from sensory assault, is effectively reserved for those with access to private housing.

Sensory citizenship and the criminalization of rest

Implicit in these practices is the deeply entrenched assumption that sensory regulation belongs in the private sphere. Housing is imagined as the space where bodies recover from exposure, where shoes come off, where pain can be managed, and where sensory input can be controlled. Public space, by contrast, is designed for movement, productivity, and consumption.

Thinking with Arendt (1958), we can see how deeply entrenched this private–public divide is, how long its durée, and ethnography shows us how it continues to structure contemporary law and urban governance. What is at play here is a violence of non-acknowledgement. Sensory needs need not be actively denied to people experiencing houselessness; rather, those needs are rendered unintelligible once housing is absent. The city refuses to acknowledge and to compensate for what housing would ordinarily provide. The result is a form of sensory citizenship in which some bodies are entitled to stillness, comfort, and recovery, while others are governed through exposure, noise, cold, hardness, and pain. Rest itself becomes suspect, and stillness becomes criminalized.

Methodological intervention: attuning to hostility on the margins

My argument draws on a five-year sensory ethnography with people experiencing houselessness in Leipzig. Crucially, in interviews, collaborators rarely spoke about feet, legs, or standing. Pain was normalized, unremarkable, often unnamed. What made these dynamics visible was sensorial co-presence: walking long distances together, standing for hours, carrying bags, waiting, navigating surveillance, and being repeatedly moved on. Having learned from sensory ethnography (Pink 2015) and work in sensory criminology on thick sensory environments most notably from Jason Warr’s writing on being trapped during a prison fire (2010), I remained with people attending to their sensory worlds, until pain emerged as an unexpected analytic focus.  I describe this methodological stance as attuning to hostility on the margins. It involves tuning into absence as much as presence: the absence of places to sit, to lie down, to recover; the repetition of movement; the accumulation of minor sensations that become debilitating over time. This form of attunement requires staying with the ordinary, the mundane, and the taken-for-granted, where violence often hides most effectively.

It also highlights how risk logics translate care into threat. For example, nail clippers which are essential for preventing infections are routinely confiscated as potential weapons, illustrating how individual bodily care is reframed as a security risk, echoing broader transformations of risk and responsibility in penality (Hannah‑Moffat 2005).

What this data does for sensory criminology

What do the experiences of houseless people’s urban navigation give sensory criminology?

First, they shift attention from spectacular or acute pain to slow, attritional harm. The pain documented here is chronic, cumulative, and often invisible, resonating with work on chronic pain as something that resists recognition and legitimacy (Johnson 2019). Second, they expand sensory criminology spatially. Rather than focusing primarily on enclosed spaces of punishment such as prisons, cells, or detention centres, they show how open city streets function as punitive environments, governing through exposure rather than confinement. Third, they redirect analytic attention from sensing places to sensing conditions of possibility: who is allowed to rest, to recover, to withdraw, and whose bodies are instead governed through pain. This invites sensory criminology to engage more fully with questions of urban governance, citizenship, and inequality. Attuning to hostility on the margins reveals that, through these forms of governance, houselessness becomes a condition of being kept in pain, on the move, and in one’s shoes. Sensory criminology allows us to see how cities govern through sensation and how suffering is not only produced but carefully designed and hidden in plain sight.

Luisa’s chapter on this subject can be found here: Schneider, Luisa. (2026) ‘Dispossessed realities Houselessness and spatial violence’, in the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology. Herrity, K., Sharma, K., Warr, J. & Umamaheswar, J. (eds.)  Vol1, Section 6, chapter 19.

References:

Arendt, H. (1998 [1958]). The human condition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Herrity, K., et al. (2021). Sensory penalities : exploring the senses in spaces of punishment and social control. United Kingdom, Emerald Publishing.

Hannah‑Moffat, K. (2005). “Criminogenic needs and the transformative risk subject: Hybridizations of risk/need in penality.” Punishment & Society, 7(1): 29–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474505048132 

Johnson, Mark. (2019). “The landscape of chronic pain: Broader perspectives.” Medicina, 55(182):1–19.

Petty, J. (2016). The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture’. DOAJ, 5(1):  67 – 81

Rosenberger, R. (2017). Callous Objects. Designs against the Homeless. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. London, Sage Publications.

Warr, Jason. (2021). Fire! Fire! – The prison cell and the thick sensuality of trappedness. In Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control, edited by Kate Herrity, Bethany E. Schmidt and Jason Warr, 19–34. Emerald Studies in Culture, Criminal Justice and the Arts. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

Other published works:

Schneider, L. T., et al. (2026). Agency Beyond Confinement: Rethinking the Relationship Between Agency and Structure in the Contemporary World, Routledge. Taylor & Francis.

Schneider, Luisa. (2026) ‘Dispossessed realities Houselessness and spatial violence’, in the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology. Herrity, K., Sharma, K., Warr, J. & Umamaheswar, J. (eds.)  Vol1, Section 6, chapter 19.

Schneider, L. T. (2025). Love and Violence in Sierra Leone: Mediating Intimacy after Conflict. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. OA: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/love-and-violence-in-sierra-leone/4A94801CE53AD8DE995BE149CBE2926B#fndtn-contents

Schneider, L. T. (2024). Imprisonment seeking among rough sleepers in Germany: Rethinking disciplinary and control society through a temporal lens. Carceral Worlds Legacies, Textures and Futures. H. Stuit, J. Weegels and J. Turner. London, NY, Bloomsbury: 127 – 144.

Schneider, L. T. (2023). Rape, ritual, rupture, and repair: Decentering Euro-American logics of trauma and healing in an analytic autoethnography of the five years after my rape in Sierra Leone. Ethos: https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12392

Schneider, L. T. (2022). “Humanising Through Conjecture: Recognition and Social Critique among Houseless People.” Ethnos: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2022.2093932

Schneider, L. T. (2021). “Let me take a vacation in prison before the streets kill me! Rough sleepers’ longing for prison and the reversal of less eligibility in neoliberal carceral continuums.” Punishment & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211010222

Schneider, L. T. (2020). “Sexual violence during research: How the unpredictability of fieldwork and the right to risk collide with academic bureaucracy and expectations.” Critique of Anthropology: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X2091727

Schneider, L. T. (2020). “‘My home is my people’ homemaking among rough sleepers in Leipzig, Germany.” Housing Studies: 1-18. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2020.1844157

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Environment Green Criminology History power sensory Uncategorized

International Handbook of Sensory Criminology Series: 3

Introducing… Coloniality, Imperialism, and the Senses

This post marks the third in a series dedicated to discussing each of the organising themes of the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology, in preparation for its launch. Each piece will leave comments open as an experiment in discussion. Please feel free to post talking points or ask questions – we particularly welcome students. See earlier posts in the series, or the link above, for contents, contributors, reviews and signposting for the next instalment.

The second section opens with an introduction written up from a conversation between Onwubiko Agozino, Rose Boswell, Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Sharon Gabie, Andrew Kettler, Macpherson Uchenna Nnam, Jessica Leigh Thornton and Jason Warr entitled “Recognising Abhorrent Legacies: Lessons for Sensory Criminology”. The discussion reflects on each of the following chapters, foregrounding two interrelated issues: the impact of colonial and imperial legacies on sensory criminological concerns in the present, and the lessons it needs to learn to become part of the broader effort to decolonise criminology as we look toward the future. These themes unfold into a complex consideration of what decolonization looks like: “Within these chapters, we find broader discussions of justice, history, coloniality, criminology, anthropology, ocean cultures, the potential toxicity of legacy, and the lessons that can be drawn from memoir” (p80).

These works disrupt western ways of approaching matters of “justice”. Each of the chapters in this section emphasise the need to consider harm in ways that frequently transcend the visible, the legible. While the focus of these pieces is the abhorrent legacies of colonialism and ways to reconceive justice, there are echoes in these treatments of harm, of the section that precedes it, disrupting how we think about violence and damage beyond immediate materiality and legal classifications. Within Coloniality… “we are invited to…think, rethink, and unthink what justice is, feels like, tastes like, smells like, sounds like, was, and should be in a future free from racism, racialisation, and harms of apartheid” (p81).

The first chapter in the second section – Doing Justice Differently: A Pan‑Africanist Perspective is written by Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Abiodun Omotayo Oladejo, and Macpherson Uchenna Nnam. In it they explore the rich history of Africanist justice and the sensorial tableaus woven in pre-colonial forms of social control. They detail the rich sensoriousness of some of the traditional justice practices which were later suppressed in favour of patriarchal, gendered, racialised violence as well as those perpetuating the violence of apartheid. In considering this history, the authors encourage us to understand, engage and challenge colonial – and other – injustices of the past as a means of imagining a different future. In his chapter I’ll Make You Shit!: Olfactory Othering and the Necropolitics of Colonial Prisons, Andrew Kettler explores colonialist discourses of smell and pollution (and logics of supposed inferiority and threats to the colonial status quo) to consider both how colonialism functions through, and weaponises, the panoptical nature of the prison. The material and the symbolic are combined to sate the colonial need to racialise, sequester, control, exploit, and monitor the bodies of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the oppressed. Kettler foregrounds the discursive weaponisation of olfaction, whereby smell is used to ‘other’ the colonial victim, forcing proximity to shit, death and putrification. ‘Olfactory othering’ is divorced from the actual smell reality, though significant stenches formed part of the everyday in penitentiaries designed for both foreign enemies and colonised locals (p97). Placing the racially oppressed into a noisome space, allowed colonial powers to cast them too as being inherently noisome. This justification then becomes cyclical, justifying and legitimating injustice.

Rosabelle Boswell, Jessica Leigh Thornton, Sharon Gabie, Zanele Hartmann, and Ismail Lagardien follow with their chapter: The Resonance Factor: Personal Experience and the Role of Sensory Ethnography in Countering Violent, Abhorrent Heritage. Both this contribution and the final one of the section again look at the horrors of the colonial past and persistence of neo-colonialism as lenses through which to understand and challenge potential futures for criminology. Boswell et al explore how sensory ethnography can help to reveal the enduring and often overlooked impacts of structural and direct violence in what they term ‘abhorrent heritage’. Focusing on South Africa’s coastal communities, they show how violence is not only historical but deeply embodied. They explore how sensory foci, allow us to access the dimensions of violence that are not always visible or legible, can unsettle dominant heritage discourses as well as expand on criminological theory to include the affective, spatial, and spiritual dimensions of harm, resistance, and social suffering. Onwunbiko Agozino concludes this section with his chapter Decolonizing Sensory Rhetorics and Activism in Africana Prison Memoirs. He considers the important lessons that can, and need to be, learned by sensory criminologists if we are to avoid the essentialist empiricism of criminology’s positivist paradigms and be part of the ongoing work to decolonise our discipline’s future. He makes the point that taking on a sensory ‘lens’ can allow us to explore that which has hitherto been overlooked, or more specifically, in the contexts of the Global South, obfuscated and silenced. He cautions that, given the materiality of sensory methods, we run the risk of once more falling into disciplinary traditions that trap us in conservative and punitive logics that preclude the type of revolutionary, liberatory, and critical criminology that we need to make progress.

These contributions urge the reader to conceive of a broader conception of justice, one which also accounts for our relationship with, and reliance on the land. Agozino urges a greater awareness that “Indigenous ways of knowing and practicing ecological sustainability include embodied and spiritual supra sensory evidence that could be missed if following only Western empiricism” (p120). Failure to acknowledge these bodies and systems of knowing replicate harms and injustice both to one another and to the world we inhabit, alienating us further from the earth that sustains us. As Dastile et al assert, dominant political systems at once diminish the toll of capitalist enterprise on the soil and sea others rely on, resulting in sensorially potent effects of exploitation in the form of, for example pollution, noise, toxic waste. In Boswell et al’s chapter this results in diminished opportunities for keeping livelihoods alive, threatened by the imposition of prohibitive regulatory frameworks. These structures do not recognise the knowledge and experience of those whose forbears have inhabited the land for centuries. Simultaneously, these systems rely on sensorial cues to reinforce cultural, racial and class biases – as Kettler elaborates in his consideration of olfactory othering as a key facet of social control in the colonial prison. A broader conception of justice here, allows us to conceive of the ways in which its practices are interwoven with our connections to both the earth and to one another. Subjects which are revisited later in the book, in section five, albeit in very different ways and places.

Andrew Kettler examines the ways in which the repertoire of olfactory imposition was woven into atmospheres of necropolitical violence; the putridity of colonial regulation (p97). The manufacture of these sensory worlds served both to demarcate space and justify its occupation. The colonial project was bolstered by racist estimations of indigenous sensory difference both as sensory and sensing bodies. The colonial creation of the savage as subordinate was reinforced “due to their supposedly inferior mental functions and perceptual apparatuses, which were believed to be always and falsely attuned to the mystical totems and taboo” (p98). Kettler refers to the sensory studies term for ethical and empathetic numbing, “self-blinding” to the humanity of those subject to violence and torture, percepticide (p100). There is a common strand between percepticide and Agonizo’s caution on the perils of too narrow a conception of the sensory. There is a danger of reiterating what he identifies as the Western tendency to shy away from bigger questions and alternative systems of knowledge.

While Agozino cautions on the perils of too narrow a conception of the sensory, and the danger of reiterating Western tendencies to obfuscate, to shy away from bigger questions and other ways of knowing, Dastile et al and Boswell et al identify mechanisms to move us closer to reconciliation. Their work identifies remedies beyond the imposition of bureaucratic, criminal justice frameworks. Community-led fora for embodied truth-telling and co-created knowledge that more closely honour lived experience, and which can better facilitate healing. Sensory criminology offers the capacity to think, feel, listen, see differently, and in so doing reimagine future conceptions of justice in ways that offer the possibility of mitigating rather than engendering harm, and of fostering inclusivity rather than facilitating social exclusion and marginalisation. Dastile et al argue for a reconfiguring of systems of justice which privilege Africanist human security and communitarianism (p92). Their chapter demonstrates how the sensorial aspects of reintegrative justice allow for a greater distinction between the affective response to the act, and the corporeal dignity of the actor – dividing feeling from feelings. Boswell et al urge us to adopt a sensorially-astute sensitivity both to embodied remembrances of violence, and those which intrude upon the interior into the dream world of spiritual life. The sensory constitutes a potential mechanism for disrupting Western percepticide.

It is important, too, to note that a significant number of scholars reject the conceptual framing of decolonising criminology all together. Juan Tauri takes issue with what he identifies as a frequently tokenistic, superficial and ultimately harmful effort to assimilate and neutralize indigenous voices. Rather than representing progress, these contributions mimic and reproduce the structural violence of the systems they emerge from. He argues of criminology’s decolonising efforts that “until it confronts its deep entanglement with colonisation, any reconciliation with Indigenous scholars will remain rhetorical rather than real” (2025). These vital criticisms raise the fundamental question of whether the master’s tools can ever dismantle the master’s house (to misquote Audre Lorde 1979). In the field of academic discourse this can arguably become a murkier issue. In this context what and who constitutes the master’s tools is itself an open question – contributors, discourse, theoretical frame, methods, formats of dissemination?

The contributors of this section have emphasised the need for reckoning, a heightened sensitivity to the violence of historical and persistent processes and forged potential pathways for us all to consider possibilities for doing justice differently. Where sound dominated treatments of violence in the last section, in section two smell provides a mechanism for charting the textures of the everyday violence of racism. Our proximity to one another, central to social interaction, is close, personal, as are, frequently, those processes of distancing and othering. As Classen et al emphasise; smell is a social phenomenon (Classen et al 1994). Though this is not to detract from the potency of Boswell et al’s identification of weaponised noise as a form of cultural violence (p114). If, as Boswell et al assert, developing a sensorial attunement to the harms of racist and colonial violence is a necessary step to more constructive iterations of justice, we must endeavour to do justice differently. In our failure to consider colonial legacies, we bequeath a most abhorrent heritage.

Some questions

What possibilities are opened up by considering the sensory in these contexts?

What might it mean to address “abhorrent heritage”?

Is the concept of “percepticide” useful more broadly to account for cultural blindness?

What might a decolonial criminology look/sound/smell like?

References

Classen, C., Howes, D., Synnott, D. (1994) Aroma: the cultural history of smell. London: Routledge https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781134822409_A25032735/preview-9781134822409_A25032735.pdf

Lorde, A. (1979/2018) The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. London: Penguin (in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114) [online] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/audre-lorde-the-master-s-tools-will-never-dismantle-the-master-s-house https://monoskop.org/images/2/2b/Lorde_Audre_1983_The_Masters_Tools_Will_Never_Dismantle_the_Masters_House.pdf

Tauri, J. (2025). Decolonising Criminology? We’re Not Interested: Indigenous Refusal and the Limits of the Discipline. Journal of Global Indigeneity, 9(4). https:/​/​doi.org/​10.54760/​001c.151793 [online] https://www.journalofglobalindigeneity.com/article/151793-decolonising-criminology-we-re-not-interested-indigenous-refusal-and-the-limits-of-the-discipline

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Environment police power prison probation research Research methods sensory Uncategorized

International Handbook of Sensory Criminology Series: 1

Introducing… Sensory Criminology: Expanding the Criminological Imagination

This short post marks the opening of a series dedicated to discussing each of the organising themes of the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology, in preparation for its launch. Each piece will leave comments open as an experiment in discussion. Please feel free to leave talking points or ask questions – we particularly welcome questions from students.

The book asks what the sensory can contribute to our understanding and pursuit of criminological inquiry? What might the value be, of attending to the sensory in social scientific and criminological investigation? What do we even mean by “the senses”? Conventionally thought of as being restricted to sight, sound, smell, touch, taste – and often laid out in that hierarchy – what happens if this is extended to include a broader range of perceptual stimuli? What happens to how we can utilise a sensory approach to criminology if we add clarity, distinguishing it from adjacent, but distinct, theoretical frameworks adopted by phenomenological and affective perspectives? How can we think about violence and its politics, how coloniality and imperialism frame our understandings of justice and punishment, narrative and the arts in the context of criminal justice – and its absence, Environmental harm and how criminal justice practices impose particular understandings of place, space, time and justice, and how the sensory can inform methodological approaches to the rapidly changing contours of criminology and society.

The handbook is dedicated to expanding these ideas and considering how developing a set of principles to guide our approach to sensory criminology works to allow for a deeper consideration of implications for decolonial thinking. This enhances capacity, we argue, for disrupting western empirical hierarchies and the social systems they both shore up and are reinforced by. The book aims to amplify voices and experiences from beyond the Global North and to expand the possibilities of our criminological imagination.

CONTENTS

Sensory Criminology: Expanding our Imagination   Kate Herrity, Kanupriya Sharma, Janani Umamaheswar, Jason Warr

Section 1: Sensory Politics of Violence

Sensing Violence: Traces, Echoes, and Afterlives Liam Gillespie, Kanupriya Sharma and Hannah Wilkinson

  1. Listening to Donald Trump’s Voice: ‘Fight like hell!’, the Capitol Hill Riots, and the Spectre of Teleprompter Trump Liam Gillespie             
  2. ‘SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH’: Sound, Silence and Gender-Based Violence Amanda Holt and Sian Lewis
  3. The Sound of Violence: Paramilitary experience in Ireland Colm Walsh
  4. War, Colonialism and the Senses: “You can’t unsee or unhear that shit” Hannah Wilkinson

Section 2: Coloniality, Imperialism, and the Senses    

Recognising Abhorrent Legacies: Lessons for Sensory Criminology Onwubiko Agozino, Rose Boswell, Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Sharon Gabie, Andrew Kettler, Macpherson Uchenna Nnam, Jessica Leigh Thornton, and Jason Warr

  1. Doing Justice Differently: A Pan-Africanist Perspective Nontyatyambo Pearl Dastile, Abiodun Omotayo Oladejo, and Macpherson Uchenna Nnam                 
  2. “I’ll Make You Shit!”: Olfactory Othering and the Necropolitics of Colonial Prisons Andrew Kettler 
  3. The Sensory Aspects of Abhorrent Heritage in South Africa Rosabelle Boswell, Jessica Leigh Thornton,  Sharon Gabie , Zanele Hartmann,  and Ismail Lagardien
  4. Decolonizing Sensory Rhetorics and Activism in Africana Prison Memoirs Onwubiko Agozino

Section 3: Sensory, Narrative, and the Arts         

Reimagining Justice through Creative Encounters and Sensory Knowing Glenda Acito, Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Fangyi Li, Lorenzo Natali, Nabil Ouassini, Kanupriya Sharma, Ozlem Turhal, and Raghavi Viswanath   

  1. Black light. Drawing, Music and Theatre as Sensory Practices in the Encounter Between Inmates and University Students Lorenzo Natali , Glenda Acito, and Ozlem Turhal 
  2. Crackle and Flicker: Music and Multisensory Experiences in Prison Lucy Cathcart Frödén and Áine Mangaoang       
  3. Seeing Museums as Criminological Spaces: An Affective Tale of Two Museum Visits Raghavi Viswanath and Fangyi Li
  4. ‘Sensory Criminology, Islamic Auditory Traditions, and Rehabilitation Nabil Ouassini and Anwar Ouassini                          

Section 4: Sensing (In)Justice        

From the Courtroom to the Street: The Sensory Dimensions of Racialised (In)justice Barbara Becnel, Dale Spencer, and Jason Warr

  1. Conflicting Senses, Victims, and the Courtroom: the case of Cindy Gladue Marcus Sibley and Dale Spencer    
  2. The Sensory Effects of Racial Profiling in Berlin’s KBO’s.  Melody Howse                          
  3. Racialized Punishment and the Sensorial Symbolism of Death Row for America’s Black Gangster Class Barbara Becnel             

Section 5: Environmental Harm and the Senses            

“The Way the Soil Crumbled in Their Hands”: Sensing Environmental Harms Amy Gibbons, Ascensión García Ruiz, Janani Umamaheswar, and Aysegul Yildirim

  1. Seeing and Sensing Environmental Harm: The Death of the British Countryside Amy Gibbons                 
  2. The Sensory Ocean: Exploring Noise and Light Pollution as Blue Crime Ascension Garcia-Ruiz
  3. Sensitising Criminology to Experiences of Environmental Noise Aysegul Yildirim

Section 6: Space, Place, and the Sensory           

Vivid and Vibrant Criminological Landscapes: Sense and Space Kevin Barnes-Ceeney, Priti Mohandas, and Janani Umamaheswar

  1. Dispossessed Realities: Houselessness, and Spatial Violence Luisa T. Schneider
  2. Release from Prison Day Kevin Barnes-Ceeney and Victoria Espinoza                        
  3. “I can’t breathe” Housing, Masculinities and Violence in Cape Town, South Africa Priti Mohandas
  4. Scrutinising Social Control in the City through the Senses Anna Di Ronco and Nina Peršak      

Section 7: Time, Justice, and the Sensory

Beholding Justice and Punishment Sneha Bhambri, Eamonn Carrabine, Kate Herrity, Arta Jalili-Idrissi and Jason Warr

  1. Sitting, Seeing and Getting Lost: The Sensory Aesthetics of Latvia’s Women’s Prison Arta Jalili-Idris
  2. Time, Temporality, and Chronoception Jason Warr
  3. It’s a Circus: The Production of Domestic Violence Proceedings in Lower Courts of Mumbai, India Sneha Bhambri
  4. Beholding Justice: Images of Punishment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Eamonn Carrabine

Section 8: Sensory Methods

“They Are Not Like You and I”: Sensory Methods  Briony Anderson, Kate Herrity, Sarah Kingston and Mark Wood

  1. Sense and Insensibility: How Technologies Invite and Invisibilise Harm Briony Anderson, Mark A Wood, Jackson Wood, Will Arpke-Wales, and Flynn Pervan             
  2. Audio Criminology: Broadening the Criminological Imagination Through the Use of Audio Methods Sarah Kingston
  3. ‘Still feels like jail’: Sensing Danger, Bleakness and Friendship in a State-Run Home For Boys Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, Aishwarya Chandran and Sanjukta Manna

This project began life as a conversation between Tom Sutton and I (Kate Herrity) at the 2022 BSC conference. Shortly after, Kanupriya Sharma, Janani Umamaheswar and Jason Warr joined. The four of us divided up the eight sections which organise the book. Each of the authors of the three or four chapters within them were invited to take part in a discussion with one another about their work. These discussions formed the basis for each introduction section of the book. Since these sections are an accessible way of introducing the contents of the book in a way which lends a substantial project a coherent narrative, they seem like a sensible focus for discussion.

As with all projects, people decline and others drop out, representation is partial, interests and approaches of the editors are reflected in those invited to participate… We discuss all this at greater length and depth in the introduction, along with our hopes for the future and the guiding ethos of the book. We hope to invite more people to the table and enrich a conversation we do not aim to be the last word in.

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Environment police power sensory space Uncategorized visual

Policing Dark Islands

Anna Souhami

One dark morning, I was standing on a hill in a howling gale in the Outer Hebrides, when I was surprised to see a police car in the distance. What did a police officer do in small, remote islands? What does policing look like when communities are small, scattered and separated by sea? Would police work be affected by the wind and rain that were then battering me? And why, after many years thinking about police work, didn’t I know?

This moment set in train an extended ethnography of policing in Shetland, the most peripheral archipelago in the UK. I wanted to explore how the historical preoccupation of criminology with the city had limited our imagination.  If our foundational research on policing had been conducted in remote islands rather than cities, what would we think was important in thinking about crime and its control? What would we notice that we currently do not see?

I soon discovered that one of the phenomena remote islands make inescapable is the dark: the visceral, overwhelming, sensory experience of immersion in darkness, and its effects on the exercise of state power.

Shetland is located over 200 miles north of the Scottish mainland in the centre of a ‘crossroads’ between Iceland, the Faroes, Scotland and Norway.   Its main connection with the UK mainland is by a 12 hour ferry from the Northeast of Scotland, though notoriously rough seas mean the journey can often take twice that. It can also be reached by propeller planes from Scottish airports, though the storms, 70mph winds and thick fog that batter the islands make this an unpredictable form of transport:  Flybe, the airline which served Shetland during my research, was known locally as ‘Fly Maybe’. 

So, in mid-December, armed with a suitcase full of seasickness tablets and some sturdy boots, I joined the young oil workers eating enormous plates of chips on the boat heading for Lerwick. Twelve hours later, I stepped out onto the deck in roaring winds, beside myself with excitement at my first glimpse of Shetland. 

I saw nothing.

Instead, I found myself enveloped in darkness, the quality of which I had never experienced before. It was impossible to tell where the land, sea and sky began or ended: the occasional tiny pinpricks of light which fleetingly appeared could have been from boats, houses or stars. This was my first experience of what islanders called ‘black dark’: an absence of light so profound that, as a police officer said, ‘you can’t let your dog off the lead as you’ll never find her again’.  Or as a former mainland officer put it, ‘you don’t know darkness until you’ve lived here. Here, there is nothing’. 

Yet while darkness may have been described in its absence – as ‘nothing’ – this was not how it was experienced. Instead, as I discovered, darkness is an acutely sensory experience. It is active, physical and alarming.

Light and darkness are central to the experience of life in remote Northern islands. Shetland experiences dramatic changes of light with continual light in midsummer (the Shetland phrase ‘simmer dim’ describes the brief dip in the light at the summer solstice) and in mid-winter, the time of my first arrival, only a few hours of watery grey daylight. Nights were not always dark: without clouds, auroras, stars and full moons lit up the sky making it possible to drive without headlights. The extraordinary experience of night illumination was so disorienting that one island police station had a list of full moon dates pinned to their front office to predict when people would ‘go crazy’.

However, more frequently, winter storms blacked out the moon and stars bringing immersion in darkness.  Staying in a little house at the end of a dark track next to a bay, I found myself overwhelmed by darkness. My fieldnotes describe tiredness, disorientation, and insomnia; feeling unable to leave my house, ‘hemmed in’ by a darkness that was ‘oppressive and total’.  To my astonishment, being submerged in darkness also brought with it a sense of creeping fear that was both existential and visceral. For the first time since a small child, I was afraid of the dark.

I soon realised these experiences were shared by the police officers navigating dark islands. All officers talked about darkness. They described how it interfered with their work: feeling exhausted and disoriented, getting lost, and not knowing in which direction they were driving. One officer came back from an unsuccessful house inquiry explaining: ‘There are no streetlights. It’s pitch black. It’s the darkest place I’ve ever been. I couldn’t find the bastard house.’ 

Yet darkness also affected officers more profoundly. It shaped the way they perceived the islands, and how they felt and moved within them.  

In the light islands were playgrounds for exploration. The starkness of the Shetland landscape became exciting:  we drove to remote cliffs to spot seals, orcas and otters on clear days, or to see shooting stars, red moons and auroras on clear nights. Officers described the colours of the land and sea, the sunsets they had seen, the wildlife and boats that passed. 

In the dark, however, islands became places of vulnerability. Officers described them as empty, lonely, barren places: ‘bleak’, ‘desolate’, depressing’, ‘shit’, ‘grey’.  Yet darkness wasn’t simply experienced as absence – of light, colour or pleasure. Instead, it was active, oppressive and visceral. Dark islands were hostile places.  Just as I felt ‘hemmed in’ in my house, officers described being crushed or consumed by darkness. It was penetrating, ‘claustrophobic’, ‘oppressive’; they described ‘sinking’ into the landscape.

Phenomenological research helps illuminate why darkness seems to generate this bodily sense of vulnerability.  Shaw (2015, p586) argues that in light, vision holds objects at a distance, becoming a ‘protective field’ which delineates the self from the world. In darkness, the boundaries between the body and environment are eroded (also Edensor 2013, Merleau-Ponty 1962, Morris 2011). Bodies become porous, leaving us open and vulnerable to the world outside. Or, as one officer described it, in darkness ‘I felt I was being swallowed by the island’.

For island officers, immersion in darkness was profoundly unsettling. As a result, officers drove quickly through dark places or avoided them entirely. Instead they headed to the comfort of the police station, or circulated around populated places with the safety of illuminated light. As one officer put it, when cloud cover at night meant there was no light at all, ‘that’s when you return to the station’. Islands became mapped through the light and the dark, structuring where officers went and what they did.

Where the police go, where they focus their attention, directly affects the use of state power. Research in dark islands suggest that their sensory experience of the environment, and the darkness and light in which they are submerged, is crucial to how police officers think, feel and move through the areas they police, and consequently what they do and who they encounter. So why have these phenomena been overlooked in police scholarship? As I have argued elsewhere (Souhami 2023), the consistency of the urban context of police research seems to have led us to overlook the physical environment of police work altogether. Remote Northern islands reveal that there is more to criminology than our preoccupations suggest. We should not be afraid of the dark.

For more on this research, see:

Souhami, A (2023): “Weather, Light and Darkness in Remote Island Policing: Expanding the Horizons of the Criminological Imagination”. The British Journal of Criminology. 63 (3) pp 634–650, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azac052

You may also be interested in the ‘Just Humans’ podcast ‘Darkness: Dr Anna Souhami’ produced by the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research:  https://www.sccjr.ac.uk/podcast/darkness-dr-anna-souhami/

References:

Edensor, T (2013): ‘Reconnecting with Darkness: Gloomy landscapes, lightless places’. Social and cultural geography 14, 446-65

Merleau-Ponty (1962): Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Morris, NJ (2011): ‘Night walking: darkness and sensory perception in a night-time landscape installation’. Cultural Geographies 18 (3), 315-342

Shaw, R (2015): ‘Controlling darkness: self, dark and the domestic night’. Cultural Geographies 22 (4), 585-600

Categories
power prison sensory smell Teaching

The Prison Mug: Perceptions of permission

Ross Little

I recently found a blue plastic prison issue mug in a brown cardboard box at home, sitting on top of a collection of classroom notes from a class I taught in prison. I was in the process of writing an article (Little and Warr, 2022) and thought I’d try to recall something of the sensory feel of that space. Instead, I was reminded that my handwriting is not always as clear as I had assumed it was. The ink had faded a little and the paper curled inwards at the edges, but otherwise was in good condition. However, it was the discovery of the mug that really transported me back to this former pedagogical space, one in which I co-facilitated an eight-week educational course. The course included students from De Montfort University and men serving long sentences at ‘HMP Lifer’. The mug might seem like an unlikely vehicle for such an evocative transportation, and yet to me it screams its institutional association.

To me, the mug is unmistakeably a prison mug. Its insipid light blue colour is distinctive. It might well be the sort of mug used in other institutional settings, but this is symbolically imbued with the essence of punishment. Its colour matches closely the faded light blue prison issue t-shirts worn by many of the men on the wings. It has a very plastic feel to it and is surprisingly lightweight, without substance, in contrast with the depth and weight of the sentences hanging over the prison learners in the classroom. It smells of plastic too, infused with a slight whiff of instant coffee, perhaps because it hasn’t had a very good wash yet, even after several years. Its authenticity has been preserved, like a relic from a bygone era found intact. The tasting notes of the coffee it contained promise that it “…makes a solid morning cup. It’s rich, bold, and robust…”. Just like me, I chortle inaccurately to myself.

I feel the need to clarify fairly early on that the mug was taken from one of our weekly sessions, hastily gathered up as we sought to depart the prison on time. The mug was taken accidentally, packed up in a box containing papers and stickers, photocopied readings and feedback sheets. This defence may not hold up in a court of law, but I know you trust my account.

The prison is not that far away, geographically speaking, from where I’m writing this now, at home. In other ways, however, it’s another world: where I am now there is the freedom to descend to the kitchen, fill up on coffee or snack on toast. I can choose something fresh and zesty or something warm and comforting, a new combination or something familiar. These are items that I’ve chosen, that create some sense of familiarity, curated for the moment. If the space has a smell, it is one that has been cultivated over time by its inhabitants, my family. It does not have that distinctive institutional smell of disinfectant mixed with blood, sweat and fear that a prison has. Or at least visitors have been too polite to mention it.

At the time of writing, I haven’t been back into the prison for a while, a period elongated by the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. It feels like a long time since I was in the prison, and I miss the classroom space. It wasn’t an easy experience, because planning and organizing it from beyond the prison boundary can be stressful and tiring. As can the facilitation itself. Going through notes and interviews with participants helped transport me back to moments and sensations experienced in the prison classroom. The classroom itself generally felt like a convivial space, a chatty place where people engaged in conversation easily despite the constrained circumstances. This was a zone where people were able to express something of their real selves, exhibit different thoughts and feelings to the ones they typically felt able to show openly in their institution they ‘belonged’ to. It felt like an honest space, a space rendered sufficiently trustworthy for the people there to engage in conversation despite their deeply contrasting experiences of day-to-day life.

University students spoke about seeing the men as humans, as individuals they could relate to; with perspectives and experiences they could learn from. I remember clearly a university student explaining to me about how this experience had also helped to humanize myself and my colleague, university lecturers. Compared with a lecture theatre environment, she was more able to see us as individual people with real thoughts, views, emotions, a sense of humour and a life beyond university. I was slightly surprised, but it made sense, and I was pleased she felt able to say this. Some months later, I was lecturing during the pandemic lockdown and I was confronted with the realization that the experience of prattling away to my laptop alone in a room at home was likely further reducing my pedagogical humanity in the eyes of students.

Back in the prison classroom, and some of the thoughts, feelings and life experiences expressed weighed heavily on me and I took some of this away with me, without even realizing it at first. Finding the mug took me back to the session it came from, and then a previous session when we were taking a break.

At break-time, everyone mingled as a group. The second week was the first time during the course we were able to take in refreshments for the group. The prison had agreed to this and to provide the hot water in flasks, but nothing more. This contrasts with the experience of the very first course, in 2016, when we were eventually able to have lunch together from the restaurant. The food had been provided by the on-site restaurant and one of the prison students proudly showed off his baking skills. Now, the prison would not, or could not, provide refreshments because the restaurant had long since ‘temporarily’ closed, and has been ever since.  We were now allowed to take certain – limited – items in. We took in some biscuits, fruit, juice, teas and coffee. I was pleased with this, as I recognized from a previous course that break time is important in setting some sort of tone, in communicating something of the course essence. Commensality tends to be more limited in our society these days, especially in prisoner society. It can helpfully echo the social nature of learning and helps humanize the space. It helps put people more at ease and communicates something of the pedagogical equity we’re aiming for during the sessions. Of course, there were considerable differences between the living circumstances of the people in the room. However, for these moments, social interaction was enabled and normalized, and subsequent conversations suggested it was a very welcome part of the overall setting. Just being able to converse with ‘normal’ people from beyond the prison boundary, who had no power or interest in impeding their paths to official rehabilitation, was experienced as worthwhile and valuable. Paired with new, fresh, products from the outside world, the effect was a sensory delight.

So, for me the mug is associated with a break, and yet a continuation of the values in the space, with informal dialogue privileged to facilitate interaction and the exchange of information, ideas and stories. The mug provided people with a vehicle for activity, or inactivity: something to do (make a drink), a catalyst for conversation, or a way to remove oneself from interaction for a short while. But the mug was never the main event, nor could it be, especially when drinks would have tasted so much better from something designed with a little more sensory pleasure in mind.  The main event for me was the biscuits and these are good for generating abstract conversation (Little and Warr, 2022). There were some plainer classics (your ‘Nice’ biscuits – how do you pronounce that word?), some popular favourites (Jaffa Cakes are not cakes), through to some more luxurious chocolate coated options. These offerings were popular amongst some but the group was careful not to demolish them too quickly. There was no stashing of the goodies in socks, trackies and sleeves I had witnessed when running a similar (shorter) course in a local ‘resettlement’ prison. The most noteworthy observation, in fact, was a palpable initial reticence amongst the prison students to touch or consume the biscuits. ‘Are you sure we’re allowed these?’ I was asked by more than one prison learner. It took what felt like quite a while for one of the students to take a biscuit, despite there being some interest. It’s unusual for a group to resist the allure of such sugary treats. It’s also impossible to eat only one; fact. Based on my autoethnographic research replicated over many years.

Being genuinely asked by a grown man if they could eat a biscuit that had clearly been brought in partly for their benefit came as something of a shock to me. The reason became clear shortly afterwards when one of the prisoners explained that they had recently been explicitly told they should not eat the biscuits. It may even have been included in the prison’s pre-course information briefing session. They were led to believe from prior experience that indulging in biscuits could lead to a ‘nicking’ and they did not want to risk unnecessary aggro for the sake of a custard cream. Whatever the precise reason, it was clearly a shared understanding amongst the group and it took a surprisingly long time to encourage them that it would be ok, and without disciplinary consequence. It was in this moment I belatedly realized that at least some people in the room sensed that I had some power in proceedings, or responsibility, or both. I had been relatively oblivious to this until that point, and now it was being made explicit. Whilst this was ‘only’ about biscuits, the biscuits had become symbolic of these other currents related to power and permission. By the end of the session we were informed clearly not to bring in any shit biscuits again. By which was meant, none from a ‘basics’ range or that might be confused with something that might be easily available institutionally.

Whilst the biscuits, and the responses to them, were significant, they were not quite as big a hit as expected. They were definitely appreciated, but there were quite a few left. By the end of the break, this seemed less about perceptions of permission, and more about personal choice. For even more popular than the biscuits was the fruit that had been brought in; there were grapes and kiwis. I recall thinking that our inclusion of kiwis was a bit of a random touch. This was not the view of one of the prisoners. The unfamiliar fresh citrussy smells cut through the heavy, warm air like nothing else. The bright, natural fruity colours hypnotised their consumers for a few moments: ‘Woah, a kiwi; I haven’t had one of them in eight years’. Cue a conversation about the last time he had a kiwi and how the quality and quantity of fruit generally available in the prison was so limited, and poor. Likewise, the (decent, not from concentrate) fruit juice went down a storm. It reminded me of how important fresh fruit and vegetables are, especially in (island) communities when access is so restricted. It also reminded me that perceptions of what is valuable, are also highly contingent upon personal circumstances. 

So, the tea, biscuits and fruit were popular, appreciated and came to symbolise break time. They were a good way of bringing people together for a chat, enhancing the comfort in the classroom space and helped people feel more at ease with each other. A sign that break times were ‘working’ well further occurred when men ‘doing time’ brought in their own tea to share with the group. This human desire to engage in exchange provided a nice touch and validated our sense that this had become a convivial space in which to teach and to learn. We had several more breaktimes like this over the following weeks. And then they changed.

During a later session, perhaps the fifth, the biscuits were stopped. Whilst exiting the prison the previous week we were told not to bring in any more fruit or biscuits for the sessions. This was disappointing but we complied with the request, which was made by a member of the education department staff. Curious to know the reason, the only explanation we received was a concern about ‘conditioning’. Conditioning seemed to be a new buzzword that was being lobbed around by certain staff to explain or justify any new restriction or cutback that further impoverished the regime. This is not to deny the existence of manipulation between people in prison and people employed to hold them there. Indeed, in recent years, there has been an increase in instances of drugs, mobile phones and sim cards being found in prisons. In the year prior to our course, it was reported in the national press that a lack of experienced prison officers had been blamed, in part, for these challenges (The Guardian, 2018). This played a part in the sensitivity towards some items being brought into the prison, such as grapes, kiwis and custard creams. Meanwhile, a prison mug escaped undetected.

References

Little, R., & Warr, J. (2022). Abstraction, belonging and comfort in the prison classroom. Incarceration, 3(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/26326663221142759

The Guardian (2018) More than 2,500 prison officers disciplined in five years, MoJ figures show [accessed November 2022]

Categories
Interviewing power research sensory Uncategorized Victimology

Sensing towards justice: The importance of attending to the sensory when interviewing victim-survivors

Beth

‘you were so afraid

of my voice

I decided to be

afraid of it too’

-rupi kaur, Milk and Honey

Recently, whilst designing a research project, I decided to look back on and examine my own experiences of participating in criminological research. I wanted to reflect on how we design and conduct research, bringing in knowledge of how it feels to be on the other side of the screen. I am a victim-survivor of abuse and have taken part in a small number of academic projects relating to this over the years. As I have only taken part in online interviews, and with an awareness many victim-survivors will experience the process differently to the way I do, I decided to investigate, and this is where I discovered a gaping hole in our conversations. There is plenty written about ‘ethical’ practice with victims of crime (Newman et al, 2006; Burgess-Proctor, 2014), how academics experience conducting their own research (Rice, 2009; Ross, 2017), and how methods may be experienced by participants (see Hlavka et al, 2007 and Campbell et al, 2009). But notably, almost all of this is written by and filtered through researchers, usually based on post-interview questions about the participant’s experience of the process. I question the effectiveness of this. How freely can those who have just sat in their vulnerability critique those imbued with more power? Participants do not have the same space to communicate for themselves about their experiences of taking part, and it seems that this has resulted in the loss of some of the nuance of emotions and sensations that taking part in research as a victim of crime can elicit.

Your research projects come into our lives suddenly and unexpectedly. Most often this is via a social media post, perhaps seen on a Saturday afternoon whilst I am sat with my family. There is a juxtaposition in this, the softness and warmth of my home against the harsh reminder of the world that exists outside of and prior to this new reality I have created. The pain which permanently exists under the surface is brought to the fore. But something about the research draws my interest and makes me stop, or go back to it. Curiosity perhaps. Most people don’t want to hear about my past, my existence is too uncomfortable for them to acknowledge and so they strip it from me on my behalf. We don’t have to talk about that. But I want to talk about it, and suddenly my head is bursting with things I didn’t know I wanted to say.

The words are almost tumbling out as I type a controlled message offering my time. Tap, tap, tap. My finger hesitates over the little arrow before I hit send. An odd thing about participating in research as a victim of abuse is that alongside the desire to be heard, worry and shame creep in at this point. Worry because I now have all these things I want to say, and if they say no I will have nowhere to put them. I will be left scrabbling to contain them again. I know I will be disappointed because the child within who couldn’t speak now desperately wants to be heard. The shame sits in my having contacted this ever-so-important person at all. Abuse lies, tells you that you have nothing of value to offer. Shame is the feeling of taking up too much space, and of needing to squash yourself into the smallest possible version so as not to trouble anyone. I am probably wasting their time.

Something that often goes unconsidered when designing time or resource pressured research is how we will communicate with people if they do not fit our study, or if we have finished data collection. Sometimes these limits are framed as ensuring researchers are not ‘over collecting’ data so as not to upset people unnecessarily, which while intended to be ethical, is actually cruel in its denial. What may seem like an innocuous email to say no thank you, might be experienced as deeply painful to someone who has already given something of themselves. If it has to be, effectively communicating why the decision has been made alongside a sincere acknowledgement that you appreciate them taking the time to get in touch can make all the difference to someone who has been repeatedly told they are not enough.

But in this case they say yes, and the interview is arranged. The screen flicks on, and the things most immediately apparent to me are that I am not in control, and the attention is entirely on me. In a way which is hard to put my finger on this feels reminiscent of the crimes I experienced. The distance through the screen mimics the disconnect I once felt with the world around me. The invisible bubble. The Untouchable. Suddenly I am acutely aware of the chair digging into my back, of not knowing where to put my arms and legs. Everything feels wrong. I feel myself shift uncomfortably whilst I try to project the image that everything is okay. Smile. That’s what ‘in control’ looks like, right? Is it? I can’t quite remember. Adrenaline floods my body; I can hear my heartbeat and I can feel that I am shaking slightly. Thump-thump, thump-thump. I clench my muscles in an attempt to regain some control. All of my senses tunnel in on this interaction, and everything else around me almost ceases to exist. There is an eerie stillness in being hyperaware of your breathing, of the tenseness in your body, in perceiving the other person, offset by the relative silence around me as my brain mutes out background information. But I want to do this. I focus on the questions, and on saying what I want to convey. Time and space begin to contort as I narrate both in the then and the now.

I wonder what the researcher sees in this moment. I suspect not much. Many victim-survivors, especially adult survivors of childhood trauma, are experts at masking pain. We often hide our experiences for many years, learning as children to live in disguise. Online research makes it easier for me to mask my distress. I can position my screen so that all you see is my face. So that you don’t witness the shaking, the shifting, the fiddling with a piece of Blu Tack. Abuse taught me how to disassociate my mind from my body, and I subconsciously do that now. I have learnt to mute myself, to deny my own physicality. I have learnt to silence myself before I am silenced, as a form of control. To exist in a half form so that I might be palatable.

Researchers may develop a strategy for managing participants distress, but in order to implement this we need to have perceived it. This can be difficult if someone is not visibly upset. Using Fricker’s concept of ‘hermeneutical injustice’ (2007), it is hard for me to communicate my experiences in a way which others will understand without showing them the physical effect on me. Abuse is inherently sensory, I can explain it only in how it felt, in sounds, and smells. Without this framework it is hard for others to comprehend, but this level of detail can be hard for researchers to hear, and so many reject it. ‘I don’t want you to get upset, shall we stop’, centres the researcher and inadvertently communicates that this may be becoming too much for you. That you want to stop. For me, my becoming upset isn’t necessarily a negative thing. In fact this may be one of very few spaces I can express myself in an authentic way. ‘Remember that this is your space, we can do whatever you need ’ communicates that the participant is in control, and gives someone whose “no” has previously been ignored permission to advocate for themselves. To be present in their whole form. To exist.

Afterwards the adrenaline floods out of my body, like a tidal wave has crashed and dissipated, leaving me tired and drained. But this experience has also felt freeing; I have put down some of the heavy stones which I carry. Brené Brown once said that “shame thrives on secrecy, silence and judgement. Shame cannot survive being spoken” (2012). In the very act of speaking, in a scenario where I have the safety of remaining anonymous, some of the shame I feel has been drawn out and leached. I have released it, and it less so belongs to me. Each time I speak, my body feels a little lighter to inhabit. I feel proud, and the warm swell that starts in my chest grows and spreads down each arm and into my fingertips. I feel bigger somehow, like an unfurling, and it is one of those rare occasions where it feels good to take up space. To have grasped at power in the choice of speaking. Of, in some small way, helping those who will come after me. In this moment I feel strong, and defiant.

Something that has come to interest me is the question of whether there is a risk that participants may feel emotions ‘outside of normal experience’, and I wonder who’s experiences we are using to define ‘normal’? To those who have not experienced trauma, what I have described would seem to be ‘outside of normal experience’. But I exist within and navigate this space every day. When I watch a film or go online, I do so knowing that I could be confronted with abuse at any time. I go out in public knowing that men will sometimes stand a little too close behind me. I have learnt to navigate and manage these things because abuse is a life sentence. I will never cease to be a victim-survivor. There is an arrogance in the assumption that I do not live with my experiences outside of academia’s research interests.

My identity has been forcibly and irrevocably changed, but that does not mean that I will never be in a position to talk about my experiences. Yes, talking about it is painful, but the silencing hurts more. Returning to Fricker’s work (2007), there is violence in the testimonial injustice inflicted on those who have experienced abuse, in the academy’s refusal to accept our right to frame our own narrative and make our own decisions about our ability to participate safely. The chokehold of his hand and of his threats now manifests in the chokehold of others’ discomfort, and in my fear of being cast out. The body has an horrendous ability to remember and replicate the bodily sensations of being silenced. And so important things remain unspoken, and I remain unseen. Being told my truth cannot exist in the world because of someone else’s perception of what is an ‘acceptable’ level of emotion is akin to having my voice removed once more. It is the imposition of power, of being spoken for, in others attempts to manage ‘risk’.

As soon as I was made a victim of abuse my entire existence became defined by risk. My risk of poor mental health. Of relationship breakdowns. Of chronic illness. Nothing is ever defined in relation to my strength. My power. My capacity to create change. I am an adult with the rights to make my own decisions, and I can assure you that victim-survivors do not speak without careful consideration and assessment first. Finding the balance is tricky, but in our desire to protect our participants we must also take care not to stifle those who want to speak, because of our failure to confront our own discomfort and fear. If you are not prepared to hear then do not do research with victims of crime, or you will compound and become complicit in the violence of our forced dissonance from the self. 

Going back to rupi kaur’s poem, every day I become less afraid of my own voice. But in it’s assertions that it is acting in my best interests, I feel deeply the silencing and rejection from an academy which is afraid of hearing me.

Reference list

Brown, B. (2012) Listening to shame. [online video] Available from www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame/transcript?language=en

Burgess-Proctor, A. (2014) Methodological and ethical issues in feminist research with abused women: Reflections on participants’’ vulnerability and empowerment. Women’s Studies International Forum, 48.

Campbell, R., Adams, A., Wasco, S., Ahrens, C. and Sefl, T. (2009) Training Interviewers for Research on Sexual Violence: A Qualitative Study of Rape Survivors’ Recommendations for Interview Practice. Violence Against Women, 15(5).

Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Hlavka, H. Kruttschnitt, C. and Carbone-López, K. (2007) Revictimizing the victims? Interviewing women about interpersonal violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 22(7).

Kaur, R. (2015) Milk and Honey. Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing.

Newman, E., Risch, E. and Kassam-Adams, N. (2006) Ethical Issues in Trauma-Related Research: A Review. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 1(3).

Rice, C. (2009) Imagining the other? Ethical challenges of researching and writing women’s embodied lives. Feminism and psychology, 19(2).

Ross, L. (2017) An Account from the Inside: Examining the Emotional Impact of Qualitative Research Through the Lens of “Insider Research”. Qualitative Psychology, 4(3).

Categories
power taste Women

A proper brew: sensory recollections of my time in prison

Danica J.M. Darley

My memory is crap. It’s a standing joke with my sister. I have no recollection of holidays we took as kids, favourite toys, friend’s birthday parties or family pets. Years of ingesting too much alcohol and fatty foods probably hasn’t helped the matter and many a counsellor has told me that it’s my brain’s way of suppressing childhood trauma. So, imagine my surprise when at work last year a taste transported me back to a situation I would much rather have forgotten. A cost cutting exercise at the day centre for young people with learning disabilities – where I worked throughout my undergraduate degree – had led them to downgrade the usual Yorkshire ‘proper brew’ tea bags to a much cheaper version. On that sunny morning in June I was sent back (thankfully only figuratively) to prison.

In July 2014 I started an 11 month prison sentence in Scotland’s only prison for women, the infamous Cornton Vale.  I had never been in prison, never even really been in trouble with the Police, and here I was wrenched away from my home in England, my husband and my 16 month old daughter for an offence I had committed 7 years previously.  My brain has done its usual trick of hiding many of the events that unfolded in the next 5 months, spent in that run down 1970’s building. However, what it chooses to whisper often comes back as recollections triggered by my senses.

Taste has always been one of the biggest triggers for my memory, helping me to recall the emotions, practicalities and surroundings of some of the most important and mundane situations of my life.  Many mothers will tell you about how good (or awful) the first thing they eat after giving birth to their children is.  For me, that was a soggy cheese sandwich on plain white bread with some sort of value, low fat spread.  I’ve never had a better cheese sandwich in my life! Bound up inextricably with that waxy cheese slice is the memory of becoming a mum for the first time, and all that goes with that, the feelings of love, exhaustion, pain, fear and overwhelming joy.

The taste of that cheap teabag whisked me back to the cramped ‘staff’ room at the side of the card workshop where I spent much of my days in ‘The Vale’. The tea was made from the cheapest possible tea bag that the Scottish Prison Service could lay their hands on. The taste was more akin to the mud soup you would whip up as a kid than any sort of tea I had tasted before, strangely chemically tasting and earthy all at the same time.  However, as is so often the case with food and drink, tea was part of a ritual. Breaks from the job were an important part of the rhythm of the day in prison, they gave us an opportunity to chat, vent, seek advice, size each other up and decide if we wanted to invest time in a friendship with our fellow prisoners. So I endured, I made tea, gratefully took tea made by others, screwed up my nose and swallowed down cup after cup of bargain basement, lukewarm, only slightly brown prison tea. 

However, I was one of the lucky ones. I had a job in the prison that meant I made a few pounds every week and I had a supportive family on the outside who could afford to send in money for me to buy the things I needed whilst in prison.  I didn’t smoke and kept my head down, choosing to spend much of it in the gym, in education or reading in my cell.  All of this meant that I was able to afford the luxury of a pack of Tetley tea bags every other week off of my shop sheet!  It’s funny the things that suddenly become important to you when you have little else to focus your mind or attention on.  Shop day was the best day of the week, ask anyone who’s been in prison and they’ll tell you that, and the best thing I got from the shop was my delicious, longed for ‘proper’ tea bags.

Having time, space (and the privilege) to now reflect on my experience in prison I realise that this sensorial taste experience can really help us to unlock important insights into how we view imprisonment, prisoners and the physical spaces in which people are locked up.  For me, it throws up questions about how society views people who are sent to prison. Is the fact that the prison service provides prisoners with the cheapest of everything representative of the way that prisoners are viewed by the wider population?  Could we not stand the ensuing moral panic created if prisoners were to be given Tetley? If, like many a liberal prison officer will tell you, the punishment is not in fact the prison experience but the deprivation of liberty itself, should the dehumanizing conditions in prison be something that people have to endure? There are also questions around the self-worth of prisoners. So many of the women that I met in prison came from awful situations which forced them to often unquestioningly accept the hand that they were dealt. They coped with life by just putting up with all the crap that was thrown at them and I wonder if the acceptance of the most foul tasting tea could be seen as indicative of their life experiences? A life that had so often ground them down that they didn’t see the point of sticking their head over the parapet and demanding better. 

All of this from a cup of fetid, brown liquid?

For me, the biggest thing that this sensorial recollection has brought was gratitude. That sounds ridiculous, but in some ways I am grateful for the experience of being in prison. Don’t get me wrong, there is so much work that needs to be done to reform all our systems so that they deliver much fairer, less harmful and just (in the truest sense of the word) outcomes for everyone whose lives they touch. However, the ability to recall in brilliant technicolor my prison experience opened my eyes, not only to how lucky I was, but to how I was wasting the opportunities that life had given me. It helped me see the world of opportunity that was before me, and set me on a path that will hopefully lead to me getting my PhD and helping to affect some really positive changes for people who come into conflict with the law. Three years of undergraduate study has given me the opportunity to retrospectively apply my sociological lens to my time in prison, and it’s interesting to do this from a sensory perspective. The senses allow us to get up close and personal with not only a person’s individual experience but with the emotions, sensations, thoughts and all the messiness that comes with that.  It allows us to more deeply interrogate and hopefully understand the situation from all angles, and perhaps come up with more creative and innovative solutions as a result. 

Categories
Ministry Of Justice power research sound space

Experiencing Research Interviews at the Ministry of Justice

Harry Annison

I like to walk to the Ministry of Justice. In part because you just can’t beat the Waterloo Sunset (so to speak); in part for the symbolism of a route that takes me past the Houses of Parliament, past the Supreme Court and past an assortment of other government departments. I can navigate most of it on auto-pilot by now. Off the train at Waterloo, racing to beat the crowds at the barriers. Out onto the South Bank. I squeeze past the endless waves of tourists near the London Eye, experience never teaching me that a quick pace is impossible. Over Westminster Bridge, usually dotted with bagpipers and tourists smiling at their selfie-stick phones. I use the road to skirt around people, until I remember this is ill-advised in central London. I push on through the hordes, wading through treacle. The air is thick with dirt. I arrive.

The brutalist exterior of 102 Petty France looms over me. It is a magnificent building, in its own way. I look up; take it in. Architectuul tells me that it is “a big, assertive building which succeeds in its job as a symbol of government authority and a landmark on the local skyline”. It is somewhat facile to describe it as prison-like, with its cold, concrete exterior and resistance to the outside world. But it is just that. I am a little early. I stroll down the side street, Queen Anne’s Gate. A plaque on the side of this mega-building tells me that Jeremy Bentham lived in a house on this site. I gaze through a barred gate. I could be free, launched into the open air of St James Park. I turn back.

Built in 1976, 102 Petty France was extensively modified from 2003 before the Ministry of Justice eventually became its new tenant in 2007. A high glass roof was installed, covering the former rear courtyard, meaning that there is now a large bright atrium at the building’s core. This contains a café, seating across various levels and glass-boxed meeting rooms. It looks remarkably like one of those overly-optimistic architect’s visualisations of how a space will be utilised: it feels light and spacious and there is a thrum of activity. Things happen here; power is held within these walls. I like being here, but feel a pang of guilt: I am there to talk about prisons, about punishment, about pain.

Getting past reception can be a challenge. They never seem to know the person I am meeting, to the point of doubting their existence to me. Initially this would induce panic in me. “Shit, I’ve got it wrong. Why didn’t I double check the details? What an idiot!” As I become more experienced, I realise that this seemed to be reception’s default approach for anyone. “Justice Secretary? Nope. Have you got a mobile number for them?” So, over time, my reaction shifts from panic to amusement. (And being more organised in asking for a contact number in advance). I sit and wait to be collected from reception.

I notice the whirr of a coffee machine: there is a brightly coloured mobile coffee shop shaped like a little tuk-tuk in the reception of the Ministry of Justice. I ponder the meeting at which this was decided to be A Good Thing. It is squeezed into the frontage, fitting – just – in amongst the anti-terrorist defences that have been installed. Out of the window I glimpse smokers, hanging around the huge strategically-placed planters on the pavement outside; more situational crime control in action. I hope that I’m collected soon; the longer I wait the more liable I am to have my bag searched by the security guards who inhabit the reception area. It would only take a moment, but it’s aggravating. My interviewee arrives.

Small talk, as we walk from reception, through the security ‘pods’ (think Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap) and to our meeting room. We walk past the signage for ‘independent’ bodies who are in fact physically based in the Ministry of Justice’s flagship building. This is normally coupled with a quip by the person I am meeting with. At the time this passes as polite chit-chat. But on reflection its importance strikes me more clearly: they mention it – and are primed to mention it – because they feel the problem. Every time they walk someone past it. Every single day.

A more recent experience involves the act of actually finding a space to meet. One interviewee had told me in advance that we might need to sit in the atrium as meeting rooms were hard to come by. It happens again. And again! And then, it became difficult even to find a table in the café. “Look forward to seeing you at 12. I’ll work in the café from mid-morning, before all the tables are taken.” What is going on?

Once I’m attuned to this situation, it can become hard not to be distracted by it. I notice people walking across my eyeline, like animals prowling the savannah looking for their prey. A free table! And they’re down, out of sight. I have also found myself, more than once, in a glass-boxed meeting room designed, I can only assume, for two-thirds of a small adult human. Being packt like sardines in a crushd tin box does not make for the best interview, it must be said.

These sometimes rather farcical experiences tell the tale, in their own way, of the crushing grip of austerity on the Ministry of Justice. Personal desks are being taken away; hot-desking is in. Partial home-working is another scheme, intended to reduce the need for office space. Different parts of government, and semi-independent bodies overseen by the MoJ, are moved in (and out), re-organisations to try to squeeze some more value (in a certain sense) out of this central London prime real estate. To the extent that this evokes the senses, it is a sense of impermanence and transience (there are always moving boxes somewhere, if you look for them), coupled with a low-level friction (people have been doing ‘more with less’, for a decade now).

My concluding observation is one that perhaps I shouldn’t admit, as a purported expert in penal policy: the Ministry of Justice makes no sense. Job roles change all the time. If you’re lucky, you may find an organogram (imagine a family tree, but for job roles) that putatively tells you who-does-what. You will invariably find that it is out of date, or does not help much on the specific issue you are researching, or both. The policy/operations boundary and related organisational schematics wash in, and out, like the tide. The organisations within 102 Petty France are contingent social constructions; they are in a permanent state of near-becoming.

Put another way, HMPPS is very much not the MoJ, and the MoJ is very much not HMPPS (or NOMS, as it was previously). Talking to insiders about issues that required a precise understanding of the current MoJ-HMPPS (and related organisational) dynamics would sometimes remind me of my French exchange trips as a young boy, trying to follow the rapid-fire chatter of my French family.

The observation that organisations – just like cultures, historical events and so on – are inherently resistant to efforts at a single and coherent account (and perhaps become more so, the more one learns about them), is by no means novel. I have myself explored what the Ministry of Justice ‘is’ from an interpretive analytical perspective, examining the narratives and webs of belief relied upon by penal policy makers.

Here, I have reflected on my sensory experiences of conducting research interviews in the Ministry of Justice headquarters, 102 Petty France, over recent years. This will hopefully be of interest to some, and perhaps even helpful to others. At the same time, I have a hunch that there is much more to investigate, to learn, and to theorise, about the sensory experience of being in spaces devoted to the development and maintenance of criminal justice policy, in addition to the direct study of spaces of punishment and social control.

Note: This account is an amalgamation of numerous visits to 102 Petty France, in part to ensure the anonymity of research respondents. To the extent that it can be said to take place at a particular moment in time, it occurred in spring 2018. For those planning to conduct their own research on penal politics and policy making, I am told that the appendix to my book Dangerous Politics, ‘Studying Penal Policymaking: Access, Ethics, and Power Relations’ is helpful and am happy to share the text with anyone who cannot access the book.

Categories
Comparative Penology power Sensory Penalities

A Taste of… Ethiopian Notes

Ian O’Donnell

Ian O’Donnell’s chapter in “Sensory Penalities” describes the assault on his senses that characterised a series of visits to a prison in southern Ethiopia. Foregrounding facets of the research experience that are seldom given the benefit of sustained academic attention it addresses themes of going, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, being, reflecting and comparing. What follows is a collection of excerpts from the chapter, with the addition of photographs which are not included in the book (full citation at the end of the piece).

Going

In 2016, Paddy Moran, a missionary priest, invited me to accompany him to a prison in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Regional State of Ethiopia, where he had been working for many years. The brief was fairly loose. I was to make a visit, see what struck me and prepare a short report in conclusion. These were unusually unspecific instructions (but none the less welcome for that) for one who is used to being trammelled by the bureaucratic demands of grant-making bodies. I updated my travel insurance, arranged for the necessary vaccinations and set off.

I had visited prisons in Europe, the United States and Australia but never in Africa, and it was difficult to prepare in advance by reading – a particular disadvantage for a bibliophile – as the pertinent literature was virtually non-existent. In short, I had no sense of potential pitfalls or pratfalls. For someone who had been studying prisons for almost 30 years, this was a reminder of early days in the field when uncertainty reigned.

Seeing

The prison that I visited (for a week in 2016 and for a few days in each of the two following years) resembled a small and bustling village with a population of around 2,000 men and 100 women. It was located in a large town, a short drive from the main thoroughfare with its traffic honking and braking, drivers shouting and waving, livestock wandering, in a weirdly crash-free synchrony. There was a steep and potholed hill up to the prison where progress was slow and pedestrians waved and greeted Fr Moran and myself as we progressed – swervingly – towards the prison gate in a battered jeep.

The immediate vicinity was busy with traders touting for business, the ubiquitous three-wheeled, blue-liveried, bajaj taxis whizzing around collecting and delivering passengers, sometimes perilously overloaded, children walking to school and playing. A metal sign had been erected just inside the gate upon which one of the prisoners had painted an almost life-size representation of a member of staff in camouflage-style uniform. The sign requested visitors to stop and cooperate with any security checks. The figure in the painting offered a respectful salute, suggesting an ethos of cooperation rather than coercion. Not being able to read the official language, Amharic, was a challenge that I had neither the time nor the talent to overcome. It was impossible for me to make sense of the written word, its mystery adding to its elegance in this stranger’s eyes.

Touching and being

The heat and humidity were bearable but whenever I sat down with my interpreter to speak to prisoners in a dormitory a crowd soon gathered, sitting, standing and crouching around us. They were curious, never menacing; always keen to listen to the discussion and to offer their own observations. There was little in the way of natural light and when the group in attendance grew large the atmosphere could be somewhat stifling. I was an object of some curiosity in a place where Irish professors were seldom, if ever, encountered. There were some challenges for my kinaesthetic sense. Sitting on impossibly small stools conducting interviews was not conducive to comfort for a gangly researcher with a notebook on his knee. I needed to watch my step walking on the compound’s uneven mud paths; they were dry during my visits which made them less hazardous than they would otherwise have been. A sense of always being in a racial minority was a novelty for me – I was told that I was the first white man to visit the prison farm – but this difference was not denigrated. I had a sense of being out of place linguistically, culturally, geographically and also temporally

Not long before going to Ethiopia I visited a supermax prison in the United States. It is difficult to imagine a wider sensory gulf than that existing between the sterility and stimulus-poor environment of the supermax and the vibrancy and all-out assault on the senses that was the Ethiopian prison compound.

O’Donnell, I. (2021) “Ethiopian Notes” in Herrity, K., Schmidt, B.E., Warr, J. (eds) Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control, pp. 203–216. Sensory Penalities is now available here: https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Sensory-Penalities/?K=9781839097270

Categories
Emotions police power sound

The knock

Jason Warr

The other day I was lain abed, taking advantage of the snooze alarm, dozy with the warm snuggled hug of the memory foam topper keeping me from the day. Parched, gritty eyed, in comforting dark when I was torn from my state by Bang … BANG, BANG!

I was immediately alert, up, on edge, worried, looking for the fresh Adidas, thrown back, awaiting the later crash as the door succumbed to uniformed baton and boot. The sounds of the banging immediately transported me back to a former time and a “6 in the Morning …”[1] moment that I was not, until this moment, aware had been haunting me. Fortunately, this time it was not the police. It was just an impatient delivery driver bringing some novelty to the door (unlike some advisory others we’re adhering to lockdown rules) and had ignored the doorbell and had just slammed fist to door. However, it got me to thinking about the police and The Knock.

Thus far many of the blog posts that have been presented here have focused on the sensorial nature of the prison and conducting research therein. This is understandable as the admins are all currently prison researchers and thus many of our connections are in the same field. However, the aim here has always been to expand our work and thinking beyond the realm of prisons and our book on Sensory Penalities into the wider realm of a sensory criminology. Here I aim to discuss one element of that: namely, the symbolism enmeshed within the police actions of knocking on a door.

Kate Herrity[2] notes that sounds such as banging (in one section of her thesis she discusses banging on cell doors) are symbolically communicative. The rhythm, timbre, volume, pitch, and tone of the ‘bang’ convey a range of messages and information. From calls for attention, to dissatisfaction, to alarm and panic, to anger – all can be contained within those sounds. She also argues that in order to understand the sound environment, the soundscape, of the prison (and thus in order to understand the prison), we need to become attuned to those sounds in order to be able to interpret and discuss their relevance and meaning within the social ecology of that environment. I contend here that we can extend such thinking to explore the relevance and meaning of police behaviours – here specifically the Knock.

Knocking is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself. There are whole articles and essays based on this.[3] The interpretations of ‘knocks’ is a complex neuro-social interaction which comprises varying neuro-functions conjoined with forms of social cognition[4]. There is the identification of both the action itself (becoming aware of the sound) and the form (discerning location and component of the sound) and then a process of contextual interpretation – what does the sound/knock mean? Ordinarily, and evidently, a knock represents an external person’s expressed desire and intention to gain some access into the space from which a door currently blocks their progress. The knock, therefore represents an intent[5]. However, there is a complex relationship of cultural expectation, mores, and manners involved in the act of a knock. Evidenced by the fact that some ‘knocks’ on a door can be considered rude – you will know what I mean by that. Think about that, you will have some recognition already that some forms of ‘knock’ are inappropriate. BANGBANGBANG when bringing a cup of tea to someone on a conference call for instance. Yet, though we have some recognition of this when asked to contemplate it, it is nevertheless one of those simplistic acts in our quotidian lives that is much more complex than we ever really bother to consider.

When it comes to the police, and their knocking on your door, this is complicated by the function of their knocking. Or in deed not knocking. In the US policing literature, there is a wide range of critical explorations on the controversial policy and practice of the ‘No-Knock’ warrant – whereby the police can gain access to a property without the ordinary provision of having to ‘knock’ on the door[6]. When it comes to police practice there is a great deal of symbolic communication layered into the sounds of their knocking or decisions not to knock. Due to the delivery drivers rude awakening of my imagination it made me realise that I have been subjected to varying forms of the ‘the knock’ by the police. There is no singular knock here, instead there is a multitude of aural communications, being proffered by differing forms of the knock. Here I explore three.

tap … tap, Tap

When I was 17 a friend of mine died. The police who attended the scene asked me to accompany them to the family’s home in order to break the news to my friend’s mum. It was the first and only time I ever got into a police car willingly. Fuck knows I did not want to go but … what do you do? I remember so vividly how nervous the two officers, one older male, the other a younger woman, were on the way there. It was the first time I had ever seen people who I associated with power, hostility, and ill-treatment seem vulnerable. The ride there was filled with pained silence. They had seen the devastation wrought on the child of the person we were on our way to see. The closer we got the more nervous we all got. As we reached the house, I felt sick with dread. The officers approached the door and gave the door a tentative tap, followed by a brief pause, and then two more taps. The last of which seemed more assertive – tap … tap, Tap.

Tap, Tap … Tap, Tap

Sat in my flat in East London, minding my own business, watching tv, there came a Tap, Tap … Tap Tap at my front door. There was a weird, proprietary air to the knock on the door. As I disentangled myself from the cushions on the sofa in order to answer the door there came a further Tap, Tap … Tap, Tap. It was, as most knocks are a call for attention, but interlaced into this knocking was something of authority, confidence, and impatience. It made me hesitate. Nervous. Alert. Ready for a confrontation, violence if needs be. When I opened the door there were police officers, a number, strategically placed at the portal, eying the locked security gate with suspicion. Nerves, fight or flight instincts began to kick in, until I noticed another set of officers at the door opposite. “Sorry to bother you sir, but there was an incident outside last night, and we’re just checking to see if you saw or heard anything”.

Routine. Breathe …

BANG, BANGBANGBANG, BANGBANGBANG

Crash. Splinter. Baton and boot.

“6 in the morning, police at my door, Fresh Adidas squeak across the bathroom floor, Out my back window I make an escape …”[7]

Except I didn’t escape from the flat. I barely made it out of bed before hands and boots were on me. Blurs of black and white. Pain, sharp, intense. Shouts ringing loud but incoherent. I had no idea why they were there but … that was nothing new. It was the last time though. There is nuance to the communicative, and symbolically communicative, actions of the knock. Here, by exploring just three forms of knock employed by police officers we can begin to see how the act of knocking on a door, with differing intents, can be discerned. We tend not to think about the sensory element of actions of, or performances by, those who wield power. Yet they are there. If we are to have a greater understanding of the interactivity of that power with the public then we need to begin to start taking these sensory elements more seriously. There are questions to explore and to be answered. This is what sensory criminology aims to do, revisit much of our criminological understanding and see if there are facets that we have, hitherto missed.

[1] Ice-T (1986) “6 ‘N the Morning”, Rhyme Pays, Techno Hop Records, Warner Bros, Los Angeles: California.

[2] Herrity, K. (2019). Rhythms and Routines: Sounding Order in a Local Men’s Prison Through Aural Ethnography., Doctoral Thesis., University of Leicester., Leicester https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.794058

[3] For instance, von Wright, G. (1988). An essay on door-knocking. Rechtstheorie, 19(3), 275-288.

[4] Lemaitre, G. Pyles, J. A. Halpern, A. R. Navolio, N. Lehet, M. and Heller,L. M. (2018). Who’s that Knocking at My Door? Neural Bases of Sound Source Identification, Cerebral Cortex, Vol. 28(3): 805–818.

[5] See 3.

[6] See: Dolan, B. (2019). To knock or not to knock: No-knock warrants and confrontational policing. St. John’s Law Review, 93(1), 201-232.

Goddard, J. M. (1995). The destruction of evidence exception to the knock and announce rule: call for protection of fourth amendment rights. Boston University Law Review, 75(2), 449-476.

[7] See 1.