Violence – Sensory Criminology

Benjamin Thorne

International Criminal Justice

The theatre of law, the performance of accountability, justice and peace. The aesthetic grandeur of shiny courtroom glass, the scent of polished wooden fixings and fittings, the nostalgia of legal dress: dark shades of silk, the gleaming white centrepiece of robes, and the noticeable absence of clustered horsehair. The glare of the world through high-end Sony lenses, strategically placed to capture the actors in this performance of law. Their moments of triumph, despair, authority, indifference. The abrupt but comforting material banality of security x-ray machines, the fire evacuation diagram fastened to a wall, the heavily branded hot drinks machine, which accompanies, bears witness to these seismic life events.

Ratko Mladić in the Courtroom of the IRMCT Hague branch. Appeal Judgement 8^th June 2021

Parallel to the public spectacle of international criminal justice, are the behind-the-scenes activities, back passages and corridors that is the legal archive documenting, recording, categorising, constructing, producing stories of past events, actions, actors, and experiences.

The archive, the material – who is it for? Me the researcher, me the teacher, me the curious member of the public? The legal people: lawyers, clerks, the investigators, the victims’ advisers? Them, over there, the individual, community, society, the bearers of trauma, the nameless who international justice purports to put centre stage, but all too often remain distant, absent, at the margins, a hollowed out rhetorical vessel of hope?

Space, place, and material stimulate the senses and memories. The distant memory of a particular smell. A trivial touch that thrusts us back to a moment of lived potency. The low toned circular sound of machinery providing momentary soothing respite. These stimulations are particularly evident at sites such as legal archives documenting traumatic pasts.

Archives are not neutral depositories of history.1 They are interplays of social, legal, cultural, and political constructs.2 Archives are also not neutral in the way they stimulate memories and the senses, which directly interacts and shapes our experience both of them and the stories within.

A legal archive: outside

The manmade and natural environment neighbouring an archive building can act as sources of sensory and memory stimulation before one enters, but which may journey with us inside. A soft warm breeze gently resting on our skin, meandering through our nasal cavities tickles a fond memory of a day in the countryside. Ascending the few steps leading to the building’s entrance a slightly out-of-place and elevated concrete slab engages at speed with the toes of our left foot. A first jolt forward head overtakes the knees, the right foot steadies the body, a quick glance around to see if anyone has witnessed this embarrassment, followed by an attempt at normalcy. A memory of vulnerability presents itself, not a specific memory but a feeling which like the blown seeds of a dandelion, scatter and linger in the mind. We open the door and enter.

A legal archive: inside

The bright and artificial harsh lighting makes it clear we have entered the institution. The small circular green and amber lights rhythmically flash as we pass through the metal detector. The sights and sounds of the archive reception room bring a sense of excitement and anticipation for the explorations to come. At the same time, the mood board of memory and sensory stimulation gathered during our morning remains close. The catalogue, a formidable gatekeep of the archive. It simultaneously brings a sense of order whilst being an unrelenting and impenetrable mass – numbers, labels, titles, dates. The rhythmic and authoritative ascending numbers and letters of archival coding, only partially quenches the sensory overload.

The material and post-conflict communities

Testimonies of action, the premeditated and spontaneous, the mundane. Spoken by witnesses, victims, perpetrators, foreigners. The objective storytelling of forensic reports, the matter-of-fact experience of death and suffering, the clinical imagery of x-rays showing a single neat bullet hole in the cranium of a nameless victim: ‘female, age 13-17’, a statistical accolade marking the failings of humanity. The letters and diary entries of perpetrators detailing, a ruthless plan, the functionary itinerary of a top-brass meeting, self-reflections on loneliness and fear. Imagery, the theatre of the trial, visual representations of atrocity, but also the everyday lived realities of its aftermath, and the intimate portraits of family celebrations before the violence.

Exhibit P38A submitted by the prosecution in case of Georges Rutaganda (ICTR-96-3) at International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda]

These materials are memories, fragments of memories, which unlike the theatre of law whose story is singular and rigid, are plural, fluid and dynamic. These somewhat side-lined fragments can stimulate the senses, memory and dialogue, and between individuals and within communities. Words can be hard to find, particularly those that seek to describe traumatic and complex social events and relationships. The material fragments of memory through its sensory stimulation can be a gateway to articulating plural experiences of shared traumatic pasts, and connections to the present and future. The material fragments of memory in atrocity legal archives can open up understanding about how justice, peace, and social repair might look, sound and feel like to those who have experienced horrendous suffering.

Sight: the Rockstar of the senses

Sight as a tool to explore crime, law and justice, especially the ‘serious’ international versions has elevated this sense into somewhat of a socialite of the senses: wherever there is a sensory ‘gig’ sight is there at the top table of the VIP room. Before the tumbleweed crossing this blog occurs following the exiting of offended visually-orientated readers, the ocular has a lot to offer archival fragments of memory. A photograph of the post-conflict period depicting an image of a church could stimulate plural dialogue. Photographs are sites not when meaning is given but where meaning is negotiated and searched for. But, to fully seek the potential of archival fragments of memories for local communities we must consider not only the ‘look at me, look at me’ socialite of the senses but embrace the opportunities of the wider sensory field.

The sensory entourage

The sounds of atrocity, justice and attempts to navigate life in the aftermath of violence, are sources of stimulation. A stimulation of memories about difficult past events: both the internal memories of lived experiences, and external memories of narratives and trauma connected to lived realities but belonging to other people. The fragments of sound can also stimulate memories that are somewhat detached from the origins of the aural source though can equally stimulate reflection, exploration and dialogue. Touch, taste and smell are also present in archival encounters, sometimes through physical interaction with the material, and sometimes through the visuality which stimulates a past scent, a forgotten touch, a sweet taste. The senses, like memory, do not exist in an enclosed sphere, like an ornamental snow globe that when shaken the snow travels only within the boundaries of the glass wall. Instead, the senses are dynamic and fluid, pivoting from one direction to another sometimes with no warning and dashing in different directions. The lived reality of shared past experiences is plural, and the untethered nature of the senses is arguably a core component of legal archive material as well as post-conflict communities engagement with them.

International criminal justice likes distance, it embraces it, usually insists on it. The justification for this distancing from the sites of atrocity is neutrality and objectivity, to keep it sterile from the events it is judging.3 The archives of international justice are also distant from those these courts claim to put centre stage: none of the archives are located within the territories of the affected communities. Some material of international criminal justice is digitally available. But, the distance of the physical archive undoubtedly impacts on sensory, and likely memory stimulation. Whilst digital archives can engage these, the loss of physical materiality of both the archive and the material for affected communities continues to put up hurdles for the potential of legal archives.

Legal atrocity archives are commonly understood as having utility value as evidence or sources for fact finding endeavours. However, these archives understood instead as sites of research in themselves and interplays of the social, legal, cultural and political, force us to challenge and disrupt our understanding of what a legal archive is, what is its purpose, and who is it for? Crucially it illuminates that these archives in their attempts at institutional sterility and distance act to remove the actors that these materials record. There is an urgent need to relocate atrocity affected communities to the centre of legal records documenting their lived experiences. Ultimately it requires international criminal justice to listen to these communities, and to allow them to be active participants in exploring what justice, peace and social repair looks, sounds and feels like.

Thorne, B., 2020. Remembering atrocities: legal archives and the discursive conditions of witnessing. The International Journal of Human Rights, 25(3), pp.467-490.
Redwood, H.A., 2020. Archiving (In) justice: Building Archives and Imagining Community. Millennium, 48(3), pp.271-296.
Clark, P., 2018. Distant Justice: The Impact of the International Criminal Court on African Politics. Cambridge University Press.

Eleanor March

[CW: suicide, violence, drug use, profanity]

The role of prisoner writing

During the Covid-19 pandemic, comparisons have often been drawn between lockdown measures and prison, yet people with lived experience of prison have countered that such domestic confinement bears little resemblance to the pains of imprisonment. These different viewpoints suggest that the general public has little understanding of what happens behind prison walls. This blogpost considers how prisoner writing can describe prison to the non-prisoner reader (i.e. a reader who does not have lived experience of prison), bearing witness to the carceral experience.

Drawing on examples of short stories about prison, written by current or former prisoners, I examine how these writers recreate sensory aspects of prison in their writing. Carceral texts commonly recount the sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells of prison; but, in my experience of reading and analysing prisoner writing, it is the depiction of prison sound that is most powerful and affecting. In this blogpost, I examine how prisoner-writers translate the speech and sounds of prison into written form, to convey the carceral experience to those outside prison walls.

Recreating the carceral soundscape

Descriptions of the prison often focus on its noisiness (Wener, 2012), with sounds such as jangling keys, banging doors and gates, and voices of prisoners and staff contributing to the carceral “soundscape” (Herrity, 2019; 2020). Prison culture is overwhelmingly oral, privileging spoken communication methods such as the “grapevine”, and prison language is typified by extensive slang, as a predominantly verbal form of expression. Key properties of the prison environment are therefore its orality, demonstrated by the pervasiveness of oral communication, and its aurality, typified by harsh, high-volume sounds.

While literature may appear to be at odds with prison’s oral culture, spoken and written communication can more accurately be conceptualised as extremes of a continuum. Accordingly, Koch and Oesterreicher replace the labels “oral” and “literary” with the terms “language of proximity” (describing characteristics associated with face-to-face, spoken communication, such as cooperation and shared knowledge) and “language of distance” (describing features of formal, written communication, like unfamiliarity and detachment) (1986/2012, pp.446-448).

Crucially, an utterance may exhibit aspects of both proximity and distance. A literary text may therefore incorporate elements typically associated with orality, such as simple sentence structures, non-standard grammar, interjections, colloquialisms, figures of speech, and slang, jargon and profanity (Chaume, 2012, pp.89-91). My analysis of carceral texts shows that prisoner-writers use the language of proximity to translate the speech and sounds of prison into written form, recreating the prison soundscape for the reader.

The carceral language of proximity

Prisoner-writers incorporate the language of proximity into their writing in several ways. It is common for carceral texts to employ first-person narration, a narrative position that arguably allows the writer to “speak” to the reader. Many carceral texts use reported or direct speech, or employ a conversational narrative voice that represents the narrator’s internal monologue. All of these techniques allow authors to quote the utterances of prison in their writing.

The language of proximity plays a crucial role in bringing these reproductions of oral prison discourse to life, as can be seen in the comparison between the following two extracts:

“You are being rude again.”

“Yes, I suppose if you find the truth rude. And, I suppose at times it is. You asked me what happened and I told you.”

Stranger Than Fiction (14K1600, 2014, p.6)

“Try and deal me a good hand this time Jason, eh? You’ve been giving me rubbish all night! I can’t remember the last time I had a face card or a pocket pair,” joked Mike.

“A good craftsman doesn’t blame his tools, Mikeyboy. You could always try bluffing it,” Sam replied. “Anyway,” added Sam, “You’re just annoyed that I keep beating you. You’re a sore loser. Sour grapes. Throwing your toys out of the pram.”

“Aye, in your dreams boyo. I’m coming for you.” Mike replied, laughing.

Through the Glass (17K0686, 2017, p.1)

Stranger Than Fiction uses full sentences and the words “you are”, rather than the contraction “you’re”, which are typical of the written language of distance. In contrast, Through the Glass uses the language of proximity, including contractions like “can’t”, incomplete or elliptical sentences (such as “Sour grapes.”), the interjection “eh”, the slang “boyo”, the discourse marker “Anyway”, and figures of speech (such as “Throwing your toys out of the pram”). Other texts include elements such as slang, profanity, dialect, or graphological transcriptions of regional accents, to further accentuate the oral nature of prison life. Through these techniques, the language of proximity permeates prisoner writing, replicating carceral orality for the reader.

Oral and aural pains of imprisonment

While such literary reproductions of oral discourse are highly effective in replicating the carceral soundscape, a number of stories go further, placing the speech and sounds of prison at the centre of their narrative.

The story Inside Out opens with a soldier on active duty. The narrator’s internal monologue incorporates speech, military jargon and slang, interspersed with the sounds of battle, “THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP” and “CRACKBANG!!”, which the narrator is able to read as “the tell tale thumps in the near distance of shells” and “a bullet” respectively (PRT18/6, 2018, p.1).

The narrative shifts to a drunken fight, followed by snapshots of the narrator’s arrest and sentencing, before his arrival in prison, all relayed through sounds and speech. The prison environment is described via the same confused narration as the battlefield sequence:

The noise…. So much noise… No noise like it I’ve ever heard!! Chaotic, screaming, the noise… so much noise!! I know, I know… I’m used to battle noise, well I’ve experienced it… Never get used to it, but this… It’s different. Cries of pain, Co dees shouting to each other, but standing face to face… Why are you shouting? A young lad in the stairs, talking gobbledeegoop, he’s gone over, BANGTHUDTHUMPCRASH down the stairs… Blood everywhere all out on the floor, the screws shout to get inside our cells. Spice apparently? I don’t know what that is!! The noise doesn’t bang with munitions in the air… This noise has a deadly, yet silent violence to it… An unknown enemy!!

Inside Out (PRT18/6, 2018, p.2)

The cacophony of prison is emphasised by the repetition of the word “noise” and the direct comparison by the former soldier narrator with the sounds of combat. Military jargon and slang and the sounds of battle have been replaced by unfamiliar prisoner slang and the utterances and sounds of prison.

Crucially, where the narrator could make sense of the sounds of warfare, he cannot read prison noise, and is overwhelmed. He turns to the synthetic cannabinoid “spice” to help him cope, gets into debt, and is attacked by another prisoner, which is again presented in terms of sound:

“Oi you WHACK…. You owe me 4 ounces burn WHACK WHACK WHACK…. What dya mean ya can’t fucking pay me?”

WHACKWHACKWHACKTHUMPCRUCHSMACKWHACKSMACKTHUMP

“double next week……. CUNT”.

Inside Out (PRT18/6, 2018, p.2)

The WHACK and THUMP recalls the CRACK and THUMP of the deadly weapons in the battlefield scene, in an aural embodiment of the violence of prison, enacted on human flesh. In this scenario, the language of proximity conveys the forced, unwanted physical proximity of prison life. Ultimately, the narrator’s inability to decode the prison soundscape leaves him unable to adapt to prison life, and the story ends with his suicide.

Inside Out foregrounds the carceral soundscape, presenting the oral and aural pains of imprisonment as central to both the story and the carceral experience. This technique disrupts the literary language of distance and requires the reader to interpret these unfamiliar sounds and utterances, within a disorientating narrative, thereby exposing them to the dizzying effects of prison orality and aurality.

Reading the prison soundscape

The sounds and speech of prison are similarly foregrounded in Block Busters, which focuses on the ability to read the prison soundscape. The story opens at night, with the prisoners Chips and Joe awakened by screams from the cell of the prisoner known as “T”:

“Arrghh,” an ungodly scream bounced from wall to wall and floor to ceiling as it rang out through the linier corridors of HMP Havoc, eventually being swallowed up by the blackness of the unlit prison wing.

The sounds of wood attacking metal and stone proceeded the painful cries, waking those who slept soundly in the peace and serenity of their caged solitude.

“Yo, that sounds like ‘T’!”

“Na, he’s not gonna be smashing his cell up bro.”

Block Busters (17K1032, 2017, p.1)

The story again foregrounds orality and aurality, combining dialogue with written representations of T’s shouts and screams, and descriptions of the accompanying sounds.

As in Inside Out, this text emphasises the need for prisoners and prison officers to read the soundscape (Herrity, 2019, p.156; p.158; 2020, p.251). This skill is central to the story’s plot, as Chips and Joe interpret the sounds of T’s distress and ring their cell bell, summoning the unsympathetic officer, Mr Shaw. Shaw refuses to interpret the sounds around him and ignores T’s screams, ordering Chips and Joe to go back to sleep.

Come morning, Chips, Joe and the other prisoners again read the soundscape, deducing that T has committed suicide:

The sounds of screws rushing around with their keys rattling like angry snakes, shouting from protesting prisoners wanting to be unlocked in order to partake in their daily routines and incomprehensible radio messages fading in and out as officers ran by. Increasingly interested prisoners peering through slightly open observation panels started to holler at others answering the choir of questions being asked.

“They’re all at T’s door, think he’s dead,” one inmate yelled as the wing once again retreated into silence.

“He’s cutting man down,” another barked.

Chips and Joe immediately rushed to their door and put their ears to the gap desperately trying to make out what was being said.

Block Busters (17K1032, 2017, p.2)

This tragic outcome highlights the power dynamics of speaking and listening in a prison setting; Chips and Joe hear T’s distress but are powerless to help him, while Mr Shaw refuses to read the prison soundscape, resulting in T’s death. The harsh noises generated by the prison officers, such as their “incomprehensible” radios and their keys “rattling like angry snakes”, are emblematic of the power of the prison system over prisoners (Herrity, 2019, p.24). Block Busters uses the language of proximity to translate the carceral soundscape into written form, but also demonstrates to the non-prisoner reader how to translate the speech and sounds of prison life.

Sensing proximity and distance

This brief discussion has shown how prisoner-writers replicate the speech and sounds of prison in their writing, replacing the literary language of distance with the oral language of proximity. Crucially, though, this approach does more than simply recreate prison’s speech and sounds; it creates an active, participatory, sensory reading experience. The reader must adopt an active, hermeneutic role, sounding out literary facsimiles of prison orality and aurality, and learning how to read carceral sounds, in order to interpret the story. In short, the reader is required both to sense and to make sense of the carceral soundscape. This participatory approach allows the writer to bring a sense of the unfamiliar prison experience to the reader, but also moves the reader closer to the unfamiliar prison world. By replacing the literary language of distance with the spoken language of immediacy, prisoner writing in turn collapses the distance between the prison and non-prison worlds, creating a new sense of proximity between the imprisoned writer and the non-prisoner reader.

Primary texts

14K1600 (2014) Stranger Than Fiction. London: Koestler Arts archive.

17K0686 (2017) Through the glass. London: Koestler Arts archive.

17K1032 (2017) Block Busters. London: Koestler Arts archive.

PRT18/6 (2018) Inside Out. London: Prison Reform Trust archive.

References

Chaume, Frederic. (2012) Audiovisual translation: Dubbing. Manchester: St. Jerome.

Herrity, K. (2020) ‘Hearing Behind the Door: The Cell as a Portal to Prison Life’, in Turner, J. & Knight, V. (eds.) The Prison Cell: Embodied and Everyday Spaces of Incarceration. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.239-259.

Herrity, K.Z. (2019) Rhythms and Routines: sounding order in a local men’s prison through aural ethnography. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Leicester.

Koch, P. & Oesterreicher, W. (1986/2012) ‘Language of Immediacy – Language of Distance: Orality and Literacy from the Perspective of Language Theory and Linguistic History’, in Lange, C., Weber, B. & Wolf, G. (eds.) Communicative Spaces: Variation, Contact, and Change: Papers in Honour of Ursula Schaefer. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp.441-473.

Wener, R. (2012) The Environmental Psychology of Prisons and Jails: Creating Humane Spaces in Secure Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.