Prison language: A psychoanalytic approach to the language of British young offenders in the twenty-first century

Abstract

I present and analyse here the phenomenon of a specific language that was spoken within the walls of a maximum security prison in the south-east of England between 2006 and 2007. In doing so, I look at the adolescent who becomes an offender, and how his language is thereby altered, here exploring language in groups and drawing on Freud and Bion, as well as the sociological contributions of Emery, Goffman and Messerschmidt, and the linguistic contribution of Teresa Labov. Examining the social structures that the language enforced, I examine my own role within and outside the prisoners' language, and explore what the prisoners learned from me and my language, and vice versa. I explore the nature of learning a language inside a prison, and examine the need for a homogeneity of language and the social adhesive in the language used. I look at my experience of one-to-one teaching versus group teaching: specifically, the differences in language used by the prisoners in these different scenarios, and try to determine to what extent language comes from outside influences and what to extent it forms and permutates inside. Using actual examples, I argue that despite the exuberance and inventiveness of the language, its usage follows Freud's “Beyond the pleasure principle,” in that there is an attempt to reduce excitation. Finally, I regard prison language as a psychic retreat, drawing on the work of Steiner, Meltzer, Emanuel, and Leader (among others); and I ask questions not only about the prisoners, but also about the function of learning inside a prison itself, while regarding the language used as a depressive defence. No identifying reference to any single prisoner, or any specific crime, has been included in these pages. The people and the place that are alluded to throughout have been rendered anonymous.

Keywords:

• prison
• language
• offender
• education
• anxiety

Notes

¹ Fraggle Rock was a children's television programme shown in the 1980s, made by the creators of The Muppet Show. It was a highly colourful song-and-dance puppet programme that featured an isolated lighthouse. The prisoners' use of this referent is interesting, combining as it does an implication of distance and estrangement; but also the reference is to colourful antics, possibly those of a clichéd view of homosexuality. The fact that the original Fraggles were only humanoid and not human might also be relevant.

²This applies to the three sets of people who spend time within its walls: the inmates, those who work there, and those who visit for reasons other than employment – or to put it another way, those who must remain there, those who are paid to be there, and those who get to go home once the purpose of their visit has been discharged. For all concerned, the key principles to be borne in mind, in one way or another, are those of punishment and rehabilitation. It is not only the young men in incarceration who are being punished, of course, but punishment is achieved, regardless of the ‘victim’, via the mechanism of a confiscation of choice.

³By no means, however, were sex crimes the only crimes to be disdained by the majority of the young offenders. ‘Arson ain't no man's game,’ is one citation in the notebook I used to record what I heard while working. On another occasion, a young man was in receipt of a sustained and disgusted ribbing from the other members of the class, despite my best efforts to halt the teasing. His crime? Stealing handbags from old ladies. He was seen as not being worthy of a place in the prison. He wasn't ‘man’ enough. He was a ‘younger’.

⁴The references to birds and bird life might make for a separate enquiry of its own. The obvious inference is that of an unconscious wish for a flight to freedom, but possibly the matter reaches further than that. After all, even the places where prisoners live are called wings.

⁵On one occasion, I mentioned to a particular offender that he used “Are you listening?” a lot. I continued that it was as though he was concerned about losing his interlocutor's attention. I asked him if this interpretation would be fair. “Man getting pissed, Gov,” he told me, warningly. “Man getting vex.” He did not like it that I had tried to analyse his patterns of speech, even in a half-hearted, ham-fisted fashion. It was at this point that the thought occurred to me that some offenders believe some staff to be deaf to prison language.

⁶Teef=to steal. Another word for “steal” is “lick”.

⁷Clock=to watch.

⁸Cardio=heart attack.

⁹So I'm all for dusting over and showing the waste what time it is = It was my intention to race over to the other man's home and teach him a lesson.

¹⁰‘The Real is primordially nothing but the gap that separates a thing from itself, the gap of repetition’ (Žižek, 2008a, p. 321). The ‘Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint: the Lacanian Real is not only distorted, but the very principle of the distortion of reality’ (p. 288, original emphasis).

¹¹Most of the offenders I worked with expressed regret (or nothing at all) during the time I worked with them. There were only a few who expressed pride, and only one whose words chilled me to such an extent that I doubted any possibility of total rehabilitation. The words in question were: “And I'd do it to him again if I had the chance. If he was still alive.”

¹²I will take the opportunity to repeat what I said in the last paragraph of the abstract: no identifying reference to any single prisoner, or any specific crime, has been included in these pages. The people and the place that are alluded to throughout have been rendered entirely anonymous.

¹³Also in Violence, Žižek notes that there are “three standard ways of dealing with a crime” – a pleasing addition to my system of threes. These are “punishment (revenge), forgiveness and forgetting”. He writes: “The only way truly to forgive and forget is to enact a revenge (or a just punishment): after the criminal is properly punished, I can move forward and leave the whole affair behind. There is thus something liberating in being properly punished for one's crime: I paid my debt to society and I am free again, no past burdens attached. The 'merciful’ logic of 'forgive, but not forget’ is, on the contrary, much more oppressive: I (the criminal who is forgiven) remain forever haunted by the crime I committed, since the crime was not ‘undone’” (2008, p. 161). There seems to be an element of the following at the prison: I (the criminal) cannot be forgiven easily so I will try to forget about everything, on the victim's behalf as well as mine. But of course this cannot work; this is fantasy. In Žižek's other volume of 2008, In defense of lost causes, it is written: “Freud's famous motto ‘what we do not remember, we are compelled to repeat’ should thus be turned upside down: what we are unable to repeat, we are haunted by and are compelled to remember. The way to get rid of past trauma is not to remember it, but to fully repeat it” (2008a, p. 321).