Sensory penalities: decoding the consequences of sensory punishment podcast

Transcript

Sensory penalities: decoding the consequences of sensory punishment

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Rebecca Torr (RT): Hi I’m Rebecca Torr and welcome to the Emerald Podcast Series. In this episode, we will be speaking to two experts on the subject of sensory criminology and their book “Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control”.

Kate Herrity is a Junior Research Fellow at Kings College, Cambridge, interested in working at the boundaries and meeting places between fields and disciplines, particularly those relating to sensory experience. Jason Warr is a Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at De Montfort University with research interests in emotions in criminology, penology, sociology of power, and the philosophy of science.

Sensory criminology is a relatively new field that explores the role of sensory experience in shaping criminological thinking. It challenges conventional expectations in criminology by incorporating sensory experiences into research. The book “Sensory Penalities” is an important contribution to this field. It explores the visceral, personal reflections buried within forgotten criminological field notes, to ask what privileging these sensorial experiences does for how we understand and research spaces of punishment and social control.
We hope this podcast will help raise awareness about the importance of sensory experience in criminology and encourage further discussion and research in this area. Thank you for listening.

Kate Herrity (KH): So sensory penalities began life really out of a conversation that was sparked by PhD research I was doing, which was specifically on the significance of sound in the prison social world of a local men's prison. My book is just out on that, by the way, but that's a separate issue. And we found ourselves in Sarajevo, at a criminology conference, the European Society of Criminology conference, where we were giving a panel on the sensual prison. And we discussed this with a number of people. The idea being that the sensory, or the senses more broadly, are a means of providing, a means of making sense of our social world. And then penalities, really has its base. I mean, literally, the conditions and qualities of punishment is what that means, but we wanted to consider that in the broader sense. So not specifically or solely related to prisons, but that broader apparatus of criminal justice. So whether probation, surveillance, policing, informal mechanisms of social control, and how we broaden those ideas about how we formally and informally police one another, what victims mean, how processes of surveillance, actually, and punishment are actually felt and experienced, and conveyed symbolically. So with that, comes the exciting potential to disrupt hierarchies of knowledge and our assumptions about what matters in terms of how we know. So Western culture very much privileges the visual. So if you think about metaphors, seeing is believing, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they're often very visually focused. But of course, that isn't the way we actually make sense of our surrounds. And we wanted to explore the instructive potential for more closely mirroring the way we actually make sense of the social world, to the way we do our, our research practice, because, of course, we cannot divorce ourselves from the smells and the tastes and the sounds that we encounter. So we actually have in the book, and I marked it, an explanation of how we anchor our theoretical approach. So we argue there are three interlocking themes. First, the political, symbolic and ideological are not only inherent to places and processes of punishment and social control, but are encoded in the sensorial outputs and transmissions occurring within those places and processes. So if you think about keys, physical restrictions, the air you breathe. Thomas Martin wrote a beautiful and very important article on the politics of air in prisons in Myanmar, for example. Second, that places and processes of punishment and social control are experienced and saw really, by those subjected to them, those who work within them, as well as those who are researching them. So we're all subject to, for example, the smell of fear or the sound of violence when we occupy these spaces. And third, that in order to fully understand and theorize about penalities, and places and processes of punishment, and social control, we need to account for these multifarious and sensorial experiences and their effects. We contend that penalty has an inherent sensory component, but also really, we borrow from symbolic interactionism. And we're really arguing that we as much construct these places and spaces of punishment in our imagination, our cultural and social imagination, as well as the political and all of these things are partially conveyed, at least through the feel, the touch, the taste, and so forth of these environments. So we wanted to encourage people to go back to the start, to their field notes, to reexamine them for all those bits that they left out and discarded because they didn't sound or seem academic or relevant, and to really approach things anew, to see to see what they come up with. So that is the why, and the how of sensory penalities. 

RT: Fantastic. Thank you, I think I mean, it's fascinating. And I think what struck me as you were talking, it's just sort of the disruptive, it's like a disrupter that, you know, we look at sort of, you know, anything, it's almost like disrupting or changing or challenging sort of conventional ways of thinking. And I think, you know, that sort of leads me on to sort of my next question, which is just sort of how sensory penalities challenges conventional expectations in criminology, by incorporating sensory experiences into research? And you sort of you have touched on this, but I wonder sort of what it does, and what extra does it give us? You know, in terms of our understanding, like, what can we gain by taking this approach to criminology?

Jason Warr (JW): The moment that we start looking at the sensory, it forces us to go back into and consider our kind of first order epistemological questions, how is it that we know, because one of the things that you know, a varying kind of philosophers and sociologists, you know, Simmel, Serres, and others have noted is that as human animals, as human creatures, we not only construct environments, and inhabit environments that are constantly communicating symbols and signals at us continually. And as humans, as Vannini et al point out is that we have both exterior receptive senses, i.e. those senses that allow us to interpret information about the world outside of us, you know, so you know, we hear things, it allows us to understand some element of our social reality outside of ourselves. And we have interior receptive centers that allow us such as balance, for instance, that allow us to, in turn, interpret what's occurring inside. And I think one of the things about sensory penalities and we make this, again, we make this point in the book, is the moment that we start taking into consideration that symbolic and material communication from the world around us, it actually begins to deepen our analysis of humans in particular spaces. Now, of course, as we're all prison researchers, we were interested in how places of punishment, how places of social control, places of border control, and you know, areas in which those broader concepts of social order and social control exist. So how are they producing symbolic and signal information? How is that being interpreted by those who are in it, you know, lots of people in criminology, whether it be in prison studies or not have used, you know, sensory description as a means of kind of adding rich data and rich detail to their ethnographies to their details to their studies. But what they've not done is actually thought through what though that sensory detail is doing and what those senses and sensory interpretations are allowing us to understand. By approaching this very explicitly in saying you know, there are sounds in our world if you hear a police siren, for instance, you know, that is doing something, it is designed to do something and it has meaning for those who are both emitting that sound, and those who hear that sound. And if we're not capturing what's occurring there, and we're not theorizing about that, and what it tells us about the power of the police, and the power of those symbols, then actually what we're doing is we're missing a whole tranche of understanding, you know, in our discipline, that actually, I think weakens our kind of theories and understanding of the social lives that we leave, but specifically, the criminological realms in which we are trying to, you know, theorize and understand.

RT: I was just thinking, as you were talking that just sort of, you know, I know you mentioned about, it can be influenced by culture. And obviously, different cultures have different ways of, you know, alerting attention, or whatever they do in prisons, it's a different ways of, of punishing. Is it a sort of a global look, your book, was it sort of, you know, you're sort of looking mainly at sort of, like, the Western sort of justice system, or sort of?

KH: Our hope was that, we would de-center the Western androcentric approach. But you're always a bit inhibited by who you know, and how far your reach. And particularly given we're all PhD students at this point. So we were really asking people to take a bit of a leap of faith, everybody who contributed to that conversation, and many people who have subsequently and through the blog, which I neglected to mention earlier, but the blog was released and set up to accompany and expand and extend those conversations with the book and also to be an accessible companion, so for teaching or initiating those conversations. So obviously, we've got some England and Scotland and Wales in there, as you might expect, certainly from J and I, and Joe Collinson Scott, Fergus McNeill have focused on Scotland, but Daina Stanley was writing from America and a prison infirmary dealing with the end of life in America. Bethany Schmidt, and Andy Jefferson, Bethany of course, being our co-editor, we're writing about transitions in post-revolutionary Tunisian prisons. Julienne Weegels was talking about the power of secrecy and silence in Nicaragua. Carla Reeves is another local, Jennifer Peirce was talking about space and surveillance in the Dominican Republic. Victoria Canning was discussing immigration confinement in Denmark, and making some parallels there with her own experience growing up in Northern Ireland. And the retraumatizing effects of being placed near military compounds as these people seeking asylum were. Lisa Flower, Yvonne Jewkes and Alison Young were reflecting on a journey to Japan. Amy Smoyer again, the US. Ian O'Donnell was reflecting on a visit to a prison in Ethiopia. And then we conclude with Ali, who was talking about the street as an effective atmosphere and the ways in which transgressions and social control are reenacted beyond the scope of official criminal justice apparatus altogether. So our reach was quite wide. But the idea that it's in any way as representative as we hoped for isn't, is just not the case, it isn't. But then by the same token, we say very explicitly at the beginning of the book that what we hope to do is invigorate and initiate further discussion and conversation, not to be the last word, not to be the definitive word, but merely, you know, a contribution to a broader conversation that we hoped to make more vivid and more accessible to people. We are in the process of editing a sensory handbook, which has more international reach. So you get a little better as you have as you grow a broader network. But I mean, these are things that no one teaches you as an academic and you very much learn as you go. So on the on the one hand, yeah, it's really quite international. It's got broad reach, and for comparative penologists out there, people who really like to extend understanding by comparing different prison environments, there's a lot of material there, a huge amount. But, you know, it's still fairly white heavy, I'm afraid and Western.

RT: I think it's, you know, it's, it's a relatively new approach and a different way of looking at things. So I think the fact that you've got, you have got global reach. I mean, that's that's a really wide, examples that you've brought together. And I've just think it maybe you could sort of talk about some examples of whether from your book or outside, where it does challenge conventional expectations in criminology. 

KH: Yeah, plenty. I'll try to limit myself. I mean, on the on the one hand to what we are arguing here, draws on ideas that are well embedded, well established, but have been displaced by ideas that have come to predominant, predominate, rather, in the wake of the Enlightenment. Ideas about the importance of observation of distance, of replication, and so on, and bound up with that are all kinds of other dialogues about power, and about hierarchies of importance, about gender, about race, about colonial reach, all of these things, and which is part of what is so interesting to me is, you know, that that sort of that broader ideological potential for that disruption. And in that sense, the the contribution that I think people have been slowest to pick up on in some respects, arguably, is the most significant, because what we're arguing here is that this is a different way of perceiving and understanding us, of perceiving again, there we go with the visual, of understanding our social, our social world, and a particular focus of criminal logical inquiry, because it so happens that we're criminologist but applies equally, regardless of whether you are an anthropologist or a biologist even. And there are numerous examples, in fact, in STEM subjects, of occasions on which people do in fact use the sensory to make sense of what they're what they're attempting to understand. But the most significant contribution, I think, is trying to affect that distinction. And that also has really profound implications for how we position ourselves and use our positionality in the field. So the way we work with other people, the way we work with those who we are researching or doing research with, you know, so when I was in the prison, it, I was trying to understand a sound environment that other people were fluent in, absolutely conversant in, they understood what everything meant, they understood when raised voices didn't indicate violence or a row. And when they did, they understood what a particular banging sound meant, they understood, without being able to see, for example, there was one time I was having, I was engaged in an interview with someone and someone had let a fire extinguisher off, just because they were bored. And it was in quite a fractious period, there were lots of violent incidents and things going on, there'd been a stabbing recently, things of that kind. And I was asking him what, what is that I'm hearing because it doesn't sound like trouble and, and we were able to diagnose that without seeing because we were in a closed room. But I was reliant on that sort of mutual collaborative learning process in order to be able to make sense of an environment that was very, very familiar to them. But nowhere near as familiar as me, which is what my chapter really in the book is trying to talk about is how we to harness those understandings methodologically, so that we can replicate them so that anyone else could replicate it anywhere where they chose to. And I draw on ideas that are both sort of anthropological and a drawn from organizational theory to do that. So that we make sense of of an environment. First, we learn that there are certain sounds that have signification, and then we move on to attuning to it so that we can decipher and interpret ourselves what that means. And that's a whole process. And that's not restricted to sound but can apply to multifarious, sensorial inputs, which of course extend way beyond the five senses.

But there are other examples in the book that I think are really interesting for the way in which they marry different ideas. So for example, where Ian O'Donnell and Bethany and Andrew’s piece, draw on common sanity, the breaking of bread, the sharing of food, and the significance of that for our humanity as a means of diagnosing or assessing and understanding broader penal cultures. In these very disparate, they both happened to be Africa, funnily enough, Tunisia and Ethiopia. And then how, how we might feel our way when we cannot explicitly talk or understand implicitly that there are things that we cannot refer to without compromising other people's safety, or our own. So that is about the silence or the absence of things. And Julienne Weegels explicitly refers to that, like what that means, how silence is used as a tool for exercising power, or subverting it, how we communicate in places when we're under strict surveillance that are very violent. Dana talks really poignantly about how touch featured in her attempts to understand and exercise compassion with a man who was dying in a prison infirmary in America, and what that, what that process meant and decentering what she could see, as a means of becoming closer to the people that she was trying to learn and understand and the processes she was trying to learn, you know, in a in an end of life space in a prison, which is profoundly moving and confrontational at the same time. But there's, there's also the ways in which these practices are embedded in criminal justice processes and practices that we just aren't accustomed to talking about. So where I talk about how working in bars for years, meant that I had a particular understanding of of knowing when trouble was coming, and how that was implicit for me until I started interrogating it in the context of the prison, like I understood, and we all know that this is a bad day. And in prison, they use words like spiky or bubbly. You know, it feels bubbly, it doesn't feel right or and yet, and they would then start asking me on a daily basis, how does it sound today. And there's a mutual recognition there that I too, was coming to understand when things were not going great, but of course, in a prison context, that can mean serious risk to life and limb. But of course, that's integral to jail craft, prison officers learn how to read their spaces, what they aren't accustomed to do, because there's no vocabulary or space for them to do it is to explicitly articulate what that means or how that adds to their skill set, how that keeps them safe, how that allows them to monitor the well-being of themselves and their colleagues how integral that is to their working space. But also, of course, how that corresponds or could theoretically correspond to broader spaces.

JW: One of the things that comes across very clearly, in almost every chapter is how the sensory is encoded within the kind of punitive landscape in which the varying chapters take place. But the manifestation of the sensory can be culturally different. So for instance, if you take Yvonne Jewkes and Alison Young's chapter, which is in consideration of a prison in Japan, the manner in which silence operates and the manner in which the systems of control that are imposed culturally and organizationally, institutionally in that institution, use, you know, use sound in a very, very particular way. But in that context, you know, the social ordering is around silence and about quiet, whereas in Kate's chapter, it becomes very evident that quiet is something troublesome, and that actually in the every day of the prison, there is a noisy hubbub that is also manifest that allows you to understand that the prison itself is running normally and properly. But in those two different contexts, you know, it's the same mechanism occurring, but the cultural manifestation is very different. And I think, you know, one of the things that it allows us to do is once we start looking at that, it actually allows us to think beyond the superficiality of the sounds, the noise, the smells, the touches, this that the other, to what those things are doing, and how they are being utilized in against or for population. So for instance, if we go back to Vicky Canning’s chapter and the, the immigration control that exists in or was operating in her piece of research in Denmark, what you've got is, if you think about this, you've got women who have, who have fled, and have sought asylum away from zones of conflict, who have then been housed in a secure detention facility that is operating right next door to a military test ground. So you've got people who have fled war being constantly exposed to the sounds that are reminiscent of things that they have fled from. Now, if we think about that, if we just take that idea. Now, either that is a completely thoughtless element of immigration control, or you know, refugee and asylum control in Denmark. But if that's the case, then that tells us something quite disturbing about immigration, detention and control in that environment. But if it's not thoughtless, if it's intentional, then that tells us something else that's really quite horrific and horrible about the manner in which the sound environment, the soundscape, the scent scape is being deployed against refugees and us and asylum seekers, seekers, as part of a hostile environment. You know, so all of a sudden, once we start to consider what is going on, what that communication is, how it's being utilized, actually allows us to think much deeper about these processes, of control, of punishment, and of social order more generally.

RT: Thank you. I think that's absolutely fascinating. And actually, it's sort of it does bring us on to sort of, you know, you talk about those insights, you know, sort of what it opens up that he wants you, you know, you sort of take, take off the veil, and you can really see, you know, what, what it's doing, what does it mean? And what's the impact? I guess the thing would be, then, how could this sort of insight help policymakers or practitioners or further researchers that are looking in these fields? What can this sort of information or this approach or these insights do for those sorts of groups? And have you seen any examples yet f it being used at all? 

KH: Yes. And broadly, so let me try and break that down, so I don't miss stuff. And I'll start at the end. Have we seen practices of it being used? Increasingly and it's slow, and it's not a standard part of the conversation, but Jenny Stickney and Jo Shingler recently released an edited volume on the journey from prison to resettlement. And a lot of Jenny's work in particular, focuses on sensory aspects of trauma and how that can make it very, very difficult for people to adjust out of the prison. And she's just released or I've just released the blog post that she very kindly contributed to sensory criminology this morning, she talks specifically about the ways in which we are hampering people's ability to survive and thrive on the outside, by failing to account for what that shock feels like when you've been accustomed to an environment of certain sensory deprivation and other sensory overloads. And then emerge into a world where time comes at you more quickly, people speak in a different way. You're assailed by tastes and sounds and smells, that that you have been deprived of for a very long time. And how do you process that massive adjustment, if you're also suffering from trauma? Another area that is getting much more attention, just at the moment and way overdue, is this specific experience of people with who are neurodivergent in the criminal justice system, of course, all aspects of neuro divergence, divergence rather, are very considerably over represented in the prison system. So people on the autistic spectrum, Dyslexics, people with ADHD. What we are starting to see around the parameters is conversations about how people who perceive the world through their neuro divergence, how that particular sensory, sensory sensitivity can impact their experience and also the way their behavior is interpreted by others. So where it looks perhaps like they're being uncooperative or difficult or troublesome, they are, in fact, trying to cope with a sensory overload that has basis in all manner of things, whether it's particular sensitivity to being touched, which of course is a really common thing. For people on the autistic spectrum, or sound sensitivity, and that takes a multitude of different forms, whether it’s misophonia. So hatred of certain sounds, such that you cannot bear to be in their proximity. And of course, people cannot curate their sensory environment at all in prison, which is a something that J and I have written a chapter on elsewhere about how that erodes a sense of home belonging and how that impacts on identity. I think once you start taking into account that those were in that emerging work, it becomes really difficult to justify not accounting for that aspects of experience in any trauma informed approach, which is absolutely central to improving outcomes, care, reducing harms, that are perpetrated in these systems in institutions.

JW: People in prisons are constantly touched by powerful others, and they have very little control over whether or not they are touched. You know, if you resist a pat down search it’s only ever going to get worse for you, you know, and there is this imposition of, of that power through that touch on populations where victimization, violence, victimization, abuse, you know, histories of abuse, histories of sexual abuse, are over represented and over prevalent in those populations. So what we are beginning to see, on the one hand, is a greater recognition that the very practices that occur within prisons actually may increase, or compound victimization and trauma for specific populations. And for specific individuals. Off the back of that what we're also beginning to see is an increasing use and understanding of the sensory as it relates to legal consequences. So it is beginning to be used in human rights legislation, specifically around the concept of dignity, for instance, you know, if the individual is rendered naked, within the institutional kind of system of surveillance, what does that mean for the dignity that the individual has in any right of privacy. So you know, all of a sudden, there's a body of evidence that can be utilized in terms of those types of cases, we're also beginning to see, you know, certainly in prisons, you know, the use of dampening equipment, or dampening kind of materials, to actually reduce the amount of sound that bounces around concrete and steel. You know, we're also beginning to see, you know, with an aging and elderly population, you know, there are very few soft surfaces in prisons. And now there is some work that is beginning, you know, policymakers and health professionals are beginning to take the sensory seriously, in terms of trying to create navigable environments for the elderly, for instance. So there are a number of ways, either legally in terms of policy in terms of practice, and in terms of kind of understanding, in terms of how the sensory is manifesting in the kind of broader world beyond the book, and beyond, beyond the academic.

RT: I think it's, you know, seeing your passion and your enthusiasm for this is, is wonderful, and it's so encouraging to hear those examples, and what difference it’s making you think, you know, sort of, especially in your story, because where you started with this research, and sort of where it's gone, you know, over those last, you know, sort of couple of decades and you know, and beyond, it's going to, you know, obviously it's going to evolve. And I just wondered sort of, from your point of view, because you know, you were at the forefront of this, what you're really excited about in terms of what's coming up in the future and what you may be what you're working on right now. And if there was anything sort of groundbreaking that you think, you know, people really do need to pay attention to.

KH: I think one of the things that is both most exciting but most pressing in the current climate given developments in Gaza, and again, Sudan, what we're proposing in Iran, is the potential for understanding the broader infliction of trauma that is an inevitable byproduct of, of launching warfare against a populace that impacts and imposes aftershocks and after images and after Effects on everybody involved. That's not only those who are subject to it, but also those who are perpetrating it. I think that holds really quite pertinent potentials for disassembling that insistence we have on viewing victim and perpetrator as binary roles that are not in any way permeable or interchangeable, rather than reflecting a more complex and nuanced reality. And I hate the cliched kind of, you know, aphorism that the people often repeat, which is ‘hurt people hurt’ or, you know, but, but the fact is, people who have had wrong done to them are more inclined to perpetrate wrong sometimes, or, or things that cause harm, because it's very difficult then to recalibrate, to a sort of healthy means of interaction. So that really excites me, which is an unfortunate word to use, in a sense, but I think the potentials for reimagining criminal justice, how we do it, why we punish, are all bound up with, with breaking apart that really crude binary that we insist on imposing, because it fits on narratives of, of good and evil in our sort of Judeo-Christian sense, but also in the popular media and every time anything horrific happens. It's not helpful, it's not healthy, it doesn't solve anything. I think there are real rich potentials to deploy the sensory as a means of closing that distance between groups of people who have been wronged or who have a history of conflict, to enable a little more empathy. I think there are potentials for critical discourse for protest that are opened up when we attend to the sensory impact of these things. It's starting to appear on syllabi in really disparate spaces. So Carleton University in Ottawa as setting up a course on sensory criminology. It's taught in Melbourne. We have colleagues in America, J has just delivered his module on sensory criminology for the first time. And teaching is really the most important thing that we can do. As for what we were working on, the blog when it's going well and I have enough staff to keep it generating, we have new pieces coming out on a fortnightly basis, often it’s a bit up and down, but in view of the fact that sensory penalities is coming out in paperback, we have reinvigorated efforts. So you know, there's some really interesting stuff happening there. And I invite people to consider contributing, we don't care whether you're a criminologist, we don't care what point of study you're at, or if you're a student or an academic at all, perhaps you're a practitioner. All we ask from people is that it is some kind of commentary on something criminological with a sensory focus. That's it. We are editing an international handbook on sensory criminology, which is bringing together voices from very disparate spaces and is and is going further towards realizing what we hoped to do with sensory penalities. I am also editing a volume with my colleagues in Oslo on soundscapes in places of detention and social justice, which marries criminology and musicology, which is their thing, but where I came in, and of course, J has a number of projects on the go too. Is also co-editing the handbook with me, with our colleagues, who I had previously neglected to mention.

JW: I mean, I think for me, I think there are a number of interesting things beginning to emerge around the investigation of state crimes, for instance, I think, where the sensory is specifically being used as a mechanism of investigation and of challenge against states. So I mean, forensic architecture, who, you know, have been around for, for some time, we're not claiming that they're working off the back of us. But what we can see is that their model of using the sensory in all sorts of different ways to investigate varying kind of state crimes and incidences of mass harm, you know, is being picked up more broadly, and is being kind of coupled with the kind of theoretical contributions that you will find in this book, and in the work that's beginning to emerge, and you're now getting people beginning to think about how they can use the sensory and investigative kind of processes. I think there's another exciting area around victimology, and the sensory victimology that is beginning to emerge. And people thinking through how either in terms of investigation or experiential victimology, you know, the sensory can play a part in those elements, and in terms of people being able to understand their own victimhood and the manner in which they communicate that to others in criminal justice processes. I think there's some interesting work around that. Also, I think there's some really interesting stuff in the environmental criminology space, or in the green criminology space, where people are beginning to think through, you know, the death of biodiversity in particular environments. And what does it mean when all of a sudden birdsong disappears from, from an environment or when all of a sudden our rivers have become so polluted with effluent, that all of a sudden the plant life, the edge of the river begins to die, and the smells and fragrances that would once have existed at the riverside are replaced by the foul smells of human industry? You know, I mean, it's what do these things mean? So, you know, I think we're beginning to see, you know, the advancement of or, and the deepening of traditional theoretical positions, and Folki in criminology, that because now that they're adopting a kind of sensory approach, it's beginning to revitalize and deepen their analysis.

RT: Thank you for listening to today’s podcast on sensory criminology. We hope that this episode has provided you with valuable insights into the role of sensory experience in shaping criminological thinking and the concept of penality. You can find more information about our guests, and a transcript of the episode, on our website. A huge thanks to my guests, along with Podcast Producer Daniel Ridge, and the studio This is Distorted. Thanks for listening, and we hope to see you again soon. Bye for now!