The Carceral Cure: How Prison Mental Health Reinforces Control

Abstract (English)

People subject to imprisonment in the UK are routinely invited and/ or coerced into mental health based interventions as part of their rehabilitation. Risk-oriented assessments construct varying forms of diagnosis - including of personality disorders, traumatic life histories and neurodivergence - to form a matrix through which criminalised people can be better managed, treated and, ultimately, reformed. Such interventions are often argued for as a progressive force in an otherwise uncaring criminal justice system; psychiatric approaches are thought to better include and meet the needs of populations who have been historically neglected and scarred by state apparatuses.
This paper questions such an assumption, arguing that psychiatric knowledge is assembled and deployed in prison settings in ways that ensnare prisoners and practitioners in intensifying forms of carceral scrutiny and control. Grounded in ethnographic work with psychological assessments, former prisoners and Parole Board members in England and Wales, the paper develops an account of ‘personality disorder in prison’, a prison-bound diagnostic category that ushers people into an account of criminal sickness from which it is hard to escape. Turning to therapeutic tools used in rehabilitation schemes, the paper draws on Britain’s murky, imperialist history of rehabilitative psychiatry in prison settings and looks at how nominally progressive movements toward recognising and including trauma, sickness and neurodivergence in accounts of why criminals offend can become entangled with wider political projects of constructing populations as pathological, and intensifying carceral infrastructure, recruiting mental health workers into assessments of risk and negotiations over captivity.