ABSTRACT
The magic wand of classifcation has long been held out as the key to a successful system.… All that has changed over the last century is the basis of the binary classifcation. It used to be ‘moral character’; sometimes it was ‘treatability’ or ‘security risk’, now it tends to be ‘dangerousness’. (Cohen 1985: 194-5)
Once prisoners are sentenced by the court to a custodial sentence, the ‘administration of their penalty’ is handed over to prison authorities: ‘Although the principle of penalty was certainly a legal decision, its administration, its quality and its rigours must belong to an autonomous mechanism that supervises the effects of punishment within the very apparatus that produces them’ (Foucault 1977: 246). Prisoner classifcation and placement are the main mechanisms through which the ‘quality and rigour’ of prisoners’ confnement are determined: once prisoners are classifed to a certain security category, their institutional placement, entitlement to privileges, access to programmes, and entire experience of the prison system are predetermined to a very large extent. If prison architecture, discussed in the following chapter, is the main ‘hardware’ of prison systems, classifcation is the ‘software’ of their make-up.
