ABSTRACT
Down in Bomana gaol (my fieldwork site), a fifteen-minute walk away, I discovered that cigarettes could have a still greater significance. For the inmates of this maximum-security installation, holding on average 700 male convicts and remand prisoners, these things, both through their circulation and consumption, were a quintessential feature of prison life. Although tobacco products were illegal in Bomana, whenever they could, men sat down together, rolled a cigarette (smuk), lit it and passed it round. Indeed, like any new inmate, one of the first things I learned was that in gaol ‘smuk is king’. This was the case not just because smoking provided inmates with a crucial kind of experience, but also because cigarettes were highly valued objects in the informal prison economy. Of course the significance of cigarettes as artefacts of incarceration is widely reported (cf. Morris and Morris 1963; Radford 1968; Heffernan 1972; Carroll 1974; Schifter 1999). Something about the ordeal of this modern form of punishment – ‘detention
plus discipline’ (Foucault 1977: 248) – seems to invite inmates, from a range of societies, to smoke and to treat that material with a special kind of reverence. But at Bomana I came to appreciate that smoking was not just a coping mechanism; when men spoke of smuk as king, they were also referring to the fact that this activity provides a constitutive logic for gaol life and the form of inmate society.
