ABSTRACT
Analyses of the consciously moral attempts to combat suicide at a women’s prison via organizational innovation provide important lessons not only in the governance of women’s prisons, but also in the conditionality and politics of contemporary penal probity. At the policy level they call into question the adequacy of quantitative methods for assessing staff efficiency in delivering an appropriate anti-suicide policy. In the realms of theory and penal politics they provoke an unease with studies in governmentality which give primacy to the teleological meanings of explicitly reform-oriented penal strategies. Insofar as such analyses omit to specify the points at which prevailing power relations and their conventional practices were under threat or open to challenge, they also omit to identify new configurations of resistance to penal oppression. Thus, while, on the one hand, successive studies of governmentality suggest that prevailing power relations ensure that all practices of imprisonment are inevitably illegitimate, and, on the other, successive governments continue to evaluate women’s prisons according to totally inappropriate criteria, present opportunities to recognize, record and extend the genuinely therapeutic practices which reduce the damaging pain of women in penal custody will be lost. Either they will not appear in teleological depictions of an ever-triumphant governmentality; or they will be suppressed by official audits looking for quantitative evidence that the prisons are ‘good value for money’. Possibilities for a ‘remoralization’ of prison regimes will thereby be occluded by the mystifications of a positivist empiricism and a theoreticist social theory.
