ABSTRACT

This chapter takes the analysis of political imprisonment beyond the parameters of institutional resistance to consider the parallel struggles inside and beyond the prison walls. It explores the material, emotional and ultimately politicized relationships between prisoners and community that were brought about by the extended experience of political imprisonment. A key theme in the social survival of prisoners and their families centred on the reconstruction of the ‘family’ as source of social continuity. The meaning of the ‘family’ as articulated by the prisoners is rooted in the heterosexual, nuclear unit and constructed through socio-religious and gendered norms. However, the allocation of roles amongst working-class families in Northern Ireland has also

been profoundly shaped by deep socio-historical stresses, including male absenteeism due to imprisonment (although nothing has been written about the absence of women in this circumstance), the impact of sectarianism on jobs, housing and incomes, and the immense burdens that were placed on women to ensure family survival in the context of poverty and violence. The concept of ‘family’ thus acquired a dual meaning as prisoners applied analogies of kinship to their prison community and to the politicization of family life. The chapter initially explores the political meanings of the coping strategies that prisoners and their families employed as they developed an awareness and practice of shared resistance. However, the subsequent analysis of political imprisonment and mothering explores the institutionalized contradictions in penal discourses of ‘familiness’, which both reinforce an ideal of ‘good mothering’, whilst at the same time magnifying the institutional barriers to achieving this end practically. The final section examines the ideological reorientation of Republican prisoners as a consequence of the ‘prison debates’ in the late 1980s, and links it with the maturation of concepts and strategies of collective resistance within and outside the prisons. In accounting for prison resistance in these terms, this chapter makes the consciously feminist point that the definition of ‘the prison campaign’ in Northern Ireland incorporated various tributaries of struggle which redefined prison resistance in gendered and collective terms.