ABSTRACT
We argued at the beginning of Chapter 1 that an examination of the relationship between actors and discourses is crucial to our discussion of long-term imprisonment in Scotland. In that chapter we focused on the institutions and actors in historical and comparative perspective. In this chapter, we elaborate this position and, in so doing, seek to accomplish several aims. We begin by detailing how our approach to the study of knowledge in society is derived from the work of Karl Mannheim. Having outlined this approach, we then connect the discussion of institutional actors from the previous chapter with an examination of the ends and means discourses which we see in play in the Scottish prison system. We shall conclude this part of our discussion by showing how these means and ends discourses can be combined to form a discourse matrix of imprisonment in Scotland. We shall use this matrix all through our analysis, but at this point it will help to locate the principal actors identified in Chapter 1 in discursive space.
