ABSTRACT
Along with health, culture, education and work opportunities, access to sport and exercise is now widely recognised as a fundamental right of all prisoners. However, this is not necessarily a global or consistent perspective, and it could be argued that the perceived function of sport and exercise in prison has varied and evolved in line with associated fluctuations in policy and societal perceptions of the primary purpose of imprisonment. Historically, penal political rhetoric in Britain has moved from the notion of prison serving to punish and deter towards a recognition of the need to contain humanely, and only from the late 20th century onwards has there been a focus on rehabilitating offenders through the provision of purposeful activity with the ultimate aim of reducing reoffending. Just as we see the contrasting notions of punishment, containment, and rehabilitation being separately constructed and contested in characterisations of the primary purposes of imprisonment, there are also substantial differences in the competing concepts of leisure (and its associations with free time, autonomy and enjoyment) and play (being characterised as freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated) and the contrasting exercise (recognised as structured, repetitive and aimed at improving or maintaining fitness or health) and physical instruction (embodied by military style drills and underpinned through a focus on being physically exhausting). It is no accident that these competing notions of the role of physical activity in prison also represent the three primary competing discourses regarding the purposes of incarceration – punishment, containment and rehabilitation – that continue to be balanced and negotiated within policy and by those responsible for the running of prisons. An inevitable result of combining these two layers of diverging assumptions in contemporary understandings of sport in prison is that exercise may be characterised as a way of containing or physically managing prisoners as much as it is increasingly recognised for its rehabilitative function.
