It seems to me that a prison is really working class. Like seriously working class. ‘d like to pick through that, today.

Firstly, I’d like to make it clear that I am generally uncomfortable with class-based labels. They’ve always seemed to me to be fairly subjective categories and actually pretty meaningless. Measures such as SIMD have always seemed more useful.

However, I recently read an article that talked about being an individualist, how that related to being a creative person and their intellect. So there was a triangle of factors and the article was discussing if that triangle of factors could be a more objective measure of “class” and I found myself accepting the argument.

Allow me to look at those three factors separately. I’ll begin with being an individualist. Very few people would argue that prisons don’t try to crush individualism. If anyone puts their head up over the parapet then the authorities try to shoot them back down and that seems true for both prisoners and staff.

Prisoners have few choices and few chances to decide on their own path. Those who are strong can forge a different route but they have to resist huge preassure. Even staff are often unable to be different – I’ve heard officers being aggressively criticised by other officers for trying to go the extra mile – “If you do that, they’ll expect us all to do it” for example.

I’ve observed a lowest common denominator type of approach and it’s all about maintaining a smodge – a dough of everyone roughly kneeded together but totally lacking in raising agent. I believe that blind acceptance of a herd mentality is a key factor of being working class.

The next factor I outlined earlier was creativity. I’d like to make it clear that there are some prisoners who are really creative, especially as for some they have never had the sort of opportunities that can sometimes exist in prison. Haung said that though, in gereral, I think prisons are creative wastelands.

That isn’t to say that prisoners and staff don’t make stuff up (they do all the time) but I do think there’s a difference between being creative and being dowright delusional. Or, indeed, in terms of staff that they are so full of laziness and apathy that they make up a reason not to do something.

So people go along with the status quo and don’t approach life with the questioning imagination, thus adding to the idea of a smodge. A bland, textureless, boring, unremarkable blob.

The final factor I’d like to write about is intellect. I use the word to mean the ability to think logically and to understand things. So I would say that there are many people who have amassed knowledge but that they lack the ability to think with the apparent knowledge and to truly understand it so I would not call them intellectual.

You may be surprised to read that I have seen many glimpses of intellect in prison. However, for a variety of reasons, the initial promising smoulderings of intellect become extinguished. Prisoners don’t try to understand why.In fact, that is a bit of a running joke that in the same way that emergency services don’t use the Q word (quiet), prisoners don’t ask why. There is no understanding in here and that is true with staff, too.

The kneeding together of those three factors (individualism, creativity and intellect), I believe creates this smodge which is the ultimate in working class. If this was done by designe then it would be true to call it an achievement. However, I rather think it hasn’t. It’s been allowed to germinate or ferment over decades of lack of attention and the result is a toxic blob that does not rehabilitate , (positively) transform lives or unlock potential and I believe that makes it the ultimate working class place.

NaN.