International Journal of the Sociology of Law (2000), 28, 33^44doi:10.1006/ijsl.1999.0113, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

WatchingThe Invisible:TelevisualPortrayal of the British Prison1980±1990

PAUL MASONCentre for Media and Justice, Southampton Institute, East ParkTerrace,Southampton, U.K.

Cinematic representations of prison can be traced back as far as the 1900s, tothe ¢lmWhy Am I Here? (1919), and since then more than 300 prison ¢lms havebeen made. Many of these ¢lms stick in the memory. I Am A Fugitive From AChain Gang (1932), for example, was an extraordinary ¢lm. It depicted the har-rowing real-life experience of James Allen (Paul Muni) who escapes a chaingang only to live in constant fear of being caught. The prison ¢lm has oftenexplored the sheer physical brutality of prisonöMcVicar (1980), Scum (1983)and Midnight Express (1979), for example. As well as tense protracted negotia-tions between warden and inmate in Riot In Cell Block Eleven (1954) and BurtLancaster tending to his canaries in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), the prison mo-vie is best remembered for inmates battling with the prison authorities: PaulNewman as Luke Jackson doing 2 years hard time in Cool Hand Luke (1962); forhis nonconformity, Steve McQueen in the title role of Papillon (1973) does twolengthy spells in solitary con¢nement; while Paul Crew (Burt Reynolds) re-fuses to throw the cons v. guards football game in The Mean Machine (1974),realising his sentence will be increased and his life made a misery by the war-den. Prison ¢lms veer wildly from the ridiculous: Lock Up (1989) (Stallonedoes Rambo in a prison yard) and Chained Heat (1992) (Bridget Nielsenprances about as a leather clad lesbian prison warden), to the sublime: GerryConlon ¢ghting for his freedom, wrongly accused of the Guildford pub bomb-ing in InThe Name of The Father (1994); and Kevin Bacon and Christian Slater¢ghting against Alcatraz and the authorities in Murder inThe First (1994).

Representations on the small screen are less memorable but of equal impor-tance, arguably shaping audiences' perspectives of the penal system. The vastmajority of prison portrayals are as documentaries, one of the earliest docu-mentaries being the BBC's ¢lm on Strangeways in 1957. The subject matter ofthe documentary, HMP Manchester in England, was also the focus for the

0194-6595/00/ 010033+12 $35�00/0 # 2000 Academic Press

34 P. Mason

best known prison documentary series on British televisionöRex Bloomstein'seight-part series Strangeways broadcast in 1980. Given the prominence of prisonin television and ¢lm, it is puzzling that criminologists and cultural studieswriters have overlooked the area. Very few signi¢cant studies on the prison¢lm exist, only Querry (1975), Nellis & Hale (1982), Crowther (1989) andMason (1998a,b) on prison ¢lm narratives; and Mason (1996) on televisionportrayals of the prison. This research attempts partially to address thisproblem.

This study concerns the portrayal of prison on English television from 1980to 1990. This period saw three terms of Conservative government, with anumber of key decisions made regarding the penal system in England andWales: the toughening and lengthening of prison sentences and short, sharp,shock' in the early 1980s; the early release of short and medium-term prison-ers coupled with minimum tari¡ periods for long-term prisoners in the mid-80s and a `prison works' policy adopted by Home Secretary Michael Howardin the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One speci¢c law and order policy announced in 1980 by the Home Secre-tary WilliamWhitelaw was an open policy for media access to Britain's jails.The ¢rst fruit of this announcement was Rex Bloomstein's eight part series forthe BBC about HMP ManchesteröStrangeways, described byThe Guardian asa frank and uninhibited series about life in prison' (The Guardian: 16 October1980). Strangeways was ¢rst broadcast in 1980, repeated in 1981 and, after theriots at the prison in 1990, the BBC transmitted the series for a third time.The 1980 and 1990 broadcasts of the Strangeways series bookend the time scalefor this study. All ¢lms, plays and drama, comedy and documentaries substan-tially or wholly concerned with prisons in Great Britain and broadcast be-tween 1980 and 1990 [1] were subject to a textual analysis [2].

The survey of prison programmes on television across the 1980s suggestsboth congruence and divergence. Congruence is discussed later and exploresrecurrent themes of punishment in televisual portrayals of prison. This is de-veloped using Foucauldian notions of spectacle and visibility of punishment.First, the changes across the decade's prison programmes are discussed. Threekey phases in the representation of the prison can be identi¢ed. They havebeen termed system', `purpose' and `restriction'.

Divergence

1980±1983: System

In winning the 1979 General Election of Conservatives promised, inter alia,` tough sentences . . . for violent criminals and thugs'' (Conservative Party1979), promising short, sharp, shock treatment in detention centres ` for hooli-gans'' (Conservative Party 1979). In the early 1980s, Government policy

Television Portrayal of the British Prison 35

centred on `giving the courts tougher and more £exible sentencing powers''(Downes & Morgan 1997:93) and building more prisons. These events,coupled with Whitelaw's open policy' for media access to Britain's jails, ledto a concentration by early 1980s prison programmes on the prison systemitself: on life inside prison, what it is like for the inmates and what it entails.It is system' in a speci¢c sense that dominates the early programmes here: asystematic ordered process which inmates are subjected to with an emphasison prisoner routine and regime. The Strangeways series dominates this periodas the ¢rst in-depth documentary series on prison following the Conservativegovernment's decision to allow greater media access to Britain's jails. Shownin eight parts between October and December 1980 and repeated in 1981, itgave an in-depth view of the prison system, often through inmates' own ex-periences. The programme carries an overbearing sense of process: of inmatestrapped in a highly structured routine determined by others, and inmates inStrangeways living the life of Escher's monks continually walking up anddown steps and not going anywhere.

The emphasis on existing within a system is prevalent in many other pro-grammes in the early 1980söLaw and Order: A Prisoners Tale (1980), Panorama:The Sentence of The Court (1982),World in Action: A Di¤cult Prisoner (1983) and 40Minutes: Mister Perks (1983). Worthy of speci¢c comment though is the ITVPlayhouse, A Sense of Freedom (1981), the dramatization of Jimmy Boyle's auto-biographical account of his life in Britain's jails. The tension and stress Boylesu¡ers during his sentence leads to violence and brutality towards and fromthe prison o¤cers. His battle for survival and ¢ght with the authorities echoesthe pattern of early 1980s prison programmes, centring on the prison process.The overt injustice meted out to Boyle is most powerfully portrayed in thebeatings he su¡ers from prison sta¡. Consequently, a subtext develops of Boy-le's refusal to come to terms with his incarceration and in particular the sheerphysical restrictions placed on him. Frequently Boyle is shot in small darkcells muttering incomprehensibly to himself, or banging on the cell door.The representations of a strict prison regime, so prevalent in the Strangewaysseries, are also strongly featured in A Sense of Freedom. This is most conspicuousin the structured routine: slop out, food collection, lock up and so on.

In communicating the system and mechanics of incarceration, prison pro-grammes rely on iconography: shots of doors slamming, bars and stairwellsare an integral part of both prison documentary and prison ¢ction. Any pro-gramme whose agenda involves an element of expose or verite camera stylewill contain footage of the prison interior. This is partly denotative of theprison environment but also has its roots in the heritage of prison coverage,a point addressed by the 1983 Channel Four documentary series Prison:

Whether it's told as ¢ction or presented as documentary fact, the worldthe prisoner occupies in our imagination has a stereotype image.The very success of the Strangeways series, especially its visual impact

36 P. Mason

ironically, has helped constrict the meaning of prison to that particularprison's interior. To the public eye, prison means Strangeways (Prison: (1)The Bankrupt Estate).

Strangeways producer Rex Bloomstein chose to use the extensive verite footageto emphasize the visual impact of Strangeways. No other prison programmesince 1980 contained such a large volume of silent footage: there is a plethoraof panning shots of landings, stairwells and cell doors. An abundance of cam-era shots portraying the inmates in relation to the nuts and bolts of the insti-tution that holds them, visually underscores the discourse of prison processand system. Such use of iconography is not restricted to documentaries either.In A Sense of Freedom it is central to the idea of con¢nement: Boyle's restrictionof movement often accompanies his (literal) ¢ghts with authority. After everybeating while in prison, the subsequent shots are of Boyle either in a bodybelt, solitary con¢nement or restricted to minimal movement due to brokenlimbs. Claustrophobia pervades these scenes, accentuated by dim lighting.The camera is positioned either at ground level with Boyle to accentuate hislack of movement or above him to depict the small space in which he now¢nds himself. Gone are the expansive panning shots of the landings in Strange-ways replaced by cramped, dank, dungeon-like cells. The mechanism of theprison machine is revealed.

1984±1987: Purpose

The mid-1980s witnessed a £urry of activity in the penal system, where theprison population rose from 43,295 inmates in 1984 to more than 51,000 in1987 (TheTimes: 17 July 1987) and serious disturbances were reported at Gar-tree, Parkhurst and Alberny in 1985. At HMP Gloucester in 1986, the Gover-nor reported conditions as having reached ` total anarchy'' (The Times:October 1985). This period of crisis in the British penal system caused a the-matic shift in prison programming away from process and system of imprison-ment towards a more political critique of the purpose of prison.

Channel Four's Prison was the ¢rst prison documentary broadcast by thenew channel since its inception in 1982. Broadcast in three one-hour episodes,it was a major treatment of the issues and problems surrounding imprison-ment and represented a move towards overt criticism of the prison system.Programmes like Prison sought to ask questions about the purpose of such asystem. This passage from the ¢rst of the episodes,The Bankrupt Estate, arguesthe concept of prison as being inherently £awed:

Why not admit that the ideal of coupling punishment with improvementdoesn't work? And that reforming regimes are, and always have been, anillusion.Why not admit that prisoners won't be programmed like Pavlov'sDogs to jump through improving hoops? . . .Why not recognize that no

Television Portrayal of the British Prison 37

regime can condition or treat criminality? . . .Has the prison now nothingleft?

Along with broad questions about the nature of incarceration, the prison pro-grammes of the mid-1980s began to question what should be done with pro-blem prisoners, inmates who do not ¢t into the system, who commit furthercrimes while in prison or who have psychological di¤culties both before andduring their sentence. 40 Minutes: The Grendon Experiment (1984), for example,discussed the softer approach adopted by HMP Grendonöa prison specializ-ing in the psychiatric care of o¡endersöto some of Britain's most dangerousinmates. Lifers (1984), a six-part documentary series concerned with the pro-blems of long-term imprisonment was also broadcast on Channel Four in thisperiod; and the prison drama Knockback (1985), where the main protagonist,Alan Ackland, is the ¢rst inmate serving a life sentence after the abolition ofthe death penalty, was also shown. Knockback's narrative centres on the prisonservice's inability to deal with a long-term prisoner, and the continual refusalto grant paroleöthe knock back of the title.

The politicizing of the prison issue was an important development in theprison programme agenda of the mid-1980s. It followed the battle betweenthe Conservatives and Labour over law and order during this period. TheConservative government were engaged in building more prisons to cope withthe increasing inmate population while Labour, in opposition: ` set out a de-tailed programme of reform for reducing the prison population by non-custo-dial measures; for improving prison conditions, regimes and prisoners' rights''(Downes & Morgan 1997: 94).

These questions about the aim, role and condition of prison in the criminaljustice system were re£ected in the presentation of prison on television. Fol-lowing the more system-centred themes of the early 1980s programmes, tele-vision adopted a more critical approach in Prison and Knockback, but alsoProbation: Overcrowding Prisons (1985) and Out of Court: Prison Overcrowding (1985).

However, this more inquisitorial role of the prison programme is multi-faceted. It is concerned with the broad question of the success of the Britishpenal system but also with more speci¢c questions about disruptive inmates,overcrowding and prisoners' rights. As the decade moves to a close, so theprogramme agenda on prison diversi¢es further and programmes becomemore speci¢c in their focus and criticism.

1988±1991: Restriction

The political nature of prison programmes in the mid-1980s broadly ques-tioned incarceration and prison's role in dealing with o¡enders. In the late1980s, prisons were still very much on the political agenda. The Home Secre-tary, Douglas Hurd, announced an increase in sentence lengths coupled withan extensive prison building programme (TheTimes: 15 January 1988). Therewere major disturbances in several remand centres, beginning at Risley in

38 P. Mason

1989 and, of course, the national prison disturbances sparked o¡ by the Stran-geways riots in May 1990. On television, the broad questions asked about pris-ons were replaced with more speci¢c issues, centering on particular aspects ofprison life. This narrower agenda covered such diverse topics as prison es-capes (Brass Tacks: High Insecurity 1988); dispersal jails (Dispatches: Vioces FromLong Lartin 1989); and the prison medical service (Public Eye: Prison MedicalCare 1990).

Nevertheless, where 40 Minutes: The Grendon Experiment (1984), 40 Minutes:Mister Perks (1983) and Brass Tacks: Solitary (1982) had used speci¢c inmatesand/or prisons to explain wider problems, programmes like Charlie Wing(1990) and 40 Minutes: Danger Men (1990) remain focused on the narrow.In CharlieWing, 10 of the 16 inmates were interviewed about their crimes, theirexperiences inside prison and their attitudes towards crime. The programme'sdetailed exploration of these inmates leads to a `where are they now' epiloguewith an update of each inmate's progress since the ¢lm was made.

Back in 1982, Brass Tacks concentrated on the very nature of solitary con-¢nement and widened its scope to include many other inmates' experiencesin solitary. In contrast, Charlie Wing, was concerned with a special unit at `C'wing, HMP Parkhurst, and Danger Men with A' wing at HMP Hull. Both pro-grammes seek to introduce the viewer to the people who live in special unitsunder conditions and regimes vastly di¡erent to other inmates.ThisWeek: SexO¡endersöPrisoners Or Patients? (1989) too restricts the agenda to one smallpart of the prison systemöRule 43 o¡enders.

What is presented during this later period of the 1980s is a fragmented viewof the British prison system. It is far removed from regime-centred agenda ofthe early 1980s and narrower than the political questions posed by the pro-grammes of the mid-1980s. The consequence of such an approach is to repre-sent imprisonment as a complex institution comprising many varieties ofprison. Each prison holds a wide range of inmates, which leads to a plethoraof di¤culties and issues. Back in 1983, the Prison series adopted such a view,brie£y exploring the range of prisons within the British system. Prison, how-ever, was concerned with the broad issues surrounding the aim and role ofprison rather than any individual theme. By 1990, the camera no longer takesin the big picture of prison but instead zooms in to explore a particular ques-tion within the system as a whole. Furthermore, the broad criticism raised bythe programmes in the mid-1980s narrows to distinct prison issues in the late1980s. The criticism discussed in 40 Minutes: Danger Men compared the condi-tions in A' Wing with the rest of HMP Hull, limiting its critique to that pris-on. Compare this to 40 Minutes:The Grendon Experiment where the criticism isconcerned with far broader issues: prison resources and types of treatmentacross the penal system. It was only at beginning of the 1990s that a muchbroader view of prison was adopted. The four-part prison drama Underbelly(1991), for example, uses issues arising from penal institutions to comment onlarger institutions like politics and business.

Television Portrayal of the British Prison 39

Congruence

Underlying the changes in theme of prison programmes throughout the 1980sis a more substantial consistent image of the punitiveöthe prison as a ma-chine. Conspicuous images of con¢nement, such as shots of bars, cells andrazor wire, are mixed with frequent shots of landings and stairwells, oftenwith inmates carrying food trays to and from cells. Such a depiction repre-sents a re-emergence of the spectacle of punishment that, according toFoucault (1979), had disappeared with the birth of the prison.

Foucault's (1979) account of the development of modern penality and theconsequent disappearance of punishment as spectacle replaces ` the mise-en-scene of the public execution'' (Sparks 1992: 34) with a process of correctioncarried out in secret. Prison negated the visible punitive measures of gallowsand guillotine and replaced it with something more nebulous: punishment it-self was concealed behind giant grey walls, prisonö` the dominant apparatusof punishment'' (Nellis & Hale 1982: 51). This withdrawal of visible modes ofpunishment from contemporary society is not a fact accepted by all. Sparks(1992) contends that Foucault's account of modern penality ` tended to neglectthe survival of the demand for retribution in modern culture'' (Sparks 1992:34). He argues that a version of the spectacle ` persists vigorously'' (Sparks1992: 35) in televisual and cinematic representations of crime and punishment.Nellis & Hale (1982) also argue that despite the loss of a focus for the publicdesire to watch punishment, the desire remains:

. . .the desire to observe punishment does not disappearöit cannot. As itbreaks against the walls of prison like a wave, it £ows back and is ab-sorbed in numerous images of the punitive (Nellis & Hale 1982: 54).

Nellis & Hale's argument is that a desire exists in modern culture to see pun-ishment carried out. With the absence of public punitive displays and withprison ` wrapped in an impenetrable veil of secrecy'' (Cohen 1985: 57), thisdesire translates into ` fantasies of punishment'' (Nellis & Hale 1982: 62). Forthe purposes of their research, they identify the prison ¢lm as one such fan-tasy, an idea supported in Querry's (1975) work:

Should we decide to think about our prisons we ¢nd that we are quiteignorant about them, and that we are forced to call upon the powers ofour imaginationsöor the imaginations of someone elseöto help us withthe details of an institution about which we really know very little(Querry 1975: 147).

Sparks' and Nellis & Hale's arguments, however, are £awed. Nellis & Hale'sproposition based on audience yearning to witness punishment relies on theassumption that the public want to see others punished, an assumption theydo not justify. They submit no evidence in their argument relating to notions(explicit or otherwise) of systematic needs and processes leading to this de-sire' to see punishment. Furthermore, such a theory reduces audience motives

40 P. Mason

for watching to one simplistic, homogenous need: a view that is dubious atbest.

Sparks' argument is far more convincing but it too is problematic. Inexplaining his position, Sparks cites two aspects of crime and punishmentin the mass media: ¢rst, vigilante characters such as Clint Eastwood's`Dirty Harry', and the Death Wish ¢lms with Charles Bronson. These, heargues are moral tales with ` immense public salience'' (Sparks 1992: 35).It seems that Sparks identi¢es a parallel between monarchic power over thebody of the wrongdoer, described by Foucault, with the revenge killings ofEastwood and Bronson: the gallows and guillotine replaced by the 44 Mag-num. Consequently, Sparks submits, ` it is not possible to argue'' (p. 35) Fou-cault's standpoint that the spectacle of punishment has disappeared frommodern penality. This is an interesting viewpoint: a parallel may exist interms of the eventual death of the o¡ender administered by the law enforcer.To equate monarchical power to that of the vigilante however requires a con-siderable jump.

As discussed above, the visual nature of punishment involved the public.Sparks' assertion that spectacle still exists is based upon a supposed parallelbetween crowds at public executions and those at the cinema. As with Nellis& Hale, this relies on an assumption about audience: that those who go to see¢lms like Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974) do so to see the villains re-ceive their comeuppance, just as the masses £ocked to the gallows. Althoughthis may be one reason for viewers watching such ¢lms (notwithstanding thelack of statistical evidence) it is hardly exclusive. Other reasons exist forwatching such ¢lms, not least the actors themselves. Dirty Harry (1971), andlater Magnum Force (1973) allowed Eastwood to develop the character ¢rst seenin westerns like A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly(1966). To use vigilante ¢lms as an illustration of how spectacle still plays apart in modern penality is to ignore these di¤culties.

As a second example, Sparks cites the recounting of the Moors murders inthe mass media as Gothic horror. This, he argues, illustrates the existence ofvisible punishment in real events which `assimilate them to ¢ctional and dra-matic conventions'' (Sparks 1992: 35). This is not punishment, however. Eventssuch as the Moors murders or, more recently, the murders at Cromwell Street,centre on the killings and not the punishment. If tabloids and broadsheetsalike reported on what happened to the Wests or Hindley while in prison,then perhaps such reports could be seen as an exhibition of punishment. Thelurid accounts of such crimes in the media refer however to the killings them-selves and not the punitive acts of the State.

Nevertheless, the spectacle of punishment does seem to re-emerge in thetelevisual portrayal of prison as a mechanical process. This echoes the repre-sentation of prison in ¢lm back as far as the 1930s, where the prison became ametaphor for the depression of 1930s America in ¢lms such asThe Big House(1930). Both Ro¡man & Purdy (1981) and Parker (1986) argue that the prison

Television Portrayal of the British Prison 41

¢lm during this time was ` the ultimate metaphor of social entrapment, wherethe individual disappears among the masses in an impersonal institution''(Ro¡man & Purdy 1981: 26). Films such as I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang(1932), Criminal Code (1931) and The Big House (1930) featured innocent menwrongly convicted, whereas when the crime had actually been committed in¢lms like 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, the convict su¡ers injustices while in prison.As Ro¡man & Purdy (1981: 28) argue, such ¢lms re£ected the dejection of therecession in 1930s America:

the ¢lms' evocation of innocence living in subjugation and terror clearlyre£ects the despair of the nation faced with incomprehensible social andeconomic upheaval . . . the cells and bars and chains eloquently recreatethe sense of frustration and restriction in a land of lost opportunity.

The `mechanical regimentation'' (Ro¡man & Purdy 1981: 26) of the prisonregime was an essential element of the metaphor as they discuss in a scenefromThe Big House:

Rows of cell doors open simultaneously and hundreds of prisoners trampin unison to the yard. In the cavernous mess hall, they sit down to eat themass-produced fodder their keepers call food. The camera tracks along arow of prisoners to reveal faces mainly individuated by the manner inwhich they express their revulsion at the meal.

This process is evident not only in ¢ctional representations of prison in the1980s, but also in documentary. The concentration by early 1980s prison pro-grammes on the workings of the systemöthe routine imposed on inmatesöasdepicted in Strangeways, is present in later programmes too. A common techni-que for communicating the routine is the shot of inmates carrying food traysback to their cells: inmates trudge up huge steel stairwells and along landings,reminiscent of the chain gang, as queues of men in the same clothes walkround and round accompanied by the sounds of echoing footsteps and theprison o¤cer occasionally bawling instructions. Such images are bolstered byvoice-overs describing inmate routine and interviews with inmates themselves.

It is the uniformity of movement that underlines the highly structured rou-tine of the prison, which is in contrast to the solid silence of the walls thatcontain it. The mechanistic nature of prison is part of television, making theinvisible punishment of o¡enders visible. It is like the back of a clock: a bar-rier concealing the mechanism beneath. Yet when the veil is lifted there is awhirring of cogs and springs continually rotating, enabling the clock to work.The prison walls are not the aesthetics of the clock back. They hide for otherreasons: justice can be seen to be done through the imposing nature of suchbarriers. Television is the hand that removes the back of the clock and revealsthe mechanism inside.

42 P. Mason

Conclusions

Changing representations of prison on television throughout the 1980s owe asmuch to the political questions surrounding the aim and role of prison duringthat decade as they do to the longer heritage of prison programmes stretchingback to 1957. The shifts in theme from programmes about system to purpose ofprison, and ¢nally narrower questions about incarceration, were shaped bythe political mood at the time of broadcast. In turn, prison programmes re-fract as well as re£ect the debates surrounding penal policy. Statistically, fewpeople experience life inside a prison, and consequently the public rely onmedia representations for their information. As Prison: (1) The Bankrupt Estate(1983) commented, ` to the public eye, prison means Strangeways''. Programmessuch as those concerning prison overcrowding in the mid-1980s enabled thepublic to enter the political debate about prisons, and perhaps shaped theconsequent manifestos of both Labour and the Conservatives.

Dramas based on real-life events can also strengthen policy-challenging ar-guments. Bad Company (1993) was the dramatization of the murder of paperboy Carl Bridgewater at Yew Tree Farm and the subsequent wrongful impri-sonment of four men. InThe Name Of The Father retold the story of the Guild-ford Four, a miscarriage of justice involving four men serving more than15 years in prison each. Programmes such as these force the issue into publicconsciousness, creating pressure on the Government of the day to ensure suchevents do not happen again.

In recent years, television's involvement in the debate about prison hastaken a bizarre turn. Fictional characters in British soap operas who havebeen victims of an injustice are the subject of national media appeals. DeirdreBarlow, a character from Coronation Street, a programme regularly watched byover 18 million people a week, was the subject of an appeal campaign in anational newspaper, `Free The Weather¢eld One'. This led, remarkably, to theU.K. Home Secretary, Jack Straw, commenting on her plight. In October1999 the other principal soap opera, Eastenders, also portrayed an innocentyoung man being convicted of a crime he did not commit. This too was thesubject of a media-led campaign to free him.

Despite the £ux in prison programmes' focus, they consistently o¡er theaudience a window on the punitive. Television makes visible the invisible pro-cesses of punishment, and enables the viewer to witness the spectacle as, cen-turies before, the sovereign's subjects have always done:

Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Becausethey must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the wit-nesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to acertain extent take part in it (Foucault 1979: 58).

As technology develops and digital television, the Internet and virtual realitybecome the viewing norm, one can only speculate on how prison will be

Television Portrayal of the British Prison 43

presented to us in the future. It seems likely however that whatever the modeof representation, the spectacle of punishment will remain.

Notes

1 Space precludes any detailed discussion of the methodological grounds for thisde¢nition. Some constraints were necessary to limit the sheer number of pro-grammes to analyseöcountries studied, exclusion of women's prisons, time limitand so on. News coverage was excluded due to its fragmented nature and di¤-culty to search. A prison programme was de¢ned as `wholly or substantially con-cerned with prison' to exclude occasional prison scenes in drama and soapoperas for example. For a discussion of the di¤culty in de¢ning the prison genre,particularly in ¢lm see Mason (1998b).

2 Analysis was organized through an analytical description of programmes basedon the approach of Corner et al. (1990). The narrative structure was examined ona descriptive level, chronologically, then discussed in more detail, with particularattention paid to communicative design, thematic development and visualiza-tions. Programmes were secondly organized into three time periodsö early1980s', `mid-1980s', and `late 1980s'öthe development of prison programmesacross the decade was then charted and explored.

Appendix

Programme references

Strangeways (1): A HumanWarehouse: 29 October 1980, BBC1, 21:25.Strangeways (2):The Allegation: 5 November 1980, BBC1, 21:25.Strangeways (3): Screws: 12 November 1980, BBC1, 22:25.Strangeways (4): Cons: 19 November 1980, BBC1, 21:25.Strangeways (5):The Block: 26 November 1980, BBC1, 21:25.Strangeways (6):They Call Us Beasts: 3 December 1980, BBC1, 22:20.Strangeways (7): Borstal Boys: 11 December 1980, BBC1, 21:25Strangeways (8): Christmas: 17 December 1980, BBC1, 21:25.Law And Order: A Prisoner'sTale: 30 March 1980, BBC2, 22:30.ITV Playhouse: A Sense Of Freedom: 17 February 1981, ITV, 22:30.Panorama:The Sentence Of The Court: 10 February 1982, BBC1, 20:30.World In Action: A Di¤cult Prisoner: 24 January 1983, ITV, 20:30.40 Minutes: Mister Perks: 13 January 1983, BBC2, 21:30.Prison:The Bankrupt Estate: 16 March 1983, Ch4, 21:00.Prison: Invisible Man: 23 March 1983, Ch4, 21:00.Prison: Inside Out: 30 March 1983, Ch4, 21:00.Lifers: 24 May 1984, Ch4, 23:05.Lifers: 31 May 1984, Ch4, 23:05.Lifers: 14 June 1984, Ch4, 23:05.Lifers: 21 June 1984, Ch4, 23:05.

44 P. Mason

Lifers: 28 June 1984, Ch4, 23:05.Lifers: 5 July 1984, Ch4, 23:05.40 Minutes:The Grendon Experiment: 15 November 1984, BBC2, 21:30.ScreenTwo: Knockback (1): 26 January 1985, BBC2, 22:15.ScreenTwo: Knockback (2): 2 February 1985, BBC2, 22:15.Probation: Overcrowding prisons: 22 October 1985, BBC2, 21:30.Out of Court: Prison Overcrowding: 4 December 1985, BBC2, 19:50.BrassTacks: High Insecurity: 11 October 1988, ITV, 20:30.Dispatches:Voices From Long Lartin: 22 March 1989, Ch4.ThisWeek: Sex O¡endersöPrisoners or Patients?: 7 December 1989, ITV, 20:30.Public Eye: Prison Medical Care: 27 April 1990, ITV, 20:00.Charlie Wing: 10 September 1990, ITV, 23:15.40 Minutes: Danger Men: 8 February 1990, BBC2, 21:35.Underbelly (1): 17 February 1992, BBC2, 21:00.Underbelly (2): 24 February 1992, BBC2, 21:00.Underbelly (3): 2 March 1992, BBC2, 21:00.Underbelly (4): 9 March 1992, BBC2, 21:00.

ReferencesCohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control. Cambridge: Polity Press.Conservative Party (1979) The Conservative Manifesto. London: Conservative Party.Corner, J., Richardson, K. & Fenton, N. (1990) Nuclear Reactions: Form and Responses in

Public Issue'Television. London: John Libbey.Crowther, B. (1989) Captured On FilmöThe Prison Movie. London: BT Batsford Ltd.Downes, D. & Morgan, R. (1997) Dumping the Hostages to Fortune. In The OxfordHandbook of Criminology (Maguire, M., Morgan, R. & Reiner, R., Eds). Oxford: Clar-endon Press, pp. 87^134.

Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish:The Birth of a Prison. London: Peregrine Books.Garland, D. (1990) Punishment and Modern Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Mason, P. (1996) Prime time punishment: The British prison and television. In Crimeand the Media: The Post-Modern Spectacle (Kidd-Hewitt, D. & Osborne, R. Eds).London: Pluto Press, pp. 185±205.

Mason, P. (1998a) System and Process: The prison in cinema. In Images: Journal of Pop-ular Culture and Film at http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue06/features/prison.htm

Mason, P. (1998b) Men, machines and the mincer: The prison in cinema. In PicturingJustice at http://www.usfca.edu/pj/articles/Prison.htm

Nellis, M. & Hayle, C. (1982) The Prison Film. London: Radical Alternatives To Prison.Parker, J. (1986) The organizational environment of the motion picture sector. InMedia, Audience and Social Structure (Ball-Rokeach, S. & Cantor, M., Eds). BeverlyHills, Sage, pp. 71^96.

Querry, R. (1975) The American prison as portrayed in the popular motion pictures of the 1930s.Unpublished Ph.D, University of New Mexico.

Ro¡man, P. & Purdy, J. (1981) The Hollywood Social Problem Film. Bloomington, Indiana:University Press.