No abstract

Since King and McDermott (1995), following Downes (1988), defined the psychological oppressiveness of incarceration in terms of 'weight', little has been written about the 'weight of imprisonment'. None the less, it is generally assumed that prisons that are 'light' are preferable to those that are 'heavy' - in part because of an assumption among many penologists that power, and its application, is dangerous and antagonistic. This article does not dispute that 'heavy' prisons are undesirable. Its argument is that there can also be dangers if prisons are excessively light. Many of these dangers are linked to the under-use of power. The tone and quality of prison life depends on the combined effects of institutional weight with the 'absence' or 'presence' of staff power. Drawing on prisoners' descriptions of their experiences in public and private sector prisons, and their assessments of important aspects of their quality of life, the article outlines what these concepts mean in practice. The authors develop a four-quadrant framework for conceptualizeng penal legitimacy and the experience of penal authority.

Drawing on an amended version of a survey employed in three previous studies, this article reports the problems experienced by 294 male prisoners serving very long life sentences received when aged 25 or under. The broad findings are consistent with previous work, including few differences being found between the problems experienced as most and least severe by prisoners at different sentence stages. By grouping the problems into conceptual dimensions, and by drawing on interviews conducted with 126 male prisoners, we seek to provide a more nuanced analysis of this pattern. We argue that, while earlier scholars concluded that the effects of long-term confinement were not 'cumulative' and 'deleterious', adaptation to long-term imprisonment has a deep and profound impact on the prisoner, so that the process of coping leads to fundamental changes in the self, which go far beyond the attitudinal.