Caring and the Prison in Philosophy, Policy and Practice: Under Lock and Key

Abstract

Care appears prima facie antithetical to punishment. Since the overlaps between care and punishment are greater than we paradigmatically expect, care ethics offers a more accurate account of prisons: recognising and critiquing both dehumanising carceral violence, and the necessity, presence, and inadequacies of penal care, as well as unlocking ways of thinking differently about structural change without losing sight of individual issues. After introducing care ethics and evidencing the presence of caring practices in present prisons, the article considers how we punish, in terms of the amount, method, and manner. Treating people in punishment as moral equals is important for liberal deontological penal theories. Treatment as equals requires context. Context is intrinsic to care-ethics praxis, which provides methods of and standards for accessing and applying this information.

Non‐paradigmatic punishments

“…Despite some remaining reservations (Brown Coverdale, 2021) we take this view to be more plausible than the other two. But many questions about it remain.…”

“…Similarly, Allegra McLeod recommends replacing criminal justice practices with preventative social measures (2015, p.1171): improving public spaces and job‐creation (p.1225–1232). These aims overlap with community‐centred alternative jurisprudence practices (Brown Coverdale, 2021, p.425). If these practices are in fact punishment, then what we have is either a change of method of punishment or the replacement of one agent of punishment by another.…”

A phenomenological reflection on women's lived experience of giving in circumstances of material scarcity

“…To begin, it might mean reexamining the ways we train nursing and other students and health professionals so as to improve their ability to recognize and promote protective factors and environmental assets of patients marginalized by socioeconomic disadvantage and incarceration. The humanistic needs of persons can appear secondary, even at times antithetical to what the criminal‐legal system views as its disciplinary mission (Coverdale, 2020; Hörberg & Dahlberg, 2015). Nurses working in carceral contexts have observed the pressure they are under to conform to a security‐first ethos (Dhaliwal & Hirst, 2016).…”

Introduction: Nonparadigmatic Punishments

“…Helen Brown Coverdale's article, 'Caring and the Prison in Philosophy, Policy, and Practice', deals with what might at first sight appear to be a thoroughly paradigmatic form of punishmentnamely, imprisonment, albeit from an unusual and perhaps initially paradoxical point of view: that of care ethics. 29 As she notes in the abstract to her article, care and punishment seem, prima facie, to be antithetical to one another (and, one might add, the antithesis seems particularly sharp when we consider incarcerative punishment). However, as she goes on to argue, further reflection suggests both that prisons are almost inevitably loci of the work of care.…”