22 - Bells, Whistles, Ships and Prisons

Summary

Sound is particularly pertinent in a place where fields of vision are often heavily restricted. Prisons are strange spaces and require a careful, slow ear to discern the routines and rhythms that comprise the ‘everyday tune’. Once the ear adjusts, audible aspects of social emotion become more discernible, as does its role in safety and survival. Focusing on the everyday is closer to more traditional ethnographies though differs from a substantial strain of prison studies more concerned with the extraordinary. Exploring the community's relationships with the soundscape, working from within, challenged assumptions about the basis for order. Sound marks out time, conveys power and is implicit in processes which both reinforce and disrupt stability. Familiarity with polyrhythmic and arrhythmic daily tempos revealed the co-produced, cooperative work stability depended upon. This challenges the wisdom of viewing prison life primarily through the prism of security and enhances understanding of the lasting effects of imprisonment for all who spend time in these environments.

Using sound as both method and focus shifted my frame of understanding considerably. My proximity to those I worked with was brought closer. My sensitivity to their broader temporal and spatial experience within, through and outside the prison was simultaneously heightened. This prompted greater scrutiny of how to portray Midtown and its people. Faithfully representing something of those who gave so generously of themselves is, rightly, an endless concern. So too, though, is the way we depict the stories bound up in ideas we co-opt in our own accounts. The tales we tell, and how we tell them, matter. In writing about Midtown, I hope I have gone some way to capturing the perilous rip tides lurking in the shallower waters of a local prison, as well as the endless warmth and accommodation extended to me while I loitered, hopefully.

It was only when Bear, Midtown's writer in residence, pointed it out, that I realized how closely the innards of the prison resembled a ship. Vulnerable and segregated prisoners languished in the sun-starved, close, subterranean hold, the twos – the ground floor – could be likened to the deck, the netting resembled rigging and so on.