11 - Arrhythmia

Summary

Recognizing signs of trouble was not sufficient to locate its source, nor prevent it. Identifying its qualities, however, provided a means of preparation. For staff this could mean taking extra care and deploying at different points around the wing; for prisoners – who often had a more developed sense of where it was coming from – this was similarly a cue for standing by. A variety of terms and rationales for taking the temperature of the day were used but reading the emotional range in the soundscape formed part of the daily routine for many at Midtown.

The soundscape offered a means of gauging the stability of the social climate and was integral to the ecology of survival for the broader community (Toch, 1992). Staff, uniformed staff particularly, as well as prisoners, relied on their ability to diagnose the likelihood of disruption as a means of keeping safe. These abilities were a vital, if largely unacknowledged, aspect of jail craft, allowing officers some sense of what they were walking into. The broader emotional climate could be discerned from the shifting soundscape, so too could disruption to stable rhythms and the onset of violence which threated the safety of all on the wing (Herrity, 2021). I draw from fieldnotes from two incidents to illustrate the qualities of bad days in which the arrhythmia of a disrupted regime rippled through the prison.

If a ‘good’ day has a particular set of sounds, so too does a ‘bad’ one: “The noise, innit like heat rises, noise rises” (Lugs). Arrhythmia refers to rhythms in a discordant state. Lefebvre defines arrhythmia as rhythms in dissonance: ‘there is suffering, a pathological state (of which arrhythmia is generally at the same time, symptom, cause and effect)” (2004: 16). This is a useful means of conceptualizing what the soundscape of a bad day indicates:

‘The atmosphere in the jail? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I can relay a story to you. This happened on the 12th of July 2015, and we’ve got a lot of new staff … and I was on landing three with one of the other more experienced staff … and I walked on, and I said: “There's sommat not right here. It doesn't feel right.”