12 - Polyrhythmia

Summary

For all the complexities of everyday life at Midtown, it had a discernible rhythm, its components the different musical parts in a series of pieces played over themselves in competing time signatures. A ‘good’ day was not one in which temporal and spatial experience united but one in which its non-linear multiplicities were in harmony; a ‘polyrhythmia’ (Lefebvre, 2004). Uneventful visits, correct and accurate counts, prompt meal service and good humour combined to carry the day.

Lefebvre (1991) identifies three dimensions to how we experience space. We think of spaces simultaneously in terms of their representation on maps and blueprints, how they come to signify ideas of form and meaning, and the way these simple understandings are complicated and undermined by the realities of everyday life as it moves through their corners. These ideas help to decode the various levels and forms of prison life. There was the prison as it was rendered by what cab drivers told me they had read in their morning papers; places of punishment/holiday camps that undermined/reinforced our sense of law and order. Prison life as it was detailed and specified on prison service orders and instructions issued by senior management or commanding officers. Then there was the thrum and bustle of bodies busily remaking social spaces through ingenious dallying, in tension with the commands bellowed around the wing, and the periodic clang of the bell. These ‘triadic’ notions of space corresponded to the rhythms of regime in theory, on paper and in practice. Attuning to their meaning revealed the complexities of temporal and spatial experience, as well as how this was woven into the various activities that comprised a stable, orderly day.

A ‘good’ day

A good day in prison has an immediately identifiable soundscape. When asked what a good day sounds like in interview people offered remarkably similar accounts. Prisoners tended to be more location-specific and their response to depend on where they wanted to be, though remarkably few told me there was no such thing. The degree of agreement between some staff and prisoners over what constituted a ‘good’ day is illustrated by comparing responses to this enquiry.