On humour in Prison

European Journal of Criminology8(6) 500 –514

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On humour in prison

Malene Molding NielsenUniversity of Copenhagen, Denmark

AbstractThis paper unravels the presence of humour in prison as an institutionalized aspect of prison life. The analysis shows how officers use humour to manage their relationships with prisoners and other staff, and how they make use of humour to establish a collective understanding of the officer job, crafting themselves as a group. The humorous exchanges between officers, prisoners and other staff facilitate social spaces where officers briefly meet prisoners as equals, and where staff articulate hostility towards one another. These social spaces exist as briefly as the humorous exchanges, but the implications are real. The officer–prisoner joking relationship fosters conflict avoidance, smooth daily interactions, service provision for prisoners and transgression of officer norms for camaraderie. In contrast, the staff–staff joking relationship grants officers a sense of power vis-à-vis other staff and an opportunity to articulate hostility where staff solidarity is required. As a communication device with ambiguous qualities, humour unites the real and the unreal, shapes social structure, interaction and positioning and is suitable for identity work in prison.

Keywordsconflict avoidance and articulation, humour, identity work, joking relations, prison

Introduction

Prisons are places of suffering, crime and abuse. I was, therefore, initially astounded by the widespread use of humour I observed when I commenced my ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish prison. My astonishment partly reflects the negligible attention devoted to humour in penal research. In this paper I seek to address this gap. I unravel the presence of humour in prison by analysing what characterizes officers’ use of it in everyday life and by discussing its immediate implications for social interaction and identity work.

By analysing how humour is appropriated in everyday prison life, I demonstrate that the use of humour goes far beyond amusement. As a communicative device, humour has a transformative potential. In transforming individuals and groups – and thereby also

Corresponding author:Malene Molding Nielsen, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, PO Box 2099, DK-1014 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Email: [email protected]

413818 EUC8610.1177/1477370811413818NielsenEuropean Journal of Criminology

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social spaces – humour is closely linked to identity work that concerns who you are, where you are, what you are doing and where you would like to be. Humour has the potential to structure interaction and social positioning and to reproduce social structure and, momentarily, redefine it. Exploring humour and its implications both requires and provides insights into relationships, shared conventions, group dynamics and individual positioning.

On humorous exchanges

One way to approach humour as an interactional exchange is to draw on the anthropolo-gist Gregory Bateson’s thinking on humour in communication. Bateson argued that we frame our actions as playful or serious by including verbal and non-verbal clues about how our speech is to be interpreted (Bateson, 1952: 10, 15; Boxer and Cortes, 1997: 277; Coates, 2007: 31). Humour presupposes a minimum common definition of a situation (Coser, 1959: 172) where interaction is required between the person intending a humor-ous remark and those potentially responding (Coates, 2007: 32). For a play frame to be successfully established, conversational participants must recognize that a play frame has been invoked and choose to maintain it (Bateson, 1952: 10–11 and 15; Boxer and Cortes, 1997: 277, and Coates, 2007: 31).

Humorous exchanges have different qualities. A joke is often a relatively short story that ends with a punch line meant to produce laughter (Coates, 2007: 30). Putdown humour involves exchanges that attempt to derive amusement at the expense of some-thing or someone (Terrion and Ashforth, 2002: 59), which may involve the telling of a joke, the use of irony, word play, sarcasm or teasing. The telling of a fun story exempli-fies another kind of humorous exchange (Goffman, 1959: 25).

Humour is a fuzzy-edged category in terms of its content and form. Anything can be fun, but often we laugh at discrepancies between what it is acceptable to express and what everybody feels, or how an individual behaves as opposed to how he or she should behave according to culturally sanctioned codes of conduct (Bateson, 1952: 9).1 Humour is closely linked to the cultural and situational context in which it occurs (Coser, 1959: 172; Grugulis, 2002: 389). In this paper, I focus on humorous exchanges that are framed as play and thus invite a reaction such as a smile or laughter.

Because humour has its own special form, it is seldom accorded the ‘serious’ consid-eration that non-play discussions attract (Grugulis, 2002: 388), in that the person intend-ing a humorous remark can always reject its negative implications – or what has been said altogether – by referring to the communication as fun and, therefore, not real. One should, however, never underestimate the serious nature of play (Zijderveld, 1983: 6). Humour creates the illusion of an unreal communication, yet it is real in its implications. In playing with the real and the unreal, humour unites opposites.

Humour has been compared to a double-edged sword, facilitating collaboration and inclusion, collusion and exclusion (Collinson, 1988: 184; Rogerson-Revell, 2007: 4), and friendliness and antagonism. It is precisely the double-sided quality of humour that warrants another look at what the anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown classifies as a joking relationship. Radcliffe-Brown describes a joking relationship as a

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special kind of relationship between persons where one is permitted and, at times, required to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is obligated to take no offence (1940: 195). According to Radcliffe-Brown, such relationships may be either symmetri-cal (that is, A teases or makes fun of B, and the other way round) or asymmetrical (that is, A jokes at the expense of B, B accepts the teasing in return or alternatively teases A only a little) (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940: 195). The joking relationship exemplifies a behaviour that in any other social context would express and arouse hostility but, Radcliffe-Brown argues, it is not meant seriously and should not be taken seriously (1940: 196). Radcliffe-Brown contends that, although humour has conjunctive charac-teristics that connote a mutual interest in avoiding conflict, it also has disjunctive char-acteristics connoting differences of interests and status and, therefore, also a possibility of hostility. I use these conjunctive and disjunctive characteristics in this paper to conceptualize and analyse humorous exchanges as joking relationships.

The conjunctive and disjunctive characteristics of the officer–prisoner relationship also refer to the personal and public aspects of the officer job that underpin important identity work dynamics in prison. These aspects can be conceptualized by drawing on the distinctions the political theorist Hannah Arendt makes in her book The Human Condition. Arendt discriminates between the who and the what of human beings. The who refers to the unique characteristics of an individual and the what refers to shared characteristics between individuals as equals (Arendt, [1958] 1998: 175–82).

Whereas Radcliffe-Brown’s description of the joking relationship reflects the func-tionalist paradigm of which he was part, I will complement his functionalist perspective with the sociologist Tia DeNora’s research on music, which inspires me to think of humour as a transformative and dynamic device. According to DeNora, transport is a metaphor often used to capture musical experiences. People get carried away listening to music that has the potential of moving people from one emotional space to another (DeNora, 2000: 7, 109–23). As such, music has the potential of organizing something outside itself. It has transformative powers because it changes things (DeNora, 2000: 48). DeNora emphasizes, however, that music is not a stimulus that generates an auto-matic response; music’s effect rather comes from the ways in which individuals orient to it (DeNora, 2000: 125).

In this paper I regard humour as a dynamic social device with transformative poten-tial; a device that may shape social positioning, interaction and social structure and that may transform the real into the unreal. Although at times people laugh when a play frame is invoked, even when they do not understand what is being laughed at (Terrion and Ashforth, 2002: 80), I recognize – in line with DeNora’s thinking on music – that the effects of humour depend on the appropriation of humorous remarks. As such, humour does not necessarily facilitate social stability and integration but may exacer-bate or signify conflict.

DeNora demonstrates how music may instigate particular mind-sets and organize dis-parate individuals such that their actions appear mutually oriented, coordinated and aligned (DeNora, 2000: 2, 110, 126). She argues that music has the potential to shape agency and may be used by people to enhance and alter aspects of themselves, allowing them to produce themselves as coherent and socially disciplined beings (DeNora, 2000:

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49). DeNora distinguishes between inter-subjectivity and co-subjectivity, where the former presumes interpersonal dialogue and collaborative production of meaning and cognition, and the latter is a result of individually reflexive alignments (DeNora, 2000: 149). Inspired by DeNora, I distinguish between situations where humour is used as a device that facilitates collective reflection on prison work, resulting in the establishment of a socially sanctioned and inter-subjective understanding of such work, and situations where humour facilitates ‘us versus them’ exclusion, with bonding implications. When the latter happens, bonding comes about as a collective reaction to an external factor.

Methodological departure

This analysis is one result of an exploratory ethnographic study conducted in a male open prison in Denmark. A starting point for the study has been that epistemology is insepara-ble from the relational quality of ethnography. The ethnographic presence of a researcher becomes a position and perspective from where data are collected and analysed while simultaneously being an integrated aspect of the research itself. In ethnographic research, the position of the researcher changes as the researcher becomes familiar with his or her field and its inhabitants, and it is from such changing social positions that the researcher evolves within the social in a subtle interplay. As such, ‘subjectivity’ is a price that has to be paid to do ethnographic fieldwork (Jenkins, 1994: 443).

The study was conducted during a 10-month period divided into two phases. I spent the initial nine weeks (Phase 1) conducting informal interviews and participant obser-vation of staff-to-prisoner, staff-to-staff and prisoner-to-prisoner interactions. In Phase 2 (a four-month period) I focused on everyday life and interaction in and around two prison wings.2 During this phase, I conducted formal interviews with a randomly selected half of the prisoner and officer populations of the wings. In total, I conducted 19 formal interviews with prisoners and 13 with prison officers. I also interviewed the governor, the wing head and the deputy. I recorded and transcribed all but one of the formal interviews, and I systematically made notes of participant observations from both fieldwork phases.

In preparing for the study I made a series of familiarization visits to 11 different institu-tions under the Prison and Probation Service, including high security prisons, open pris-ons, a jail, exit institutions, the Staff Training Centre of the Prison and Probation Service and two municipal offices established to follow and support prisoners released on proba-tion. I spent approximately one full day in each place shadowing staff and conducting interviews and observations. Data generated from these visits also inform the analysis.

Playing with positions: Joking relationship

In this section I demonstrate how humorous exchanges may be used to play with the (in principle strictly differentiated) positions of officers and prisoners and the norms that are tied to these positions. The example below, which is drawn from my fieldwork notes, illustrates the general features of such exchanges, which may be characterized as light, non-threatening and always directed at someone present.3


Near the main reception desk Officer T and I run into Prisoner C.

With a demonstrative smile Prisoner C says to Officer T: ‘Hello sweetheart.’

Prisoner C hands over a document to the officer and explains that he would like to know whether the police must be consulted if he applies for release on probation. Officer T, who is carrying a cup of coffee, takes yet another sip.

Indicating that he would like to smell the drink, Prisoner C wittily says: ‘Hey, could I examine this please?’

Directed at me, Prisoner C bends over towards the cup and adds: ‘You see, in this institution one has to continuously check on everything.’

Prisoner C explains he has got himself a job and that he is now able to comply with all the formalities related to applying successfully. He adds that another officer previously looked at the document and that this officer did not think the police would have to be consulted if he applied.

Officer T: ‘Who is your spiritual leader?’

Prisoner C looks confused. He does not get the humorous remark, but his attention is intensely directed towards Officer T.

Officer T reframes the remark: ‘Who is your contact person?’

Prisoner C: ‘Officer G.’Officer T: ‘Well, Officer G is on duty today.’Prisoner C: ‘Yes, but he really does not understand these things.’Officer T: ‘I will tell Officer G you would like him to add to your file that you have found

a job now and have all the formalities in place to apply for release on probation.’

The exchange continues. Officer T once again assures Prisoner C that he personally will make sure Officer G follows up on Prisoner C’s request. As the conversation continues, Prisoner C keeps on smiling and calling Officer T ‘sweetheart’. Eventually Officer T leaves. Prisoner C’s expression changes instantly as his facial muscles relax, and he says: ‘You have got to keep on pushing otherwise nothing happens.’

As should be evident from the humorous exchange, Prisoner C imitates a role reversal by pretending to examine the content of Officer T’s drink, implying it might contain alcohol or drugs. The role reversal humorously describes the position of prisoners under surveillance and the position of officers as surveyors, positions that we are invited to laugh at together while the humorous exchange is ongoing. Officer T accepts the invita-tion that the play frame provides. He mirrors Prisoner C by ironically referring to his colleague as a spiritual leader, thereby providing a non-threatening putdown of the position that he himself represents, that is, a prison officer and contact person. The immediate implications of the exchange are clear. Officer T agrees to push for his colleague to finalize the casework related to Prisoner C’s application.

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The humorous exchange allows both parties to distance themselves from their respective position in the prison context whereby they expose unofficial aspects of themselves and reduce the inequality that officially characterizes the relationship. By creating a distance from their formal penal positions, the officer exposes an understand-ing of the prisoner that goes beyond the prison context, and the prisoner has an oppor-tunity to communicate with the officer on more equal terms while humorously pushing for services in a non-threatening way. The joking relationship is characterized by mutual expectations of a reciprocal exchange that ensures a continuation of the humorous dialogue – a dialogue that helps prevent any major emotional outbreaks or conflict (Kristoffersen, 1986: 103).

Because officers represent the jurisdictional system when they monitor and manage the exclusion of prisoners from society, I argue for a comparison between the jurisdic-tional and institutional distinction between officers and prisoners and the disjunctive (separation) aspects of Radcliffe-Brown’s joking relationship. I also argue that the quasi-domestic characteristics of the total institution that produce intimate interactions between officers and prisoners and their mutual interest in running everyday life smoothly suggest the presence of conjunction (alliance).

Whereas the disjunctive characteristics of the officer–prisoner relationship connote differences of interests and status, and the possibility of conflict and antagonism, the conjunctive characteristics connote attachment and mutual interest in collaboration. As such, my observations correspond with other research on humour in prison (see Kristoffersen, 1986, and Mathiesen, 1965). I will, however, add a perspective to previ-ous research that further explains the aptness of humorous exchanges as a social device to manage relationships.

The humorous exchanges between officers and prisoners are characterized by a move away from the official roles both have within the prison context, that is, what they are, towards an encounter where officers and prisoners are allowed to expose personal unique qualities, that is, who they are. It is from this perspective that humour momentarily rede-fines social structure. When this happens, the actual content of the humorous exchanges is irrelevant. It is who it includes, the humorous form and the movement from what to who that matters.

For this reason the play frame, with its illusory qualities of being unreal, becomes a powerful tool. It allows officers to connect positively with prisoners without being judged as transgressing social norms for interaction. As officers move from what they are and allow themselves to expose personal aspects of themselves (their who), they transgress their norm of maintaining a professional distance from prisoners. Among officers, maintaining a professional distance requires disguising personal aspects of the self and vocal loyalty to the officer group (Crawley, 2004; Kauffman, 1988; Liebling and Price, 2001).

In the alliance that evolves between Officer T and Prisoner C, Prisoner C criticizes his contact person. Officer T indicates that he accepts the criticism by acknowledging the need to push his colleague to finalize the casework and, in so doing, Officer T discloses loyalty to Prisoner C as opposed to maintaining and articulating loyalty to his colleague. This does not imply that all officers follow the same path as Officer T. Joking relation-ships do not always involve breaches of staff loyalty; but regularly they do.


It is from this perspective that the encounter not only violates social norms for officer camaraderie. It becomes an empathetic encounter in which emotion rules are trans-gressed, rules that guard officer interaction by asserting that officer disclosure of empa-thy, affection, fear or a private self towards prisoners should be avoided.

In humorous exchanges, officers and prisoners establish a positive connection that repeatedly tests the solidarity and loyalty of the prison officer group. Although the trans-gressions are real, this is potentially compensated for by the unreal illusory qualities of humour. These illusory qualities pave the way for amicable communication and provide the possibility of denying the implied content of such exchanges, if need be.

Negotiating subjectivity and co-subjectivity

In this section I examine a typical example of a humorous exchange between different staff categories. The exchange, which is extracted from my fieldwork notes, is character-ized by a play frame that introduces a scathingly ironic yet humorous remark indicating antipathy towards the recipient of the remark. As biting putdown humour, the example has exclusive and, therefore, also possible bonding implications.

Hanna is a staff coordinator in the workshops where prisoners ideally spend weekdays working on different crafts. Hanna has joined the regular morning meeting of prison officers, a meeting that staff from the workshops normally do not attend. Hanna is here to inform officers about the appropriate handling of food for prisoners in solitary confinement and of food in general. Prison officers are responsible for serving pre-cooked meals to prisoners in solitary confinement.

Before Hanna takes the floor, an overwhelmingly cheerful atmosphere fills the room. Officers exchange smiles as Hanna starts to explain how important it is to continuously control not only the temperature of hot meals served for prisoners but also the temperature of the fridges in the kitchens attached to each prison ward. Hanna has brought along thermometers and a folder with lots of written material on the subject matter. While Hanna talks, prison officers chuckle and exchange looks.

Hanna: ‘Hot meals must be 75 degrees when they are taken out of the microwave and all fridges must have a thermometer.’ Hanna produces a thermometer to demonstrate how easy it is to measure food degrees.

Officer A: ‘Hanna – this is unmanageable and not realistic. There are too many officers checking in and out of different shifts and teams every day. It involves too many people.’

Officer B: ‘Why cannot somebody from the kitchen take care of this? You could send some-body from the kitchen to measure the temperature, somebody to whom these tests and measurements make sense?’

Hanna: ‘But measuring the temperature of food and fridges does not require any brains at all.’

Officer C: ‘Aha, that is why! It is because it does not require any brains to conduct these measurements that the assignment is given to us?’

Laughter breaks out around the table.

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Hanna: ‘Officer D has developed some rules of thumb regarding the handling of food to prisoners in solitary confinement.’

Hanna is interrupted by Officer B, who suggests that Officer D can take care of it then. More laughter follows.

The meeting moves on and Hanna leaves.

The exchange between Hanna and the officers at this morning meeting exemplifies tough putdown humour bordering on harassment. Several features characterize this kind of humorous exchange.

First, the exchange resembles teasing in that it is sarcastic and targeted towards Hanna, a person who is physically present, a requirement for teasing to take place (Boxer and Cortes, 1997: 279). Second, Hanna makes an effort to negotiate her position by ignoring the humorous and ironic accusation imposed on her by Officer C. She refers to the guidelines on food management developed by Officer D, emphasizing the presence of sense in the officer group. Her attempt is, however, not successful. It is swept away when Officer B interrupts and suggests that Officer D should then cater for food meas-urements, and the amused meeting participants move on to the next agenda item. Third, when Hanna reacts, her reaction is serious. Mulkay notes that humorous remarks about potentially serious topics often receive serious replies because such remarks convey seri-ous messages, despite the sender’s indication of a humorous content (Mulkay, 1988: 80).

During the course of my fieldwork, I observed a conflict of interest between work-shop staff and prison officers. Officers expressed a view that other staff groups do not acknowledge the work pressure that officers experience and the competencies they have as a staff group, including their capabilities to interact with and manage prisoners. This does not imply that workshop staff did not interact constructively with the officer group, but it implies that the collaboration between the two often was difficult. Not surpris-ingly, a recurring topic at staff meetings was how to improve collaboration between the two groups. Furthermore, on several occasions officers told me that they considered themselves to be lowest in the hierarchical structure of the prison – below prisoners – and they confided that prisoners and other staff groups were always given priority at the expense of officers.

Emerson (in Mulkay, 1988: 80) argues that humour is often used to deal with the presentation of difficult conversational topics. This was the case at the staff meeting, where a seemingly innocent exchange on food management actually referred to an ongoing conflict between the officer group and workshop staff, a staff group that Hanna represented as the workshop staff coordinator. Hanna was literally laughed out of the room, and the agenda on food management along with the conflict between the two staff groups remained unsolved. As such, the humorous exchange articulated and potentially exacerbated an existing conflict.

In drawing on Arendt’s distinction between the what and the who, at this meeting who Hanna is as a person is not acknowledged, and it did not matter. The important aspect of Hanna’s presence here was what she represented, that is, workshop staff. As a result, the human togetherness is lost. The who becomes irrelevant and the presence of the what takes over (Arendt, [1958] 1998: 180).


Hanna’s subjectivity is ignored and her authority as a representative from the work-shop is erased in humour against the simultaneous and manifest mounting presence of the officer group as a powerful collective what with a fellowship that absorbs all officers present. For a moment the officers exhibit similar feelings and actions as participants in the playful but disrespectful sarcastic communication, constituted in relation to an extra-personal parameter (DeNora, 2000: 149), that is, workshop staff.

The seemingly playful and unreal exchange had real and powerful implications. Although humorous, the meeting was unpleasant because everybody derived amusement at the expense of Hanna, and they undermined her authority as staff coordinator by refus-ing to respond seriously and constructively to the issue that she tabled. Hanna’s very presence was threatened, although the threat was nicely wrapped in an unthreatening humorous frame in which her agenda point evaporated. Furthermore, these implications – that vanished in laughter – temporarily appeared less significant because they were erased with reference to the unreal qualities of humour, qualities that allowed the entire incident to be forgotten. As such, humorous exchanges may redefine reality and may play a significant role in structuring interaction and social positioning.

Although the different staff groups are allied by virtue of being colleagues with a common interest in running everyday life smoothly and without conflict, I constantly observed their interaction as being imbued with conflicts of interest pointing to differ-ences in status and function. These were conflicts that were articulated when officers described how they experienced the prison social hierarchy and their position within it. The co-presence of these conjunctive and disjunctive characteristics warrants a com-parison with the officer–prisoner joking relationship.

Whereas the humorous exchanges between staff and prisoners are generally charac-terized as light and non-threatening, although they may at times be biting, the humorous exchanges between staff often border on harassment and are momentarily exclusive. In staff humorous exchanges, the what is typically maintained as a premise for the interac-tion, which explains the immediate exclusive implications. Furthermore, staff mostly respond seriously and defend their position. I observed, however, that if staff did not leave the room, as in the case of Hanna, they often threw in a humorous remark at a later stage in the interaction to reciprocate.

The officer–prisoner joking relationship allows officers and prisoners to step out of their official positions and briefly meet as equals, and the joking relationship staff have with each other allows them to step out of their formal roles as colleagues and allies and to articulate their conflicting interests and positions where staff solidarity and loyalty are normally required. In both cases the interaction is defined by a play frame that makes it possible to erase negative implications with reference to the unreal qualities of humour. As such, the play frame preserves both the conjunctive and the disjunctive aspects of the relationships.

Comprehending and creating a collective us in relation to a ‘difficult’ them

Here I will look at how officers use humour to reflect collectively on the officer job and to establish a collective sense of ‘us’. When humour is appropriated in this fashion, it is

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non-threatening and inclusive, and it involves telling stories, mostly about prisoners who are not present. Such stories may also relate to other categories of staff who are absent during the humorous exchange. I will, however, concentrate on fun stories about prison-ers because these are by far the most common.

The fieldwork note extracts below summarize observations I made at a staff meeting where officers, social workers and managers reviewed how prisoners in the different wards were coping.

Manager A: ‘Prisoner Z, how is he doing?’Officer F: ‘Ohh, Prisoner Z.’

Smiles are exchanged around the table.

Officer F: ‘Well, he is unwell. He is actually on his own in a cell that sleeps two. He really ought to get a room on his own because nobody wants to serve time with him.’

Manager B: ‘We have to treat Prisoner Z like we treat any other prisoner [upon arrival prisoners are normally referred to a cell that sleeps two]. Therefore, instead of letting him jump the line of prisoners waiting for a single room, with all the fuss that this may entail, we should rather let him stay alone in a cell that sleeps two knowing that we might eventually have to give the other bed to somebody else.’

Officer F: ‘We made a mistake with the specimen the other day. Prisoner Z walked down the corridor [Officer F raises his arms in the air indicating victory] shouting “I produced a clean test”.’

The meeting participants smile, some shake their heads.

Manager B: ‘Yes, it was a mistake – and it was embarrassing to stand in front of the other prisoners and let him know he had in fact tested positive [for drugs].

Officer F: ‘We did show him [that is, Prisoner Z] the test results but he was totally intoxicated and did not get it [Officer F goes cross-eyed and pretends he cannot stand straight]. I really need a reaction when I enter the room, a movement or a sound. He lies like this [imitates a dead person). You never know whether it is the final rattle you are witnessing when you enter his cell.

Some of the meeting participants smile again.

The above observations provide a typical example of staff discussing drug addicts. Rarely were addicts discussed without accompanying laughter, insiders’ smiles and exaggerated gestures similar to those of Officer F. Before the discussion of Prisoner Z commenced, the meeting participants exchanged smiles, smiles that provided an indica-tion of the expected humorous exchanges, smiles that reappeared as long as Prisoner Z was on the agenda.

Drug addicts constitute a challenge for staff, a challenge that points to paradoxical aspects of the officer job where officers have to cater for control and security while simultaneously supporting and motivating offenders to live a life without crime through personal and social development (Kriminalforsorgen, 2000: 8–9). Despite the availabil-ity of drug treatment programmes on which prisoners may request enrolment, prisoners


often choose not to enrol. As a result, hard drug addiction in ordinary prison wards is a reality that aggravates illegal trade, violence and crime inside prison – features of prison life that officers have difficulties controlling. As such, the presence of addiction high-lights a gap between their ideal official and informal roles.

During my fieldwork I observed staff communicating in a similar humorous manner about other categories of prisoners who they likewise had difficulties handling and who they had informally classified as ‘difficult’. Such ‘difficult’ clients typically included prisoners who officially direct complaints to the Prison and Probation Service, alcohol-ics, prisoners who were particularly abusive or disobedient, or prisoners who were unusually violent and who the informal justice system could not control.

It is possible to interpret humorous exchanges on ‘difficult’ prisoners in different ways. Adopting a psychological perspective, one could consider humorous exchanges as a coping mechanism that releases tension and helps staff overcome job challenges by establishing distance – with laughter – from particularly demanding tasks. In this interpretive frame, humour is regarded by researchers as palliative (Crawley, 2004: 44; Crawley and Crawley, 2008: 139; Sanders, 2004: 281–3). It is also possible to under-stand humorous exchanges as situations where officers are confronted with paradoxes that characterize their job role and experiences, situations where they attempt to repair or positively modify the difficult and contradictory aspects of social interaction (Mik-Meyer, 2007: 17; Tracy et al., 2006: 291). A third interpretation – the argument adopted in this paper – is that officers use humour when they refer to aspects of their job they find particularly demanding. In sharing these aspects of their job, they articu-late difficulties they are expected to overcome and manage despite the immense chal-lenges that they pose. Although the stories refer to real experiences, the playful frame of the humorous exchanges provides the possibility of a withdrawal from any experi-ences expressed that may not comply with official ideals of what an officer should be able to handle, for example, to manage and move forward ‘difficult’ prisoners.

In humorously accounting for their personal experiences, the meeting participants are – as recipients of the humorous remarks – invited to accept and sanction the account by responding to it with a comment, a laugh, a similar story or simply a smile – as they did in response to Officer F’s description of Prisoner Z. The inviting characteristics of humorous exchanges turn the account of the individual officer into a collectively sanctioned and collaborative reflection on the officer job, that is, an inter-subjective construction of meaning.

Although my study corresponds with Crawley’s findings (2004) in that it shows how humour can provide clues as to aspects of the officer job, I argue that such humorous exchanges go beyond the provision of clues. With humour, officers craft themselves as a staff group. By sharing and collectively acknowledging the difficult realities of the job and their reactions to these realities, officers connect the official ideal and unofficial aspects of their job in a collective account that informs their self-understanding. As such there are similarities between officers’ appropriation of humour and DeNora’s descrip-tions of how people use music to arrive at, enhance and alter aspects of themselves and their self-concept, as a kind of self-production (DeNora, 2000: 49).

Officers’ humorous crafting of themselves goes beyond situations where they address difficulties surrounding their interaction with prisoners. It extends into challenging

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situations that relate to their interactions with each other. For example, they frequently use humour to craft themselves collectively as a group in situations where officers from different wings – with radically different understandings of how the job should be done – are temporarily brought together.

Concluding discussion

Although a widespread use of humour in prison has been observed across continents and in diverse cultural locations (Crawley, 2004; Goffman, 1961; Kristoffersen, 1986; Mathiesen, 1965; Tracy et al., 2006), surprisingly little research exists on humour in prisons. I have sought to address this deficiency by analysing the appropriation of humour and exploring its immediate implications.

My analysis shows that humour is a pivotal aspect of daily prison life linked to prison officer identity work, work that officers engage in to manage their relationships with prisoners and colleagues and to establish a collective understanding of what it takes to be an officer. Humorous exchanges allow officers and prisoners temporarily to withdraw from their official roles, that is, what they are as officers and prisoners, respectively, and to meet in a space where, in a socially sanctioned manner, they can display unofficial and personal characteristics that point to who they are as unique individuals – a space in which they can for a short time meet as equals. From this perspective the playing with social positions that the humorous frames facilitate unveils how humour may – albeit briefly – redefine social structure.

Inspired by Radcliffe-Brown (1940), I have shown how the humorous exchanges between officers and prisoners compare to a joking relationship. A joking relationship develops in situations where the relations of people are characterized by a simultaneous presence of disjunction (separation and antagonism) and conjunction (alliance and attachment) and by a necessity to maintain the relationship despite these opposing char-acteristics. It is the presence of such opposing features that characterizes the officer–prisoner relationship, a relationship defined both by strictly differentiated jurisdictional and institutional positions and by collaborative and often intimate interactions. The joking relationship is reciprocal and has an institutionalized presence in prison.

The existence of a social space in which officers and prisoners can meet as equals is as brief as the humorous exchange, but the implications are real. As such, and in line with other studies, this study illustrates how the appropriation of humour fosters an avoidance of conflict and contributes to smooth everyday interaction between officers and prisoners. Furthermore, it shows how the officer–prisoner joking relationship often entails a transgression of officer norms of camaraderie and emotion rules.

Officers also use humour to attain an inter-subjective understanding of what it takes to work as prison officers. They use humour to craft themselves collectively as a profes-sional group. When humour is used like this, it frames a space in which officers can articulate the challenges and experiences that they encounter personally and as a group, challenges and experiences that become socially sanctioned as they are humorously shared and informally added to the job description. In prison, the process through which officers constructed their professional identity was ongoing and manifest. It exacerbated an ‘us’–‘them’ distinction that mostly referred to the officer–prisoner relationship, and it


helped officers overcome the challenges of having to collaborate with colleagues who had different perspectives on and approaches to the officer job.

Officers’ continuous crafting of themselves as an ‘us’ in relation to prisoners and their simultaneous ongoing playing with their official and private positions suggest a need to balance their complex position in prison. It points to a work environment that requires a constant stepping into and out of private and personal positions and, as such, it suggests a structural ambivalence. It is from this perspective that an analysis of humour consti-tutes a useful lens through which to view prison social life. Furthermore, it helps to uncover important layers of identity work that provide insights into what it takes to work as an officer in prisons similar to the one addressed in this paper.

The study also points to an inherent conflict between prison officers and other categories of staff in relation to which humour was used by officers to demonstrate and establish their powerful presence as a group vis-à-vis other staff categories and to influence decision-making. When this happened, internal and inherent staff conflicts were articulated but not solved.

On the one hand, I observed the presence of disjunction as an inherent tension and conflict of interest between different categories of staff. On the other, I noted conjunction as a formal general alliance of staff categories as colleagues mutually oriented towards running daily life smoothly and avoiding conflicts with prisoners. The simultaneous presence of disjunction and conjunction and the institutionalized use of humour in staff communication suggest that a kind of joking relationship also exists between different staff categories.

The joking relationship that prison officers had with other staff allowed them to briefly step out of their formal roles as allies and colleagues and articulate their conflicting interests and positions. These were interests and positions that it could be dangerous and inappropriate to articulate in an environment in which loyalty and trust are requirements for staff to successfully manage security and control together.

Studies on humour in social work have argued that humour provides an interactional moment when organizational members can frame and enact their situation, select a preferred interpretation, and affirm and retain the reorganization through memorable laughter (Tracy et al., 2006: 301). Although laughter constitutes a powerful device in the internalization of reality, and humour allows officers to frame, reframe and enact their situation in prison, this study shows that these characteristics only partly account for the qualities of humour. As much as humour may enhance the internalization of officers’ altered positions, its illusory qualities simultaneously allow officers collectively to leave behind and erase humorous exchanges and the negative implications they may have, thereby making the humorous event and the resulting laughter forgettable. Humour unites opposites: the real and the unreal. This ambiguous quality of humour as a communicative transformative device may shape and erase social structure, interaction and positioning, a quality that makes it an apt social device for identity work in prison.

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (2 4040 280).

Nielsen 513

Notes

I am especially grateful to Margaretha Jarvinen, Sarah Tait, Sarah van Mastrigt and the Writing Group at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology for their valuable comments on this paper.

1. Discrepancies, paradoxes and absurdities are some of the concepts that are continuously related to humour (see Bateson, 1952; Coser, 1959; Grugulis, 2002; Mik-Meyer, 2007; Mulkay, 1988).

2. These wings did not offer any drug, alcohol or related treatment schemes.3. All quotations and observations included in this paper are edited to ensure the anonymity of

staff and prisoners.

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On humour in Prison

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