Ben Laws & Ben Crewe On Emotion Regulation Among Male Prisoners
‘… prisons are ‘complex and spatially differentiated emotional domains’
In Emotion Regulation Among Male Prisoners, Ben Laws and Ben Crewe have argued that the ‘emotion regulation framework’ can assist in having a more nuanced and specialised understanding of emotion management strategies in penal establishments. While acknowledging that prisons are emotionally fraught places, Laws & Crewe have critiqued the strict binary of ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ domains prevailing in the existing literature, while putting forward a framework of how individual prisoners regulate and express their emotions.
While critiquing the neat distinction between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ in Goffman’s notion of dramaturgy, Laws & Crewe endeavour to introduce emotion regulation framework to the sociology of punishment to reconceptualise the carceral stage.
They begin by exploring the emotion regulation framework as explained by JJ Gross, which defines it as:
‘the processes by which individuals influence the emotions they have when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions. Emotion regulatory processes may be automatic or controlled, conscious or unconscious, and may have their effects at one or more points in the emotion generative system.’
This framework lays down five strategies of emotion regulation which operate during and between the stages of encountering a situation and providing an emotional response to the said situation. These five strategies are Situation Selection, Situation Modification, Attentional Deployment, Cognitive Change, and Response Management.
a. Situation Selection: when emotion is regulated by carefully selecting the environment
b. Situation Modification: This strategy involves altering the existing physical environment to meet our needs
c. Attentional Deployment: when someone chooses to concentrate her attention towards or away from an emotional situation
d. Cognitive Change: it’s the final stage where we attempt to reappraise our understanding of a particular emotional situation.
e. Response Management: As per Gross, after an emotion is internally felt a person can try to modify their physiological, experiential or behavioural expressions directly, which may include mental relaxation techniques such as exercise, sleeping, bathing, eating and smoking.
After explaining the emotional regulation framework, Laws & Crewe share the observations made during the study conducted to understand emotion management strategies of male prisoners. They noted:
‘Personal cells were used as spaces where more challenging emotions could be processed and ventilated. While all of the prisoners in this study admitted the need — at some point — to cry in prison, the fact that these moments were almost unanimously contained ‘behind closed doors’ (Gary) indicated that prisoners still exerted a degree of control over such ‘breakdowns’.
While observing that prisoners do have a certain sense of autonomy over when and where they experience emotions, Laws & Crewe submit that prisoners are able to carve out niche situations for themselves within the restrictive nature of the prison environment:
‘These privately cultivated spaces could provide a degree of escapism and psychological relief from the wider world of the prison. Indeed, having autonomy over even the smallest aspects of the environ- ment could help prisoners get through their sentence by making the prison regime more predictable.’
In terms of attention deployment, which is a form of distracting one’s mind away from the situation at hand, the study observed that lack of variation and positive stimulus in the environment became a barrier for prisoners who wanted to avoid thinking about their life outside the jail, their personal and family problems:
‘… restrictions on movement and limited access to personal resources impede prisoners’ abilities to resolve problems, which can increase feelings of sadness and frustration.’
Further, the study observed that, in terms of cognitive change, those who engage with humour have more interpersonal contact and superior access to support networks than those who do not.
When it comes to response modulation, which is the behaviour that a person exhibits in response to the emotion that has been felt, the study observed that most of the prisoners felt that open displays of emotion were hazardous. Apart from this expressive suppression, the other form of response modulation that could be seen was ‘social sharing’:
‘… forms of mutual ventilation and problem sharing could allow prisoners to think more clearly about the challenges they faced in prison, providing a degree of comfort and an escape from isolation. The majority of participants only shared their intimate feelings with loved ones via phone calls, visitations and letter writing.’
After making these observations, Laws & Crewe argue that the way in which emotion regulation framework interprets the concepts of ‘fronting’ and ‘backing’, a more sensitive account is provided of the emotional challenges that the prisoners face while individually responding to the problems of imprisonment. They have also outlined the implications of using this model:
‘First, attempts to regulate emotion are constricted by the unique characteristics of the prison. This is clearly evidenced by the governance over space in prison which places limits on the opportunities of prisoners to use ‘situation selection’. The rigid and monotonous nature of the prison regime may be particularly challenging for extro- verted prisoners who have to adjust to prolonged periods of isolation and confinement in cells. Similarly, constraints are placed on prisoners’ options for social sharing (a response modulation strategy): phone calls are expensive and are restricted to narrow times in the day, letter writing is slow, in person visits take weeks of pre-planning and coordination and there is often a degree of scepticism about the neutrality of prison ‘listeners’.’
Therefore, with this study, Laws & Crewe have attempted to look beyond the binary distinction of ‘fronting’ and ‘backing’ by taking recourse to the emotion regulation framework in studying sociology of imprisonment.
Complement this with Ben Crewe, Jason Warr, and Peter Bennett on the Emotional Geography of Prison Life, and Erving Goffman on The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
