Anton Symkovych

Whilst universally places of deprivation, prisons are not created equal, nor do people within them experience and manage their lives, or daily work in the case of prison staff, uniformly. Prisons offer an opportunity to study the interconnectedness of social structure and human agency. Although generally constraining in prison, structure nonetheless can assist, if not encourage, prisoners and officers to exercise, assert, and augment their agency. Prisoners and officers as autonomous, moral agents engage with structure differently and for myriad reasons and purposes. They reproduce, challenge, and alter structure whilst preserving or, conversely, reinventing their identity.

I will spend my time at the IAS analysing and writing up the data from the case studies I conducted in medium-security prisons in England, Ukraine, and South Africa. Using this material, I will explore how societal transformation and the reorganisation of state governance and penal policies cohere with daily life in prisons. In particular, I plan to focus on change, together with resilience and endurance – of individuals, but also that of penal sensibilities and prison practices. My aim is to contribute to the theories surrounding prison governance and human adaptation and resistance. Expanding the focus to non-‘Western’ contexts is critical if we are to ascertain whether what we currently understand about power, order, and identity in prisons is merely region specific or is valid in different socio-economic, legal, organisational, and cultural settings.