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It's many years now since I worked as a sociology tutor in the maximum security

wing of Durham prison but I can still remember the notoriety enjoyed by some of my

students gang leaders like Charlie Richardson and Ronnie Craig,

train robber Bruce Reynolds, bank robber John McVicker.

I can also, without too much difficulty, remember the sounds of the place, the resonating footsteps and the clanking keys and the

the banging doors.

The what? But what stays most vividly in my mind still it's a memory of the

atmosphere of the place here is how Stan Cohen and I try to characterize that aspect of E-wing in our book Psychological Survival.

The lighting was completely uniform. There were no shadows or pools of light. There were no color variations, no distinctive clothes,

merely two sets of uniforms. There were no windows which opened in this building to let in any

air. So the great concrete and steel vault throbbed day and night winter and summer to the rhythm of an inadequate ventilation system.

This was a lifeless cavern of railings and landings and pipes.

It's like living in a submarine, as one prisoner said.

And of course for these prisoners, the voyage was measured in decades, not months.

Well, even as we wrote that, we realized how much a picture, a photograph,

any sort of visual representation would have complimented our meager words. I was therefore

intrigued to learn of a recent lecture given at Goldsmith's University of

London under the title The Iconography of Punishment, and its author, Aeman Carabine,

whose professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, now joins me in the studio.

Visual sociology.

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