Liminality in and through remand centres: A risk to societal cohesion?

Abstract

How are remand centres perceived? Are they safe places, places of security? If so, for whom? When security and risk thinking is discussed, the view of a society usually has primacy over the view of prisoners. Therefore, I would like to consider what happens inside remand centres. While members of “normal” society may think or imagine these centres to be secure, the imprisonment of potential offenders at a distance without addressing the background of their crimes can also increase risk thinking. When explicating a risk – on the part of society – potential offenders are assumed to behave in anomic ways. The narrative of risk is de jure not-existing, but obviously touches on a need for security in contemporary society. I assume that this behaviour is less rational than emotionally anchored and follows the narrative of a divided, polarised society and the thinking of the loss of societal cohesion. Where the sense of insecurity is abstract, neither tangible nor comprehensible, individual and collective fears seem to emerge. In this regard, the question arises of who actually needs to be protected from whom, how and from what exactly: This is because the need for security is a universal one – not only between inside (the remand centre) and outside (society), but also among defendants.

In my contribution I would like to explore the question of how defendants experience liminality in and through remand centres. I show this using the example of a (still pending) field research in a remand centre in Frankfurt a. M. (Germany) based on autoethnographic mapping and expert interviews (with prison administration, pastoral care). In the context studied, remand centres represent a multidimensional construct of liminality: They are liminal spaces and display liminal conditions of being. The defendants are neither inside – in prison/a prisoner – nor outside – in society/a free person – but are in transition both spatially, temporally and socially. In this respect, they are themselves “betwixt and between”. As “transients” they are detached from the “normal” social order in society. Such transitions are therefore often experienced as a time of crisis: Safety, in the sense of certainty, does not exist, no longer exists or has not yet been re-established. However, for inmates living together in a remand centre, the (in-/voluntary, thereby liminal) cohesion between each other is central to the experience of safety and security. How inmates previously learned to behave and act cohesively “outside” and what kind of cohesion they take back “outside” is still unexplored. Thus, my contribution questions how cohesion in transition is constituted by the societally excluded – between the inside and the outside – and how this affects societal cohesion and also risk thinking.