Preamble: a moment of conference

When I started to attend criminology conferences nearly twenty years ago, I was treated to a rare moment of unintentional humour and collective self-awareness. In a large lecture theatre at the University of Portsmouth a rising academic star was presenting a paper on the penal climate in the Netherlands, renowned for its humane, parsimonious approach to incarceration. As Dr Francis Pakes put up a slide illustrating a newly built Dutch prison cell, chuckles could be heard rippling round the auditorium as academics recognised the cell's facilities and dimensions as almost completely identical to the university's student accommodation they had just vacated to attend the presentation. Like their rooms, the cell had an en-suite shower and toilet, a fitted single bed, work bench, wardrobe and storage facilities. Although delegates’ funny bones were tickled as they shared with each other the irony of their willingness to swap their conference accommodation for a prison cell, I felt an edge to this levity. Alongside these images a memory lurked; the cell I had been in some twenty years earlier in HMP Norwich had no sanitation and a battered steel bunk bed was crammed next to a single bed so as to accommodate three men in a cell designed nearly a hundred years earlier for a single prisoner.

The comparison entertaining the conference delegates was not lost on me but the apparent ease of the appraisal was troubling, the nerve it tickled also burned. It felt personally anchored in a serious criminological question, the one posed by Michel Foucault in the 1970s: ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’ (Foucault, 1979, p 228) Now, the relentless march of penal progress has advanced to include universities in this list of resemblances. And we find it more amusing than alarming.

In this chapter, James and I seek to extend the critical tradition of The Open University (OU) approach to questions of crime, punishment and social order by exploring the wider ramifications of imprisonment. We also seek to contextualise the OU's contributions to higher education in prisons and contribute to wider critical discussions about what universities are for (Collini, 2012; Connell, 2019; Dawson, 2019).