Article 3: Sensing Security, Sensing Safety

Security and safety are as central to prison management as their meanings are taken-for-granted. Frequently used interchangeably, their meaning elided, I explore how thinking sensorially disrupts assumptions about security and safety practices. Drawing on various pieces of prisons research, most heavily ‘Sound, Order and Survival’ (2024) I use three examples: locked doors indicate security, but are they experienced as safe? What of those who experience the sensory differently? Do alarms aid security as we suppose? What becomes clear when applying a sensory perspective, is the extent to which the elision of security and safety obscures understanding. This obfuscation constitutes a regime of truth which occludes processes which ostensibly seek to induce and sustain both security and safety, despite these being distinct and sometimes conflicting objectives which can work to undermine the realisation of either. How does this disrupt assumptions about practice and ask how this might influence application in the future?