Percival, Tomas. 2025. Prison Records: (Counter-)Narratives of the Offender Assessment System. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

Prison Records investigates how the prison records individuals and the mechanisms by which these records are mobilised to govern them. The project offers a conceptualisation of the prison system as a mediatic structure: one that first records and processes aspects of imprisoned individuals (such as their risks, attitudes, behaviours, and offence history), and subsequently enacts modes of oversight, intervention, and decision-making based on these records. The project argues that these forms of data collection, processing, filtering, storage, and transmission have reconfigured both modes of governance and the forms of resistance that characterise the contemporary prison system in England and Wales.

The analysis centres on a specific system: the Offender Assessment System (OASys), a computer-based risk assessment tool that has been in operation across the prison system in England and Wales since 2001. It also examines the various conditional pathways, such as ‘offending behaviour’ programmes and interventions, that are required of incarcerated people to demonstrate their risk reduction in the areas determined through assessment processes. As such, the project provides an account of how such mediatic structures shape the position of carceral subjects. It demonstrates how seemingly routine administrative tools, databases, and protocols of information sharing exert profound yet often opaque effects on the lives of incarcerated individuals. These tools not only codify and normalise the structural harms inherent to the carceral system, but also generate new modalities of suffering. However, despite the material force of such systems, Prison Records also foregrounds the resistance and agency of those subjected to them. It explores how people continue to find ways to live within and negotiate these structures, creating rhythms of refusal that contest and redirect these forms of control.

Methodologically, the project involved practice-based research. This entailed collaborating with a group of previously incarcerated individuals to both generate knowledge about the prison system and coproduce audio counter-narratives. Through the production of audio works, the project challenges the authority and interpretive power of the prison’s recording structure, opening space for creative and resistant forms of knowledge production. As such, this project not only examines prison records and the narratives they generate about incarcerated individuals but also seizes the opportunities provided by the practice to critique and contest these records through dialogic supplements in the form of counter-narratives. In doing so, it employs media technological recordings to generate alternative forms of self-representation vis-à-vis the system’s accounts, thereby challenging the broader media-technological apparatus of the contemporary prison estate.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00038812
Keywords:	prison, risk, OASys, counter-narratives, assessment, database, resistance
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Visual Cultures > Centre for Research Architecture
Date:	30 April 2025
Item ID:	38812
Date Deposited:	13 May 2025 16:45
Last Modified:	14 May 2025 09:12
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38812

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