Sick and surplus : personality disorder, political economy, and the production of subjectivity in British prisons

Seglow Hudson, Rebecca Lucy (2024) Sick and surplus : personality disorder, political economy, and the production of subjectivity in British prisons. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis traces the construction and management of personality disorder in English and Welsh prisons. The single most overrepresented mental disorder diagnosis in prison, personality disorder forms the backbone of an elaborate rehabilitative infrastructure spread across the prison estate. ‘Having’ the disorder often shapes one’s journey throughout a custodial sentence and impacts prospects of release. This thesis asks how the disorder is constructed, and why. In so doing, it connects the ‘inner’ world of subject, diagnosis, and treatment to the ‘outer’ world of institutions and political-economic conjuncture. It draws chiefly on critical medical anthropology, critical criminology and historical materialist literature. Historically informed, the thesis emphasises the long relationship of psy categorisation to imprisonment. In this vein, it also situates the diagnosis’ emergence under New Labour to the political-economic circumstances of their governance. Based on fieldwork with documents, former prisoners, and Parole Board members, the thesis unearths a prison-specific nosology of personality disorder. Here, ‘trauma’ is understood to sediment into immovable personality ‘traits’ that determine criminal behaviour and continually generate ‘risk’. These traits are worked on through interventions that aim to produce ‘insight’ and self-management skills within prisoners. I locate this—a prison-specific nosology, its logic, and its attendant infrastructure—within the wider arc of British capitalism. A core contention of the thesis is that the deployment of personality disorder has to be understood within historical and material developments. To this end, the thesis lastly argues that the diagnosis’ long-lasting dominance in penal healthcare can be understood by connecting its breadth, fluidity and ossification of trauma to political-economic developments. The thesis offers contributions to work on subjectification in prison, imprisonment under neoliberalism, the management of surpluses under capitalism, and the political negotiation of trauma.

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