Chapter 5

Walls and bridges: framing lockdown through metaphors of imprisonment and fantasies of escape

David Gurnham*

Introduction

Imprisonment traditionally and popularly tends to be characterized by two features, namely that it impedes the prisoner’s freedom of movement and that it contains and separates prisoners from those at liberty (Fludernik 2019). During the first twelve months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK we saw periods of extreme intensification of both features inside prisons as well as their extension into other kinds of institutions. Furthermore, we saw them extended by public health laws to society more generally, where the imposition of lockdown regimes resulted in severe restrictions on movement for millions of people (JCHR 2020). This extension of concepts traditionally restricted to prison settings out into wider society raises important questions about the potency of imprisonment metaphors in the socio-legal imaginary.

This chapter takes an historical view on the pandemic inasmuch as it looks back on the impact of legal restrictions imposed during the period of Spring 2020 to Spring 2021; however, the themes and ideas it addresses about law, language and metaphor are of contemporary concern. It begins with an account of imprisonment itself in terms of the broad features with which it is traditionally associated (i.e. impeding and containing the prisoner) and the intensification of these features during the pandemic, noting also how these features may be blamed for precipitating claustrophobia, depression, anxiety and fantasies of escape. The following section identifies how these features make imprisonment a wellspring of metaphors that, as Monika Fludernik (2019) has demonstrated, frame normative thinking and critical reflections in law and humanities scholarship. We finally turn to an analysis of restrictive ‘lockdown’ measures during 2020 and into 2021: in the prose of law and policy, but also in poetic and visual art responses. Reviewing critical academic and parliamentary committee commentary on the UK government’s public health restrictions alongside some key collections of pandemic poetry and art, this chapter considers how experiences of lockdown have been framed in the popular imagination by imprisonment metaphors, and reflects on the broader significance of these metaphors for law and humanities.

This is a discussion that therefore crosses disciplinary borders between law, humanities and the arts, to explore how ostensibly separate endeavours draw imaginatively on a common store of metaphors in translating experience. The particular poetry and art collections analysed and discussed here were selected on the basis of their ‘meeting’ with the legal and policy initiatives both temporally (all of the poetry collected was written and published during the ‘first wave’ of the pandemic in the UK) and thematically (all of the poetry and art collections discussed are conscious and explicit responses to the pandemic). It was important, furthermore, that they should represent a broad and diverse range of material, including work by both professional and amateur poets and artists. Through this exploration of legal and artistic responses to the pandemic, the chapter observes how the experience of lockdown (and, in particular, experiences of being locked down at home) connects metaphorically to that of imprisonment by way of metonymic links and cues involving houses imagined as cages, householders fettered by chains, bars and manacles, and people imagined variously as caged birds or animals. The discussion of legal responses to the pandemic focuses on England and Wales, although the ideas proposed here go beyond the confines of jurisdictional borders.

Prisons in a pandemic: movement stopped and people contained

Prompted by fears that outbreaks of COVID-19 could overwhelm overcrowded jails and Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) in England and Wales, in Spring 2020 the government introduced severely restrictive public health measures, and these had two primary impacts. The first of these was an abrupt and profound cessation of movement, both in and out of, and within, prisons and YOIs. Visits, educational and rehabilitative programmes, exercise regimes, transfers in and out to attend court hearings, or to institutions of a different security level, or to alleviate overcrowding, were all stopped (JCHR 2020, 34–5). Furthermore, provision of services beyond basic sustenance and hygiene was suspended (Ministry of Justice 2020, 4). The pause on new trial hearings and in-person parole hearings led to a large build-up of people in prison who might otherwise have been able to go to court or access early release (Brennan 2020, 1221–2). Likewise, the ‘flow of people into prisons’ and the ‘churn in prisons, with people coming in and out’1 was reduced by a greater recourse to suspended sentences as opposed to short custodial sentences. Indeed, the Sentencing Council (2020) advised at the time that sentencing judges should ‘keep in mind that the impact of a custodial sentence is likely to be heavier during the current emergency than it would otherwise be [and] must bear in mind the practical realities of the effects of the current health emergency’.

The extent of the public health restrictions placed on movements in and out of and around prisons during the pandemic was certainly unusual. However, it is also right to understand these restrictions simply as an intensification of a traditional and permanent defining characteristic of imprisonment. For Fludernik (2019, 6), ‘the curtailment of autonomous physical movement’ is the ‘most basic’ quality of imprisonment, and in the cultural imagination manifests in prisoners being ‘tied, … shackled, or fettered[, etc.,] terms metonymically related to the dungeon scenario’ (emphasis in the original). Frustration of the desire for movement is a staple theme for prisoners, who have used poetry to describe their experiences. It is the underlying theme of the Pinter Award-winning poem ‘An odour was all it took’, in which HMP Whitemoor prisoner Joe Gynane juxtaposes his ‘earthbound’ body against his ‘sky[ward]’ soul:

The smell of cut grass stained the air,

Evoking memories of a bittersweet childhood

A time before care,

Before I made my mother cry,

Earthbound,

Yet seeking the sky …

(Longford Trus t 2020)

Similarly, the depressing mundanity of prison routine described by Ian Hall in ‘The Daily Grind’ is flecked with a single, hopeful gesture towards the possibility of autonomous movement by way of escape into a more dynamic life:

It’s time for dinner and then for tea

The only two events that seem to be

Left in my life, everything else is gone

Do I live here, is it where I belong?

Or am I just passing through

Each day the same, nothing new …

(Hall 2010)

We recognize these personal reflections as offering a critique of the prison environment because they invoke a quality or sense of movement as essential for a fulfilling life in order to identify precisely that as being absent from the prisoner’s experience. It is for the same reason that we understand the impact of social distancing measures imposed on prisoners during the pandemic in 2020, in particular the lack of opportunity for time out of cells and the cessation of group activities, as troubling. When the function of prison is reduced to that of a mere container, it sets movement as the antonym of imprisonment and is consequently understood to be generally harmful for prisoners. Contrastingly, assertions about prison sentences that have ‘worked’ (in the sense of having brought about rehabilitation in a prisoner) tend to associate movement with imprisonment in a positive way, most commonly through the metaphor of the rehabilitative journey: the ‘distance’ the prisoner has figuratively ‘travelled’ during their time behind bars, ‘reaching’ their potential after sustained reflection on their crime (Parole Boar d 2014).

The second impact of the 2020 measures imposed by government to control the spread of COVID-19 in prisons was a strengthening of prisons, and especially prison cells, as containers that confine and separate. A dramatic example of this aspect of policies for prisons during the pandemic was the time spent by prisoners in their cells. Once the lockdown measures had been implemented, the 22–4 hours per day spent by prisoners locked in their cells effectively amounted to ‘solitary confinement’ (JCHR 2020, 35), a measure traditionally regarded as a punitive one, and with well-documented risks for mental health. The government’s national framework for managing prisons stipulated that during an outbreak, a stage 5 ‘complete lockdown’ would mean ‘no time in the open air [and] all meals served at cell door’ (Ministry of Justice 2020, 4). According to HM Inspectorate of Prisons, reporting on the ‘extreme restrictions’ on prisoners in prisons in London, Liverpool and Kent:

The vast majority were locked up for nearly the whole day with usually no more than half an hour out of their cells. We found some examples of even greater restrictions. In one prison, a small number of symptomatic prisoners had been isolated in their cells without any opportunity to come out for a shower or exercise for up to 14 days (HM Inspectorate of Prisons 2 020, 7).

Additionally, radically reduced contact between prisoners and the outside world led to a figurative plugging and stoppering of the pores in the carceral membrane that had until then allowed a degree of penetration. This thereby reinforced the sense in which prison, and the prison cell in particular, is a vessel within which the prisoner is held. It is entirely unsurprising, therefore, that these multiple ways in which movement in and between prisons ceased in 2020 led to a spike in emotional and mental health problems: an increase in suicides, instances of unrest and disorder and a general sense of heightened ‘anxiety, hopelessness, and anger’ among prisoners have all been attributed to lockdown measures that restricted movement (Brennan 2020, 1223).

For Fludernik (2019, 6), ‘containment in enclosed space’, and the wall of the prison as an ‘enclosing circumference’ (25) that prevents escape, is the second most basic defining feature of imprisonment. Fludernik notes that a salient quality of the prison is that of creating a physical and a symbolic inside and outside, and the ‘specific carceral manifestations [of that quality] in the symbolic functionalization of walls, bars, doors, and windows’ (24). Writings about the experience of imprisonment, and applications of the ‘container’ prison metaphor outside of imprisonment contexts, often rely heavily on this ‘functionalization’. Hence, writings on the experience of prison can be expected to reference the impenetrability or claustrophobia-inducing quality of the walls, and the barred windows that allow the prisoner to glimpse the world beyond the restrictions placed on them. As we find in the report by Brennan (2020, 303) about prisoners’ mental health during the pandemic, it can be the perception of a sudden and unusually severe ‘sealing up’ of carceral pores that can provoke the most intense feelings, ‘from grief, despair, or despondency all the way to rage, fear, or frenzy’.

Particularly in situations where prisoners are visible through cell bars, these are qualities that call to mind the image of the caged bird (or perhaps a wild animal), which we can understand well, since ‘jail’ derives from roots in Old French (jaiole) and medieval Latin (gabiola), which both mean ‘cage’ as well as ‘prison’. Indeed, the caged bird is a metaphor commonly found in works of literature, standing both for actual prisoners (as ‘jailbirds’: ‘When (like committed linnets) I / With shriller throat shall sing …’)2 and also for more informal situations in which a person may be or feel trapped or captured. In both instances, the appearance of the caged bird metaphor in literary writings about imprisonment tends to signify the desire to escape. As Fludernik (2019, 316) puts it: ‘the mind (bird) can indeed take wing and soar beyond the confines of the immediate prison (the body, despair, the current political situation, etc.) … Real birds, too … epitomize the captive’s desire for freedom and hope of escape.’

The container metaphor frames Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, in particular the narrator’s insistence that from the inside, ‘all we know … is that the wall is strong’ (Wilde 2013, 26). The brutal reality of being held within that ‘strong’ grip is contrasted with what lies outside it, and which can be glimpsed through the window: the ‘strange freedom’ of the scudding clouds beyond the bars, whose ‘ravelled fleeces’ are contained by nothing at all. The celebrated Cavalier poet and prisoner during the English Civil War Richard Lovelace (1930) used the same device in ‘To Althea, from prison’ when, from behind the ‘stone walls’ and ‘iron bars’ that imprisoned his body, he compared favourably the undefeatable ‘liberty’ of his soul to the ‘Fishes that tipple in the Deep’ and the ‘Enlargèd Winds, that curl the Flood’. Nelson Mandela also used it in a letter of 1 August 1970, when from his prison cell he wrote to a friend:

Throughout my imprisonment my heart & soul have always been somewhere far beyond this place, in the veld & the bushes. I live across the waves with all the memories & experiences I have accumulated over the last half century … in my thoughts I am as free as a falcon (Mandel a 2011).

The modern British prison poetry quoted above is framed by the same metaphor of fantastical upward movement. Joe Gynane’s ‘earthbound’ creature ‘seeking the sky’ could equally be a caged bird or a prisoner. Relatedly, the one hopeful line of Ian Hall’s modern poem uses a travel metaphor (‘Or am I just passing through’) to invoke a fantasy of autonomy, or even of being able to ‘pass through’ and out of the bars of his window.

Windows thus traditionally serve an important role in imaginative or narrative depictions of imprisonment that belies captivity and staves off the hopelessness of prison as ‘live burial’. The cell window ‘serves to underline the contrast between Nature (light, air) and symbolic Death (in the prison tomb), and between animacy (voices, human and animal life) and the enforced inanimacy of the prisoner’ (Fludernik 2019, 31). As we shall see below, the symbolism of the window as a point of interpenetration between the prisoner and the outside world also provides the basis for fantasies of escape from confinement in artistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 and 2021.

Imprisonment metaphors in law and humanities

We have seen now that the arresting of movement and enclosure or containment are two particularly distinctive qualities of imprisonment, and that these qualities give shape and meaning to more general feelings associated with being imprisoned, caged, trapped or captured. In doing so we have drawn on information about the impact of lockdown on prison environments, about imprisonment more broadly and about the theoretical framing of imprisonment in the social and cultural imaginary, primarily by Monika Fludernik (2019). This section develops these reflections on the negative emotional impacts of imprisonment and extends them beyond carceral contexts. We review how recent law and humanities scholarship has deployed the key metaphorical and metonymic themes of imprisonment in the service of critical thought.

‘Pinning, fixing, capturing’: metaphors of impeded movement in law and humanities

We can readily appreciate the broad applicability of the idea of fetters on movement as the basis for a discursive framework for legal studies. Both Hobbes (1651) and Blackstone (1765) identified the absence of physical constraint as a necessary first principle in their treatises on the nature of liberty. Legal scholars within the humanities have also insisted on the possibility of movement as necessary for conceiving law by invoking metaphors and metonymies of imprisonment in pejorative descriptions of ‘traditional’ ways of thinking. Olivia Barr (2016, 72), describing her ‘jurisprudence of walking’, is careful to emphasize that she should not be misunderstood as engaging in an exercise of ‘pinning or fixing or capturing movement’ but instead merely of ‘noticing and paying attention to movement’. She understands the scholarly act of ‘describing’ or (more modestly) ‘redescribing’ law, not merely in terms of conveying observations (although conveying is indeed already a movement metaphor) but furthermore as, respectively, ‘to form or trace by motion or to pass or travel over a certain course or distance’ and to ‘mov[e] to another or the other side’ (63). Barr’s choice of words is crucial in clarifying the ethical dimension of her scholarship – the ‘pinning’ and ‘fixing’ she certainly is not doing to her subject metonymically, calling to mind the dubious practices of nineteenth-century naturalists attaching dead butterflies to a board for display.

Margaret Davies (2017), similarly, promotes the ethos of movement in the imagery and metaphors she uses throughout her writing. A good deal of what Davies finds faulty in ‘traditional’ legal theory and philosophy (the tendency to ‘misrepresent’ the conceptual and abstract as being prior to the material and embodied (43)) she attributes to the malign influence of Descartes and his separation between the mind and the world: between the intellectual (reliable) and the sensible (unreliable). Importantly for our purposes, Davies is not content simply to critique that dualism. She goes further by depicting Descartes himself coming up with his famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ while all the time almost comically static: ‘sitting by the fire, wrapped in a warm winter gown’ in his ‘little room’ (62). By contrast, Davies herself is to be found outside in the bracing fresh air and engaged in vigorous, active learning. Her approach is ‘exploratory rather than analytical’; she seeks to ‘extend’ and certainly not to ‘define’ law, her approach being one that ‘locates law in a variety of places’ (2). Inspired by William James’ assessment that ‘Something always escapes’, Davies’ chief concern, as a legal philosopher, is to ensure that ‘thinking [may avoid becoming] trapped by concepts’ (12). Davies quotes Elrich’s analogy between attempts to ‘imprison law’ within a code and attempts to ‘confine’ the ‘living water’ of a stream in a ‘stagnant pool’ (20).3 The language of trapping and imprisoning is telling, as is the aversion to defining, the latter deriving from Latin roots associated with bringing movement and activity to a stop: finire (to bound, limit) and finis (boundary, end).

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, likewise living true to his philosophical outlook, has described having hit on his ideas for his book Spatial Justice (2014) while riding his bicycle in Copenhagen and, like a mobile Isaac Newton, being (figuratively) struck by the ubiquity of law in the signage, road markings and layout, traffic lights, and so on. If those forms of law are themselves static objects, we would add that the author-cyclist himself is ‘carrying’ law with him, since by observing admonitions, for example, about where to cycle, when and where to wait, when to go and who to give way to, he lends physical reality to them at every (actual) turn. This materialist turn in law and humanities is one that responds to J. G. Ballard’s cautionary tale of Faulkner, protagonist of the short story ‘The Overloaded Man’, whose descent into mental illness and murder proceeds from his unhinged desire to achieve a state of ‘pure ideation, the undisturbed sensation of psychic being untransmuted by any physical medium [and to] escape the nausea of the external world’ (Ballard 2014a, 343). Faulkner fails to heed the warning of his former colleague, a wise Business Studies professor, who cautions him that ‘by any degree to which you devalue the external world, so you devalue yourself’ (334).

Phenomenological studies offer even more examples of how the metaphors of impediment to or stopping of movement provide material for humanities scholarship in law. James Gray reflects on J. G. Ballard’s childhood wartime memory of discovering an empty swimming pool and the novelist’s uncanny return to it in his fiction (Ballard 2014b). For Gray (2019, 156), this image is arresting insofar as it represents a jarring confrontation with the impossibility of the freedom of movement that a swimming pool ought to represent, and thus a traumatic ‘dissolution of progress and the absence of the social’. He goes on:

In the lifeworld, a swimming pool … usually … extends to us an array of possibilities and envelops us in the anticipatory sensation of the act of swimming. By contrast, an empty swimming pool … has a disturbing gravity, a weightiness of form greater than that of the material it displaces and a harshness of substance and angularity that exactly oppose the lightness and freedom of swimming (Gray 2019, 155–6; emphasis added).

The unsettling experience of inertia and absence represented by the empty pool of Ballard’s childhood memory and Gray’s analysis reminds us of the central place of movement and mobility in a ‘living’ society of functioning legal relations. The empty pool, with its ‘disturbing gravity’, ‘weightiness’ and ‘harshness of substance and angularity’, calls to mind the depressing architecture and grind of prison. Indeed, the weightiness and loss of momentum encoded in Ballard’s arresting encounter with the empty swimming pool connects thematically with the references in modern prison poetry discussed above to the sense of being held down – ‘earthbound’, and the ‘grind’ of daily life. By contrast, the ‘lightness and freedom’ that a pool ought to conjure reminds us again of the yearning and fantasy of liberty in the soul of the prisoner that, oriented towards the light, transcends their grim reality.

‘Inside’: the container imprisonment metaphor in law and humanities

Container or capture metaphors have been applied in broader contexts in law and humanities scholarship, and in ways closely related to the metaphor of the arresting of movement. We referred above to J. G. Ballard’s short story ‘The Overloaded Man’ as a cautionary tale that literalizes the ‘new materialist’ admonition that one should not follow Descartes’ radical separation between mind (abstract thought) and body (the material world). The attitude of mind that Descartes prized as essential for sound philosophical thought is reimagined by Ballard as the road to mental breakdown and psychic disintegration. The horrific ending of that story sees its protagonist Faulkner casually murder his wife (whom, true to Cartesian principles, he finally comes to perceive merely as ‘a bundle of obtrusive angles’ (Ballard 2014a, 343)) and then calmly drown himself in the garden pond. From that position, the protagonist is able at last to enjoy ‘existence uncontaminated by material excrescences’ (344). These events are echoes of the punishment of crime by imprisonment as live burial (albeit in water rather than earth in this case), and of the prison cell as an enclosing coffin or tomb from which escape is only possible in a spiritual or figurative sense. Reminding us of the birds that in the imagination ‘take wing and soar beyond the confines of the immediate prison’ (Fludernik 2019), the final words of Ballard’s story describe how Faulkner, watching the sky from six inches below the surface of the water, ‘waited for the world to dissolve and set him free’ (Ballard 2014a, 344; emphasis added).

An application of the imprisonment-as-container metaphor as a guiding principle for legal humanities more broadly is proposed by Gary Watt in his description of the ‘capture’ of equity by the Court of Chancery, and his aim of ‘releasing’ it (at least as far as ‘a reasonable outer limit’ (Watt 2009, 19)) by way of a richer and ‘more humane legal language’ (25). Central to Watt’s project is an analysis of the law and equity metaphors of Dickens’ Bleak House and its central theme of the interminable Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Of these metaphors, arguably the most memorable are the caged birds kept by Miss Flite, the latter a long-time party to that case. When we meet her at the start of the novel, Miss Flite has become aged and mentally ill awaiting her ‘Day of Judgment’ at the court. Like many others (such as the young Richard Carstone, to whom the following speech of Miss Flite’s is addressed, and for whom it is an omen), she wrongly expects the judgment to be transformative:

‘I began to keep the little creatures,’ she said, ‘with an object that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of restoring them to liberty. When my judgment should be given. Yees! They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be free! Very mortifying, is it not?’ (Dickens 19 85, 104)

Dickens’ use of the motif of caged birds as a metaphor for being ‘in Chancery’ (the words that Miss Flite uses to describe herself as a daily attendee in the court, and with which Dickens also opens Bleak House itself as the title of chapter one) only serves to reinforce the existing carceral implications of that expression. Furnishing his view that Bleak House ‘clangs with echoes of the prison door’, Watt (2009, 56–7) observes that ‘in Chancery’ and ‘incarcerate’ derive from the Latin roots cancer and carcer respectively, ‘both meaning bars or crossed bars’. ‘Cancel’ also shares the same root, and ‘chancellor’ (from which we derive ‘Chancery’) comes from cancelli: bars or grating forming a barrier behind which a Roman cancellarius (official) was stationed in Basilica and courts of law, and which separated judges from the public (Watt 2009, 56; Barnhart 2010). Far, therefore, from the spirit of responsiveness with which we would associate equity, Chancery is by contrast derived from strong barriers that hold certain things in and keep others out. It depressingly served, as the Elizabethan jurist William Lambarde put it in Discourse upon the high courts of justice in England (1591), in words quoted by Watt (2009, 56–7), to ‘cancell and shut up the rigour of the generall Law, that it shall not breake forth’.

The negative etymological association of ‘in Chancery’ with a container that ‘locks up’ equity provides the impetus for Watt’s exposition of ‘equitable’ legal practice and scholarship, which does not do away entirely with the container, but ensures a steady flow into, within and out of it. Like Margaret Davies and Ballard’s Faulkner, Watt finds his meaning in a pool of water: ‘the waters of the law stagnate when they are still. Equity supplies a stream to stir up what has settled down. It is this stream that keeps law alive’ (Watt 2009, 212). This, then, is a view that connects with the ethical dimension of humanities scholarship in law as proposed in different (but similar) ways by Barr, Davies and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, discussed above. They all represent a concern to describe and problematize instances of ‘capture’ and ‘imprisonment’ within material and figurative walls and ways of effecting meaningful ‘release’. Indeed, on interdisciplinarity, Watt insists that ‘the true aim of law’s engagement with literature … is not to capture the literature [by way of literary citations in judgments or essays], but to release the law [from narrow, doctrinaire thinking]’ (25; my emphasis).

Thus we can observe that both of the key characteristics of imprisonment we discussed in the previous section (namely, impediment to movement and containment) do indeed signify beyond the imprisonment context to which they apply literally. The degree of agreement on this point across a range of contexts means that these characteristics already serve as conceptual metaphors for framing the aims and techniques of ethical humanities scholarship. In the next (and final) section of the chapter we explore how this framework may be extended to assist in shedding some useful light on the framing of ‘lockdown’ experiences and policies during the COVID-19 pandemic in both the prosaic language of law and policy and the poetic and artistic imaginary.

The wider world as prison during a pandemic

We have seen now how the two salient characteristics of imprisonment (be they derived from actual experience or from imprisonment in the imagination) serve beyond carceral contexts themselves. They thus assist in framing ideas and arguments, and provide a principled basis for guiding value judgements. In this final section we take this a step further, exploring what light they can shed on experiences of the pandemic and of restrictive public health measures imposed and enforced outside the prison context. Our focus here is on those periods of the pandemic marked by national ‘lockdown’ – that word itself an imprisonment metaphor. In this regard, we take as our starting point Fludernik’s claim – which Fludernik (2019, 1) herself presents as a neutral observation – that ‘[i]mprisonment (at least metaphorical imprisonment) is a fairly familiar experience’ by virtue of the ubiquity of references to imprisonment as a way to understand all manner of experiences that involve feeling trapped or frustrated:

We all, at times, feel confined in particular situations or relationships. Traditionally, these intuitions translate into well-known prison metaphors like those of ‘life as a prison’, the ‘body as a prison’, or thought patterns or ideologies as confining structures (Fludernik 2 019, 1).

One might question whether it is wholly appropriate to frame lockdown and other restrictive measures, adopted primarily to protect life and health under extreme and unusual circumstances, within the terms of imprisonment. Certainly, it would be wrong either to overstate the impact of lockdown in the general community or to trivialize the experience of people serving jail sentences. As noted above, imprisonment has always involved a severe kind of deprivation, and this reached extreme levels during the pandemic. Although the strongest lockdown measures imposed on the wider community in England and Wales did indeed involve far-reaching prohibitions – for example on leaving one’s home without ‘reasonable excuse’, and on meeting more than one person from another household4 – it would be wrong to equate these with the sorts of measures imposed in prisons. For these reasons, we would be wise to acknowledge certain perils in following too quickly the generalizing implications of Fludernik’s observation about the translation of experiences into prison metaphors. Having acknowledged this caveat, however, there are at least three reasons to continue on this path.

First, it should be remembered that in drawing on imprisonment to frame experiences of lockdown more broadly, we are suggesting that there are concepts of imprisonment that help us to understand why lockdown in the wider community came to be framed the way it did. This is not the same thing as suggesting that people in that wider community suffered hardships analogous to those inside prisons. Although it is true that metaphor works on the basis of a perceived resemblance between things of different domains, we do not claim that lockdown in the community is ‘like’ being in prison in terms of the degree of burdens suffered.

Second, there is evidence that many individuals, both in prisons and in other institutions, experience some of the more extreme restrictions as if they were imposed for the punitive and deterrent reasons with which they are traditionally associated. We have noted above that this was a criticism of lockdown measures implemented within prisons, and below we will also examine similar criticisms of measures imposed in care homes.

Third, the question of applying our imprisonment metaphors to understand the pandemic more broadly is primarily descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words, it is foremost an issue about the extent to which these metaphors are already informing responses to the pandemic and what the implications of this may be, rather than whether they should be doing so. Of the now vast body of artistic and poetic responses to the pandemic, a rich seam of this work invokes the metaphor of movement impeded, which can be traced metonymically to imprisonment thanks to its deployment of carceral imagery. Therefore, to understand artistic and poetic responses to the relevant legal restrictions requires us to understand the translation of experience into prison metaphors. At a descriptive level, the appropriateness or otherwise of such acts of metaphoric translation is rather beside the point, and so below we review and analyse some examples of these responses.

Non-carceral detention and metaphors of impeded movement

The JCHR (2020, 39, 40–2, 43–4) highlighted at least four sites other than prisons or YOIs of (potentially unlawful) ‘detention’: Assessment and Treatment Units (ATUs) for young people with learning disabilities, mental health hospitals, care homes and Immigration Removal Centres. The chief effects of these developments can be understood in terms of the cessation or suspension of movement – the movement constituting relevant institutions’ normal activities and processes, and also the movement of human bodies that would ordinarily circulate within and in and out of those institutions.

It is a matter of concern if the effect of protective measures introduced in non-carceral institutions is to call to mind the chief features of imprisonment. In certain care homes the emotional and psychological impact of prohibitions on residents leaving their rooms or receiving visitors has indeed been framed in punitive terms. In BP v Surrey County Council (2020), a case concerning an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease who was in a care home, Hayden J observed (at para 6):

All agree that BP has struggled to cope with or understand the social distancing policy which it has been necessary to implement. FP said that she believes her father thinks that he is being punished in some way … It is thought that the deprivation of contact with his family has triggered a depression.

In their later report on care homes, the JCHR frame their analysis of the hardships experienced by care home residents by invoking from the start a strong container metaphor that could well be a description of prisons: ‘While care home residents were left on the inside, families have been forced to wait on the outside’ (JCHR 2021, 4). In case a reader might wonder whether this prison-like nomenclature of a radically separate ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is too dramatic, the report goes on to observe that government guidance at the time recommended that residents who did go outside – even just ‘for exercise in a park or to sit outside at a hospitality venue’ or a ‘short walk out’ – should then be required to self-isolate for 14 days. There were good reasons, therefore, for residents to understand such measures as punitive and as a deterrent against such temporary escapes, even if this was not the intention behind the policy (12).

The Committee was particularly critical of care homes whose operations most strongly evoked conditions prevailing in prisons: homes that banned visits altogether (rather than making individualized risk assessments), or else that imposed ‘restrictions on visiting [that] forced families to endure “prison-like” visits, permitted only to speak to their relatives through telephones behind plastic screens’ (JCHR 2021, 4). As for prisons, the mental health impacts of the restrictions on care homes are well documented. The Committee report collected testimonies from families of residents whose complaints about the regime further echo lockdown conditions imposed in prisons – of residents being ‘isolated, often for 24 hours a day, in a tiny room’, and consequently very quickly becoming anxious, isolated, depressed (14).

The impediments to movement experienced in prisons and care homes during periods of lockdown resonate thematically with numerous artworks displayed in the online Covid Art Museum (CAM). The museum features various images drawing attention to the suspension or arrest of the forward motion of time itself: a clock with its hands stopped by bits of masking tape (Bois 2021); another clock with its minute hand held, quivering, by an obstructing Coronavirus cell (Graph 2020); another clockface which, instead of numbers at each of the twelve hour marks, shows only the word ‘PANDEMIC’ (Andrade 2021); a weekday calendar on which the distinguishing part of each name of the days of the week has been scribbled out, leaving only the word ‘DAY’ repeated seven times (Zaremba 2021). Other images depict impediments to bodily movement: an Uber journey route plan displayed on a phone, starting at the prospective traveller’s own bedroom and ending in the next room a few yards away (Rochat 2020); a padlock, the metal parts fused together to remain forever closed (Saade 2020); a manacle or ball-and-chain against a clear blue background, the ‘ball’ showing the characteristic corona spikes of the pathogen (Navarr o 2020).

Figure 5.1: ‘Covid Time’ by Santi Graph

Figure 5.2: ‘Daze of the Week’ by Matthew Zaremba

These images speak to the theme of the normal course of things having been suspended or halted. The altered clocks and calendars suggest the temporal suspension of life, and the fused locks and ball-and-chain imagery explicitly reference imprisonment to suggest both personal and institutional pathways to justice blocked or stopped. For people actually ‘doing time’ in prison, of course, the sense of clocks having been stopped and locks permanently shut carries a particularly sharp meaning, cruelly suggestive of one’s punishment being surreptitiously or capriciously extended – a figurative ‘throwing away of the key to one’s cell’. For those experiencing lockdown outside a prison environment, the images recognizably draw on a prisoner’s frustration and helplessness at finding everyday, taken-for-granted possibilities regarding autonomous movement brought to a stop.

Staying at home and prison as a container

Three separate periods of lockdown restrictions in the UK from March 2020 prohibited the leaving of one’s home other than for a limited number of ‘reasonable excuses’ (Brown and Kirk-Wade 2021).5 Although this meant very different things in different places, lockdown-as-imprisonment and lockdown-as-cage metaphors quickly became familiar frameworks for conceptualizing experiences in the popular imaginary. Those relatively well placed and equipped to cope with and adapt to movement restrictions have been referred to as occupying ‘a gilded cage’ (Tingle 2021); at the other end of the scale, meanwhile, lockdown has been observed to exacerbate and intensify already confining and constricting conditions. For example, ‘stringent restrictions on movement shut off avenues of escape, help-seeking and ways of coping for victim-survivors’ of domestic abuse while at the same time granting to abusers ‘greater freedom to act without scrutiny or consequence’ (Bradbury-Jones and Isham 2020; emphasis added).

Of the pandemic poems collected for this chapter, a number explore the mental health consequences of the sense of claustrophobia associated with being locked down with one’s household. These touch on feelings of helplessness and isolation, of having public health measures ‘done to’ one, and the consequent risk of descent into depression and other mental health problems, abuse of substances and the risk of violence (Ertan et al. 2020). These are all themes that connect strongly with the sense expressed in the prison poetry described above: that of not being in control of one’s life or its routine as a consequence of being inside the enclosing walls of the prison and its schedule. ‘Since You Ask’ by Carol Ann Duffy (2020) alludes to a number of different practical and emotional consequences of feeling imprisoned, including being the subject of frustration and disempowerment, as well as being the object of others’ observation, judgement and anxiety:

cornered, certified, crapped on, cursed,

manhandled, mangled, miffed, mugged, mad,

wits’ end, worried, not waving but

rat-arsed, ranting,

   rending, raving …

Duffy’s reference to Stevie Smith’s 1957 poem ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (in which a swimmer’s distress signals are misinterpreted by observers on the shore as ‘larking’) seems to speak to the increased difficulty faced during lockdown by potential victims of mental health breakdown or domestic violence in being noticed and getting the assistance they need (Bullinger, Carr and Packham 2020). At the same time, the repeated ‘ed’ words emphasize an intensified observation in a more abstract, symbolic sense, the increasingly objectified subject of the poem coming to resemble a potentially dangerous creature in a cage. These lines call to mind Kay’s (2020, 887) observations about how the ‘stay at home’ message made the home a central focus of scrutiny during the pandemic. The ‘hypervisibility’ of the home under such ‘intense focus’ exposed stark differences between those for whom it was a place of safety and those for whom it was not.

If Duffy obliquely invokes the visibility of prisoners to observation (whether through the ‘fourth wall’ of bars facing a central observation tower as in the Benthamite Panopticon, or else through the spyholes of solid cell doors), Caroline Gauld’s ‘Mirrors of Anguish’ makes this allusion more explicit. Gauld imagines lockdown as a prison, which she names ‘prism’ to emphasize its associations with observation and visibility. She also invokes the image of ‘hell’ – the latter a popular allusion in modern prison writing as well:6

Windows are soulless eyes

Invisibly condemning us to hell

Within clear view of heaven

Encased, enclosed, locked in a prism.

(Garner 2020)

Other lockdown poems reflect that sense of perceiving oneself to be apart from society and its sociability, and from the bonds of solidarity that come with being part of a community. This is another trope typically found in prison writing. In ‘ZoomDoom’, Carolyn Brookes looks with dangerous envy at her neighbour’s property:

One up two down, my tiny box,

T’would even piss off Goldilocks.

An elbow nudge at cuckoo pace

I’d steal my neighbour’s body space.

(Garner 2020)

The idea of the home as a prison, cage, box or coffin that confines its human contents figures strongly in visual-artistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. The CAM displays numerous variations on this theme, showing inhabitants trapped inside as if being kept, warehoused or buried. One striking artwork comprises a floorplan of an apartment that has assumed the shape of a person (Minchoni 2020); another features a house with human arms and legs that sits in a rural landscape (Tasky 2020). These sorts of images suggest occupants having become synonymous with the architectural structures that they occupy. In another image, a woman is shown in a box-like space, engulfed and wrapped around by billowing polythene sheets ambiguously calling to mind warehouse packaging, tangled bedsheets, even a corpse’s winding sheet (Sorochinski 2020). Other images exploit cell-wall imagery such as endless repetitions of the characteristic four upstrokes and a strikethrough reminiscent of prisoners tallying the days to freedom (Allen 2020; Atay 2020), or of the ‘cancelling’, ‘incarcerating’ bars of Chancery discussed above.

As we noted above, these are all visual responses to the pandemic that depend on the familiarity of the metonymic elements of imprisonment as containment: enclosing walls and their confinement and separation of contents inside from the world outside. All of these images present visual metaphors of ‘home-as-[cage/box/tomb]’ and ‘person-as-house’ in ways that exude a sense of constraint, containment and claustrophobia. It is a combination of carceral themes that has translated into a language of protest as well. When the University of Manchester had steel fences erected around its halls of residence in November 2020, with a single point of entry and exit to enable ID checks on students accessing or leaving their accommodation, students protesting held up signs including ‘HMP University of Manchester’, ‘HMP Fallowfield’ and ‘students in cages’ (Abbit 2020).

Figure 5.3: ‘Confinement’ by Orane Tasky

Moderating fantasies of freedom

What points of broader application for law and humanities do we find in these ‘translations’ of diverse experiences of legal restrictions into prison metaphors? One point would be to notice how the ‘fantasy of liberation and escape’ (Fludernik 2019, 316) found therein also tends to carry important normative overtones about the necessity for people to bear their circumstances with fortitude. In the CAM we find: a ghostly face staring sadly out from a small attic window at the same time every day (Velasco 2021); a man (the artist himself) alone in his room, gazing through his partially blinded window, the slatted pattern of sunlight and shadows falling on him and the interior as if through cell bars (Rodriguez 2020); a family of four posing in a group as if for a formal portrait, staring back at the viewer from within a house-shaped birdcage that squashes them together (Werning 2020); a pen-drawn person sitting languidly in a cage while a bird flits past (Kushiyama 2020); a Magritte-esque painting of an interior view of a gloomy hallway, the viewer looking out through a doorway that frames not a natural exterior view, but a door-sized phone screen, its background image an alpine holiday paradise and its 24-hour digital clock set at 20:20 (Monreal 2020). In a words-and-music-and-images video by the band LYR (2020), film clips of Bristol families ‘staying at home’ and displaying their home-made art and signs from their windows and doors are accompanied by Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Lockdown’ about dreams of ‘bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks, / waterfalls, creeks …’ and a reminder that ‘the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow / but necessarily so.’

Figure 5.4: ‘Woman at Window’ by Inés Velasco

Figure 5.5: ‘COVID Cage’ by Denis Kakazu Kushiyama

These works not only acknowledge that the confinement of the body can be imaginatively transcended in fantasy; they also subtly reinforce the necessity of that bodily confinement. I have written elsewhere that media reporting of cases of ‘queue-jumping’ at shops by people also prosecuted for criminal breaches of the COVID Regulations is indicative of the emergence of a strong normative code regarding movement in public places. In the pandemic, ‘good’ movements have come to mean movements that are patient, unhurried, in step with others. By contrast, movements that fall out of that common step betray a lack of decent self-restraint and forbearance. The latter may not necessarily constitute a breach of the regulations on social distancing, but they certainly lend a justificatory rationale for prosecuting in the popular imagination (Gurnham, 2022). To put it in Simon Armitage’s words, responsible shoppers understand that the process is ‘long and slow / but necessarily so’. These norms are referenced in various poems that reimagine the obligations on us to restrain and coordinate our movements through the terminology of choreography and dance. In ‘This Dance’, Dagmar Seeland describes the particular difficulty involved in rule-compliance in the pandemic as a problem of ‘keeping in step’:

Recently we waltzed through life

not caring where we trod.

Now, moving to a different beat,

We struggle to find our feet.

(Garner 2020)

It has been observed before that the performance of law in its formal settings (say, in the courtroom or parliament) depends on the choreography of bodily movements to ensure the correct transfer of legal meaning (Mulcahy 2021). Seeland’s poem goes further than this, reminding us that law is also enacted in the choreography of ordinary bodily movements. Claire Boot’s ‘Social (Distance) Dancing’ (2020) takes up this idea, observing how (in the author’s words) ‘social distancing transformed the act of shopping into a kind of dance’:

Let’s tango at two metres in Tesco

And salsa at six feet in Spar,

Let’s waltz very warily in Waitrose

And foxtrot in a pharmacy from afar. …

Join the chary cha-cha at the checkout

And the cautious ceilidh in the queue,

As we all try to avoid one another

For the shopping that’s essential to do.

Every verse of the poem reminds us that this ‘dancing’ is not at all an act of free expression, but rather a call for moderation and compliance with social distancing rules.

We can read dance performances produced during the pandemic as aligned with this serious ethos too: Corey Baker’s (2020) Swan Lake Bath Ballet, featuring twenty-seven professional international ballet dancers all individually performing the theme from Tchaikovsky’s ballet from within the confines of their own bathtubs; a video produced by Opéra de Paris featuring members of the company performing individual ballet routines from within their own homes and set to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, dedicated to health care staff and all key workers, which starts with the admonition to ‘stay home’ (Klapisch 2020); a woman dancing in her bedroom, who features in the LYR video referred to above, is a picture of contained exuberance. In all cases the bodily movements gesture towards freedom, but the subject of the performance always remains strictly within the enclosing circumference, be it the bathtub or the boundary of the performer’s own home. If these productions are moving for audiences during periods of lockdown, then this is likely to be in large part because viewers can appreciate and share the fantasy of escape represented by the spirit of beauty contained within those boundaries, which, like Nelson Mandela’s inner ‘falcon’ or the caged birds of Dickens’ Miss Flite, evoke the sense of a soul transcending the bars that imprison its body.

Conclusions

The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on social and cultural life has generated diverse responses and reactions from within the humanities and the arts, and it would not be possible to give anything like a full account of these in a short essay like this. By setting these responses within a broader humanities scholarship on law, however, I hope to have established that a significant portion of that response draws its meaning and moral force from imaginative familiarity with (if not actual experience of) imprisonment. Rather than being separate and disconnected from ‘ordinary’ social life, it seems clear that imprisonment – and its qualities of impeded or suspended movement, and of capture, enclosure and confinement – is crucial in understanding social and cultural responses to lockdown restrictions. This chapter has suggested that various and ostensibly unrelated forms of response to these restrictions – from parliamentary committee commentary to poems and visual art – draw on a common wellspring of imprisonment metaphors. These metaphors provide a foothold for debate and reflection on the impacts of relevant measures on individuals and families, and on possible alternative routes out of the pandemic.

Notes

1. Expressions used by, respectively, the Prison Reform Trust and David Gauke (former justice minister), quoted by Beard (2020), my emphasis.

2. The quoted lines are from ‘To Althea, from Prison’ [1642] by the royalist prisoner Richard Lovelace (Lovelace 1930).

3. On the stagnant pool as a legal metaphor, see Gurnham (2019).

4. The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations SI 2020, No 350.

5. In England, these were imposed from 26 March 2020, 5 November 2020 and 5 January 2021.

6. See also Gurnham (2019).

References

Abbit, B. (2020) ‘University of Manchester criticised for numerous failings and “rushed” decision to install lockdown fencing at Fallowfield campus’ (Manchester Evening News, 5 December) https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/university-manchester-criticised-numerous-failings-19397552.

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Artworks

Allen, B. (2020) Untitled (22 October) https://www.instagram.com/p/CGqK2Lai7Ks/.

Andrade Arango, A. (2021) ‘So tired of this. Tired of this madness. Wanting time to pass, days to be felt, life not to be like repeating the word “empty” over and over again, over and over again’ (7 March) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMIDArPDv1s/.

Atay, E. (Failun Mefailun) (2020) Untitled. (27 November) https://www.instagram.com/p/CIFyywxjrkn/.

Baker, C. (2020) Swan Lake Bath Ballet (July) https://coreybakerdance.com/dance/swan-lake-bath-ballet/.

Bois, G. (2021) Untitled (12 January) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ8vlxJDx1V/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Graph, S. (2020) ‘Covid Time’ (24 August) https://www.instagram.com/p/CERo9zWKuax/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Klapisch, C. (2020) April. Opéra de Paris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIiG14Ggmu0&t=32s.

Kushiyama, D. K. (2020) ‘COVID Cage’ (21 November) https://www. instagram.com/p/CH3tdazD_bi/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

LYR (2020) ‘Lockdown’ ft. Florence Pugh, Melt Yourself Down (May) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0bWqq8sQiE.

Minchoni, D. (2020) ‘In quarantine’ (23 September) https://www. instagram.com/p/CFfAAmmD9rs/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Monreal, I., (2020) Untitled (27 April) https://www.instagram.com/p/B_ftseDDRHM/.

Navarro, J. (2020) Untitled (13 September) https://www.instagram.com/p/CFFIqumjotO/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Rochat, P. (2020) Untitled (20 March) https://www.instagram.com/p/B98p-sxHE2g/.

Rodriguez, M. (2020) Untitled (30 August) https://www.instagram.com/p/CEhHXotjAjX/.

Saade, S. (2020) Untitled (17 August) https://www.instagram.com/p/CEAc6brjTB-/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Sorochinski, V. (2020) Untitled (15 September) https://www.instagram.com/p/CFKxfgCD9AD/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Tasky, O. (2020) ‘Confinement’ (12 October) https://www.instagram.com/p/CGQW6TliCPm/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Velasco, I. (2021) ‘Women at Window’ (30 January) https://www. instagram.com/p/CKrMd9iDFCB/.

Werning, I. (2020) ‘Yes we do feel a bit caged’ (31 December) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJdip0jjtts/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

Zaremba, M. (2021) ‘Social distancing got feeling me like …’ (5 March) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMCpTJwjZh3/.

Legal sources

The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations SI 2020, No 350.

BP v Surrey County Council [2020] EWCOP 22.