Tomas Percival
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Tomas Percival's PhD research project
Prison Records: Or Counter-Narratives of the Offender Assessment System
Prison Records examines how structures of assessment, management, data, and risk have reshaped the contemporary prison system in England and Wales.
Prison Records examines how structures of assessment, management, data, and risk have reshaped the contemporary prison system in England and Wales. This interdisciplinary and practice-based project focuses on the Offender Assessment System (OASys), a risk assessment tool and database that produces profiles of incarcerated individuals upon which "evidence-based" decision-making can be undertaken.
The project reveals how this data system not only records but also actively constitutes the governance and behavioural expectations of incarcerated individuals.
The first chapter traces how the interplay of law and order, management paradigms, neoliberal policies, logistics, and computation has reshaped the concepts of "crime", "risk", and "rehabilitation".
The second chapter examines the production of offender profiles, revealing the extent to which the logics of the calculation of risk engenders the criminalisation and individualisation of social and psychological needs and generates prescriptive and punitive pathways for those subjected to assessment.
The third chapter interrogates the effect of the various conditional pathways, such as offending behaviour programmes and interventions, exploring the mechanisms that compel incarcerated individuals to conform to the accounts of risk generated by their profiles—reconfiguring behaviours such that they become intelligible and manageable within the parameters of technical management.
The thesis culminates in an exploration of the day-to-day modes of resistance, negotiation, and refusal that have emerged in response to such recursive modes of oversight, articulating possible modes of life beyond capture.
Methodologically, this research is grounded in a practice-based approach. It involves collaborating with formerly incarcerated individuals to request and review their prison records and engage in an experimental interview process that results in the creation of a series of audio works. These counter-narratives challenge the system's interpretive authority, providing a platform for those typically silenced or coerced into various kinds of confession by it to have another means of describing their experience.
As such, this project not only critiques reformatory structures and participatory paradigms but also fosters the formation of autonomous voices in specific ways, thereby shifting the dynamics of agency.
Ultimately, Prison Records contributes to debates on abolition and decarceration, particularly by revealing the painful, unjust, and individuating effects of risk assessment processes on those within the prison system.
Tomas is a member of Roundtable four.