Restoration, abolition and the loving prison: Jimmy Boyle and Barlinnie Special Unit

Abstract

This article revisits Glasgow's Barlinnie Special Unit (BSU) in light of the reissue of Jimmy Boyle's biography of his time in Scottish prisons, ‘A sense of freedom’. Viewing BSU as expressing restorative values, it analyses the different meanings of the sense of freedom which emerge from Boyle's account. It finds a developing dynamic of different meanings of freedom, from negative resistance through trust and solidaristic action to love and creativity. Together these represent a basis for a moral psychology adequate to understanding human change in a prison context. The article considers BSU as a restorative and reparative practice which challenged the prison system's overall punitive and persecutory form – its ‘structure in dominance’. It reflects on Thomas Mathiesen's (1974/2015) Politics of Abolition about the relationship between therapeutic practice and political development to argue that BSU represented an abolitionism relevant to prison today.