Correction

by H

There is a long and honourable tradition linking the mackintosh to warfare - the trenchcoat after all is often said to bear its origins in its name - but until Jean Minch's La Punition en Impermeable the role of rainwear in regimes of correction has been much less explored.

Familiar outside the prison is the use of the raincoat as part of a uniform - for the forces, schools, the police, nurses, and, in today's image-driven corporate world, by almost any organization wanting to persuade the public that it offers a professional and disciplined service.

Prisons have always seen themselves in that light, and the uniform of the prison officer has always presented her and the hierarchy she belongs to as essentially military in ethos and authority.

Here, as with the military, as with the police force, it is the trenchcoat that is invoked as a way of expressing superiority of rank. The policewoman in the panda, the soldier with the gun - personnel such as these towards the bottom of the pyramid have to do without the icons of command - the epaulettes, the gunflaps, the buckles, the straps - paraded by their superiors. But they have to contend with the weather just the same, and to help them do so while maintaining that essential image of disciplined professionalism uniform outerwear is always de rigueur.

For the prison inmate too the tradition of a uniform goes back to the introduction of the modern corrective institution by the reformers of the late 18th Century. Prisons kept people inside however - almost as a matter of definition! - so that the need to equip prisoners with outerwear was never pressing. (It was the convention from the early days of reform that on those rare occasions when an inmate had to attend court she would make the journey wearing the ordinary clothes she had brought with her into the prison on her committal).

To this general rule that the raincoat has played little part inside the prison there is a possible exception, and that is the practice in the VDCWG. It's not certain exactly what goes on or went on there -( it's not even absolutely certain that it is/was a real place) but the accounts that circulate and get cited refer to the single item of clothing inmates are issued with (bar footwear) as a type of 'mackintosh'. And they also imply that this highly distinctive item is used not merely in the familiar way to weaken the sense of individual identity and locate the prisoner firmly as subjugated to authority, but also to play highly specific (and deeply problematic) roles in the disciplinary/control regimes employed.

In his new book, Minch maintains, in effect, that these problematic ideas, whether actually experimented with in the Voss or not, are worth serious consideration. The mac

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