Controlling reality: Drugs and experiences of time in a Danish Prison

Abstract

The focal point of this article is inmates’ experiences of drug use and drug treatment in
Danish, high security prisons. It focuses on inmates with a drug use who, during their
stay in the prison, either continue their drug use on regular wings or seek to be clean at
one of the prison’s treatment wings. From the perspective of the inmates, the article shows
how serving at respectively treatment or regular wings renders possible different forms of
existence and everyday life. The inmates define life at the regular wings as ‘unstructured’.
Here they can – because of the presence of drugs – control their own reality and thus obtain
a more endurable stay in the prison. Opposite, on drug treatment wings, it is expected
that inmates live a ‘structured’ live and live up to societal ideals of being reflexive, future
oriented and progressive.
The article concludes that inmates do not experience the ‘unstructured life’ at the treatment
wings as meaningful as it is not attractive in their meaningless life situation inside
the prison. Opposite the presence of drugs makes it possible for the inmates to obtain a more
comfortable stay in the prison.
This article is based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish prison for
men.