Carceral is an adjective meaning of, or relating to, jails or prisons. The sharp-eyed among you have probably already realised that it shares its roots with ‘incarcerate’ (i.e. put in prison). Both of these come from the Latin word for prison, ‘carcer’. And that comes from ‘karkros’, a Proto-Italic word for ‘enclosure’ or ‘barrier’. In case you’re wondering ‘Proto-Italic’ languages are the ancestors of the Italic languages, spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. So well old, then.
There are lots of other slang words for prison and going to jail. Here are just a few I found.
Slammer
This one didn’t appear until the 1950s in the US of A. It’s pretty straightfoward – it refers to doors being closed noisily behind you.
Clink
Possibly from the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer closing the irons around the wrists or ankles of prisoners. There was also a prison called the Clink in Southwark which goes all the way back to 1129 (and is now the site of The Clink prison museum, where my sister and I once spent a memorable afternoon – there are A LOT of awesome photo opportunities in there). It might also have been influenced by the Flemish word ‘klink’ meaning ‘latch’.
Doing bird
Cockney rhyming slang for ‘birdlime’ which translates to ‘doing time’. This is probably because birdlime is horrible sticky stuff spread on twigs to trap small birds by utter bastards (thankfully banned in most places now).
Pokey
This first appeared in the early 20th century, although no one knows its exact origins. It might come from ‘pogey’, a 19th-century English slang word for poorhouse.
Pen
This is short for ‘penitentiary’, which has been around since the early fifteenth century. Then it meant a ‘place of punishment for offenses against the church’, from the Medieval Latin ‘peniteniaria’ meaning ‘of penance’. The slang term ‘pen’ first appeared in 1884.
In other prison news, England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe, locking up 149 people for every 100,000 of the population. Yay us. And apparently old people are getting naughtier – between 2002 and 2015, the number of prisoners aged 60 and over rose by 164%.
If all that’s left you feeling a bit depressed, here’s Johnny Depp in a parody of Jailhouse Rock in John Water’s stone-cold classic ‘Cry Baby’. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you watch it immediately – alongside JD, it also has Iggy Pop and Ricki Lake in it, for crying out loud.