Jailhouse Rock

carceral

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.

inmate

I’ve just started watching Screw on Channel 4, a comedy-drama (although two episodes in there’s definitely more emphasis on drama than comedy) about a category-B men’s prison oop North somewhere. One of the prisoners talked about the word ‘inmate’. and how it hasn’t always applied to prisoners. Which got me thinking…

You might have already guessed where ‘inmate’ comes from (although I didn’t). It dates back to the 1500s and originally meant someone who lived in a house which was rented by someone else (AKA a possibly illegal sub-letter). It’s literally just ‘inn’ (as in pub where people can stay) and ‘mate’ (as in pal) smushed together. Which seems a bit unimaginative, but whatevs.

Over time, ‘inmate’ came to mean anyone who lived with lots of other people in a single house. Then, in the late 1800s, people also started using it to refer to those who’d been locked up against their will in prisons, asylums and hospitals. At around the same time, the words ‘roommate’ and ‘housemate’ appeared in the dictionary. So it wasn’t long before ‘inmate’ lost its original meaning and came to be used only to refer to people who’d been incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure.