The working session explores the use of force within the UK’s Criminal Justice System as a psychosocial response to distress. The session will position physical restraint, chemical incapacitation, and isolation as organisational responses to fear. Throughout, we reflect on the methods implemented in secure frontline practice and consider how these can manage anxiety through control, exclusion, and chemical regulation of individuals.

The session, formed through practice-based reflections, situates the use of force within a psychodynamic framework. Considering transference, counter transference, splitting, projection, and containment, whilst contemplating how distress reconfigured as danger can impact on effective relational practice. Touching on resistance, often viewed as a threat and risk, we reflect on how institutional dynamics appear to stabilise institutions more effectively than they protect the individuals within them, further reproducing distress rather than addressing it.

Through an exploration of the institutional pipeline, we trace the transmission of distress across institutions, highlighting where individuals encounter similar responses of containment that raise questions about the institutional capacity to hold emotional pain without misplacing it. Sound, silence, and structured attendee reflection are used to explore the ethical implications and impact on relational practice.

To start, attendees cross the threshold with an audio extract that conveys a secure environment (keys, alarms, metal doors, etc.) to support their embodiment of the experience. Through silence, attendees are asked to consider bodily responses as data when examining how fear is managed in their own settings.

Through the application of psychosocial concepts of social defences and organisational anxiety, the session argues that humanisation and relational practice are not ethical add-ons, but an essential psychosocial intervention capable of managing fear whilst effectively holding institutional anxiety; thus preventing it from being displaced onto individuals “contained” within the UK’s Criminal Justice System.