Performing Punishment, Transporting Audiences: Clean Break Theatre Company’s Sweatbox

It’s not everyone that gets to experience the inside of a prison van—or sweatbox. Hard seats, unforgiving heat (or cold), no windows, and no way out. Most of those that have been transported in one have been arrested and are being moved between holding cells and courts or from sentencing to prisons. Otherwise, they are officers responsible for ensuring the safe transportation of people between various sites associated with the criminal justice system. Very few would find the experience one they would like to repeat. Yvonne Jewkes characterises the transportation of prisoners in sweatboxes as hell-holes. Each prisoner being transported, she says, is locked inside a tiny coffin-like cubicle, approximately five feet high and measuring about 34in by 24in, with a 10in square clear plastic window and a small hard metal seat on which they must remain seated.