Embodying prison pain: women’s experiences of self-injury in prison and the emotions of punishment

This paper explores the meanings and motivations of self-injury practices as disclosed in interviews with a small group of female former prisoners in England. In considering their testimonies through a feminist perspective, I seek to illuminate aspects of their experiences of imprisonment that go beyond the ‘pains of imprisonment’ literature. Specifically, I examine their accounts of self-injury with a focus on the embodied aspects of their experiences. In so doing, I highlight the materiality of the emotional harms of their prison experiences. I suggest that the pains of imprisonment are still very much inscribed on and expressed through the prisoner’s body. This paper advances a more theoretically situated, interdisciplinary critique of punishment drawn from medical-sociological, phenomenological and feminist scholarship

Introduction to the special issue on The problem of punishment : renewing critique

This introduction presents a collection of papers by Alan Norrie, Craig Reeves, Susanne Karstedt, Tiffany Bergin, Michael Koch, Mary Bosworth, Anastasia Chamberlen, Henrique Carvalho and Anita Dockley. It briefly discusses the origins of this collaborative research project, and outlines the theme, aims and format of the special issue, which calls for an interdisciplinary, theoretically informed and conceptually and practically critical examination of punishment today. It then provides a summary of the approach and argument of each of the contributions to the issue and offers a few reflections on ways forward