Sentenced to hard (relational) labour: Coping with community connections whilst imprisoned
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Event details
York Sociology Seminar Series
The boundary between the prison in the community - and how this might be traversed, permeated or negotiated - is of growing concern to criminologists. Scholars have highlighted that features of the contemporary prison regime – such as sport, education, technology, media and family contact – may lessen the pains of confinement or help to promote more positive future outcomes. Conversely, others have suggested that greater freedoms can be “bittersweet”, and ultimately lead to imprisonment being experienced as more painful.
Drawing on data collected ‘at a distance’ through the correspondence method of cultural probes, Cara will argue that rather than framing this discussion in terms of pain, it is more productive to analyse the way that people in custody manage their relationships with their communities and families outside as a form of ‘work’ or relational labour. This conceptual lens not only helps us to see how people in custody agentically manage their relationships with the world outside the prison, but also that some people may have more resources to support this endeavour than others.