Being Imprisoned

Punishment, Adaptation and Desistance

By: Marguerite Schinkel

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Hardcover | 17 October 2014 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
192 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 1.27

Hardcover

$187.31

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Little attention has been paid to the way in which criminal punishment is interpreted and narrated by offenders. This book uniquely addresses this area, examining the narratives of long-term prisoners with a special focus on the meaning they ascribe to their sentence, its impact on their lives and how it affects their inclination to offend in the future.

Through a range of in-depth narrative interviews with male prisoners at different stages of their sentences, Schinkel considers their views on the legitimacy of their sentence, analysing what factors play a role in the shaping of these perspectives including life circumstances and the effects of rehabilitation. Exploring what purposes of punishment prisoners support and perceive as achieved by their sentence, the book argues that the need to survive the prison environment and the need to tell a progressive narrative outweighed the individual characteristics of each case, leading prisoners to accept their sentence even when they had cause to oppose it.

Being Imprisoned offers new insights into how prisoners perceive their sentences and brings together issues of prison life, the moral performance of prisons, desistance and the purposes and legitimacy of criminal punishment.

Industry Reviews

"It is a book about punishment, imprisonment, re-entry and desistance - and the interrelationships between. ... It is brilliantly written and painstakingly analytical. This book is a must read for undergraduate and postgraduate students, but also for academics, policy makers and practitioners." (Beth Weaver, European Journal of Probation, Vol. 7 (4), 2015)

'Prisons are meant to accomplish a remarkable amount from punishment to rehabilitation to resettlement even. Yet, oddly, we rarely seek to test these theories by listening to the understandings of prisoners themselves on the imprisonment experience. In this important new work, Marguerite Schinkel allows us an almost unprecedented insight into these perspectives and develops a new approach to understanding the effects of imprisonment.' - Shadd Maruna, Dean, School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, USA

'A turning point for the scientific and legal study of imprisonment as punishment. Schinkel's research brings empirical depth to a field that has long theorized on the basis of the shallowest of understandings of how prison is experienced by those imprisoned and to a remarkable degree failed to question many of the premises thought to justify its routine imposition.' - Jonathan Simon, Berkeley Law, University of California, USA

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