Escape rooms have grown in popularity across the world, with a number of these sites established in decommissioned sites of confinement or operating in purpose built faux-prisons. Drawing on fieldwork in prison-themed escape rooms across Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, this article explores how these tourism and leisure sites contribute to meaning-making vis-à-vis imprisonment and punishment. Beyond examining how these games allow game players to consume punishment at a safe distance from the realities of imprisonment, we show how these venues of penal spectatorship commodify major elements of penality, notably by using wrongful imprisonment and the prospect of death behind bars as carceral tropes. This process of commodification distorts and skews the realities of these phenomena, reinforcing hegemonic views of the punitive injustice apparatus. While the prison escape room experience is meant to entertain and though some sites offer surface-level criticisms of penality, our findings show how these sites reproduce carceral logics that sustain imprisonment as a central practice of exclusion in contemporary times.
The gendered pains of imprisonment, and particularly the partial or complete deprivation of mothering, have been increasingly recognised in prisons scholarship. Yet, given the ‘colour-blind’ representation of maternal imprisonment in much of the British literature, the distinctive experiences of Black mothers have received little attention. This article begins to address this problematic oversight by drawing upon narrative interviews with nine Black mothers who have lived experience of imprisonment in England. From the standpoint of Black Feminist Thought, our analysis identities three intersecting pains of Black maternal imprisonment: Marginalised mothering, subtle discrimination, and self-censorship and appeasement. We argue processes of racialised and gendered oppression combine to shape Black mothers’ experiences within and through the prison walls and thus explicate the ways in which the prison perpetuates the systematic repression and regulation of Black motherhood.
In this introductory essay, we aim for three goals. First, we write briefly about the genesis of the project that eventually became this themed issue, both to give context for the important papers herein, and to make a point about the value of global exchange in terms of southernizing and decolonizing punishment and society studies, specifically related to the North and South of the Americas. Second, we offer a few overarching comments regarding the nature of prisoner work in the Americas, with an eye toward those readers who might like to use the papers contained herein to conduct further research and theorizing on the topic. Third, and finally, we close with a few comments about each paper, again with the goal of highlighting accomplishments and areas for future inquiry which we, ultimately, hope this themed issue inspires.
Prisons and jails are organizations, yet scholars rarely use organizational theories to understand carceral phenomena. Using Cohen and colleagues’ (1972) seminal work, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” prisons and jails can be viewed as “organized anarchies” where staff make choices divorced from reality, causality, and intentionality. Carceral institutions exemplify organized anarchies with their conflicting and ambiguous goals, unclear policies and limited managerial oversight, and high levels of turnover and understaffing. Here, staff make choices in chaotic environments. To demonstrate carceral institutions are organized anarchies where staff make choices using the garbage can model, we use the implementation of sustained lockdowns during and after COVID-19 as an example. Drawing on in-depth interview data, this article provides analysis and findings from 447 residents and 183 staff in eight prisons and five jails in the United States. Implications for this work focus on understanding carceral decision-making and then considering ways to improve it.
Prison tourism research into the memorialisation of historic spaces of incarceration has focused primarily on the experiences of visitors to decommissioned prisons and/or those presenting them as sites of memory. Historic sites that are still in operation as prisons have largely been overlooked. We address this research gap, drawing upon a large ESRC-funded project exploring the ‘persistence’ of Victorian-era prisons in the United Kingdom. We argue that although such operational sites are not being consciously memorialised for an external audience, there are still practices of preservation, interpretation and commemoration taking place within them. Incarcerated people and prison staff still encounter past lives and practices, albeit in more subtle and less curated ways than do conventional ‘prison tourists’. We show how those living and working in such historic prisons understand their institutional histories, and how these histories shape their lived experience. In so doing, we collapse the distance between research into prison tourism and the lived experience of contemporary carceral institutions.
This article examines the institutional legacy of coercive confinement at the former Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry in Waterford, Ireland — now part of South East Technological University. Framed by the question of whether educational reuse reproduces, erases or transforms the site's carceral legacy, it draws on carceral geographies and gendered confinement to position the Magdalene Laundries as enduring systems of moral and spatial control whose afterlives demand ethical scrutiny. Focusing on the Waterford site as a single case study, the article traces its institutional transformation from a Catholic-run site of forced labour and confinement to a functioning technological university campus. It analyses survivor oral histories and spatial testimonies that disrupt institutional forgetting and examines how educational initiatives, particularly the Waterford Memories Project and When Silence Falls , activate the site as a space of memory, resistance and public pedagogy. In doing so, it interrogates the role of universities as inheritors of carceral spaces and asks what responsibilities such institutions hold in contemporary Ireland. By centring a survivor-informed, site-specific analysis, the article contributes to debates on spatial justice and institutional accountability. It argues that transforming a former carceral site into an educational space is not closure, but a critical threshold where memory, silence, justice and hope remain in active negotiation.
The Dominican Republic's “New Prison Management Model” has been a beacon of progressive corrections reform in Latin America, with “rehabilitation” as a key pillar. This article analyzes reform leaders’ discursive claims about rehabilitation programs, the actual practices of education, work, and artistic programs in prisons, and the explanations that staff and incarcerated people offer about how these programs rehabilitate. Prison staff deploy concepts of internal moral change through reflection, adversity, and work. Yet, they also speak about and allocate resources to programs in ways that uplift social exclusion and stigma as root causes of crime. This emphasis, combined with relatively shallow clinical interventions, disrupts assumptions rooted in Global North research about criminal behavior and desistance. Even though the Dominican perspective is infused with paternalism and religiosity, its grounding in structural inequalities is more progressive and appropriate than a focus on individual attitudes or cognitive deficiencies.
The author, incarcerated in his childhood in a local orphanage, returns to the site – now a private school – hoping to stage a function there. He then books a room at a former Babies Home – converted to a bed-and-breakfast motel no more than 500 metres away. At the other end of town, he spends a short week at a posh holiday resort on the site of a former Catholic orphanage. The experiences at all three sites reanimate disturbing memories and narratives of childhoods marred by appalling abuse and neglect. Insiders know these decommissioned institutions once provided as much coercion and punishment as care and protection. This paper explores the value of insider knowledge and memory activism in exposing the dark histories of what some call these places of ‘pain and shame’ and others ‘sites of conscience’. In the face of the competing commercial interests of new proprietors at all three sites, the paper contrasts the lack of apparent interest in memorialisation at two sites with a strong campaign led by former residents at the third site that has led to modest, but belated, success.
This themed issue aims to ignite a new dialogue on Nordic penality, moving beyond the traditional benchmark of ‘exceptionalism’. We introduce the concept of ‘pockets of punitiveness’ within the context of Nordic coercive confinement. By examining these pockets within the welfare state, we highlight how certain penal practices, such as (voluntary) isolation, youth punishment and indeterminate sentencing, coexist with and emerge from broader humane policies, despite their painful nature. Such pockets, in other words, expose the inherent complexities and contradictions in Nordic penal philosophy. By showcasing the breadth of Nordic coercive confinement, we argue that these punitive pockets are not anomalies but essential to understanding the multifaceted nature of Nordic penality. This issue thereby offers a fresh conceptual vantage point, encouraging nuanced and empirically rich analyses of punishment practices in Nordic countries.
Prison life is structured by countless situations where prisoners must await authorization from authorities to carry out everyday tasks. This study analyzes waiting not as idle time but as a productive process shaping power relations between prisoners and staff. Initially focusing on the enforcement, uses, and resistance to scripturalized communications, it examines how waiting becomes a central issue in asymmetrical negotiations within prisons. While some have interpreted the emptiness of prison time as a sign of the failure of the disciplinary project analyzed by Foucault, this study argues that impatience is reframed as a moral deviance, monitored by the administration and targeted through institutional sanctions and emotional labor. Waiting thus becomes a vehicle for a diminished yet persistent disciplinary project—a discipline of emptiness. The effects of this paradoxical renewal of discipline on prisoners are examined in the final part of the paper.
This article examines how Palestinian women navigate imprisonment under shifting carceral regimes, focusing on the relationship between political context, prison temporality, and strategies of survival. Drawing on 65 testimonios with formerly imprisoned women, alongside published carceral narratives and archival accounts, the study challenges approaches that treat coping as a stable psychological disposition. Instead, it conceptualizes endurance as a historically contingent practice shaped by transformations in the prison itself. The article develops two analytical concepts grounded in women's own narratives: the School of Joseph , which captures periods in which minimal order, collective organization, and temporal continuity allowed prisoners to invest captivity with meaning, cultivate solidarity, and sustain future-oriented projects; and the Whale of Jonah , which describes moments of intensified repression marked by suspended time, bodily vulnerability, and the collapse of relational and ethical horizons. Through close engagement with testimonios spanning multiple periods—from the late 1960s to the aftermath of October 7, the article traces how practices such as learning, symbolic resistance, intimacy, marriage, and reproductive struggle became possible, and later structurally foreclosed. By centering Palestinian women's voices, the article contributes to carceral studies by foregrounding the temporal and relational dimensions of imprisonment in colonial and wartime contexts. It argues that the disappearance of outward-oriented practices of resistance signals not a decline in women's agency, but a transformation in the carceral regime itself, from one that sought to discipline life to one increasingly hostile to life-making altogether.
Quantitative social network research in prison contexts has largely overlooked cooperative practices, such as communal cooking. Remarkable, since qualitative prison food studies identify communal cooking as an important activity through which social bonds are formed and resources are pooled. However, little is known about how cooking partnerships are structured and which factors shape them. This study addresses this gap by analysing cooking networks among 119 incarcerated men across three prison units in The Netherlands. Using social network analysis, the study examines whether financial resources, cooking skills, status and socio-demographic characteristics are associated with the likelihood of cooking together. Findings show that communal cooking is structured by trust, friendship, social similarity and status, rather than by resources or cooking skills as was shown in prior research. Based on our results, we argue that prison food provisions should consider the impact of their institutional arrangements on social organisation and how to actively promote collaboration and constructive social interaction.
For decades, literature has traced the pains of prison life. Prison research, in many ways, has become saturated with the ‘pains of imprisonment’, with extensive literature exploring the concept of penal harm and its enduring impacts upon the individual. Whilst foundational, this focus has limited prison research, and has overlooked the everyday methods through which individuals respond to, and manage these pains. Drawing on diary entries written by a Black, religious, foreign national father incarcerated in England, this article asserts that imprisonment is not always without reaction. Disrupting dominant narratives in current prison literature, we present empirical evidence of ‘mature coping’, first introduced by Johnson and Dobrzanska to highlight productive and responsive prison experiences. We also foreground diaries as a unique insight into coping practices, advocating for their use in criminological research to better understand the intricacies of prison life.
The Indian mission school, with its haunting institutional merge of Christianity and education, marks how carcerality and its categories structure not only the Native boarding school, educational, and child welfare systems that follow in what is now the United States, but the carceral state itself. Indeed, this material and ideological punishment infrastructure is a prerequisite for the politics of genocide, fascism and authoritarianism. These ongoing colonial projects that we live with today make historic sites of settler care, learning, and religious fervor, penal harbingers for the carceral moment we live in. This article examines this settler project through the evangelizing “mission” of Valley Towns Baptist Mission school, the largest and most popular settler mission among the ᏣᎳᎩ/AniKituwah/Cherokee people. As a key point of first contact with forms of settler colonialism and Christian supremacy, the school emerges as a contested site where evangelical practices, logics, and ideologies systematically sought to eradicate Cherokee knowledge, life ways, and spiritual cosmologies. Amid ongoing counter-archival efforts to unravel the fate of family ancestors who attended this school, I draw from official and legal documents, Native elder stories, land walks, and Indigenous scholarship that unveil a field of carceral christianizing cruelty and enduring strands of life flourishing cosmologies. These tensions continue to shape how Cherokee and Indigenous peoples address harm and harm-doing without prisons and jails, laying out some of the world's most abiding and foundational ways into struggles for communal healing, safety, accountability, and abolitionist plotting for power.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate the strengths of letter-writing as a qualitative method of inquiry in prison research. It aims to do so by drawing on the author’s research on experiences of isolation in Scottish prisons, carried out through letter exchanges with prisoners over the course of over a year. The positive elements of letter-writing were significant not solely from a researcher prospective, but also from that of correspondents. Through a process of catharsis and storytelling, participants were able to reflect on and recount stories of their trauma in isolation. However, a number of emotional and ethical challenges were encountered in the process, which researchers need to be mindful of prior to embarking on correspondence-based prison research.
The article brings historical lived experiences of the Pentridge Prison Complex in Coburg, so-called Australia, into conversation with auto-ethnographic observations of the now decommissioned site's redevelopment. Pentridge has experienced a ‘transformation’ of the prison, from its historical role as one of the largest and most infamous maximum-security prisons, into a modern, sanitised residential and commercial prison tourism precinct. This article will present lived experiences that relate explicitly to the lead author's personal connections with and memories of visiting the Pentridge site during the 1980s when her brother was imprisoned there. In this article we highlight the politics of decommissioning institutions, prison tourism and the selective curation of social memory against Cohen's seminal work on the dynamics and effects of official and social denial. We argue that the revisionism and redevelopment of the site represents an extension of the obfuscation, denial and secrecy practised by the authorities in the face of prisoner experiences of violence, harm and death at Pentridge. Contrasting lived experience, personal memories and connections to the prison highlights the incongruence, trivialisation and revisionism implicit in the redevelopment and commodification of Pentridge as a tourism theme park. In conjunction with Cohen's states of denial, we situate our auto-ethnographic approach against aspects of sensory and ghost criminologies. However, our aim is to maintain a focus on dynamics of power and representational politics by contrasting the lived experience of having a family member incarcerated in Pentridge with recent observations of the redeveloped site. We contend in this context that remembering is a necessary form of resistance to come to terms with the consequences of state denial and avoid the replication of future carceral logics and systems.
This article critically examines the proposed Irish National Centre for Research and Remembrance, in Dublin. Envisioned as a memorial, museum, and research archive, and to be located on a former Magdalene laundry site, the Centre is analysed through the lenses of ‘dark heritage’ and hauntology. While the National Centre offers potential for public reckoning and historical accountability, the article assesses the risks of marginalising survivors in its development. Survivor testimonies reveal that these sites remain emotionally and psychologically charged. We thus argue for survivor-led governance and regionally grounded memorialisation that goes beyond symbolism. An ethical form of national remembrance must avoid sanitised narratives, promote grassroots participation and recognise localised approaches to memorialisation to capture the range of survivor experiences. The article sheds light on how co-designed, participatory approaches might further a global model of remembrance rooted in survivor empowerment and social justice.
Representing Ireland's histories within the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) requires sensitive engagement with institutions of coercive confinement and their continuous impact. Among the most sensitive areas of national heritage are the histories of Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Institutions, and Industrial and Reformatory Schools. This paper outlines a collaborative methodology grounded in curatorial humility and the prioritisation of lived knowledge from survivors and affected communities. In recent years, NMI Curator BM has advanced contemporary collecting practices to enhance representation of these institutions, alongside Curator DR's development of a ‘lived-experience collecting’ approach. Together, these curators are developing a co-curatorial practice through new interpretive work in NMI galleries, created in collaboration with lived-experience experts. Reflecting on this ongoing work, the authors consider the methodological, ethical and organisational challenges that arise when addressing sensitive histories and ongoing realities. They propose that curatorial humility offers a framework for navigating these complexities and for supporting accurate, respectful and survivor-centred representation of Ireland's history of coercive confinement.
This article explores the epistemological value of pracademic proximity in prison and resettlement research. Through a pracademic, autoethnographic lens, it explores self-isolation in prison, showing how everyday encounters between staff and residents can shape both sentence progression and knowledge production. Drawing on lived experience from correctional practice and academic inquiry, the article demonstrates how powerful moments of proximity can inform pracademic knowledge building and disrupt experiences of isolation. Using creative writing and embedded methodology, it highlights how small relational gestures (‘big, small things’) can be transformative in prison and resettlement contexts. By engaging with the suffering and neglect associated with self-isolation, the article calls for greater attention to relational dynamics in penal environments. Ultimately, it emphasizes the epistemological significance of pracademic contributions in shaping and expanding academic knowledge.
The debates on system responses to children who come into conflict with the law are ongoing. In this article, we analyse how new system responses to youth crime create ‘punitive pockets’, when child welfare services are intertwined with systems of control and penal approaches to behavioural regulation. The new Danish system of youth crime prevention was introduced as an alternative to lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility in order to divert children from the criminal justice system. The new system is a hybrid between child welfare and criminal justice logics, and we argue that child welfare interventions are curbed by systems of control and punitive practices. Drawing primarily on qualitative data from a mixed-methods study of the policy reform, we highlight that children experience a system that focuses on punishment and control, and that the most vulnerable children facing multiple disadvantages experience being ‘set up to fail’.
