Caged Emotions: Adaptation, Control and Solitude in Prison

This book focuses on the emotional experience of imprisonment. In no uncertain terms: prisons seethe with emotions and feelings. Based on two empirically rigorous studies, this book analyses how prisoners attempt to adapt and control their emotions. It begins with an account of male and female prisoners held in medium-security prisons and then moves to the particular case of emotions in solitary confinement. There has been a turn towards emotions in criminology but this is the first book to centralize the subject of prisoner emotions in a detailed manner. The ethnographic study of feelings has much to contribute to broader debates about survival in prison and pathways to desistence. Most importantly, it emphasizes that ‘full-blooded’ depictions of prisoners belong at the heart of academic inquiry.

Ben Laws is Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK. Ben’s research has focused on the emotional dimensions of prison life, which was based at the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre. He has professional experience working in a range of mental health settings across the UK and US, mainly supporting those with autistic spectrum conditions (ASCs) and a range of other complex psychiatric, behavioural and developmental disorders.