In this ethnographic study Maria Adams turns a geographical and feminist lens on prisoners’ families. She captures the testimonies of families as they navigate the sociological and social challenges of the imprisonment of loved ones, exploring key concepts including inequality, penal power, and vulnerability. She also measures the impacts on many aspects of families’ emotions, relationships, and identities, and considers the sources of support and resilience they draw on. With original research and fresh insights, the book deepens our understanding of carceral geography and how families experience spaces, both inside prison and beyond the bars.

Sensory Penalties aims to reinvigorate a conversation about the role of sensory experience in empirical investigation. It explores the visceral, personal reflections buried within forgotten criminological field notes, to ask what privileging these sensorial experiences does for how we understand and research spaces of punishment and social control.

The ’punitive turn’ has brought about new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the ’carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.

When someone you love goes to jail, you might feel lost, scared, and even mad. What do you do? No matter who your loved one is, this story can help you through the tough times.

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As the number of prisoners in the UK, USA and elsewhere continues to rise, so have concerns risen about the damaging short term and long term effects this has on prisoners. This book brings together a group of leading authorities in this field, both academics and practitioners, to address the complex issues this has raised, to assess the implications and results of research in this field, and to suggest ways of mitigating the often devastating personal and psychological consequences of imprisonment.