The main aim of this essay is to explore prisoner life writing within the specific, richly and multiply dependent context of teaching and learning undergraduate criminology at an English university, from the authorial viewpoint of a teacher and her students as budding criminologists and coauthors. This article seeks to redress a continuing resistance to life history approaches in criminology, despite the discipline being formally devoted to the understanding of the meaning and experience of imprisonment in all its forms and consequences. What follows is a reflection on what students had to say on the fascinating subject of prisoner auto/biography and its place in popular and expert discourses on crime, criminality, and punishment, contextualised within the academic discipline of criminology. Imprisonment has emerged as a crucial theme in contemporary globalised society, whether considered in its practical manifestations as a punitive system for locking up increasing numbers of people, as a potent metaphor for what is widely regarded as the carceral society, or as a noumenal trope for exploring philosophical, political, moral, and/or cultural possibilities of freedom, creativity, self-expression, and transformation through the notion of confinement. 1 Across these diverse, shifting, and interweaving narrative constellations -and more -there is a vast and growing corpus of research literatures on imprisonment and (life) writing and their implications for individuals and societies from a range of historical, philosophical, sociological, cultural, legal-judicial, and/or other perspectives. A comprehensive review of the literature on prisoner life writing, an important