There is both hope and frustration in this article. A recent research exercise in a prison found it to be inspirational in its ethos, relationships and mission. Prisoners talked passionately about their experiences in it and its impact on their personal development. But prisoners received very little resettlement support and things sometimes went wrong as soon as they were released, not because of any ‘moral failings’ on their part, but because they could not even navigate the journey ‘home’. It looked like everything we know cumulatively about ‘better prisons’, but its prisoners were failed as they transitioned out. More ‘tragic imagination’ is required in penal policy.

Typologies of prison life in men’s establishments have tended to emphasize the most desolate features of prison life such as aggression, violence, exploitation, and stark displays of individualism. Without seeking to contradict these positions, we suggest that competing narratives of care are also operating in male establishments in England and Wales. Through combining data from two recent, but separate, semi-ethnographic studies of prison life in two prisons (total n = 43), we present a completely different kind of typology based around Moore and Gillette’s (1990) archetypes of masculinity, called: ‘King’, ‘Warrior’, ‘Magician’, and ‘Lover’. This archetypal framework foregrounds the role of care in prison and the different manifestations of communal relations among prisoners. Building on recent developments in prison sociology that have explored the nexus between imprisonment, interpersonal relations and masculinity (see Crewe, 2014), this article argues that care is a fundamental feature of prison life that takes on a wide range of forms, including: paternal roles, intellectual expertise, information sharing and close physical bonds. This complicates linear depictions of prison life that are emotionally stolid.

Surviving prison has always involved ‘action’ and game playing. Higher stakes—‘life-trashing sentences’, the fear and risk of radicalization, increased incidences of homicide and labyrinth routes out—have compounded the experience of struggle: to be heard, for dignity, against exposure to violent injustice, and for release; the wrestling of ‘the self’ against a bleak and unyielding bureaucracy. In this article, we revisit McDermott and King’s Mind Games: Where the Action is in Prison showing how long-term prisoners are exposed to unregulated, unfathomable forms of power and action, and how long-term imprisonment feels increasingly like being ‘abandoned by humanity.’