Accounts of prison life consistently describe a culture of mutual mistrust, fear, aggression and barely submerged violence. Often too, they explain how prisoners adapt to this environment—in men’s prisons, at least—by putting on emotional ‘masks’ or ‘fronts’ of masculine bravado which hide their vulnerabilities and deter the aggression of their peers. This article does not contest the truth of such descriptions, but argues that they provide a partial account of the prison’s emotional world. Most importantly, for current purposes, they fail to describe the way in which prisons have a distinctive kind of emotional geography, with zones in which certain kinds of emotional feelings and displays are more or less acceptable. In this article, we argue that these ‘emotion zones’, which cannot be characterized either as ‘frontstage’ or ‘backstage’ domains, enable the display of a wider range of feelings than elsewhere in the prison. Their existence represents a challenge to depictions of prisons as environments that are unwaveringly sterile, unfailingly aggressive or emotionally undifferentiated

T he depr ivat ion of cer t it ude, legit im acy and hope: For eign nat ional pr isoner s and t he pains of im pr isonm ent Drawing on quasi-ethnographic fieldwork in a Specialist Foreign National Prison, this article discusses the new pains relating to a lack of certitude, legitimacy and hope with regard to both their carceral and post-carceral lives.

All prisoners have their identity stripped from them and, ultimately, reconstructed by the institutions in which they are incarcerated. However, for life and indeterminately sentenced prisoners the effects of this process, reinforced over extended periods, creates a particular set of burdens. For it is this population, above and beyond that of other prisoners, who need to address the implications of an imposed carceral identity in both navigating the day-to-day life of the prison and securing release. The four core burdens are firstly, an ambiguity on what identity indeterminately sentenced prisoners were supposed to have. Secondly, reconciling an imposed identity that they did not necessarily feel adhered to their pre-established sense of self. Thirdly, recognition that in order to operate or perform within the prison they needed to adopt an institutionally acceptable form of their self. Fourthly, that they had to manage how their performance of self was judged and recorded by the prison. This article aims to contribute to the growing body of work on Narrative Criminology by arguing that these burdens results in what I define as narrative labour.

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