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Drawing from an ethnographic study of men's social relations in an English prison, this article explores the potential of attending closely to men's practice for the light it may shed on the boundaries of punishment. Interviews with prisoners and fieldwork experiences reveal something of the way prison acts on an ethnically diverse group of men. Focusing on the way men use cooking facilities on the prison's wings, the article explores the way men make food for themselves and each other and thereby occupy prison space with unconventional (and conventional) gender practice. Using intersectional perspectives the article shows how practices of racialization, racism, conviviality and coercion are woven into the fabric of prison life. These quotidian experiences are juxtaposed against the question of how prisons and prisoner populations represent a spectrum of violence in which gender dynamics remain under-examined. By providing glimpses of men's lives in an English prison to reveal aspects of the ways masculinities and ethnicities interact to shape a penal regime the authors offer some resources for, and perspective on, the theorization of punishment's boundaries.

This article explores aspects of young men’s gender identities as they serve time in an English Young Offender Institution. Based on qualitative research, the article discusses three dimensions of the way the young men talk about their lives, inside and outside prison. It is argued that the evocation of a specific condition of being ‘ on road’ is linked to forms of youthful masculine collectivity, ‘ my boys’, which valorize pre-modern forms of martial masculinity. These two themes converge in the pre-eminence of ‘ postcode pride’, the salience of ‘the local’ in the young men’s accounts of themselves. These aspects of the young men’s experience are explored with reference to other recent research findings on young men’s experience of ‘gang’ activity and living on the social margins.

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Despite its original vision of a community of ex-convict criminological and criminal justice experts, Convict Criminology has had difficulty with international expansion and has remained largely a North American movement. There are many reasons why this has occurred. This paper reviews the efforts that have been made to internationalize Convict Criminology in Europe and discusses some of the barriers it has faced. It also suggests prospects for moving the field forward in a truly international manner and the problems that this entails.2