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As many scholars have noted, women remain peripheral in most analyses of the practices and effects of imprisonment. This article aims to redress this pattern by comparing the problems of long-term confinement as experienced by male and female prisoners, and then detailing the most significant and distinctive problems reported by the latter. It begins by reporting data that illustrate that the women report an acutely more painful experience than their male counterparts. It then focuses on the issues that were of particular salience to the women: loss of contact with family members; power, autonomy and control; psychological well-being and mental health; and matters of trust, privacy and intimacy. The article concludes that understanding how women experience long sentences is not possible without grasping the multiplicity of abuse that the great majority have experienced in the community, or without recognizing their emotional commitments and biographies.

The legal doctrine of ‘joint enterprise’ has been heavily criticized for lacking legitimacy, primarily linked to distributive (in)justice. This paper draws on the narratives of ‘joint enterprise prisoners’ serving long life sentences for murder to address such concerns and extend the discussion to questions of ‘legal legitimacy’. Prisoners who were early in their sentences explicitly rejected the legal legitimacy of joint enterprise, while those at a later stage reported ‘accepting’ their conviction and demonstrated ‘consent’ by engaging with their sentence. We argue that rather than representing normative acceptance of the legal legitimacy of joint enterprise over time, this acceptance is a form of instrumental acquiescence associated with ‘dull compulsion’ ‘coping acceptance’ and personal meaning making.

Drawing on an amended version of a survey employed in three previous studies, this article reports the problems experienced by 294 male prisoners serving very long life sentences received when aged 25 or under. The broad findings are consistent with previous work, including few differences being found between the problems experienced as most and least severe by prisoners at different sentence stages. By grouping the problems into conceptual dimensions, and by drawing on interviews conducted with 126 male prisoners, we seek to provide a more nuanced analysis of this pattern. We argue that, while earlier scholars concluded that the effects of long-term confinement were not 'cumulative' and 'deleterious', adaptation to long-term imprisonment has a deep and profound impact on the prisoner, so that the process of coping leads to fundamental changes in the self, which go far beyond the attitudinal.

Prison privatization has generally been associated with developments in neoliberal punishment. However, relatively little is known about the specific impact of privatization on the daily life of prisoners, including areas that are particularly salient not just to debates about neoliberal penality, but the wider reconfiguration of public service provision and frontline work. Drawing on a study of values, practices, and quality of life in five private-sector and two public-sector prisons in England and Wales, this article seeks to compare and explain three key domains of prison culture and quality: relationships between frontline staff and prisoners, levels of staff professionalism (or jailcraft), and prisoners' experience of state authority. The study identifies some of the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of the public and private prison sectors, particularly in relation to staff professionalism and its impact on the prisoner experience. These findings have relevance beyond the sphere of prisons and punishment.

‘Anti-social behaviour’ (ASB) has become an important political and social issue across Europe over the last two decades, despite much debate over the term itself. In England and Wales there is an assumption that what constitutes ASB is ‘common sense’ and that it represents behaviours that are ‘patently unacceptable’. Yet critics argue that the term is ‘slippery’ and, in practice, disproportionately applied to specific groups in society, including young people. This article reports the findings of a study in Greater London exploring interpretations of ASB among adults and young people. It shows that interpretations vary according to the age of the person identifying the behaviour, as well as the age of the perceived ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. Adults are more likely to interpret behaviours as anti-social, particularly those associated with young people. The article considers how perceptions of risk influence interpretations and calls for greater inter-generational ‘connectedness’ to improve understandings of behaviour between adults and young people.