First, we have added a very significant degree of empirical & explanatory detail to debates about Nordic penal exceptionalism, which question & advance many foundational assumptions about imprisonment in inclusionary & exclusionary jurisdictions e.g. Norway & England & Wales respectively. Our data specify the distinctive ways that the ‘texture’ of imprisonment differs between these jurisdictions, moving beyond reductive metrics of penal mildness & severity. Our research programme complements & challenges more macro-level accounts of penality, meeting David Garland’s call for small-n comparative studies which help detail the relationship between political economy & the daily texture of incarceration.
Second, we have developed a unique account of the micro-processes & practices of entry into & release
from prison custody, connecting the mundane practices & lived realities of imprisonment to meso- & macro-level issues beyond the prison.
Third, we have generated original insight into the relationship between penal power, staff-prisoner relationships & the everyday social world & culture of imprisoned sex offenders & female prisoners, in a way that challenges many assumptions of mainstream prison sociology. With regard to a range of sub-topics– prisoner hierarchies, feelings of safety & un-safety, the dialectic of power – our analyses will serve as a corrective to reductive & undifferentiated accounts of the imprisonment, in particular through the lens of gender.
Fourth, our study of deep-end confinement – involving privileged access to the most inaccessible corners of each system – has allowed us not only to describe the most extreme forms of confinement in each jurisdiction (i.e. the limit point of state coercion), & the ways that imprisonment is experienced in its most acute forms, but also to theorise how ‘dangerousness’ is perceived, constructed & managed in different jurisdictions.
Fifth, our study has enabled us to detail & theorise various more general aspects of imprisonment, including loneliness in prison, ‘soft resistance’, experiences & practices of cell-sharing, & reinventive narratives among prisoners.
Sixth, our policy sub-study, which involved around 80 interviews overall with senior policy players in England & Wales & Norway, has helped us to expose policy dynamics within the two research sites.
Seventh, our findings have enabled us to very significantly develop a framework for understanding the texture of imprisonment, organised around the ideas of the ‘depth’, ‘weight’, ‘tightness’ & ‘breadth’ of penal power.
Overall, our findings & outputs represent significant breakthroughs empirically, theoretically & methodologically, expanding the foundational basis of prison sociology and building an exceptional tool for comparative and cross-national penology. The concepts that comprise it offer an advanced means of understanding the different dimensions of penal texture & the experience of imprisonment.
