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In the last 20 years, there has been an exponential increase in research about food in prison. Given this growing interest, it is appropriate to take stock of the field by mapping and synthesizing existing knowledge in order to identify gaps in knowledge and make recommendations for future research. Specifically, the purpose of this scoping review is to understand the experiences of incarcerated people with food in order to inform interventions that will promote positive outcomes for justice-involved individuals and correctional facilities. This review identified 38 peer-reviewed research articles about food in correctional facilities. This sample included qualitative (n = 28) and quantitative (n = 10) research that explored the both the pragmatic and symbolic dimensions of food in these settings. Taken together, this body of research provides a rich description of prison food practices and the implications of these practices on medical, psychological, and sociological outcomes. Moving forward, collaboration between academics, incarcerated people, and correctional practitioners is encouraged in order to develop programs that use this research to improve individual and intuitional outcomes. In addition, while emerging research has begun to develop knowledge about prison food in developing countries, the literature focuses primarily on the US, Canada and Western Europe and there is a need to expand the geographic scope of this inquiry.

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program is an experiential learning program that involves teaching college courses inside correctional facilitates to classes that include incarcerated and nonincarcerated students. This teaching note describes the program and argues that its congruence with social work values makes it a valuable tool for preparing students to take on social justice work. The impact of the program’s pedagogy and structure on students’ and faculty’s capacity for critical thinking and self-reflection is described. Logistical issues to consider in developing programs are discussed.

Prison foodways narratives can expand knowledge about cultural beliefs and perceptions of correctional systems. This exploratory analysis, based in qualitative interview data, seeks to initiate dialogue about the ways in which formerly incarcerated women in the US deploy racialized food narratives when describing the acquisition, preparation, and consumption of prison food. The participants’ food narratives construct prison as a non-white space that is better matched for African-American and Latina women, reinforcing and enacting larger cultural notions about incarceration. This opening analysis calls for more research and deliberation about how prison foodways narratives contribute to understandings about and perceptions of correctional systems and incarcerated people. © 2015, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This article builds on existing knowledge of inmate resistance by analyzing formerly incarcerated women's narratives about prison food. Participants described trying to secure extra cafeteria portions, hoarding food, smuggling and stealing food, and cooking and eating in the cellsall to resist prison power and gain some control over their lives by managing what, how, when, and with whom they ate. These data shed light on prison life and suggest changes to food policy to curb inmate resistance and bolster the rehabilitative potential of correctional facilities.

Research has demonstrated the importance of supportive relationships and social networks to prisoners’ psychosocial outcomes, especially for women. Understandin...

Background: HIV risk behavior in women who use drugs is related to myriad psychosocial issues, including incarceration. The experience of incarceration elevates women’s HIV risk by disrupting social networks, housing, employment, and access to health care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in criminal-legal practices resulted in decreased incarceration, especially among women. These changes may have largely altered HIV risk among women who use drugs, depending on their access to care in the community. Objective: This study seeks to build knowledge about the impact of shifts in criminal-legal practices during the COVID-19 pandemic on HIV risk behaviors of justice-involved women who use drugs. Methods: Qualitative methods are used to gather and analyze women’s narratives about their life experiences before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on individual and structural determinants of HIV risk behaviors. Thirty formerly incarcerated women with a history of substance use are being recruited through collaboration with community partners. Each participant completes a sociodemographic survey and two interviews. The first interview uses a life history instrument that invites participants to reflect on key turning points in their lives. The second interview uses a calendar approach to gather information about participants’ lives during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020-March 2021). The interviews (1 hour each) are audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis. Rapid Qualitative Inquiry and thematic analysis are being used to manage, organize, and interpret the data. The study team will collaborate with a subset of participants to develop digital stories about their COVID-19 experiences, a process that allows for member-checking and triangulation. Findings will be disseminated to program and policy makers in academic venues, community settings, and social service agencies. Results: To date, 10 women’s data have been collected. In total, two themes have been identified in this preliminary data: (1)the chaos and instability of participants’ lives increased during the COVID-19 pandemic: participants reported a wide range of psychosocial and health problems and limited engagement with social service systems. Interaction with criminal-legal systems was rife with uncertainty; participants described living in a state of limbo, which was extremely stressful. (2) When asked to describe a “turning point” in their lives, many participants attributed their substance use to the traumatic loss of a child due to death, incarceration, or termination of parental rights. During the COVID-19 pandemic, participants’ struggles to cope with these unresolved experiences of grief and loss were intensified by the widespread death and dying of the pandemic. Conclusions: Preliminary findings suggest that HIV risk factors increased for participants during the COVID-19 pandemic and invite further investment in community-based harm reduction programs, especially housing, that support women who use drugs. Interventions that address experiences of maternal grief and loss may reduce women’s substance use. Trial Registration:

Women’s perceptions of the prison experience and the punishing dimensions of their confinement are under-examined. To expand knowledge in this area, Sexton’s theory of penal consciousness is used to analyze formerly incarcerated women’s narratives about prison food. This analysis builds understanding about the lived experience of incarceration by explicating one dimension of prisoners’ understandings and perceptions of punishment. Women’s narratives describe both concrete and symbolic punishments associated with food. Participants spoke about poorly designed, sloppy food systems that left them feeling uncared for, ignored, frustrated, and humiliated. Women articulate experiences of hunger that reflect both a deprivation of adequate food and a rationing of humane attentions. These punishing perceptions may inhibit the efforts of social service and health providers to engage incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women in care. In contrast, exceptional participant narratives about positive, non-punishing food experiences suggest that ameliorated food systems could improve the lived experience of incarceration and promote the engagement in services that is needed to improve the outcomes of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women.

Sensory Penalties aims to reinvigorate a conversation about the role of sensory experience in empirical investigation. It explores the visceral, personal reflections buried within forgotten criminological field notes, to ask what privileging these sensorial experiences does for how we understand and research spaces of punishment and social control.

Knowledge about women's socio-emotional experience of incarceration is sparse. To address this gap in the research, open-ended interviews were conducted with 9 incarcerated women in Denmark. The inquiry focused on their experiences with prison food and eating, including questions about hygge-related practices. Hygge is a cherished part of Danish culture that encourages people to create cozy environments by sharing food and fellowship. While this warm and comforting practice may seem incongruent with prison, contemporary theory about carceral geography suggests a wide range of emotional spaces within prisons and identifies the central role of incarcerated people and external norms on constructing these spaces. The participants’ narratives describe and explain the role of hygge in Danish prisons. Participants report using food and other props to construct hygge in their cells, in common areas, and with visitors, in order to build safety and manage the harshness of prison life. While these experiences are fleeting, findings suggest that the ability of these women to engage in hygge practices has a deeply positive impact on their lived experience of incarceration. The findings expand understanding about the role of food in prison and inform the practices of correctional facilities.

Food is a central component of life in correctional institutions and plays a critical role in the physical and mental health of incarcerated people and the construction of prisoners’ identities and relationships. An understanding of the role of food in correctional settings and effective management of food systems may improve outcomes for incarcerated people and help correctional administrators to maximize the health and safety of individuals in these institutions. This report summarizes existing research about food systems in correctional settings and provides examples of food programmes in prison and remand facilities, including a case study of food-related innovation in the Danish correctional system. Specific conclusions are offered for policy-makers, administrators of correctional institutions and prison food services professionals,and ideas for future research are proposed.

This book draws on historical and cross-disciplinary studies to critically examine penal practices in Scandinavia. The Nordic countries are often hailed by international observers as ‘model societies’, with egalitarian welfare policies, low rates of poverty, humane social policies and human rights...

Sexual minority women are disproportionately incarcerated and more likely to experience structural and interpersonal violence while incarcerated than heterosexual cisgender women. To build knowledge about this population and inform social work practice, theories of embodiment were used to conduct thematic analysis of five interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer masculine-identified people who had been incarcerated in a women’s prison. This analysis explicates how participants used bodily practices to construct gender and communicate identity to themselves and others. Uniforms, prison regulations, and physical manifestations of female embodiment complicated these efforts. Participants described the ways in which they monitored and evaluated their own bodies while also managing the constant surveillance of their bodies by others. Taken together, these findings explicate the ways in which participants’ bodies were produced both through their actions and the external gaze of others. Implications for social work include exploration of language and masculinity in practice settings and suggestions for correctional policies. Findings encourage inclusion of non-binary frameworks and increased attention to the embodied self in order to expand understandings of human behaviour in the social environment. IMPLICATIONS Interpret with caution any information about gender identity surmised from intake forms and observation of clients’ bodily practices. Ask clients to describe their gender identity. Prioritise correctional policies that promote the health and safety of incarcerated people and staff over policies that enforce social norms related to gender and have no implications on security. Encourage re-entry service providers to collaborate with LGBTIQA+ organisations that provide social support to clients who identify as sexual minorities. © 2021 Australian Association of Social Workers.

Justice-involved women face myriad challenges as they negotiate the terms of community supervision and manage the long-term implications and stigma of living with a criminal record. Major tasks that women juggle include securing safe, affordable housing, finding and retaining employment, accessing physical and mental health care (including substance use treatment), and handling relationships with family, friends, children, and intimate partners. In addition to these responsibilities, women must meet their basic physiological needs to eat, sleep, and use the toilet. Women’s ability to safely meet their personal care needs may impact their capacity to manage their criminal-legal challenges. This study uses qualitative methods to understand justice-involved women’s lived experiences related to urination. Specifically, the study reports on a thematic analysis of 8 focus groups conducted with justice-involved women (n = 58) and the results of a toilet audit conducted in the downtown areas of the small city in the United States where the focus group participants were living. Findings suggest that women had limited access to restrooms and reported urinating outside. Lack of restroom access impacted their engagement with social services support and employment and their ability to travel through public spaces. Women perceived their public toilet options as unsafe, increasing their sense of vulnerability and reinforcing the idea that they did not have full access to citizenship in the community because of their criminal-legal involvement. The exclusion and denial of women’s humanity that is perpetuated by a lack of public toilet access impacts women’s psychosocial outcomes. City governments, social service agencies, and employers are encouraged to consider how lack of toilet access may impact their public safety and criminal-legal objectives and expand opportunities for people to access safe restroom facilities.