This presentation will explore how persistent punishment is experienced by Scottish families affected by imprisonment. Drawing on qualitative research, the presentation will discuss how family members respond, and adapt to, multiple, and often sustained interactions with the prison(s). It will explore how family members maintain relationships with those inside, and how prison (re)fits into families’ everyday lives.

The boundary between the prison in the community - and how this might be traversed, permeated or negotiated - is of growing concern to criminologists. Scholars have highlighted that features of the contemporary prison regime – such as sport, education, technology, media and family contact – may lessen the pains of confinement or help to promote more positive future outcomes. Conversely, others have suggested that greater freedoms can be “bittersweet”, and ultimately lead to imprisonment being experienced as more painful. Drawing on data collected ‘at a distance’ through the correspondence method of cultural probes, I will argue that rather than framing this discussion in terms of pain, it is more productive to analyse the way that people in custody manage their relationships with their communities and families outside as a form of ‘work’ or relational labour. This conceptual lens not only helps us to see how people in custody agentically manage their relationships with the world outside the prison, but also that some people may have more resources to support this endeavour than others.

The paper presents the results of an ethnographic research that investigates the experiences of motherhood and childhood lived by detained women and their children within the Institute for Attenuated Custody for Detained Mothers (ICAM in Italian) and the group home in Milan. The research focuses on the relationship between detained mothers and the school context attended by their children, to understand how the experiences of motherhood are constructed in the interaction between detention facilities and schools. The case study has been chosen as the research strategy to explore the specificity of the detention condition within its real-life context and to analyze the contemporary phenomenon of motherhood in jail, which is currently at the center of Italian public and political debate. Referring to a qualitative-phenomenological paradigm, which encompasses both the epistemological orientation of the study and the data analysis, the paper is based on the outputs of semi-structured interviews and focus groups with the educational staff of detention facilities and schools, to grasp the perspectives of the different institutional subjects involved. Despite the persistence of selective processes that condition access to the field of the penal contexts, the in-depth interviews conducted with mothers have represented a valuable tool to generate situated knowledge of prison context, delve into the biographies of the women inhabiting them, and show how mothers and their children actively appropriate the control system they are subject to.