When families (co) exist within and across prison walls: A study of Simultaneous Familial Imprisonment

Extensive scholarship has examined life inside carceral settings, while a parallel body of work has focused on understanding the numerous repercussions of imprisonment on families outside prison walls. This thesis focuses on a phenomenon that lies at the intersection of these two fields of study: Simultaneous Familial Imprisonment (SFI). SFI encompasses all familial relationships inside the prison estate, including those between relatives held in the same carceral setting and those held separately, in different prisons. This study is the first designed to explicitly and exclusively research SFI, and the first to address the presence of families within the English prison estate. As such, it adopts an exploratory approach to understand how the presence of family may shape life inside prisons, and in turn, how the prison may impact family life. This thesis is based on a mixed-methods research project conducted in closed prisons (two men’s and one women’s) across England over a period of fifteen months. A survey of two hundred people held in a men’s Category C prison was conducted, aiming to establish the extent of SFI. Results suggest that SFI is a common phenomenon across the prison population in England, with 46% of respondents reporting having experienced SFI. These quantitative findings were complemented with thirty-one in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with men and women experiencing familial co-imprisonment. The qualitative findings identified four significant dimensions of SFI. First, that prison and imprisonment are often interwoven in people’s lives well before they enter the prison estate. The frequent contact with prisons from a young age, through friends’ and family members’ imprisonment, may render the prison an ordinary feature of everyday life. Second, communication between co-incarcerated family members is precarious, often dependent on external support and subject to the discretion of prison staff. Third, proximity or distance to a co-incarcerated family member impacts the experience of imprisonment. Finally, the findings reveal how familial practices, love and care manifest in prison, arguing that they both diverge from, as well as mirror patterns established before SFI. The thesis concludes that to fully understand the impact of Simultaneous Familial Imprisonment – on individuals, families, and wider social structures – requires situating these experiences within broader carceral continuities that shape people’s lives long before, during, and after incarceration.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Fischer, Ariadni

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lanskey, Caroline

• Simultaneous Familial Imprisonment
• Prison
• Families of prisoners

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/e6e71863-0799-4a2c-aa72-f4ce6607fdac/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0001-6969-0386

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/392313