This book brings together a group of leading authorities in this field, both academics and practitioners, to address the complex issues that the increasing number of prisoners in the UK, USA and elsewhere has raised. It assess the implications and results of research in this field, and suggests ways of mitigating the often devastating personal and psychological consequences of imprisonment.

Foreword 1. Introduction: the effects of imprisonment revisited Part 1: The Harms of Imprisonment - Thawing Out The 'Deep Freeze' Paradigm 2. Release and adjustment: perspectives from studies of wrongly convicted and politically motivated prisoners 3. The contextual revolution in psychology and the question of prison effects 4. Harm and the contemporary prison 5. The effects of supermax custody 6. The politics of confi nement: women's imprisonment in California and the UK Part 2: Revisiting the Society of Captives 7. Codes and conventions: the terms and conditions of contemporary inmate values 8. Revisiting prison suicide: the role of fairness and distress 9. Crossing the boundary: the transition of young adults into prisons 10. Brave new prisons: the growing social isolation of modern penal institutions by Robert Johnson 1.1 'Soldiers', 'sausages' and 'deep sea diving': language, culture and coping in Israeli prisons 12. Forms of violence and regimes in prison: report of research in Belgian prisons Part 3: Coping Among Ageing Prisoners 13. Older men in prison: survival, coping and identity 14. Loss, liminality and the life sentence: managing identity through a disrupted lifecourse Part 4: Expanding the Prison Effects Debate Beyond the Prisoner 15. The effects of prison work 16. Imprisonment and the penal body politic: the cancer of disciplinary governance 17. The effects of imprisonment on families and children of prisoners 18. Reinventing prisons