Abstract
In this epilogue I suggest that this volume is a promising example of what I call ‘moral social scholarship’ (Liebling, in progress). It shows the extent to which our moral lives are real and can be studied empirically. Moral values show up whenever we study the human world closely and in person-centred ways, but they show up with particular starkness when we study places of confinement and dehumanisation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was on his way from Paris to Vincennes to visit his friend Diderot in prison when he read an advert for a prize essay on the question of whether the arts and sciences have a corrupting or purifying effect on morality. During this walk, he had a sudden revelation (‘I saw another universe and became another man’, Confessions) and thus his life's work began. He won the competition, publishing his first Discourse on the Arts and Sciences in 1750. The epigraph on the title page of this work, from Ovid who was banished from Rome, is translated as, ‘Here I am a barbarian, because men understand me not’ (Rousseau, 1973 edition). Whatever the difficulties of living in political communities, in exile we no longer belong, cannot return, are brought to ruin: We are destroyed. This painful kind of exclusion has been built into contemporary prisons, and other institutions of coercive confinement. 1 They constitute a kind of banishment.
Whatever we make of Rousseau's interest in primitive democracy or the innocence of rustic life, the vignette above makes the point that going to prison wakes up the moral imagination. There are reasons for this. Pain and suffering can shift us to ‘an ethical mode of being’ (Zigon, 2010: 9). Existential questions become hard to avoid. There is a moral intensity to prison life, which is linked to the fact that they are places full of darkness, power, and deprivation, but also occasional light and kindness. Prisoners experience intense emotional responses to these extreme contrasts: The absence, then fleeting presence, of signs of humanity. Paradoxically, prisons can be strangely honest, raw, places, where ‘revelations of objective value’ occur (Chappell, 2023). In other words, values have an ontological reality. Much goes on in prisons that is ‘morally illuminating’, to use Iris Murdoch's term (1992: 335). My own life's work grew out of the value-charged experiences that prisoners shared all too readily when given the opportunity. They talked with passion, insight and clarity about things that matter, including our urgent need for deep human regard, and our profound responses to the nature, use and abuse of power (Liebling, assisted by Arnold 2004). Prisoners encounter moral value phenomenologically, at its most ‘vivid, intense and immediate’ (Chappell, 2023: 61). This is because our lives are ‘saturated in value’ (p. 293). As medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman argued in his Tanner Lectures: Experience is moral, as I define it, because it is the medium of engagement in everyday life in which things are at stake and in which ordinary people are deeply engaged stake-holders who have important things to lose, to gain, and to preserve. (1999: 362)
I found early on in my research life that, alongside the vulnerable and alienated, prisons are full of skilled artists, wise craftsmen, avid readers, and intellectuals in formation, who have sometimes given shrewd advice to each other and to me. Cherishing the conversations I have had there by no means constitutes a defence of prisons. Instead, I argue for deeper interrogation and critique of what they bring about. It is one of the tragedies of the prison as an institution of punishment that its moral effects are assumed rather than empirically studied. This is beginning to change, as punishment theorists and prison scholars begin to work more closely together. I hope I have been part of this development, alongside others (see e.g. Crewe et al., 2020; Ievins, 2023; Jarman, 2024; Liebling, 2011, 2014; Seeds, 2022). Punishment practices remain morally incoherent as well as damaging in their effects and far removed from the stated aims declared in policy or theory.
So Alice Ievins and Ryan Williams should be congratulated for conceiving and organising the symposium on moral and ethical issues of confinement they held in Cambridge in 2022 and for bringing this themed issue to fruition. Many of the papers in this volume were first developed for that event. Each constitutes a kind of case study of moral experience in various places of detention. Alice and Ryan have done the world of confinement studies a great service. The contributions they have collected emerge from a wider than typical range of geographical regions (India, Central America, the US, Europe, and the UK), and from distinct types and contexts of confinement (prisons, nursing homes and post-release community settings). But their overarching contribution here has been to raise imaginative and penetrating questions about what current institutional structures make morally possible (Jacobs, 2017) as well as what the ethical deliberations and struggles of the confined in their lived and localised worlds tell us about the experience and effects of confinement. This is both a humane and critical project.
The papers are enticing and original and take us to some uncomfortable and tense edges in the study of imprisonment. Julie Laursen and Kristian Mjåland, for example, describe the strange absence of professional reckoning with the offence in most prisons, particularly in everyday interactions between staff and prisoners, in both England and Norway (Laursen and Mjåland, 2025). This avoidance of the obvious – a form of negligence – could make punishment feel ‘empty and meaningless’. It is especially the case when the one professional group to whom offending behaviour is ‘franchised out’ in contemporary prisons focus exclusively on risk. Apparent silence about offences committed, imagined, contested, or regretted can be contrasted with the powerful and often damaging moralising that goes on elsewhere – off the wings, in social media, in political rhetoric, or in pubs and bars. The authors argue that ‘the prison is a particular ethical world, one in which the offence is both there and not there at the same time’. How might imprisonment change if closer attention was paid in ordinary prison places (and not just specialised therapeutic spaces) to the moral meaning of both the offence and the punishment? Could this be done without the interference of damaging and coercive ‘institutional distortions’? That some prisoners engage in hard ‘moral labour’ without help tells us something about the futility of punishment as it is currently conceived. Should – could – the prison ‘help with prisoners’ moral projects’? Should the prison pretend to be ‘an empty moral space’ when it is clearly communicating morally, and negatively, to its population? Should time spent in prison matter morally (Ievins, 2024)? Should the prison be a place of reinvention (Scott, 2011)?
In Living on Death Row in India, Maitreyi Misra and Zeba Sikora describe in detail the struggles of three very different individuals to manage the bleak demands of life before mandated, but not certain, execution (Misra and Sikora, 2025). The accounts of their fragmented psychological and emotional journeys are moving and informative. The authors show how the ideal of reformation is expected of prisoners who have been condemned to die, and how some attempt this: seeking meaning and human goodness in impossible circumstances, whilst others long for death to come. Even amongst the resigned, trapped desires ‘break through’ – the life instinct battles with feelings of futility. Drawing on ‘the anthropology of becoming’, their account challenges common understandings of the inner lives of offenders convicted of serious crimes and the legitimacy of such a devastating penalty.
Anna L. Jordan describes the ‘moral confinement’ her interlocutor, Sam, experiences on his release from a 16-year prison term in California. She encountered him from her ethnographic ‘home base’ – a non-profit support and rehabilitation centre in the community – in what is a beautifully described period of immersion in the lives and struggles of ex-prisoners in a state that boasts of high incarceration. She traces the ‘less visible dimensions of penal power and their lived effects as they surface in post-prison life’, explaining Sam's moral disorientation, sadness, and ‘low grade anguish’. His punishment is never over. How does a person establish a moral identity in a world from which they are forever excluded? His very choice to live in a hostel managed outside the Corrections Department's reach, where he could be both vulnerable and sober, and leave his former world behind, was part of his ‘moral project’. Anna shows how a moral value, such as gratitude for his newfound freedom, becomes distorted or translated by penal logics – turned into a moral demand. It is owed and he is subjugated. The prison ‘echoes’ in ways that ‘thwart individual efforts at ethical self-development’. As she puts it, ‘moral life even after incarceration is enmeshed with the carceral regime’ (Jordan, 2024). There is both banishment and unending grip.
Julienne Weegels describes the tensions between a penal system designed to impose a political framework and reeducate its outliers into conformity, and the efforts made by political prisoners and their families to challenge this framework, from inside and outside prison. Her account of the recent history and politics of the penal system in Nicaragua, linked to the repression of protest outside the prison, add moral complexity to the requirements penal systems make on prisoners. There are varied ‘moral assemblages’ accessible by prisoners, which shape their experiences. These include resources on offer from non-state actors, family members, religious institutions, educational, sports and cultural volunteers. She illustrates how incarcerated people's understandings of personal change can differ from those of the state, itself involved in a kind of ‘performative battle for legitimacy’. This comes at the cost of the human, civil and political rights of its civilians. Her account shows how political contexts ‘structure certain moral and ethical potentialities within confinement’ (Weegels, 2025).
Ryan Williams revisits Sykes’ classic description of the prisoner social-moral world in light of his studies of Muslim identities in and out of high-security prisons. The original tendency in prison sociology to pay narrow analytical attention to a single, dominating inmate code is no longer useful or appropriate. He shows that the study of morality in prison could be reinvigorated by more contemporary analyses of how prisoners deliberate upon, adopt, contest, or innovate around those codes, only some of which remain viable. He suggests that the ‘real man’ is no longer the epicentre of the inmate code, but traits of the real man, revised with ethno-religious features, nevertheless remain detectable. Codes from the street are still imported, but they must ‘contend with overlapping and contrasting codes and moral discourses that prisoners need to navigate across the vectors of authorities and other prisoners’ (Williams, 2025). Islamic morality in prison can have coercive edges, for example, particularly in high-security prisons, but these edges are navigated in deliberative ways by individual prisoners. The contemporary prison experience is ‘characterised by multiple, overlapping morality systems’, some of which are ‘bound to forms of governance that rearranged the ethico-political experience of imprisonment along racial and religious lines’. Prison sociologists need new forms of expertise: In religious and critical race studies, for example, to ‘read’ the modern prison. We certainly found this in our most recent studies of relationships between prisoners, and staff and prisoners, in high-security prisons (Liebling and Williams, 2018; Williams and Liebling, 2022).
Jago Wyssling describes the ‘fragmented personhood’ of dementia patients in a Swiss nursing home (Wyssling, 2025). He begins with a powerful vignette – a dialogue – on who this woman ‘used to be’. He sees plainly how she still ‘is’, asking how staff navigate the ethical lives of people with different degrees of dementia. Professional nursing staff create moments of autonomy and consent in everyday processes but on a tightrope in which sometimes families’ needs present moral challenges. Who is personhood ‘tethered to’ in these moments? Personhood is created for rather than by the patient, according to the often implicit frameworks of staff. This is inevitably hazardous. Jago's thoughtful account raises many questions about why any welfare or public institution should be ‘understaffed and overworked’, given the impact of such states on the quality of front-line staff decision-making. Why has this damaging state of affairs become the norm? Wyssling ends his analysis by raising the challenging question of how researchers try to ‘construct autonomous ethical subjects’ in our research projects. In the same way, he describes here, we sometimes risk blurring the lines between ‘giving a voice’ to our participants and ‘making them speak’ when we choose a particular framework. Personhood is fragile enough under conditions of confinement. It takes special care to guard against further infringements. The concept of personhood has a central place in moral theorising, and moral experience, that we should take utterly seriously. When we study persons in confinement, we always risk trespassing upon rather than validating it.
This raises one of the basic questions implicit in this themed volume of how good, critical, relevant research in institutions of confinement gets done, particularly in an accelerating, over-burdened, risk-averse and cash-strapped academic setting. We see here the value of anthropological approaches to the field, but also some of the difficulties of doing it well and up close without causing harm, or without running up against top-down, narrowly conceived methodological constraints. There is also the problem of risk, exacerbated by disintegrating prison regimes, and the disappearance of staff from chaotic landings. 2 The authors together illustrate the case for longer temporal frameworks, wider geographical reach, and a broader concept of confinement to be adopted in our field. But there is also a strong case for more intimate, imaginative and open-ended research in specific locations than current trends allow. We need better designed and supported ethnographic and longitudinal studies if we want to know ‘what sort of moral life’ prison makes possible, ‘inside and outside its walls’ (Ievins, 2024: 943). Sometimes small, integrated teams manage this better than lone scholars. Using a methodology I refer to as ethnography-led measurement, my work suggests that different kinds of prisons lead to very different forms of moral possibility: most prisons are morally corrosive and hard to survive; some – the rare exceptions – can contribute to personal growth and expansion. These prisons tend to be full of generous human gestures, responsiveness, a strong sense of human potential, and opportunities to find or reassemble the self (Liebling, in progress). Katherine Auty and I have shown that prisons have to be above a certain moral threshold for any of this to be possible (Auty and Liebling, 2024). Very few prisons reach this state, for reasons we need to be more explicit about. Good prisons are, in a sense, ‘anti-prisons’ (Gilligan and Lee, 2004).
Being a good enough witness to the experiences of the confined takes time, flexibility, care, a kind of quiet attentiveness, and courage, as well as well-designed methodologies translated back into ordinary human practices. It requires us to stay in tensions (e.g. between certainty and uncertainty, distance and proximity, sadness and determination) that can feel disturbing. The process may take us to our own limits: Good research requires not just the use, but the development, of our capacities.
When reading these papers, I found myself reflecting on the value of philosophy teaching in prison, and the role of higher education and the arts more generally in stimulating life-affirming engagement in the worlds of culture and learning. How many lives have been transformed through the discovery of pleasure in creativity, craft, horticulture, cuisine, caring for birds of prey, or the many other examples of making and skills development that could radically redefine the experience of punishment? What does this tell us about what facilitates the flourishing rather than destruction of human beings? Why do we create the opposite of growth and repair, politically? I thought about the work of the Forgiveness Project and other restorative justice initiatives, as promising antidotes to the empty space Laursen and Mjåland describe, especially in the absence of a more professionalised role for prison staff, whose contribution to better prisons is so underestimated. As long as we have prisons, we should campaign for their improvement as well as for drastic reductions in their use. The fundamental question as to the moral meaning and effects of punishment, in both theory and practice, remains vital.
David Garland called punishment a ‘tragic social institution’ (1990: 292): a flawed and morally contradictory solution to problems of conflict, regulation and social relations. Those of us who study or work in prisons often feel as well as describe the shape and impact of those moral contradictions. It is salutary that ex-prison officer Alex South has used the term ‘moral injury’ to describe the experience of staff working in unsafe, dangerous prisons: alienated from their own morality or professional standards, they try to get to the end of each day without losing a life, but suffer the consequences in elevated rates of suicide, alcohol addiction, breakdown, or domestic violence (2024). Some staff, and prisoners, describe contemporary prisons as like war zones. They feel, but cannot express, something like betrayal and existential confusion. In Rethinking Punishment, Leo Zaibert specifies the nature of punishment's failure – it does not resolve tragic matters neatly but leaves ‘moral remainders’: Prisoners, punishers, staff working in institutions, victims and families suffer as a result of incoherent or gratuitous sanctions that no-one can make constructive or healing (2018). In courts, complex human lives become reduced to simplified narratives and then to ‘legally relevant facts’ in an adversarial, bureaucratic process that most of those on the receiving end cannot understand and feel alienated by (see, e.g. Minissale, 2023). Then they spend meaningless time in prisons that don’t function safely or legitimately. How much justice is delivered by criminal justice, or penal sanctions, in the end?
Developments in moral anthropological literature have revitalised the field of prison studies, as some other recent collections and contributions suggest (e.g. Bottoms and Jacobs, 2023). Seeing the prison – the institution and the experience – through a moral lens is one of the most promising of these recent developments. Zigon's term ‘moral assemblages’ is helpful (what comes to count?), as it reminds us both of the continuities between prisons and the world outside, and of the need to reassess how the way we think about punishment, or position it politically, shapes prisons in thoughtless but profound ways (2010).
There has been a significant shift in the centre of gravity about the moral life, not just in anthropology, away from the moment of moral decision or choice (the subject that has long preoccupied moral philosophers) towards a more embedded notion of how we attend to and make sense of the world, and in what ways we are morally at stake in it, as well as the ways in which we fail (e.g. Tessman, 2015, Mattingly, 2014). These themes always were present in the work of neglected philosophers like Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Phillippa Foot and Elisabeth Anscombe (see e.g. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, 2022; Lipscombe, 2022). It is encouraging that a major revival of grounded ethical theory or moral anthropology seems to be underway. Penology needs to reach beyond its typical partner disciplines (e.g. in psychology and sociology) to tackle these pressing kinds of questions.
This volume is a promising example of what I call ‘moral social scholarship’ (Liebling, in progress). It shows the extent to which our moral lives are real and can be studied empirically. Moral values show up whenever we study the human world closely and in person-centred ways, but they show up with particular starkness when we study places of confinement and dehumanisation. Perhaps we would use prisons less if we understood better the deep pains and sufferings of those who endure, or visit, prisons, and the utter pointlessness of confining human beings to cramped and empty spaces. I do not mean to be sentimental about what prisons contain: Violence should trouble us, but we need to find better collective solutions or responses to it, including prevention. We should acknowledge the extent to which we increasingly use imprisonment for purposes well beyond the immediate management of risk.
Our subject has become even more demanding, challenging and important to study well as the ways in which we punish deepen and proliferate. The kinds of studies represented here take ethical imagination, time, freedom from rigid methodologies, and care. Carrying them out well, and discovering their meaning, takes a community. Thank you to Alice and Ryan for helping to build such a space.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
