Abstract
A prison sentence is imbued with moral meaning about the offence which led to the punishment. However, based on interviews with prisoners serving typical sentences in England & Wales and Norway, we found that the offence was largely absent as a theme in staff-prisoner interactions during imprisonment. For some interviewees, the offence remained an absent-presence, which they tried to make sense of on their own, while others preferred to ‘get on with it’ and simply complete their sentence. We explore how the ‘absent-presence’ of the offence sometimes made punishment feel empty and meaningless, especially for prisoners who struggled to come to terms with their convictions. Drawing on the sociology of ‘nothing’ and the anthropology of ethics, we describe how the absent-presence of the offence can lead to confusion and misplaced shame, but at the same time foster positive relationships between the people who live and work in prisons.
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