For decades, literature has traced the pains of prison life. Prison research, in many ways, has become saturated with the ‘pains of imprisonment’, with extensive literature exploring the concept of penal harm and its enduring impacts upon the individual. Whilst foundational, this focus has limited prison research, and has overlooked the everyday methods through which individuals respond to, and manage these pains. Drawing on diary entries written by a Black, religious, foreign national father incarcerated in England, this article asserts that imprisonment is not always without reaction. Disrupting dominant narratives in current prison literature, we present empirical evidence of ‘mature coping’, first introduced by Johnson and Dobrzanska to highlight productive and responsive prison experiences. We also foreground diaries as a unique insight into coping practices, advocating for their use in criminological research to better understand the intricacies of prison life.
Pritchard et al. (Sun,) studied this question.