Functionings and the Pains of Parental Imprisonment

Imprisonment generates polyvalent “pains”. Decades of research show these pains are embedded in the different dimensions of penal power. This article draws on interviews with 30 mothers and 30 fathers in a medium-security prison in Ghana to explore the nature of the pains experienced by parents. The parents were in prison for long sentences, an average of 6.8 years for mothers and 17.4 years for fathers. Their accounts of prison life reveal prison to be a threat to parents’ “functionings” and “ground projects”. Prisons eviscerated the lives they imagined for themselves and their families; the parents lived in constant anxiety about the well-being of their children; they feared the deterioration of the economic conditions of their children and agonized about severed relationships due partly to the prison policy of non-visits for minors. These findings have implications for the sociology of imprisonment.