The Experience of Prison in Finnish Female Inmates’ Letters from the 1880s to the 1900s

In this chapter, Johanna Annola explores Finnish female inmates’ experiences of prison by analyzing their letters. The letters were written in the 1880s to the early 1900s to the directress of a Christian shelter for women. Annola suggests that even though prisoners did not always describe their lives in detail, their experiences of carceral TimeSpace are embedded in their letters as choices of cultural scripts. The letters also reveal entanglements between the present institution (the prison) and the absent institution (the shelter). These entanglements hint at the accumulation of carceral layers in the minds and bodies of the writers. Annola suggests that while the carceral layers produced an institutional burden, they also carried information that could be used to develop coping methods and survival strategies.