The soundscape of prison life – for both inmates and staff – is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with it? This book tells the story of a year spent with a UK prison community, bringing its social world vividly to life for the first time through aural ethnography. Kate Herrity’s sensory criminology challenges current thinking on how power is experienced by the imprisoned and the lasting effects of incarceration for all who spend time in these environments.

Sensory Penalities reflects an explosion in explorations of the sensory and disrupts conventional expectations of both form and focus by expanding anthropological practices and craft into the field of criminology and criminological research. In providing accounts of physical/sensorial experiences within sites of surveillance and control, the authors in this edited collection bring elements of research experiences (often absent from existing work) to the fore; the impressions and sensual experiences which remain forever in field notes. In so doing they carve out spaces to consider these places and the ways in which they are theorised anew. The book aims to explore what sensory aspects of experience mean to those engaged in such research, and how they can shape our criminological thinking. What are the sensory textures of these experiences? What do they tell us? How do we communicate them? Finally, what does consideration of these elements tell us about penality? This timely volume challenges and remakes assumptions about what criminology is and should be; more accurately reflecting the post-disciplinary nature of the field.