Television, Emotion and Prison Life: Achieving Personal Control

This article describes the precarious and sensitive relationship prisoners have with television; it focuses exclusively on the voices of male prisoners to identify how they relate to their viewing experiences within the prison space. This article foregrounds the chief emotional responses prisoners articulated in relation to both prison life and television; boredom, frustration, and happiness. This discussion offers readers an emotive perspective on the ‘pains of imprisonment’ (Sykes 1999). This typology has traditionally underplayed the role of affect. Like other recent prison research this paper calls for a centring of emotion to more fully understand imprisonment. Television plays an important and valuable tool for prisoners’ coping strategies. It is co-opted as a therapeutic tool or ‘protective device’ (Layder 2004:26) to mitigate against the harms of daily life and supply social and psychological nourishment within the prison space.