2025/01/01 by Lucy Campbell · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies #Law in Society and Culture #Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
paper · doi:10.1525/joae.2025.6.2.227
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In this article I use autoethnography to explore some of my experiences that occurred while I was imprisoned in five prisons in Mexico. These experiences focus on affect and look to examine how affect manifests and is felt within a female prison environment and in the traumatized spaces and places of prison. In 2004, I was arrested in Mexico for transporting controlled substances across international borders. I served my ten-year sentence in various prisons both abroad and in the UK and they all felt different; they each had a flavor, a felt affective experience that was only sensed as qualia, a sensuous quality of feeling.1 This sensuous quality of feeling varied in its type and intensity depending on the space, place, and the mix of people in it. Prison for me was a rollercoaster of affective encounters, each prison both holding its own affective energy as well as holding the women who channeled it.