Liila Holmberg’s article ”Feeling right: The lateral control of prisoners’ affective self-work in a women’s community rehabilitation unit in Finland” has been published in the international peer-reviewed journal Incarceration.
Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in a women’s community rehabilitation unit in Hämeenlinna Prison, the article examines how emotional self-work is organised and governed in contemporary rehabilitative imprisonment. The study develops the concept of affective self-work to describe forms of emotionally mediated self-governance that have become central to rehabilitative penal practices.
The findings show that emotional participation, such as openness, responsiveness, and self-disclosure, becomes a moral expectation embedded in everyday interactions. Importantly, these expectations are not enforced solely by prison staff. Instead, prisoners themselves actively monitor, evaluate, and regulate one another through processes of lateral control, extending rehabilitative aims into peer relationships.
The article contributes to international debates on rehabilitation, penal power, and prison ethnography by demonstrating how affect and emotion function as key media through which contemporary penal governance operates.
Reference
Holmberg, L. (2026). Feeling right: The lateral control of prisoners’ affective self-work in a women’s community rehabilitation unit in Finland. Incarceration, 7. https://doi.org/10.1177/26326663261488300
