Ben Laws
Biographic Data
| ID | 5238154 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Laws |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Laws |
| SIGNATURE | BEN LAWS |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1126-2236 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Asylum and Nonreligion
This book examines the challenges of nonreligious asylum seekers, based on two years of fieldwork in Sweden, The Netherlands, and Norway.It highlights the unique difficulties they face, such as being incorrectly assimilated with religious converts, evidencing their non-belief, and the stereotypes that undermine their claims.Despite international human rights protections, nonreligious individuals often struggle within asylum systems due to biases …
Self-generated asylum evidence
The demonstrable rise in self-generated asylum evidence—most typically via social media—is in need of explication. Drawing on cases from ethnographic research in Sweden this article sets out to understand why asylum seekers turn to extreme forms of activity such as filming themselves burning the Quran. It appears that such ‘staged’ evidence is most often born out of a sense of emotional desperation in the face of a stone-wall assessment system wh…
Caged Emotions
‘King, Warrior, Magician, Lover’
Typologies of prison life in men’s establishments have tended to emphasize the most desolate features of prison life such as aggression, violence, exploitation, and stark displays of individualism. Without seeking to contradict these positions, we suggest that competing narratives of care are also operating in male establishments in England and Wales. Through combining data from two recent, but separate, semi-ethnographic studies of prison life i…
Caged Emotions
Segregation Seekers
Recent calls from senior managers, human rights groups and academics continue to scrutinize the impact of solitary confinement. But much less attention has been paid to prisoners’ own motivations for segregation. By analysing interviews with 16 segregated men in a high-security prison (Category-A) in England, this article foregrounds motivation. The argument involves a detailed description of the complex, and sometimes contradictory, motives that…
Liminality revisited
This article draws on interview data with women in two prisons in the UK to understand the emotionally nuanced and sensorially attuned relationship between confined individuals and carceral space. The article presents an ‘emotional map’ comprising: (i) living or ‘being’ spaces; (ii) free places; and (iii) ‘therapeutic spaces’ in prisons.This tri-spatial thematic analysis enables us to use Victor Turner’s concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ …
Reimaging ‘the Self’ in Criminology
Notions of ‘the self’ in criminology are rarely explored or defined, which is surprising given how pervasively the term is used. According to narrative criminology, the self is generated and moulded by the stories we tell; our identity emerges through narrative scripts and these stories motivate future action. But this understanding of selfhood is quite narrow. This article attempts to widen it by separating selfhood into three categories: ‘the r…
The return of the suppressed
Prisons research is familiar with the idea that prisoners ‘mask’ their feelings. But this behaviour is often characterised as a social defence mechanism, or a product of prison masculinity, rather than a deeply embedded psychosocial strategy forged over time. The term ‘emotional suppression’ is introduced as a way of better exploring the ‘biographical depth' of this behaviour. This article aims to outline why both male ( n = 25) and female prison…
Subcultural Adaptations to Incarceration
This essay discusses the evolution of the understanding of inmate subcultures in US prisons. It provides a selective description of historically and geographically specific “models” of inmate subcultures, both to highlight the range of social and subcultural arrangements in prisons and to explain why such variation exists and what questions should be asked of any descriptive account of the prisoner social world. Emphasis is placed on the heteroge…
Honour and respect in Danish prisons
Using empirical data from prison-based cognitive-behavioural programmes, this article considers how prisoners’ subcultural capital shapes their responses to demands for ‘cognitive self-change’. We argue that accounts of ‘respect’ in the prior literature fail to capture how prisoners react to these programmes, and that a discussion of honour (and what we term ‘respect plus’) needs to be incorporated. The empirical material derives from four differ…
Emotion regulation among male prisoners
Prior research consistently documents that prisons are emotionally fraught places where successful adaptation depends, in part, on prisoners’ abilities to calibrate their emotional expressions and display strategies. Yet these accounts have largely overlooked theoretical insights from the psychological literature on emotion which can develop our understanding of exactly how and why prisoners regulate their emotions. By combining Gross and Thompso…
Emotion regulation among male prisoners
Prior research consistently documents that prisons are emotionally fraught places where successful adaptation depends, in part, on prisoners’ abilities to calibrate their emotional expressions and display strategies. Yet these accounts have largely overlooked theoretical insights from the psychological literature on emotion which can develop our understanding of exactly how and why prisoners regulate their emotions. By combining Gross and Thompso…
The return of the suppressed
Prisons research is familiar with the idea that prisoners ‘mask’ their feelings. But this behaviour is often characterised as a social defence mechanism, or a product of prison masculinity, rather than a deeply embedded psychosocial strategy forged over time. The term ‘emotional suppression’ is introduced as a way of better exploring the ‘biographical depth' of this behaviour. This article aims to outline why both male ( n = 25) and female prison…
Liminality revisited
This article draws on interview data with women in two prisons in the UK to understand the emotionally nuanced and sensorially attuned relationship between confined individuals and carceral space. The article presents an ‘emotional map’ comprising: (i) living or ‘being’ spaces; (ii) free places; and (iii) ‘therapeutic spaces’ in prisons.This tri-spatial thematic analysis enables us to use Victor Turner’s concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ …
Reimaging ‘the Self’ in Criminology
Notions of ‘the self’ in criminology are rarely explored or defined, which is surprising given how pervasively the term is used. According to narrative criminology, the self is generated and moulded by the stories we tell; our identity emerges through narrative scripts and these stories motivate future action. But this understanding of selfhood is quite narrow. This article attempts to widen it by separating selfhood into three categories: ‘the r…
Honour and respect in Danish prisons
Using empirical data from prison-based cognitive-behavioural programmes, this article considers how prisoners’ subcultural capital shapes their responses to demands for ‘cognitive self-change’. We argue that accounts of ‘respect’ in the prior literature fail to capture how prisoners react to these programmes, and that a discussion of honour (and what we term ‘respect plus’) needs to be incorporated. The empirical material derives from four differ…
Segregation Seekers
Recent calls from senior managers, human rights groups and academics continue to scrutinize the impact of solitary confinement. But much less attention has been paid to prisoners’ own motivations for segregation. By analysing interviews with 16 segregated men in a high-security prison (Category-A) in England, this article foregrounds motivation. The argument involves a detailed description of the complex, and sometimes contradictory, motives that…
Emotion regulation among male prisoners
Prior research consistently documents that prisons are emotionally fraught places where successful adaptation depends, in part, on prisoners’ abilities to calibrate their emotional expressions and display strategies. Yet these accounts have largely overlooked theoretical insights from the psychological literature on emotion which can develop our understanding of exactly how and why prisoners regulate their emotions. By combining Gross and Thompso…
Subcultural Adaptations to Incarceration
This essay discusses the evolution of the understanding of inmate subcultures in US prisons. It provides a selective description of historically and geographically specific “models” of inmate subcultures, both to highlight the range of social and subcultural arrangements in prisons and to explain why such variation exists and what questions should be asked of any descriptive account of the prisoner social world. Emphasis is placed on the heteroge…
Honour and respect in Danish prisons
Using empirical data from prison-based cognitive-behavioural programmes, this article considers how prisoners’ subcultural capital shapes their responses to demands for ‘cognitive self-change’. We argue that accounts of ‘respect’ in the prior literature fail to capture how prisoners react to these programmes, and that a discussion of honour (and what we term ‘respect plus’) needs to be incorporated. The empirical material derives from four differ…
The return of the suppressed
Prisons research is familiar with the idea that prisoners ‘mask’ their feelings. But this behaviour is often characterised as a social defence mechanism, or a product of prison masculinity, rather than a deeply embedded psychosocial strategy forged over time. The term ‘emotional suppression’ is introduced as a way of better exploring the ‘biographical depth' of this behaviour. This article aims to outline why both male ( n = 25) and female prison…
Liminality revisited
This article draws on interview data with women in two prisons in the UK to understand the emotionally nuanced and sensorially attuned relationship between confined individuals and carceral space. The article presents an ‘emotional map’ comprising: (i) living or ‘being’ spaces; (ii) free places; and (iii) ‘therapeutic spaces’ in prisons.This tri-spatial thematic analysis enables us to use Victor Turner’s concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ …
Reimaging ‘the Self’ in Criminology
Notions of ‘the self’ in criminology are rarely explored or defined, which is surprising given how pervasively the term is used. According to narrative criminology, the self is generated and moulded by the stories we tell; our identity emerges through narrative scripts and these stories motivate future action. But this understanding of selfhood is quite narrow. This article attempts to widen it by separating selfhood into three categories: ‘the r…
Segregation Seekers
Recent calls from senior managers, human rights groups and academics continue to scrutinize the impact of solitary confinement. But much less attention has been paid to prisoners’ own motivations for segregation. By analysing interviews with 16 segregated men in a high-security prison (Category-A) in England, this article foregrounds motivation. The argument involves a detailed description of the complex, and sometimes contradictory, motives that…
Caged Emotions
‘King, Warrior, Magician, Lover’
Typologies of prison life in men’s establishments have tended to emphasize the most desolate features of prison life such as aggression, violence, exploitation, and stark displays of individualism. Without seeking to contradict these positions, we suggest that competing narratives of care are also operating in male establishments in England and Wales. Through combining data from two recent, but separate, semi-ethnographic studies of prison life i…
Caged Emotions
Asylum and Nonreligion
This book examines the challenges of nonreligious asylum seekers, based on two years of fieldwork in Sweden, The Netherlands, and Norway.It highlights the unique difficulties they face, such as being incorrectly assimilated with religious converts, evidencing their non-belief, and the stereotypes that undermine their claims.Despite international human rights protections, nonreligious individuals often struggle within asylum systems due to biases …
Self-generated asylum evidence
The demonstrable rise in self-generated asylum evidence—most typically via social media—is in need of explication. Drawing on cases from ethnographic research in Sweden this article sets out to understand why asylum seekers turn to extreme forms of activity such as filming themselves burning the Quran. It appears that such ‘staged’ evidence is most often born out of a sense of emotional desperation in the face of a stone-wall assessment system wh…
Criminology (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Prison (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending (5 works) · Homelessness and Social Issues (4 works)