By Dot Goulding
RRP $49.95 (incl gst) ISBN 9781876067182

Recapturing Freedom is about the experience of long-term prisoners as they prepare for release. Dot Goulding shows the connection between the institutionalisation that strips inmates of their identity in order to make them tractable, and their subsequent, all-too-common failure to cope with life on the outside.

Her book is based on extensive in-depth interviews with male and female prisoners. Recurring themes are the relentless surveillance and control to which prisoners are subjected, and the centrality of violence and brutalisation in the prison experience – group violence, sexual violence and, according to the interviewees, violence which is officially sanctioned.

Recapturing Freedom shows why most long-term prisoners find freedom so hard to recapture – physically free but mentally still locked into a subculture of brutality, isolation and deprivation, it is most often prison that recaptures them.

Goulding finishes her book with suggestions on how, taking account of the actual experiences of prisoners, this endless cycle of recidivism might be stopped.

Institute of Criminology Series No 24 2008

This book can be ordered from Federation Press.