‘You feel like you’re doing something’: Foodcare as a family practice in the space of the prison visiting room

Harman, V. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7296-7235, Power, E., Adams, M., Dodds, C., Garland, J. and McCarthy, D. (2025) ‘You feel like you’re doing something’: Foodcare as a family practice in the space of the prison visiting room. Current Sociology. ISSN 1461-7064 doi: 10.1177/00113921251384683

Abstract/Summary

Prison visits are important opportunities for those incarcerated to see their family members and maintain and strengthen family relationships. However, prison visits can be experienced as a stressful environment where family members lack control. This paper advances understandings of the prison visiting room as a space for foodcare – one that presents opportunities for incarcerated women and their family members to ‘re-do’ family by demonstrating care through food choices. Consuming refreshments together and purchasing items that would ‘treat’ incarcerated family members helped to evoke memories of eating together in childhood or prior to incarceration. The qualitative data from incarcerated women in a prison in England and their visiting family members documented how restrictions brought in concerning refreshments in the Covid-19 pandemic temporarily eliminated opportunities for family foodcare. Furthermore, when refreshments were re-introduced in a limited way, they were interpreted negatively due to an assumption that their pre-packaged nature meant they were lacking care, simultaneously demonstrating the social and familial importance of refreshments within the space of the prison visiting room.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/124520
Identification Number/DOI	10.1177/00113921251384683
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Politics, Economics and International Relations > Politics and International Relations
Uncontrolled Keywords	food, families, prison, qualitative, commensality
Publisher	Sage
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