This article develops a new theoretical framework, penal consciousness, that examines the ways in which prisoners orient to and make meaning of their punishment. Penal consciousness identifies the processes from which penality emerges by simultaneously privileging the subjective consciousness of individual prisoners and locating this consciousness within the structure of the larger carceral system. In doing so, the penal consciousness framework moves beyond the limited, objective view of punishment as legal sanction to a more expansive view of penality that privileges subjectivity and meaning. From the inductive analysis of 80 qualitative interviews with prisoners, two dimensions of punishment emerged as key to understanding penality: salience and severity. Findings reveal that severity of punishment is predicated on the level of abstraction at which punishment is experienced, while salience of punishment is determined by the ''punishment gap'' between an individual's expectations and experiences of punishment. By examining punishment as the nexus between the objective and the subjective, the penal consciousness framework enables punishment as it is understood by prisoners to differ markedly from what is conceived of as punishment by lawmakers, but at the same time to be contingent upon it. This allows punishment to be examined in situ rather than in its ideal, articulated, or abstract form-an important advancement from conventional understandings of punishment.

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Drawing on interviews with 76 prisoners, 47 prison staff, and 14 experts, we document lived experiences of punishment in the Danish prison context. We argue that, regardless of "humanizing" elements of normalization and humanity, prisoners and staff may experience the power of the carceral state in Denmark in ways similar to those under more obviously harsh confinement regimes, as exist in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the United Kingdom. Ultimately, macro-level theories like Scandinavian Exceptionalism serve as a rhetorical tool, implying that harsher prison systems are fixable, but fail to reflect the micro-level realities of incarceration.

In this article, we conjoin two long‐standing lines of inquiry in criminology—the study of prison life and the study of sexual assault—by using original qualitative and quantitative data from 315 transgender women incarcerated in 27 California men's prisons. In so doing, we advance an analysis of the factors and processes that shape their experience of sexual victimization in prison. The results of qualitative analysis of 198 reported incidents of sexual victimization exhibit a range of types of sexual victimization experienced by transgender women in prison and reveal the centrality of relationships to their experiences of victimization. Findings from logistic regression models buttress the qualitative results, highlighting a factor that consistently and powerfully indicates vulnerability to sexual victimization is involvement in consensual sexual relationships with male prisoners. Together, the data demonstrate the prominence of intimate partner violence in prison, complicate the distinction between consent and unwanted sexual experiences in the lives of transgender women in prisons for men, and shine a light on the workings of gender in a total institution that privileges heteronormativity at the expense of the safety of transgender women in prisons for men. We discuss the implications of our findings in light of timely policy concerns.

This article examines the "dilemma of difference" transgender prisoners pose and face within a sex-segregated prison system organized around the pursuit of safety and security. Our analysis uses data from a study of the culture and experiences of transgender prisoners in four men's prisons. Using qualitative data from interviews with transgender prisoners, focus groups with prisoners, and focus groups with staff, our findings reveal a common contention that transgender prisoners are (according to staff) and should be (according to prisoners) treated like everyone else, despite their unique situations. This further demonstrates the stakes that this dilemma carries for the prison regime and transgender prisoners' roles in challenging it without engaging in overt resistance-which carries high stakes for them. Accordingly, we elucidate how the rigidity of an institutional structure built on inherent contradictions can have the potential to complicate the achievement of institutional goals.