ABSTRACT

On the other hand, the values of doing your time well, or at least avoiding doing your time ‘hard’, were not divorced from withstanding the pains of imprisonment and maintaining personal integrity against surveillance, correction and bodily intrusion. Rather, the infusion of these values into narratives of survival illustrated the fact that few regarded themselves as having emerged from prison unscathed or unchanged. Neither was the concept separable from the necessity of making difficult choices between conflicting positions, in dealing with problems as ‘women’ or ‘as political Volunteers’, or relinquishing those emotional attachments or aspects of the self which were connected with their penal victimization.