ABSTRACT
The “pains of incarceration,” as articulated by Gresham Sykes, provided a subjective perspective on the experience of punishment in the twentieth century. As understood by Sykes, the pains of imprisonment ranged from the loss of freedom to the denial of heterosexual contact. Brutal physical punishment, while not entirely eliminated from today’s penal practice, has at least been largely diminished in the modern Western prison. However, the punishment of the body by the constraint of touch, now recognized as a fundamental human need, represents a domain of penal suffering that is little considered in the literature. Prohibitions on human contact within the prison are derived from cultural assumptions about male aggression and criminal misbehavior, where touch may lead to assault. These same guidelines are routinely imposed in women’s prisons, such that the law interprets touch and human physical contact as risky and illegitimate despite far lower levels of violence and criminal misbehavior in women’s prisons. This paper explores the prohibition on touch in women’s prisons, especially the tactile and emotional contact between human beings that meets important psycho-social needs. The law denies this essential human experience of emotive touch while permitting forms of punitive touch – strip searches, cell extractions, body cavity searches, and some medical procedures that are used by staff to control prisoners. This paper explores restrictions on touch that underlie routine prison practice and what these practices mean in the context of women’s incarceration.
