Sharing Imprisonment

This chapter focuses on prisoners and relatives’ narratives to analyse how they negotiate relationships in the shadow of prison and to explore their views on the relational, familial, social, and economic implications of imprisonment. The analysis is based in the Portuguese context, as it is a country that has been witnessing a substantial increase in the prison population. Among the information publicly available about the socio-demographic characterization of the Portuguese prison population, there is no data on family-related dimensions. The absence of a method that collects, analyses, and disseminates information about the familial situation of prisoners is representative of the invisibility of the theme on the public debate. Moreover, this chapter is the first in-depth and comprehensive Portuguese research that jointly takes into consideration prisoners and relatives views’ on the social and familial implications of imprisonment.