Incarcerated women’s cooking and eating practices in a ‘humane’ Danish open prison

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to examine incarcerated women’s cooking and eating practices in a Danish open prison to gain insight into the Nordic penal exceptionalism debate. Self-catering and the policy of normalization, which dictates that prison conditions be as similar as possible to conditions outside the prison, have been seen by some as evidence of humane prison conditions. This article draws on three months of ethnographic fieldwork to argue that incarcerated women in a mixed-gender Danish open prison use cooking and eating to display family, articulate allegiance, and negotiate relations of exchange. Incarcerated women used food preparation to maintain relationships with family and negotiate relationships with other prisoners, yet data also reveal the ways in which incarceration and turnover profoundly strained these relationships. I argue that self-catering is worth emulating while emphasizing the limitations of labelling it humane and propose that turnover deserves further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Open prison
• Nordic penal exceptionalism
• self-catering
• women
• Denmark
• turnover

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I am not suggesting that Pratt confounds prison conditions with prisoner experience. Pratt recognizes that the experience of incarceration is complex, multi-faceted and is influenced by more than just material conditions.

2. Pratt’s two-part article series published in 2008 (J. Pratt, 2008) were based on research conducted in Finland, Norway and Sweden. Denmark was not included, despite the fact that Denmark is considered a Scandinavian country. In subsequent publications, Pratt broadened his argument to include all Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland (see Pratt & Eriksson, 2014)

3. To ensure confidentiality, the name of the prison and all of my informants have been changed. Fængslet means the prison in Danish.

4. I do not discuss officer–prisoner relationships in this article because officers were so rarely present in the kitchen.

5. Scharff Smith and Ugelvik (2017) have criticized the Nordic Penal Exceptionalism thesis for ignoring incarcerated people in remand prisons, which have some of the most challenging and restrictive prison conditions in Denmark.

6. One of the women corrected me when I referred to her as Roma, telling me, ‘no, we’re sigøjner here.’

7. Quotes that were recorded or documented word for word are presented with quotation marks and quotes that were taken over the course of participant observation are presented in italics.

8. The Danish Prison and Probation Service does not keep statistics of how many women commit crimes in collaboration with a partner or family member, however the prevalence of incarcerated couples and families during my three months of fieldwork suggests this could be a productive line of inquiry.