Feeling (Un)safe in Prison: A Comparative Analysis of England & Wales and Norway

Sophie Martens and Ben Crewe

The British Journal of Criminology, 2025, vol. 65, issue 3, 541-558

Abstract: While there is abundant literature on prison violence, much less has been written about how safety is perceived and conceived in prison. Even less is known about how these feelings of safety and their respective predictors may vary between prison systems. This study illustrates what predicts feelings of safety and how prisoners define and experience safety in two jurisdictions, Norway and England & Wales. The research employs a mixed-methods approach, using data from surveys (N = 984) and interviews (N = 199) from a major comparative penological project. It finds that while prisoners in Norway generally reported feeling safer than prisoners in England & Wales, the quantitative predictors of safety did not vary by jurisdiction. From a qualitative perspective, however, it was observed that prisoners in England & Wales held a more limited definition of safety (bounded safety) in which they accepted a constant need for vigilance, whereas prisoners in Norway showed more trust in their environment. This finding suggests that feelings of safety in prison may be (at least partly) context-dependent, which raises important questions regarding the much-debated ‘safety paradox’ in prison, and forms a relevant insight for future comparative work.

Keywords: prisons; Nordic exceptionalism; safety; England & Wales; Norway; mixed-methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azae064 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:crimin:v:65:y:2025:i:3:p:541-558.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The British Journal of Criminology is currently edited by Eamonn Carrabine

More articles in The British Journal of Criminology from Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().