‘Doing’ Coercion in Male Custodial Settings

'In this fine-grained study of a correctional facility and a forensic psychiatric hospital focusing on critical situations, Luigi Gariglio shows that while inmates are doing time, officers are doing coercion. In Erving Goffman’s lineage, he makes a remarkable contribution to the growing domain of prison ethnography and provides important clues to the understanding of violence in custodial institutions.' - Didier Fassin, Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and author of Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition

'Doing Coercion is a very intriguing book for many reasons. It is an ethnography carried out in a context where it is not easy to gain access and find a proper role to remain with profit. The book triumphs in tackling a very thorny topic, namely the use of force in the daily activity of prison officers, without ethical or political prejudices. In coping with all these methodological and theoretical challenges, the author utterly succeeds.' - Mario Cardano, Turin University, Italy

'We are witnessing a prison ethnography revival. This book is a careful and engaging study of the use of power in an Italian prison. It presents a unique exploration (a ‘micro-sociology’) of the lawful yet morally problematic use of force. The author is creative and imaginative in his use of methods and scholarly in his approach to the subject. He sheds new light on the ‘traumatic and complex world’ of the prison.' - Alison Liebling, University of Cambridge, UK

'In this personal account, sociologist and photographer Luigi Gariglio muses on the nature of coercion [...]. The result of extensive ethnographic research, that combined observation, semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation, this book offers a rare glimpse of life inside these high security establishments. In its focus on Italy, it also extends the prisons literature, outside its usual Anglo-American circuit.' - Mary Bosworth, University of Oxford, UK