Anastasia Chamberlen (Warwick Sociology) has been awarded the prestigious BSC Book Award for her book Embodying Punishment: Emotions, Identities and Lived Experiences in Women's Prisons. Published by Oxford University Press, the book offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of women's lived experiences of imprisonment in England. It puts forward a feminist critique of the prison, arguing that prisoner bodies are central to our understanding of modern punishment, and particularly of women's survival and resistance during and after prison. Drawing on a feminist phenomenological framework, Embodying Punishment revisits and expands the literature on the pains of imprisonment, and offers an interdisciplinary examination of the embodiment and identities of prisoners and former prisoners, pressing the need for a body-aware approach to criminology and penology. It brings to the fore and critically analyses longstanding and urgent problems surrounding women's multifaceted oppression through imprisonment, including matters of discriminatory and gendered treatment as well as issues around penal harm, and argues for an experientially grounded critique of punishment.

The BSC Book Prize is awarded to ‘a book which shows evidence of particular distinction and/or innovation in methodology or theorising in the general field of criminology, or in the application of criminological theory or research to crime policy or penal practice. In essence the winning book must make a valuable contribution to the further development of criminology’.