Abstract
Despite the increase in the number of prisoners in the UK dying from natural causes, these deaths are rarely researched and receive little public attention. This chapter establishes the relevance and need for this book in contemporary prison studies, using government data and existing scholarship to demonstrate the importance of considering deaths from natural causes in prison. It sets out the approach that will be taken, introduces the fieldwork used to collect the ethnographic data which informs the analysis to follow and reflects on the author’s status as an ‘insider’. The reader is introduced to five pseudonymised prisoners whose experiences illuminate key issues in deaths from natural causes in prison custody.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2015).
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Robinson, C. (2023). Introduction. In: Dying in Prison. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27103-8_1
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