Love as human virtue and human need and its role in the lives of long-term prisoners - A multidisciplinary exploration

As a contribution to the effects and pains of imprisonment literature this thesis examines one influencing variable in the lives of prisoners serving long sentences in an English low security prison: the absence and presence of love. Love features throughout semi-structured interviews with 16 male long-term prisoners as a twofold social-ecological concept of human need and human virtue.

Insights into long-term prisoners´ past and present life-worlds, into the prison experience and into the meaning of outside and inside relation-ships reflect love´s dual mode of operation. On the one hand, prisoners´ narratives revolve around the pains and effects of the absence of love in early experiences of violence, abuse and trauma, as well as in their current environment. On the other hand, the presence of love features as resilience factor for getting through their sentences and as motivational power for investing in positive identities.

Furthermore, this thesis suggests a (re-)consideration of the prison experience regarding the role of love in its set-up and purpose.