Incarcerated women’s cooking and eating practices in a ‘humane’ Danish open prison

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine incarcerated women’s cooking and eating practices in a Danish open prison to gain insight into the Nordic penal exceptionalism debate. Self-catering and the policy of normalization, which dictates that prison conditions be as similar as possible to conditions outside the prison, have been seen by some as evidence of humane prison conditions. This article draws on three months of ethnographic fieldwork to argue that incarcerated women in a mixed-gender Danish open prison use cooking and eating to display family, articulate allegiance, and negotiate relations of exchange. Incarcerated women used food preparation to maintain relationships with family and negotiate relationships with other prisoners, yet data also reveal the ways in which incarceration and turnover profoundly strained these relationships. I argue that self-catering is worth emulating while emphasizing the limitations of labelling it humane and propose that turnover deserves further research.