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

Christina Valeska Straub

Apr 2021 · Vernon Press

About this ebook

While the importance of love is rarely questioned, the effects of its presence and absence in certain environments often goes unnoticed. This book analyses the role of love in the lives of prisoners in a low security English prison. It seeks to provide a deeper insight into the meaning and role of love as a dual concept in the social-ecology of human existence, human development and well-being, and sets out to encourage a critical and practical (re)consideration of the potential benefits of love´s (re)inclusion into the prison set-up and purpose.

This qualitative multidisciplinary analysis – based on psychological, moral philosophical, neuroscientific, and sociological literature – will appeal to postgraduates and early career researchers across the social sciences, as well practitioners of Criminal Justice and others interested in offender rehabilitation, and the effects of prison.

About the author

Dr Christina Straub’s vocation is centred around qualitative social research. She graduated as a Cultural Scientist at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the European-University-Viadrina, Germany, in 2009 with an ethnographic study about the construction of individual identity in the subculture of Hot Rodding.

Her first post-graduation employment led her to work as full-time Research Assistant for the Prisons Research Centre at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Together with Professor Alison Liebling and Helen Arnold she conducted a study from 2009-2011 about staff-prisoner-relationships in a high-security prison commissioned by the UK Home Office. She also completed a qualitative evaluation of RESTORE for London-based charity The Forgiveness Project. As a Senior Research Assistant at Southampton Law School she was involved in an ESRC-funded impact project in collaboration with the Prison Reform Trust, supervised by Dr Harry Annison on the pains and needs of families of people serving an Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection (IPP).