This chapter examines the normative implications of understanding the pain of incarceration not merely as a deprivation of liberty but as a systematic threat to the fundamental human need to belong. In particular, it asks whether a punishment can ever legitimately deprive a person of a human need so essential to survival – on a par with food or water – and critical to human flourishing. In response, the chapter advances the view that belonging is a constitutive component of human dignity and contends that this recognition provides the foundation for a “right to belong,” including within the carceral context. The discussion then situates belonging within penal theory and conventional justifications for punishment, demonstrating how attention to both the nature of this need and its centrality to human dignity prompts a critical reassessment of the normative justifiability of imprisonment under core penological goals, while also inviting broader reflection on the relationship between punishment and pain. Finally, the chapter considers the implications for penal practice, considering how acknowledgment and protection of the need – and its potentially corresponding right – to belong might shape assessments of imprisonment along two dimensions of penal legitimacy: sentencing severity and the (in)humanity of prison conditions.

The Real Pain of Punishment explores the true pains of incarceration using insights from empirical sciences and people with lived prison experiences. The book highlights the concept of “belonging” as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly incarcerated in a New York State facility, reflects on how embracing belonging within penal approaches can inform responses to harm grounded in humanization, proximity, empowerment, and collaboration. With this chapter and more, the book advances a call for deeper epistemic dialogue within legal discourse on crime, punishment, and justice. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

What would it take to build a belonging-oriented criminal justice system? In this chapter, I explore this question with five system-impacted scholars with living or lived experience at a New York State facility. Together, we map pathways for the changes needed to create a penal system capable of reconciling the demands of individual justice and public safety with a more humane and dignified approach to those in conflict with the law. The chapter centers on three interrelated themes. Humanization calls for understanding human behavior, including criminal conduct, across a person’s lifespan, taking into account individual, social, and structural factors that shape developmental trajectories and support the capacity for change. Proximity entails dismantling structural, moral, and epistemic barriers to collaborative dialogue on justice matters. It seeks to create spaces where diverse voices converge to advance solutions to social harms that foster accountability, prevention, and reparation, while challenging prejudice and distrust. Epistemic empowerment involves incorporating the perspectives of (formerly) incarcerated individuals into theoretical and practical inquiries regarding offending, imprisonment, and legal system reform, recognizing the significance of their contributions to civic, legal, and political conversations about justice and change. The chapter operationalizes the epistemic recognition of lived experience in legal discourse on crime and punishment, advancing a vision of justice that embraces the transformative value of belonging.

The Real Pain of Punishment explores the true pains of incarceration using insights from empirical sciences and people with lived prison experiences. The book highlights the concept of “belonging” as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly incarcerated in a New York State facility, reflects on how embracing belonging within penal approaches can inform responses to harm grounded in humanization, proximity, empowerment, and collaboration. With this chapter and more, the book advances a call for deeper epistemic dialogue within legal discourse on crime, punishment, and justice. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This chapter integrates empirical research on the pains of imprisonment with psychological and neuroscientific insights into the nature, sources, and effects of social pain, including its connection to the fundamental human need to belong. It argues that social pain provides a comprehensive framework for situating the pains of imprisonment – outlined in Chapter 3– within a unified conceptual construct. This argument rests on three interrelated premises. First, the contexts of exclusion that elicit social pain – social isolation, rejection, and ostracism – closely mirror the layers of exclusion that define the various domains of prison life. Second, the effects of social pain – particularly when pervasive or prolonged – on psychological well-being, behavior, and health significantly overlap with those documented among incarcerated individuals, both during and after imprisonment. Third, the psychological mechanisms that lead people to cause social pain in others, while underestimating its consequences, similarly underpin the logic of punishment, including the tendency to minimize the actual harms of the prison experience. Building on these premises, the chapter develops the book’s central claim: that the real pain of carceral punishment ultimately resides in the systematic threat to the fundamental human need to belong.

This chapter “enters” the prison and examines the extensive body of empirical literature documenting the pains of imprisonment. Given the breadth of research, the analysis is necessarily selective, focusing on the principal frameworks through which these pains have been studied and classified across different populations and institutional settings. The chapter organizes these experiences into four interrelated domains that shape prison environments: deprivation, space and time, power, and relationships. While acknowledging variability across individuals and contexts, it emphasizes that prison pains most often manifest as severe psychological distress, accompanied by feelings of loneliness, disempowerment, dehumanization, and self-stigma, with profound implications for one’s sense of social self. Crucially, these pains do not stem necessarily from overt abuses or extraordinary deprivations. Rather, the diffuse combination of social isolation, lack of recognition, denied agency, neglect, and pervasive distrust renders imprisonment a chronically stressful and potentially traumatic experience. These factors, the chapter contends, are profoundly consequential because they undermine the fulfillment of basic social needs grounded in the fundamental human need to belong.

This chapter examines the principal philosophical debates surrounding the nature, function, and justification of pain in state-imposed punishment. It begins by analyzing the relationship between hard treatment and pain, including longstanding disputes over whether hard treatment must be intended to cause suffering and whether it must, in fact, be experienced as painful by those subjected to it. The chapter then considers the role of penal pain within expressivist and communicative theories and examines its justification within the dominant deontological and consequentialist frameworks. A central theme of the chapter is that, despite the prominence of pain in punishment, its precise character remains undertheorized. Few accounts engage directly with the kind of pain that punishment does – or ought to – inflict. The chapter argues that this conceptual opacity stems, in part, from penal theory’s tendency to abstract from concrete practices, treating punishment as a uniform response to crime rather than as a practice embedded in social and institutional realities. One of the most significant – and contentious – of these realities is prison.