How incarcerated women experience sport in prison: A systematic review of qualitative studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous sociological research on sport in prisons has primarily focused on the male prison population. Against this background, this article deals with sport in women's prisons and analyzes qualitative studies published in English and German since the turn of the millennium in the form of a systematic review. The focus is on how incarcerated women experience and reflect on sport in prison and what meanings they attach to sport, according to previous studies. The aim of the review is to present overarching, recurring findings on this question. Through a systematic literature search in the databases Web of Science, ERIC, and SURF, we identified 13 qualitative studies that met our inclusion criteria. At a superordinate level, our comparative analysis shows that imprisoned women have contrasting perceptions of sport in prison. On the one hand, some imprisoned women experience sport in an extremely positive way, insofar as: (a) through sport, they gain health-promoting experiences; (b) sport helps them to cope with imprisonment; and (c) through sport, they gain self-esteem-boosting experiences and perceive personal development. Sport therefore proves to be a positive experiential space in some cases. On the other hand, sport is sometimes experienced negatively by imprisoned women insofar as: (a) they experience interpersonal and emotional tensions; (b) they experience body-image discomfort and trauma associated with participating in sport; and (c) they have to accept unpleasant structures and male ideas of sport. Sport therefore also proves to be a negative experiential space in some cases. Our review provides evidence that incarcerated women experience sport in prison in a much more negative way than men and at the same time provides background information for the low level of sport participation among imprisoned women reported in previous studies. Important implications for the implementation of sports programs in women's prisons can be derived from our findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".