Share this Post

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.

Federica Coppola is Associate Professor of Law at IE University. Prior to joining IE, she was Senior Researcher in the Dept. of Criminal Law at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law, where she currently is a Research Affiliate.

She holds a JD summa cum laude from University of Bologna, an LL.M in International, Comparative, and European Laws, and a PhD in Law from the European University Institute. Following her PhD, she was Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University in New York, a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, and a postdoc scholar at Columbia University’s Social Relations Lab & the Center for Justice. Over the course of her career, she has held visiting positions at University of Pennsylvania Law School, the UPenn Center for Neuroscience and Society, the Institute of Criminology at University of Cambridge, and Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge. She has also taught lessons of justice and psychology in detention facilities in New York City and Freiburg.

Professor Coppola’s research and teaching interests include criminal law theory, sentencing and punishment, criminal constitutional law, criminal and social justice, and neurolaw. Her work has been featured in journals such as the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Criminal Law and Philosophy, the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, the UCL Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law. She is the author of “The Emotional Brain and the Guilty Mind: Novel Paradigms of Culpability and Punishment” (Hart Publishing, 2021) and the co-editor of “Social Rehabilitation and Criminal Justice” (Routledge, in press). Her second monograph, “The Real Pain of Punishment: Eradicating Social Exclusion from Criminal Justice”, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.