Layered abandonment: The moral interpretation of suffering in extreme confinement

Abstract

Loss and rejection are central to prison life, yet how they crystallize into a more general sense of abandonment remains under-theorized. Drawing on 64 interviews with men held in prolonged self-isolation or serving indeterminate forvaring sentences in Denmark, we conceptualize abandonment not simply as hardship but as suffering plus attribution: being left in harm by identifiable others perceived to have the capacity to respond. Building on Stauffer’s notion of ethical loneliness, defined as “the experience of being abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard” (2015, p. 9), we develop layered abandonment as a typological framework. We specify five distinct layers of abandonment that may occur independently or in combination and show how their co-occurrence compounds suffering. With abandonment, we foreground the moral and relational processes through which prisoners interpret suffering as the failure of others to respond, rather than treating suffering as an impersonal, arbitrary, or diffuse condition of confinement.