This book explores and formulates a response to the question: How best can those held in modern systems of mass incarceration be cared for pastorally when many prisons diminish both hope and humanity? Employing the multi-disciplinary approach of practical theology, this ethnographic enquiry will be a guide for chaplains and all who strive to embody compassion wherever human flourishing is undermined. The book's structure follows the pastoral cycle method from practical theology, remaining context-based and practice-focused throughout. Pastoral insights are illustrated with personal, poetic and movingly reflective material drawn from the lived experience of indeterminately sentenced men who did not know if or when they would be ever released. The author, a former prison chaplain, remains reflexively and humanely present in the text, modelling the profound humane regard and pastoral presence that is central to this work. This book will take the reader deeply into penal spaces on a journey of both compassion and hope.

This important, lucid book burns with compassion for those incarcerated in prisons, seeking to find authentic, realistic ways of enhancing humanity and hope in constrained, inadequate environments.  Beedon's well-researched text uniquely illuminates the situation of the many prisoners still held under indeterminate sentences in the UK, some of whom are encountered in their own words.  It will be vital reading for prison chaplains and pastoral theorists as well as politicians, policy makers and those involved in justice systems around the world.  Passion, analysis, realism and imagination meet here to create a salutary, inspiring read for anyone wanting to extend their understanding of prisons, criminals, pastoral care and sensitive research - together with our common human frailty and potential. 

-Stephen Pattison, Emeritus Professor of Religion, Ethics and Practice, University of Birmingham, UK

This book is a work of profound humane regard. It takes the loss of hope as its starting point and finds its way through the dark to a place of possibility. The author bears witness to men serving indeterminate prison sentences for public protection. Using 'found poems', and his own compassion, he describes the men's suffering, some ways forward, and a much-needed form of pastoral care.