On the first day of the short prison sentence I served in my twenties, I was joined in the reception cell by an older man, probably in his late forties, also starting his sentence. We exchanged the usual cagey formalities of ‘what and how long are you in for’. ‘Three months’ I said. ‘Fuck me’ he scoffed, ‘I done more than that in a Panda car’. I believe he had and he faced a long haul on his latest sentence. He was the saddest, most broken man I met in the prison. The first days of a long sentence in prison can be like that, I'm told – no road ahead, no road back. Harder Time indeed. This book makes grim reading and I only wish more people would take the trouble to do so, for Natalie Mann has crafted a compelling account of an issue few people will find compelling. It tells the story of men in prison who will, most likely, die there of old age, their lives progressively degraded by growing infirmity and permanent incarceration.

Reading this book I was reminded of a radio programme I listened to that interviewed the governor of a vast American prison. The governor indicated the extent of his prison by saying ‘pretty much all you can see between here and the horizon, that's us’. Then, according to the reporter, he gestured to a workshop building, ‘that's the busiest place here, that's where they make the coffins’. In addition to providing the local community with coffins, long-term inmates prided themselves on the kind of coffin they could make for themselves. They knew it was how they would leave the prison and they wanted to do it in style.

Mann declares that her book is an attempt ‘to give a voice to all those individuals who have been systematically ignored by governments, by prison service policy, and until very recently, by criminologists’ (p. 19). She is concerned not only by the limited quantity of literature on the topic, but also by its tone. What there is, she says, tends to characterise the men as ‘powerless and accepting of their fate’ (p. 100). Albeit that it is a picture at least partially drawn out of sympathy with their predicament, it is one that Mann says unhelpfully compounds the denial of their agency.

Mann finds a theoretical vehicle for her intentions in Giddens' ideas about structuration in which agency and structure are conceived as always implicit in each other. Like a Möbius strip, structuration theory appears to combine two ‘surfaces’ (structure/agency) as a single entity, a duality, and like a Möbius strip, the theory is sometimes more elegant in appearance than it is useful. Perhaps sharing this concern, Mann also introduces Bourdieu's thinking about habitus and cultural capital in the opening chapter, as well as nodding toward Goffman's dramaturgical interactionism. At this point in Chapter 1, I began to have concerns that rather too much was being attempted in too little space, as Chapter 1 also included some insightful observations about the emotional burdens of prison research and the gender dynamics of a woman researcher in a men's prison.

Almost as if having dispensed with the formalities, Chapter 2, ‘The Child Sex Offenders’, wheels in the culprits. The range of causal factors propelling the meteoric rise in older prisoners serving longer sentences is both wide and complex, but Mann provides a lucid account of the interplay of legislation, cultural hardening, intolerance and punitive inflation. Nevertheless, I felt my heart sink and my feminist sympathies quake as I read how retrospective revelations of sexual abuse have combined with new forensic science to create a new age (and class) profile in the male long-term prisoner population. Mann's chapter meticulously contextualises this feature in the extant literature on male sex-offender prisoners, again challenging reading. Chapter 3, ‘Ageing and the Prison Regime’, reviews the specific and particular impacts of both prison architecture (think prison landings, staircases, etc.) on older men's capacities to participate on an even footing in health care, education, social activities and labour workshops. Chapter 4 realises Mann's intention of engaging with and amplifying the way prisoners deal with their predicament. It delivers on its title, ‘Coping Strategies and Sources of Support’. Chapter 5 returns to more theoretical and analytical territory. ‘Power, Order and the Maintenance of a Masculine Identity’ is a welcome addition to the growing tendency toward theoretically informed gender specificity in books on prison.

The book closes with a summary discussion of the ways in which the pains of imprisonment for older men in prison can be both recognised and mitigated. Ironically for me, HMP Norwich, where I served my sentence, is held up not so much as a beacon of good practice, but an exemplar of the problems of providing age-segregated housing for the ‘greying prison population’. I shall leave the last words to Mann (p. 113): ‘Many of the prisoners in the sample referred to such units as “God's waiting room”, and many were frightened about ending up in such a facility.’