This book explores and addresses body search practices in prison environments from different angles (criminology, sociology, human rights and law) and discusses such practices in different national contexts within Europe. Body searches are widely used in prison systems across the globe: they are perceived as indispensable to prevent forbidden substances, weapons or communication devices from entering the prison. However, these are also invasive and potentially degrading control techniques. It should not come as a surprise, then, that body searches are deeply contested security measures and that they have been widely debated and regulated. What makes theses control measures problematic in a prison context? How do these practices come to be regulated in an international and European context? How are rules translated into national law? To what extent are laws and rules respected, bent, circumvented and denied? And what does the future hold for body searches?

Chapter 1. Body searches as contested control measures.- Chapter 2. The imposition of power through touch: A sensory criminology approach to understanding body searches.- Chapter 3. Searching, 'state of security' and the structuration of prison security.- Chapter 4. Strip searches: A risky practice that needs to be monitored.- Chapter 5. Strip searches through the lens of the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment in European human rights law.- Chapter 6. Body searches and vulnerable groups: Women and LGBTQI+ people in prison.- Chapter 7. Body searches in Belgian prisons: dignity, security and denial.- Chapter 8. Body searches in French prisons: Dignity and security on a roller coaster.- Chapter 9. Stripping the self away: security, control, and punishment in the practice of strip searches in Spanish prisons.- Chapter 10. Gendered punishment and protest in a context of conflict: Strip searching in Northern Ireland.- Chapter 11. "There's a tech for that": balancing dignity and security in carceral settings through alternative technology devices.- Chapter 12. What future for body searches in prisons?.