Prison is a central social institution, yet it remains a closed and relatively inaccessible environment to the general public. Perceptions of prisons and prisoners are often shaped by media and popular culture rather than first-hand experience or academic research. Within this cultural landscape, the experiences of women prisoners remain largely invisible. Women constitute a small minority within prison systems and are placed in institutions designed for men based on assumptions about masculinity. Women in prison are therefore treated not as ordinary prisoners but as an exception. The prison’s aim of transforming the prisoner entails, for women, not only a transformation from criminal to law-abiding but also from deviant to normal women. Although qualitative prison research on the lived reality of imprisonment has gained renewed attention in the Nordic countries since the early 2000s, qualitative studies focusing on women and gender remain limited in the Swedish context, leaving gaps in knowledge about women’s experiences of imprisonment. The aim of this dissertation is to understand the lived reality of prisoners in women’s prisons in Sweden. Particular attention is paid to the pains of imprisonment and to how these are gendered. The study examines how conditions in women’s prisons are described in oversight bodies’ documentation, as well as how prisoners describe emotions, relationships, power, and resistance in prison life. The dissertation is based on two sub-studies. The first consists of a document analysis of oversight bodies’ documentation of women’s prisons, primarily from the Parliamentary Ombudsman. The second consists of qualitative interviews with nine prisoners serving long-term sentences in women’s prisons. The study is grounded in a critical feminist perspective that views the prison, like other institutions, as operating through normalising practices and being organised around assumptions about gender, class, and ethnicity. The analysis combines classical prison theory, particularly Sykes’s pains of imprisonment, with gender theory. A gender perspective is necessary to make these traditionally male-centered theoretical concepts analytically meaningful. The analysis shows how the pains of imprisonment are shaped by gendered institutional practices. By combining prisoners’ narratives with oversight bodies’ documentation, the study shows that the pains of imprisonment in Swedish prisons for women are gendered. Prisoners describe how institutional practices regulate emotions, relationships, and autonomy in ways reflecting expectations of normative femininity. These conditions produce gendered pains of imprisonment in which the control of intimate and relational aspects of life becomes a central source of suffering. At the same time, prisoners respond to these gendered pains of imprisonment through everyday forms of resistance, often by criticising or negotiating prison practices by invoking the system’s norms and values, particularly legal rights and gender equality. The dissertation contributes to prison research by analysing the pains of imprisonment from a gender perspective and examining how power, resistance, and gender are enacted in the lived reality of Swedish prisons for women. The study shows how prisoners’ experiences are shaped by institutional structures and broader social norms on gender and deviance. The study contributes to the limited body of qualitative research on women’s imprisonment in the Swedish and Nordic context.