Prior research consistently documents that prisons are emotionally fraught places where successful adaptation depends, in part, on prisoners’ abilities to calibrate their emotional expressions and display strategies. Yet these accounts have largely overlooked theoretical insights from the psychological literature on emotion which can develop our understanding of exactly how and why prisoners regulate their emotions. By combining Gross and Thompson’s component model of emotion regulation with recent interview data (N = 16) from a medium security men’s prison (HMP Moorland), this research draws three conclusions. First, prisoners manage emotion by attending to different components of the emotion model (i.e. through situation selection, attention deployment and response strategies). Second, attempts to regulate emotion are often hampered by the unique challenges of close confinement and prison rules. Finally, emotion management may be influenced by both ‘hedonistic’ and ‘utilitarian’ goals: the latter may explain situations where prisoners harness ‘negative’ emotions (such as anger and fear) to achieve long-term aims such as health and social conformity. The implications of this research are twofold: it offers a way beyond dramaturgical models of prison life, while also offering suggestions which could promote the emotional health of prisoners.