Experiencing very long term imprisonment from young adulthood: identity, adaptation and penal legitimacy
A blog
In January, after what felt like a very long time in suspense, Dr Susie Hulley and I were informed by the Economic and Social Research Council that we had been successful in applying for a grant to undertake a study titled: Experiencing very long term imprisonment from young adulthood: identity, adaptation and penal legitimacy (ref: ES/J007935/1). The idea had first emerged several years ago from a conversation with the Director of High Security Prisons for England and Wales, who said that the nature of the long-term prison population seemed to be changing – becoming younger, less predictable, with fewer 'professional criminals' than in the past. Around this time, Susie and I were both involved in a comparative study of public and private sector prisons, during which we had both conducted interviews with men who had very long sentence tariffs. Both of us were struck by the sheer weight of these sentences – and, in my case, by the mixture of resentment and resignation that was expressed about them. In previous studies, I had interviewed a small number of men who talked eloquently about the difficulties of retaining a sense of ‘future identity’ after having been imprisoned for so long: how did you know who you really were, when the last time you were in a ‘real environment’ was when you were twenty years younger?
Our interest dovetailed with some of the findings emerging from a piece of research being undertaken by colleagues at the Institute of Criminology on staff-prisoner relations in HMP Whitemoor, a high-security establishment, where many prisoners fitted the profile in which we were interested (see http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/research-and-analysis/moj-research/staff-prisoner-relations-whitemoor.pdf). Among other things, our colleagues reported that, compared to a decade or so earlier, the prison’s atmosphere felt very different, in part because there were so many more prisoners feeling desperate about and disorientated by the length of confinement that they were facing. Some of these men could barely talk about what lay in front of them, and were deeply alienated by their treatment by the state, both prior to their imprisonment and in terms of the sentences handed to them. Governors, too, were struggling to find ways of making life meaningful for this prisoner group i.e. giving them reason to feel any kind of hope about the future, particularly as prison conditions were becoming more austere and restrictive, in a number of ways. Some senior managers were concerned about the implications for control and security of having a growing number of prisoners in the system who appeared to be importing gang affiliations into the prison, and had – though the term is something of a cliché – 'little to lose'.
As we began to work up a research proposal, we were struck by how little research has been conducted on the long-term prison population in recent years. Psychological Survival, by Cohen and Taylor, remains a classic of prison sociology, but it reflects a different era of imprisonment, and it has not been superseded by a more contemporary account. The literature from the US on life without parole offered some interesting points of comparison, but – again – much of this work felt limited in value: many of the prisoners we expect to interview will serve huge sentences and yet they will be released with many years of their lives ahead of them. Susie and I have both recently become parents, in our mid-to-late thirties, and it is hard not reflect on the fact that our interviewees may be released at our ages, with the possibility – theoretically – of creating completely new lives for themselves, but having spent half of their lives in prison. What does this do to someone? How do they cope, maintain relationships, plan for the future? How does it feel to be at the start of such a long sentence, or near the end? How do sentence lengths of this kind shape prisoners' attitudes towards prison staff, the system, and the state?
These are the kinds of questions we will be pursuing, as our abstract (below) suggests. We would welcome any feedback, and we will be updating this blog regularly to provide detail of the build up to the fieldwork, its ins-and-outs, and our emerging findings.
This study will explore the experiences of prisoners who are given very long sentences (15 years or more) when aged under twenty-one. Around one hundred interviews will be conducted with prisoners at various stages of such sentences, as well a smaller number of interviews with prison staff and managers. The main aim is to provide a detailed account of the experiences of these prisoners, focussing on three main areas: first, how they cope with (and develop during) such long sentences, and how they manage issues of self and identity; second, how they adapt socially to imprisonment, in particular, their relationships with staff and other prisoners, and their levels of compliance, engagement and resistance; and, third, how their sentence conditions and lives prior to imprisonment shape their perceptions of penal legitimacy. The research will contribute to policy and practice in a range of areas, for example, by better informing relevant policymakers and practitioners about the consequences of new sentencing practices, about the needs of this group of very long-term prisoners, and about the operational challenges resulting from the growing number of prisoners serving very long sentences from an early age.
Dr. Ben Crewe
Dr. Susie Hulley
Comments
i was sent to prison when i was 17 for a GBH and it could have been a long sentence if id killed the man that was assaulted, so i always look at these sentences with a thought to what could have been.. - Gary