Swimming with the Tide: Adapting to Long-Term Imprisonment

Abstract

Given the increasing number of prisoners serving life sentences in England and Wales, and the increasing average length of these sentences, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the experiences and effects of such sanctions. This article describes how prisoners serving very long sentences from an early age adapt over time to their circumstances. In particular, it focuses on the transition between the early and subsequent stages of such sentences, specifically, the ways that these prisoners adapt to the sentence, find means of managing time, come to terms with their offense, shift their conception of control and self-control, make their sentence constructive, and find wider meaning in and from their predicament. Our argument is that most prisoners demonstrate a shift from a form of agency that is reactive to one that is more productive, as they learn to 'swim with', rather than against, the tide of their situation. Keywords Long-term imprisonment. prisoners. adaptation. transitions. In a recently published article, Kazemian and Travis (2015: 3) argue that researchers and policy makers have 'largely ignored the issue of long termers and lifers', and, more specifically, that 'life course and criminal career research has failed to examine and document changes that occur during periods of incarceration' (p4). Writing primarily about the USthe global leader in the allocation of very long sentencesand about particular kinds of research approaches, their diagnosis is relevant beyond these geographic and methodological domains. As they note, 'the most comprehensive studies conducted with long termers and lifers were carried out several decades ago' (p8), a statement that applies to the UK and Western Europe as much as it does to North America. In the latter, researchers who are interested in extreme forms of confinement can turn their attention to super-max institutions and the phenomenon of life without parole sentences (see, for example Rhodes 2004; Johnson and McGunigall-Smith 2008). In England and Wales, given the rising number of prisoners serving life sentences, and the increasing average length of these sentences, it is all the more surprising that so little attention has been paid to these sanctions. Changes in legislation have increased the 'starting points' for consideration of the minimum period of custody for a range of homicide offenses. As a result, the average tariff imposed upon people sentenced to life (excluding whole life sentences) increased from 12.5 to 21.1 years between 2003 and 2013. 1 In sum, an increasing number of men and women are serving sentences which, until fairly recently, were not only extremely uncommon, but were also considered more or less unsurvivable. While Kazemian and Travis discuss long-term prisoners primarily in relation to their criminal careers and potential desistance, writing within the tradition of mainstream prison sociology, our interest does not need to be limited to these parameters. Large numbers of men and women face decades of incarceration, and ...

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