The Lived Sentence

Abstract

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Imposed Stories: Prisoner Self-narratives in the Criminal Justice System in New South Wales, Australia

“…This material can be limited to a summary of the judge's comments on sentence. One prisoner in Hall's study said that the prison had only a small extract of what were his judge's lengthy sentence comments (Hall 2014). The authorities use such documents to inform their dealings with prisoners: risk assessment instruments are administered; case-plans are developed.…”

“…The authorities use such documents to inform their dealings with prisoners: risk assessment instruments are administered; case-plans are developed. Most importantly, the facts about the offence (via the 'fact sheet' or the comments made on sentence) are treated as 'the truth' (Hall 2014). In other words, the 'imposed narrative' that has been sutured to the offender during in-court processes travels with that offender into prison.…”

“…Drawing on the concept of the 'lived sentence' (Hall 2014), we demonstrate how this constructed narrative is imposed on the offender through in-court processes and throughout their time in prison. These stories -what we call 'imposed stories' -are sutured to the offender.…”

“…This article contributes to that slowly growing body of socio-legal and criminology scholarship concerned with examining the daily practices, and experiences of people who work in, and who find themselves caught up in, the justice system (see Crewe 2009Crewe , 2013Hall 2014;Schinkel 2014). The concept of the 'lived sentence' as a challenge to a narrow, legalistic view of sentencing highlights the experience of the sentenced person and focuses on the continuous nature of the expectations derived from the sentence (Hall 2014 Our work builds on that empirical research involving 'offender narratives': for instance, the ways in which legal narratives about people get constructed and deployed. Drawing on ethnographic observation of police practices, McConville, Sanders and Leng (1991) have shown how police construct the legal narrative through the process of investigation.…”

“…She has also shown how the process of segmenting or fragmenting the narrative by questioning begins in the police interview (Eades 2008: 210). Weisman (2004), Hall (2014 and Rossmanith (2015) have similarly illustrated how sentencing and other criminal justice processes contain implicit expectations of offenders to act and speak in certain ways (including, for instance, the construction of an acceptable remorse narrative).…”