It's my great pleasure to welcome thank you for the 50th anniversary lecture of the year. And then, as many of you will know, published widely in the field of Prison Studies, where his 2009 book, The Prisoner Society, is a classic account of men's imprisonment. Ben works at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, where he's deputy director of the Cambridge Prisons Research Centre and the director of the Master Penology Program.
Fans Prisons. Research covers a range of topics from long term imprisonment, which [INAUDIBLE] be speaking about today to masculinity to a comparison between the public and private sector, and to investigations of staff, culture and experiences in his work. Ben combines mixed methods to try to understand in more detail the experiences and the impact of incarceration.
Currently, Ben's working on a five year European Research Council consolidated grant, which is called Penal Policy Making and the Prisoner Experience A Comparative Analysis. And that research is a comparison between prisons in England and Wales and prisons in Norway. According to his website, it will involve studies of penal policymaking and a penal field, the experiences of female prisoners in prison, sex offenders and prisoners in the most secure part of each jurisdiction's prison system.
That research, as I understand it, has begun, but sort of. So it's sort of begun. But we're obviously going to have to wait some time for its outcome. And instead, today, Ben is going to be sharing with us findings from his SAIC funded project on long term imprisonment. Thank you very much. It's amazing the stuff that you say on your website about yourself and then realise you actually have to fulfil those promises.
Thank you, Mary. I'm delighted to be here. It's very nice to see so many people and I'm going to start by reading out this extract, which is from a letter sent to me by one of the participants in the study that I'm going to be talking about today, which is a study of prisoners serving very long life sentences. And so this is Dan, in the early years of a life sentence with a 15 year tariff.
And he says all of one's plans and life goals are very much put on hold until one's re-emergence into the light of day. Perhaps the better analogy is of a cocoon. We are trapped in a chrysalis while the outside world rushes on without us. Yet within the chrysalis, a metamorphosis is taking place. We change as people. We achieve certain things removed from the real world.
And so what emerges is a transformed individual. For better or worse, one can never truly be the same or simply take off from where we left off. Whatever happens in here, I will be catching up on all those lost years of my youth. Think of all the things I should be doing now. Establishing my career, getting married, having a family, settling down and amassing all the various accoutrements of living a home, a car, etc. And Dan was was not a particularly typical prisoner.
So this is a particularly eloquent quote, but what he expressed was pretty typical. So a fairly profound reflection on how it feels to exist both within and between two worlds, the world of the prison and the world outside for such a sustained period.
And my I guess my main argument today is that long term imprisonment is best understood as a gradual coming to terms with a series of dislocations from the prisoner's sense of self, from his or her previous life and from the future that he or she imagined. And my starting point is the 1968 in of its report on the regime for long term prisoners in conditions of maximum security, and the reports are almost 50 years old. But it's quite useful as a as a kind of contrast to contemporary concerns.
So long term prisoners were defined as those serving a sentence of over four years. That's actually a fairly standard definition in lots of European research. Sentences of more than ten years were considered very long, and only two prisoners at the time had been in custody for a continuous period of more than 15 years, sentence length of 15 years or more. And they were so common that they hardly register.
So at the end of 2010, which was just before we started this study, there were over 2300 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences with tariffs. So that's the minimum amount of time that you serve a 15 years or more. And in the previous decade, the number of offenders who received a tariff of that kind.
Increased by 240%. And just to give you a sense of how sentence lengths have changed, this this is this comes from a Freedom of information request put in by someone in the law faculty at Cambridge that I now steal. And it just the pattern is just very clear here. So this is for this is the minimum term for prisoners serving mandatory life sentences. It excludes whole life tariffs. But you can see a steady but very significant rise over a relatively short period of time.
So all of this means that a growing number of prisoners are serving sentences that a generation ago were not just very rare, but were also considered fairly survivable. And this development has generated quite a lot of concern and discussion among practitioners.
So the former chief inspector of prisons warned that high security establishments and young offender institutions were becoming less stable, more difficult to run, and possibly more unsafe as a result of holding a growing proportion of young men serving very long sentences. This is a quote who may feel they have little to lose.
And in 2011, Michael Spurr, who's the chief executive of Norms, made very similar observations about the risks of a younger, longer term population who, as he said, don't buy into the system with the risk that that can lead to concerted disorder. So these are really concerns about control and order. But but obviously there's a broader set of questions about what it's like to be subjected to the most extreme sanction of the state.
How are these sentences psychologically survivable, and what does it mean to live some of the most formative decades of one's life behind bars? And the answer is, we don't really know because although in the 1970s, there was a this was a kind of heyday period of research on long term imprisonment. There's relatively little literature since that time. And as I've explained, that we're now giving out these very long sentences with much more frequency.
So what I want to talk about today is a study that I've been conducting with two colleagues, Susie, Holly and Serena, right on prisoners serving life sentences with tariffs of 15 years or more. But who was sentenced when they were aged 25 or under? And our starting questions were, what are the problems that these prisoners encounter and how do they deal with those problems?
Second, how do they adapt socially to the environment? So how do you construct a life for yourself, a sort of social and relational world? And also, how do these prisoners perceive the legitimacy of their situation, though? I'm not going to talk about the third matter, a great deal. And Mary, not very nicely said that I'm a mixed methods researcher. I'm I'm much more instinctively qualitative, but I'm very much an advocate of mixed methods research.
So in this study, we we gave out a survey which I'll talk about more in a second to all of the prisoners who met our criteria and who were willing in all of the prisons that we went to and for the interviews with the men, we deliberately selected people for interview who were at particular stages of their sentence.
So either early, which we defined as within the first four years, MIT, which was kind of putting the tariff in to plus or minus one year and then prisoners who were near to prisoners who were near to or beyond their tariff point, though that could mean anything from a year before the tariff to 15 years beyond the tariff, and that that group was very disparate because there were so few women in the system who met our criteria.
We tried to interview all of them, so we didn't bother with sampling by sentence stage. And this just gives a basic sense of some relevant numbers. So when we began the study, there were 803 men and 27 women in the population we were interested in. We interviewed 125 of the men and 21 of the women, and we collected surveys from 294 of the men and 19 of the women, and we went to 25 prisons overall.
So across the spectrum, so ranging from high security down to open establishments and every security category in between. The survey that we administered and built on a research tool developed by Barry Richards in the 1970s when he studied long term prisoners in the UK. And the survey was then adopted by a handful of North American researchers in the 1980s.
I don't know if you'll be able to see this at the back. Richards devised these 20 problem statements, and he asked prisoners to rate how often they experienced each of these problems and how easy or difficult they found it to deal with these problems. So it's a measure of frequency and solubility. And so we we we took on Richards's questions. We changed one or two. So there's one that was something like feeling like worrying that you're going to become a vegetable or something like that.
I can't remember whether I the second one here that we changed the phrasing of some of these, and then we added 21 of our own. And we did this after spending a few weeks in HMV Dollar Tree, which is a life of prison. And it became clear to us that the a set of problems that prisoners were describing to us were much broader than the ones that Richards had looked into.
So some of the things we added reflect changes in the nature of imprisonment, particularly sort of the increase in the number of indeterminate sentences, the role of prison psychologists and so on. But you'll see that some of the other problem statements are about issues that almost certainly were relevant in the 1970s, but just weren't on the radar of researchers or of or of Richards.
So things like thinking about the crime that you committed, feeling that you're losing contact with family and friends, prison officers, making life harder. These are these are not new issues. And I'm going to start just by briefly reporting some of the survey findings. And here you can see the five most severe problems reported in Richards's study that another major study by Flanagan in the US.
And then we've I've split this into the men and the women in our study and problem severity is calculated by multiplying the scores for the frequency and the solubility of, of all of these problems. So everything up here, these are all problems that were experienced often and that were hard to resolve. But what you'll see is that some that there's quite a lot of consistency between these three studies or these four groups.
So the missing somebody appears across all four studies and there's a number of other problems that you'll see feature in two or three of the studies. And that's obviously interesting in itself given the the spans in time and geography between the studies. So I guess the obvious point is, is that it suggests that there are some burdens that seem more or less inherent to long term confinement.
And you'll also notice that the results for the men and the women in the study look rather different, although I'm I'm not going to dwell on that. Now, if anyone is desperate to ask a question later but doesn't know what they want to ask about, this would be a nice thing to ask about. But I'm trying to control my audience and I just want to flesh up as well some of the problems that were rated as relatively severe by our participants. And I have cherry picked a little bit here.
I'm famously Gresham Sykes in the Society of Captives said the worst thing about prison is having to live with other prisoners. So I think it's quite striking that getting annoyed or irritated with other prisoners was ranked relatively low. So this is out of the 36 problems overall and 38 perhaps and.
And it was ranked fairly low by both the men and the women. And similarly, issues like finding it hard to keep out of trouble feeling worried about your personal safety and prison officers making life harder were not experienced as highly severe relative to other concerns. And notably and this is something you should hang on to in your minds, these are largely social and relational issues.
And this graph just shows here we've organised the individual problems into thematic dimensions just to give a clearer sense of the relative difficulty of particular types of problem. So if you can't read the fact the one on the far left where the scores are highest is outside relationships. So that includes items like feeling that you're losing contact with family and friends and being afraid that someone you love or care about will die before you are released.
Second along is thinking about the crime that you committed. That's a single item, but didn't load statistically onto any others. I'll come back to that. And then the third along is time, which includes things like thinking about the amount of time you might have to serve and feeling that you're losing the best years of your lives. And I'm going to return to these themes during the duration of the talk. The thing I want to highlight here is that the the green line is the results for the women.
The red line is the results for the men. So it's it's very, very clear that the women experienced every set of problems as significantly more severe than the men, statistically significantly more severe than the men and even the problems that they experienced as the least severe. So mental well-being, which is here, the women's score 10.31 is higher than the men's scores on six of the dimensions.
So we just get a very clear sense here that long term imprisonment for women was acutely more painful than it was for the men. Let me move on just to note some of the patterns that we found when we split the analysis up according to sentence stage will soon be done with the tables and graphs. But they're important, I think, in just just in setting up the discussion that's going to follow.
And the study was not longitudinal. We are hoping to get some funding to follow people up, but what we were able to do was explore whether there were any differences between people's experiences according to the stage of the sentence that they were at.
And we found three clear pattern. So first problem severity was highest among the participants who were in the early sentence phase, and it was lower for those in the middle or late phases, except for the problems that were specifically to do with release. And the red may be doesn't show up very well. I've used colour here just to show up where the differences are statistically significant but try to keep the table fairly clean.
But the pattern, the pattern is quite clear. So even though not all of the differences are significant, it's telling that with the exception of release anxiety, they all move in the same direction. So prisoners at later sentence stages reported a lesser degree of problem severity than those in the earlier stage. Second, we found that prisoners further into their sentences reported higher levels of emotional and psychological well-being than those in the earlier phases.
So here you can see the percentage of prisoners agreeing or strongly agreeing sorry, agreeing or disagreeing with a selection of statements. And you can see that by sentence stage, an increasing proportion agreed or strongly agreed with a range of items about things like emotional intelligence, maturity, mental health, stability and so on. And again, the differences are statistically significant, though we haven't shown that the detail here.
So just a couple of examples. So I am learning or have learned to deal with my emotions. 50% agreed. 50% of those at the early stage agreed. But that goes up to over 80% at later stages. The percentage agreeing with the statement I am becoming will have become more polite and considerate towards others that almost doubles as you go up sentence stages and the same for I'm I'm becoming or have become a better person overall.
And then third we find that prisoners further into their sentences were less committed to what prison sociologists often call inmate values. So again, just to give a couple of examples, while almost a third of prisoners at the early stage agreed with the item, a prisoner should always be loyal to another prisoner rather than staff. That that figure is only 7% among late stage prisoners.
And while only 3% at the early stage agreed that it's sometimes okay to tell stuff about another prisoner's business among late stage prisoners, that's 25%. So. So what we've got there is is. So so said among prisoners at later sentence stages, lower problem severity, higher personal maturity or psychological health, and lower commitments inmate values. And those findings are quite consistent with other studies that have used these kinds of surveys.
So so that so it's a fairly consistent finding. That problem severity goes down. And Robert Johnson uses a phrase mature, hoping to convey the idea that prisoners develop ways of learning how to cope, including things like respect for others and self-sufficiency. And so all of this has led many scholars to conclude that long term imprisonment is not especially damaging and that many prisoners, far from becoming prison ized or institutionalised, develop skills that might help them on release.
I'm going to come back to that later, partly because I don't think that's the right interpretation of the findings, and I think the qualitative data helps explain why in a rather complex way. So so the point of putting these slides up upfront is that it frames the discussion that's going to follow. And what's worth hanging on to is first, the sense that prisoners learn to adapt so they find ways of coping. Second, we get some sense that they feel themselves to be maturing emotionally.
And third, we get a sense that their social commitments are rather loose. And what I want to do now is use the interview data to to explore in more detail the transitions that I think prisoners are going through as they go through their sentences. And I'm going to try by the end to explain, perhaps not fully, some of the trends that I've just described.
The other thing it's worth me saying is that the patterns that I'm going to describe now, it's not the case that they were universal, but they were remarkably consistent. So I will talk in fairly general terms from this point on. So. When they described the initial phase of their sentences, our participants communicated a number of things.
First, the shock of receiving a sentence for murder, but also the sort of temporal vertigo that resulted from confronting a minimum sentence that was often longer than the number of years that they had been alive. So the reason we're using vertigo as a term is that what was often described to us was this sense that time kind of walked in front of you. So one prisoner said to me, his future flashed before his eyes, which I thought was a very powerful description.
And the third theme here is intrusive recollections. So flashbacks, nightmares, a constant replaying of the murder event and a kind of repetitive trauma about the brutality and the enormity of what they had participated in or witnessed. And then fourth, a kind of a kind of undirected anger, sometimes anger about being given a sentence that the prisoner didn't feel that he or she deserved.
Lots of our prisoners were convicted under a joint enterprise, which, again, is something I could come back to later. But just as often, these feelings of anger derived from feelings of underlying feel, feelings of guilt or loss. So a kind of grief for the life that the prisoner had lost. So reflecting back on his early months in prison, Curtis draws our attention to the connection between his sort of outward directed anger and his feelings of unresolved shame.
So he says, I was I was taking my anger out on people with the evidence. It was clear that I did it, but I didn't really want to admit it to myself at the time. And in the second quotes, I think what Assad is describing here is the way that the anger that he directed towards himself was in the main, about seeing the life that he had anticipated sort of evaporates. So he says, I was angry when I got my sentence. I was really angry. I was angry with me. I was angry with how my life turned out.
Deep down, I know I had a lot more potentially in my life to do so much more so much good with my life. And I think these quotes convey the kind of existential emotions of hopelessness and despair that were present across almost all of the accounts of the early months of the sentences. The other thing that I think they communicate is the way that these prisoners reacted and adapted to their experiences, mainly through things like emotional, numbing and dissociation.
So this is returning to the slide I showed a minute ago. Maria says it wasn't real. Dan talks about the the early monks being an out of body experience. And I think two things are worth noting here. The first is that although some of what was described to us can be interpreted using the kind of conventional patterns of imprisonment, literature, the the emotional content of the interviews went far beyond those the pains that typically feature in the research literature.
And secondly, there's a sort of temporal dimension to these quotes and the sense in various forms of not being fully in the present or in the case of intrusive recollections, the sense that the present is being constantly impinged on by memories from the past. And both of the points that I'm making are significant in our decision to conceptualise these early adaptations through the use of psychoanalytic concepts of suppression,
denial and sublimation. So these are all sorts of psychic manoeuvres that in some way repudiate the present. So so one coping technique for prisoners was to try to suppress or block out their predicament, either just through the kind of power of the mind or through the pursuit of kind of chemical oblivion. So the use of drugs or alcohol. So, Neal says the less of where you are, the easier it is to deal with blank nothingness. That's what gets you through. That's how you survive.
The second strategy Sublimation involves prisoners channelling their feelings of guilt or despair into positive endeavours. And sometimes that meant kind of claiming back part of their life that they had hoped to lead by by by doing the things that they felt they would have done anyway or engaging in sort of pseudo legal activity. So appealing the sentence. So so here Roger is reflecting back on the early years of his sentence.
And he says, you know, for the first ten years, a painting is another coping mechanism to get you through. And then the third strategy. Is was denial. So the refusal to acknowledge the existence of the reality being faced and denial took two forms. The first was denial of time. So that's a refusal to consider or an inability to consider the sentence in its entirety, or a kind of blithe optimism about the number of years left to serve or the speed with which time would pass.
So. So when early stage prisoners were asked how they manage time and the prospect of many years in prison, they would consistently say that that to stop, prevent some form of mental breakdown. They chose not to think ahead, but they did that time, day by day. So Karl says, I just take each day as it comes, because if you start thinking too far ahead, then it's a lot harder.
And in contrast, Terrence, in the second quotes and his tone, his description of these decades ahead of him is, I think, very strikingly casual. So he says, I'll have another three or four years here. So he was in a high security prison. Then there'll be close to 20 left, then I'll be in cafe and before you know it, you're in dark at the second form of denial, with denial of the offence. So a defence mechanism that I think holds at bay some of the painful realities of being convicted of murder.
And of course, I'm not suggesting that none of our interviewees were not guilty, only that I think that only that many of them, reflecting back on the early years, talked about the functions of denial. So John says, I didn't want to accept that I took a human life. I couldn't believe I could be that person. And Calvin, in the last quote says, I couldn't just bear to say, yes, I did it, because obviously that night, it wasn't just the one person that died.
If it was, it felt like a part of me died as well. So I guess the question is, have how are we trying? How do we understand what's going on here? And what I've tried to highlight is the presence of three intense emotional states, all of which I think are implied in the survey data, too. So grief for the loss of an imagined future and also for the set of social relations, that one in which the prisoner is embedded.
Shame, whether that's acknowledged or suppressed, about being involved in a serious murder, and also anger either produced by feelings of unresolved shame or by feelings of illegitimacy about the sentence length or the conviction. And so to advance the argument, I want to map those emotions onto. What I'm going to refer to is as a threefold form of dislocation.
So dislocation from the world that the prisoner was in, a kind of existential dislocation from the prisoner's sense of who they are that's linked to them having committed a murder or been involved in a murder and then a kind of temporal dislocation. I'm not sure if that's quite the right term, but from the future that the prisoner had envisaged and here the work of Margaret Archer has been extremely instructive.
Many of you will know Margaret Archer is a social theorist. She has no interest in prisons at all. Her work is about structure and agency, and specifically the ways in which agents encounter social structures through modes of reflexivity. And she defines reflexivity as a kind of capacity to deliberate on our actions in relation to the social circumstances that we encounter.
And Archer says that importantly, the extent to which people are reflexive and the nature of their reflexivity varies as a result, both of biographical experiences and social context. So so fundamental to her argument is that social transformation means that there is less congruence between the world that we grow up in and the situations that we come to encounter. And she says, in these situations of what she calls contextual discontinuity, traditional guidelines for action are unreliable.
So we can't function just through tacit knowledge or custom or have it. We have to make our way through the world. That's the name of one of her books, almost through internal deliberations of some sort. And Archer calls these internal conversations driven by watched by what she calls ultimate concerns. So that we think about we're constantly monitoring, reflecting on ways in which we should act with our sort of end goals, a set of end goals that we define for ourselves in mind.
And empirically, her work draws on interviews with university students, and she does this to try to understand different modes of reflexivity and the different ways in which people relate. Eye on things that people like family members to shape their decision making and also the different kinds of goals that people set for themselves.
And the choice of university students is significant because university is that period of life when individuals often break away from their family life to some extent, and begin to be confronted with a series of life decisions about what what kind of person they are, what kind of life they want to lead and so on.
And. The connection with the study that I'm describing is that long term imprisonment represents a very extreme demonstration, not just of constraint, but also displacement from one lifeworld to another.
And so Archer's vocabulary of structure, agency and these mediating processes, this internal conversation offers, I think, a very useful way of thinking about how these long term prisoners find ways of acting and adapting to this rupture in their circumstances and also in their sense of self and their life possibilities. So I've already suggested that. But prisoners in their early sentence stage felt completely overwhelmed by time, the amount of time that stretched ahead of them.
And when we asked early stage prisoners how they thought about time or how they manage time, the phrases that came up very consistently were things like, I just take it as it comes, or I do it day by day. So this quote from one of our female interviewees captures a typical kind of response. So we say, How would you think about your time in here? I don't I just don't think about it. Do you think about day to day, week to week? No. Do you plan at all?
No. I take days as they come. I don't want to do none of that. And these are people with a lot of days to be taken day by day. But this was a very common response. So interviewees say they couldn't imagine the future or it was too painful for them to cast their minds that far ahead. Even often, they would say even tomorrow. So, you know, even the very short term future felt irrelevant. The same as today and time in the present also felt meaningless to them.
So the descriptions that were given of time and imprisonment drew on a consistent discourse of states being stuck in time, treading water, or, as this quote suggests, just, just existing rather than living. And similarly, early stage prisoners very consistently reported feeling that they had virtually no control over their lives.
We get a sense of that in these, quote, quotations, that this sense of powerlessness was felt very sharply in relation to the general loss of liberty, the sense that staff held power over them because staff had the keys. So this this phrase about they've got the keys is there, I think, in the first and the third quotes. And so ultimately, these prisoners, they couldn't get beyond the fact that their lives were primarily and directly determined by other individuals,
that they ultimately they were just constrained. They were they were in prison. So they were objects in space as well as time. And Yvonne Jewkes, in a very good piece of writing about long term imprisonment, has you talked about liminal to being in a liminal state that this is a useful way of describing long term prisoners? Liberality, though, implies being in transition between one state and another.
Whereas I think what's being conveyed here is a sense of being stateless, of being nowhere, and the congruency between the terminology, the metaphors used by all participants. And Archer's description of fractured reflexivity is extremely striking. So when I read Archer's description of fractured reflections, I had one of those quite rare eureka moments and how she describes the fractured reflexive as a person who is impeded or displaced in their life trajectory.
So she says, it's like someone who this is a quote having learned French then finds myself in an exclusively German culture and is unable to participate until or unless he begins to master the new language again. Notably in her 2012 book, The Reflexive Imperative in Light Maternity, she emphasises the role of traumatic life events in generating a kind of, I guess, a mentality that's about everyday survival.
And Archer says fractured reflexes are engaging in a form of self-talk, a form of reflexivity, but that inner conversations are predominantly expressive. So what she means by that is that the inner conversations are emotional and just add to their sense of distress, rather than providing them with kind of guidance about how to move on in the world. So she says they are disorientated about their concerns or how best to realise them. And as a result they are what she calls passive agents.
They are people to whom things happen rather than people who exercise some governance over their lives by making things happen. And even the terminology that that she uses that her interviewees use are very resonant with the descriptions I've just given. So being adrift, going with the tide, taking each day as it comes and so on. And so I think all of this conveys the way that early stage prisoners profoundly disorientated and displaced.
So in a situation where the past no longer seems relevant to the future and the present makes no sense, but these prisoners were swamped by their emotions, unable to think forwards on what kind of objects rather than agents in relation to time and space. But when they described the different phases in their sentences. Mid and late stage prisoners who we interviewed reflected that shutting out the realities of the situation became progressively harder over time.
So there was general agreement that this took about 3 to 5 years. Often this was the period during which prisoners were appealing so they could maintain the hope that they wouldn't have to serve the whole of the sentence. And others said it was only once they were settling in a prison full of other lifers, or with a few years of imprisonment under their belt, that they could kind of commit psychologically to the situation that they were in.
And so, as we see in this final quote, there's this sense that as the outside world fades and friends drop away, this becomes your world. And what followed and what I want to spend the rest of my time explaining was a process of transition in five main areas that more or less correspond to the dislocations that I identified earlier. So adapting to the sentence, that's adjusting to the fact that your social universe is no longer where it was.
Finding means of managing time, shifting conceptions of control. So both of these are about coping with the challenges of the present, coming to terms with the offence and with whom one is morally or ethically. And also making the sentence constructive, finding meaning in it. So these are adjustments that involve some kind of orientation to the future.
And most prisoners reported that after this initial phase of denial and desperation, accepting the situation was essential for psychological survival that you just have to cope. And the findings here are quite consistent with what Ian O'Donnell says in his book Prison Solitude and Time, which is about the essential adaptability of humans. So our interviewees tended to say, I never thought I'd be able to cope, but you have to cope.
You just find a way of coping. But coming to terms with the sentence meant acknowledging that the prison was their new home and the only place where their life could meaningfully be lived. So the key phrase in this first quote is you you just you still you just have to still get on with life. And it's important to and it's important to know how different this is from what short term prisoners typically say. The short term prison is generally say prison is not real life.
It's just a temporary world that I'm in when I'm suspending the rest of my existence. So it it's somewhere inauthentic and it's not worth me investing time in building a life for myself in here. Whereas what we see in this quotes is prisoners recognising that there is a shift in which that they're sort of the world that they are actually living in now is the prison on the outside world is no longer their world.
So the first prisoner here says it doesn't matter where you're living, you're still living a life. Life is just the environment you're in. And similarly, in the second quote, the prisoner reflects that this is home now, this is life now. Get used to it. And so almost all of our interviewees reflected that after a few years, the reality set in, to quote Edward Zambo, that they were persons living in prison rather than offenders doing time.
In other words, life just wasn't in suspension perpetually, which is what much of the prison literature suggests. Life was relocated within the walls of the prison. So there's and there's this palpable sense here, both of resignation and agency. So accepting, fatalistic, the overall situation, but within that set of rather desperate circumstances, endeavouring to make the most of things. The second adaptive transition, if that's the right phrase, was about time.
So in contrast to the early stage prisoners, mid and late stage interviewees had found ways of taming. They fear anxieties about the weight of time. So they did this partly by splitting up the time ahead of them into manageable chunks, often World Cups. I've got four more World Cups to serve. Or they gave themselves what O'Donnell calls time anchors, so sort of target points in the future.
So that would often be that my target point is getting to a Category C person, so a lower security prison or getting a certain number of qualifications. But they had points in time ahead of them that they could reach for. And they were also much more skilled at managing time in the present or manipulating time in the present. So often this was through rituals of faith or spiritual practices, which enabled them to almost lift themselves out of the present.
So sort of transcendental is a is the right phrase here. So you could lift yourself out of clock time through things like meditation or prayer. And also when they talked about how they pass their time so often through things like reading or use of the gym, their accounts weren't suffused with the sense of being marooned in the present or overwhelmed by the present.
These routines were self devised rather than imposed upon them, and that made life tolerable and predictable rather than sort of routinised in a way that was unbearable. And so certainly when they when they talked about time, they were much more likely to describe it as something that could be used rather than something that just had to kill off, that they had to just expand. Their transition was it was in relation to control and self-control.
And I we saw a minute ago that early stage prisoners felt themselves to be almost completely lacking in autonomy, partly because they defined control, mainly in relation to whether you were locked up or not, whether you were in prison or not, whereas those who were further on, certainly they recognised the limits on their autonomy. But they were. But they had found areas of life over which they felt they did have some control, particularly emotions and interactions.
So Daniel says, I've got control of certain aspects, I've got control in my reactions and how I react to people, how I interact with people and my plans for the future and getting myself prepared and ready for that. I've got certain control over my education and I've got certain control over staying healthy and staying fit, staying positive. So the thoughts about control extended beyond this binary condition of being kind of locked up or not or being free.
And they expressed this much stronger sense that there are some aspects of their life can be self-determined. And I guess, again, you know, Donald writes about this, but this is about accepting your general predicament and then focusing on aspects of self control and self management. The other thing that I want to emphasise here is that this was about cultivating an ethical self through through making decisions about interactions,
emotions and so on. So think I call this moral subjective action and Lambeck describes it as ordinary ethics. So seeking to live life well and wisely, being good, doing good in one's everyday actions. So it was important to prisoners to to demonstrate through their routine dealings with others.
So through being courteous and reliable, being someone that could have a good conversation, these were ways of demonstrating that you were an ethical being in a world that didn't give you many opportunities to do that. And this partly relates to the importance of resolving feelings of shame.
Shame about what you're done for who you were. Lots of our interviewees continued to maintain innocence, but for others, a really key part of adapting to the present involves kind of moving on from the period of denial, psychological denial or legal denial, and coming to terms with what it means to have been involved in someone else's death. So I'm in this. So you get a sense in this first quote that accepting the offence requires a complex form of psychological adjustment.
So taking moral responsibility without being so psychologically swamped by what you're done. So Julius says he shouldn't have died. His comedy shouldn't have felt the grief. But at the same time, there's nothing I can do. I can't carry this burden with me for the rest of my life. And Bernard, in the second quote, he's describing the process of resolving his guilt as as a kind of key moment in taking control of his life. And he says, it was like I were writing in my own pages of my book.
It wasn't someone else writing them for me. From this point on, I was in control of where I went. And most interviewees who who weren't denying the effects said that this process of reconciling themselves with what they'd done was a was a fateful moment in their life. And alongside the murder itself was something that changed them profoundly.
So so sort of dealing psychologically with the offence and with feelings of shame generated quite profound existential reflection about what it meant to take someone's life and to also have one's own life radically changed by being given a kind of life bending sentence. And so here we're seeing forms of quite deep introspection about life and loss and self. John Irwin calls this the kind of moral self inventory that's like a kind of moral audit of your self.
You know, who am I? What? What have I done? Why am I here? We get this list of questions here in the second quotes and does, and as a result, as a desire to engage with life productively, to look forwards rather than backwards, and to take control of one's life narrative.
And I think these preoccupations help to explain some of the figures that I showed earlier, which were about prisoners quite loose social ties, that that why when I've interviewed prisoners in other contexts not serving long sentences, much of their life, much of what they talk about is the kind of is prison politics or the informal economy or, you know, instrumental friendships. Whereas these prisoners were were relatively uninterested in those things.
And I think this is because it was much more important to them to be sort of having and resolving these interior conversations and thinking about their individual moral development and thinking about ways of living a good life. And the kinds of reflections I've just showed are like one of Archer's other types.
She calls the matter reflexive, and she characterises matter reflexive as people who are slightly disengaged from their own families and keen to produce lives that are different from the lives they were or from their own backgrounds and are rather socially isolated so that they're making life decisions without consultation with other people. She she says as a result, they are reflexively preoccupied with themselves, so they're engaged in this constant process of self-examination, self-critique.
So she says the subject is internally conversing about herself and not just about her external actions. And she describes better reflexive as being interested in self-knowledge and self-transformation propels by a very idealistic sense of ultimate concerns, wanting to make a difference in the world rather than just wanting to satisfy individual needs.
And the ultimate concerns for our mid-stage prisoners combines sort of moral self-development and the desire to make the sentence and life beyond constructive. So constructive for themselves, but also for wider society. And. In the early stage, relatively few prisoners could see any meaning in the situation that they were in, partly because they saw the real world as being outside the prison environment.
So so Martin here says nothing constructive can occur because I'm still within these walls, whereas prisoners who were further into their sentences generally said, I want to achieve something better with my life. I want to make the most of this sentence not and they weren't just talking about so they often would talk about education. But when they did that, they weren't just talking about getting qualifications or learning skills. They were talking about wholesale personal change.
So making themselves a better person and giving something back to society. And the offence was relevant here in the in the drive to ensure that something positive emerged from this tragic thing that they'd been involved in.
So Daniel, he'd had a meeting with his victim's mother and he says that she said that she didn't want two lives to be wasted and that she wanted me to just make sure that my life turned out with something good and not waste it, you know, partly in the memory of her son who died that night. And it was like taking a deep breath for a first time, like when I breathed and it was like I felt some new life in my lungs. And part of what's really interesting here is this language of rebirth of the past.
You not no longer being relevant and you breathe breathing afresh, being a new person, and the finding of meaning was enabled by religious faith or spiritual commitment. So belief systems and the practices that they entailed functioned across the temporal dimensions that I've mentioned past, present and future. So that helped prisoners atone for what they've done. They help them find meaning and godliness in this sort of never ending present.
They fortified prisoners to endure their present conditions by giving them some sense that there was a meaning to their suffering and that there might be a less painful afterlife. They provided answers to these kinds of questions about the purpose of life, the consequences of taking someone else's life, and so on. And they also offered a basis for personal transformation. So some person has talked about it's these things that teach me how to be a normal, decent human being.
That's quite an extreme quote, but a decent example. Okay. So I want to wrap up now by just discussing some interpretations of the findings and some of the broader implications. The first thing is that the findings, I think, call into question the tendency within prison sociology for the offence itself to be considered slightly irrelevant. So prison sociologists don't tend to discuss what it is that people actually did and what meaning that might have for people.
But we found this to be a really key determinant of the prison experience. So alongside the amount of time to which people were sentenced, the nature of the crime of murder and for the women in the study as well, that prior experiences of abuse, these were the driving forces of their adaptations. And it's also important to say that these things seem to override the significance of almost all other important variables.
We didn't find differences between white and ethnic minority prisoners, for example. So it's as if the it's as if the sentence length and the offence kind of overrides everything else. So the enormity of the act and the sort of severity of the sanction flatten other variables, I guess. Second, I'll try to illustrate that there were sharp differences between the adapted patterns of prisoners in the early stage and subsequent stages of these very long sentences.
And I think the most useful metaphor here is title. So prisoners in the early stages were, in effect, treading water. That was a phrase they often used. They were being kind of carried in a rather submissive way by the flow of the sentence or were trying to swim back against it. So that energy was spent trying to deal with immediate emotions like anger, despair, and they felt little control over their daily existence or their long term future.
So a bit like our just description of fractured reflexive, they were largely passive in the context of their everyday predicament. Their form of agency was reactive, backwards looking, whereas those further on had come to accept, if I can sort of labour the metaphor that they that they were, that they couldn't escape the water and they deliberately submitted to its flow but tried to use its energy to their advantage.
So tried to use sort of tidal energy as a. And we're calling this productive agency. So that focus was in the future rather than the past, and their use of the present was constructive rather than depleted. They were trying to do something with time rather than just get rid of it. Driven by a new sense of self and a kind of ultimate concern with being good, doing good, living a good life. And and this brings me to the final point, which is which is about the impact of long term imprisonment.
And I mentioned earlier that problem severity diminished with sentencing stage and prisoners at later sentence stages reported higher levels of emotional happiness, maturity and so on. I really want to emphasise the importance of not taking those results at face value. That's partly because of research on the post-release outcomes of long term prisoners.
So Liam and Committed have recently argued that or demonstrated I guess that the long term prisoners on release exhibit the characteristics of what they call a post incarceration syndrome, very similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. And Margaret Shinkle in her book, Being Imprisoned is just a short passage where she notes that the prisoners who long term prisoners who'd been released describe themselves as institutionalised. None of those who were still in prison did.
Because, of course, institutionalisation is something that you're very unlikely to be able to recognise when you're within it. In other words, what might be disabling about long term imprisonment isn't clear to you when you're within the environment to which you've had to adapt.
So if we return to the quote that I began with, I think there's a sort of implicit explanatory theory here, and the reference to metamorphosis is consistent with what many other prisoners said about the positive ways in which they felt that changed over the course of the sentence. So some. Describe themselves almost as superhuman. So Calvin says this place has just been absolutely amazing for me.
It's developed me as a human being and a person and an individual and a man, and that this is consistent with the literature. On post-traumatic growth, it's sometimes called post adversarial growth. So the idea that following experiences like abuse or serious illness, people often report positive change, an enhanced an enhanced sense of meaning in life.
But I want to sound a note of caution, because what many of our accounts implied was a kind of hardening of the self, so a need to build an emotional wall around themselves. And as these quotations illustrate, prisoners often distinguish between what they call prison maturity. That's what I mean by when I used the phrase earlier of mature coping.
So being well adjusted to the prison environment, these structural features of scarcity and loneliness and insecurity that to distinguish between that and having deficits in terms of social maturity. So Victor says maturity wise, yeah, I've grown up, I'm more rational now. I'm more aware of the consequences of my actions. Now I feel more stable. But you've got one part of me. This feels like I'm still 17, because that's the age of coming in.
And I have no life experience or expectations in life, and I've never had to pay taxes or nothing, really. And similarly, Nathan says, I'm immature in certain areas, and I'll always be immature in prison because it's the outside world that would help me mature. We say, What are the areas where you feel that you're immature, intimate relationships of friendships, stuff like that.
So just to return finally again to the starting, quote, prisoners worked on and transform their personal identities and their orientations to the world. They sense the future, but they did that within the chrysalis of the prison with limited resources and outside normal structures and framework.
So so Dan says the outside world rushes on and they they felt that they had been deprived of normal adult milestones and markers of social achievement, often family life learning to drive, things like that. So in terms of their social maturity, their lives felt on pause because they haven't experienced normal rites of passage or responsibilities or relationships. So to return to Archer's terminology, they should reflexively engage only within the structures in which they were located,
unlike her description of matter reflexive. And this is important. They couldn't just move on at the points at which they became disappointed that life didn't meet their ideals. They couldn't change career or up sticks, or at the point of personal reawakening. They couldn't move on in their life.
They had to adapt to two worlds at once the overwhelming structure of the prison to which they had to adapt in order to survive, and the vague world of the future for which both their present and their past guidelines for action were irrelevant. So that is where I think the metaphor doesn't quite work. I spent a lot of time rereading this letter because where is the. The butterfly emerges from its chrysalis perfectly adapted to the environment.
I'm much less optimistic that long term prisoners, despite the positive descriptions of their personal development, emerge back into society, well adjusted to its demands and requirements. I'll stop there. Thank you very much.