Abstract
The abolition of capital punishment in Britain was finalised in 1969. In the remaining decades of the 20th century, long prison sentences took over from execution as the justice system’s principal mode of punishment for the most serious offences. Sociologies of prison life of course pre-date this development. One of the major changes in prison life, however, since Clemmer’s (1950) analysis of the process of ‘prisonization’ and Sykes’ (1958) study highlighting the ‘pains’ of imprisonment has been the rise in the number of prisoners serving long sentences. In 1979, there were 10 times as many long-sentence prisoners than there were 22 years previously (House of Lords, 1982: 870).
Irwin categorised the men who fell into this growing group of long-term prisoners as having discrete modes of adapting to prison life, basing his account on prisoners’ different pre-prison ‘careers’ (Irwin, 1970: 7). Cohen and Taylor (1972) proposed prisoners’ pre-prison relationships to authority as the ‘ideological’ structures determining prisoners’ adaption to prison life. Harder to generalise about, however, are ‘situational’ prisoners, those who ‘got caught up’ in events which lead them to serving long sentences, with little recognisable shared structure to their pre-prison lives (Cohen and Taylor, 1972: 178).
As the authors of Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood explain, the contemporary demographics of prisoners with long sentences are quite different to those in the mid- to late-20th century. In the 21st century, the image of the hardened gangster serving the time he knew he risked with a lengthy clandestine career is replaced by one of the young, typically BAME, men, new or peripheral to organised crime (Crewe et al., 2019: 11). 1 There are two main differences here then between ‘lifer’ populations, relating to age and ethnicity. How or why are more young BAME men ending up in long-term imprisonment? A major contributor is the rise in so-called ‘joint enterprise’ sentencing. In a stabbing between rival groups, what used to see one or two individuals given long tariffs now sees half a dozen or more attendees receiving the same. This numerical increase in long-term joint enterprise sentences is exacerbated by a qualitative intensification in public and ministerial retributive sentiment, particularly related to the coverage of knife crime and ‘gang’ violence. In the 10 years between 2003 and 2013, this qualitative shift manifested itself numerically as the average sentence length for murder rose from 12.5 to 21.1 years (Crewe et al., 2019: 3). All of which serves to make long-term imprisoned young individuals a growing and novel demographic of penological analysis.
What Irwin and Cohen and Taylor’s studies highlighted for penological research was the importance of pre-prison life to prison life. Young long-term prisoners, however, have had much less life on average than those serving long tariffs in the 1960s and 70s. Crewe, Hulley and Wright’s study contains numerous quotes from long-term prisoners communicating shock that their tariff was longer than the years they had lived (2019: 82f, 212). For contemporary long-term sentenced prisoners, then, their pre-prisons lives are short and mostly juvenile, over which they had notably less control than previous older life-sentence recipients. Even an early exposure to the sharp end of law enforcement leaves a younger offender few years to develop a defined personality type, which Irwin and Cohen and Taylor both link to a subsequent prison adaption style. It is then perhaps unsurprising that the grouping Cohen and Taylor dismiss as unamenable to analysis – situational offenders – are much more commonly found in Crewe, Hulley and Wright’s study.
The reminder here, then, is that prisoners – like all humans – form and re-form personal identities in time, where beliefs about one’s past and future form the material from which our sense of self is (re-)constructed. The book’s subtitle – ‘Adaption, Identity and Time’ – shows a commitment to this humanistic understanding of time. The struggle for any analysis of contemporary young long-sentence prisoners, then, is how to balance the observation that pre-prison life does matter to individuals’ experience of prison, and that many long-tariff prisoners have had remarkably little pre-prison life.
The authors’ answer to this analytic conundrum is their method for analysing what they label the ‘offence-time nexus’. Being sentenced to 15-plus years, at the age of 25 or younger, for involvement in murder 2 form the three cruxes of the study’s participants’ affective situation. This situation is mapped over three stages of imprisonment: early (first 4 years), mid-stage (halfway through tariff, +/− 2 years) and late-stage (2 years prior to, or post, tariff). Prisoners at each stage were surveyed and asked to rank concerns in their life, with the authors conducting in-depth interviews with just under half of the surveyed population. Responses showed correlations between sentence-stage and the prioritising of the 39 ‘potential problems’ of long-term imprisonment. Instead, then, of a causal typology straddling pre-prison and prison life, Crewe et al.’s model finds distinct modes of adoption, informed by but not deduced from prisoners’ pre-prison lives. With three independent and interdependent variables, the authors are able to ascertain commonalities amongst prisoners of the same sentence-stage, and differences, through their in-depth interviews.
It is in the interviews, including the ‘pen portraits’ and numerous quotes from interviewees, that the richest insights into the offence-time nexus are revealed. Given the methodological issues the authors concede regarding cohort bias, and the nature of the novel scale and demographics of the research population, any longitudinal conclusions about change over time for life-sentence prisoners are somewhat limited (Crewe et al., 2019: 58, 61). In the place of strict deductions are rich reflections from prisoners about the interplay between time and identity during their sentences. It is here that the study’s most arresting moments are found; observations, for example, about the visceral physiological characteristics of early-stage long sentences, about the internalised punitive debt felt by many mid-stage prisoners, and about the feelings regarding the relative authenticity of prison and pre-prison ‘selves’ reported by late-stage prisoners (Crewe et al., 2019: 81f, 137f, 277f).
The observations about temporal orientation are a strong aspect of the study. While it is perhaps unsurprising that late-stage prisoners are more future-oriented than their early- and mid-stage counterparts, it is interesting that the authors observe a shift from a ‘present-coping’ to ‘past-reflective’ orientation in the move from the early- to the mid-stage of prisoners’ sentences (Crewe et al., 2019: 136). It is difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the effects of being involved in a murder and the lengthy sentences handed down as a result, given their co-occurrence for most of the study’s participants. It is notable, however, that the comments from early-stage prisoners relate more to the existential disruption of long-term imprisonment than their involvement in the offence. 3 At this stage, ‘time’ takes precedence over ‘offence’ in the offence-time nexus. The need to cope and survive essentially freezes early-stage prisoners in the present and day-to-day. Once the existential shock of receiving a life sentence recedes, it is suggested, prisoners feel more emotional freedom to reflect upon the past (Crewe et al., 2019: 131f).
Superficially, this observation can seem to read as an endorsement of at least ‘medium-term’ imprisonment for serious offences. The authors are keen to note, however, that it is primarily the shock of imprisonment, not the offence, which causes the early stage of imprisonment to be so traumatic. As relationships become increasingly more painful for both the prisoner and their loved ones, the strain of maintaining a ‘one-foot-in, one-foot-out’ stance gives way to acceptance of the prison as social world. Coming to terms with the sentence precedes coming to terms with involvement in the offence (Crewe et al., 2019: 131). The phenomenological absence of the events relating to the offence in the early stage of imprisonment is then as salient as their presence in the mid-stage.
It is worth asking at this point what is lost in substitution of ‘punishment’ for ‘time’. ‘Time’ qua sentence is neutral, a state-of-affairs, a calendar; ‘punishment’ on the other hand is overtly retributive, normative, and relational, from the State to prisoner. As the authors note, many of the pains of imprisonment do not lessen over time, and of the ones which do, adaption and internalisation ought not to be framed without reference to the coercive environment in which they are experienced (Crewe et al., 2019: 328–329). To quote Ray (50s, post-tariff): you’ve come to know yourself during your sentence; it’s an emotional and spiritual journey, but if you do those then you really are doing well and it makes it easier. (Crewe et al., 2019: 133)
The authors dedicate the book’s conclusion to distancing themselves from any advocation of very long-term imprisonment as a State’s response to serious offences. They go as far as to cite evidence of its counter-productivity for rehabilitative goals, and to suggest that very long sentences are ‘wasteful’ (‘these were very long lessons, and very harsh calls’): ‘it is tragic that this reassessment of life occurred only at the point at which what lay ahead was many years of custody’ (Crewe et al., 2019: 322–323). The question of shorter sentences is left open.
The conclusion is an essential component of the book’s narrative, and is unique in its normative tone. It retrospectively colours much of the neutral documentation of the preceding chapters, itself informed no doubt by the study being a ‘dovetailing of interest’ for the researchers and ‘senior figures within what was then the National Offender Management Service’ (Crewe et al., 2019: 25). The study contains a great many rich and invaluable observations about the presence and negotiation of imprisonment’s pains right up until release (Crewe et al., 2019: 329). Where it potentially leaves the reader wanting is what it goes part-way but stops short of saying out-right: in requiring the early stage of imprisonment to overcome the trauma of the sentence handed to them, there is little evidence found that this early stage helps mid-stage prisoners to become oriented towards the events relating to their sentence offence (assuming the importance of confrontation and acceptance in a goal of rehabilitation). If anything, it appears to hinder reflective orientation. Put differently, the ‘time’ component of the ‘offence-time nexus’ appears ‘wasteful’ not only as it applies to post-epiphany moments, but for long sentences in their entirety. If ‘time’ is not substituted for retributive ‘punishment’, this conclusion is harder to avoid.
