1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:07,920 It's my great pleasure to welcome thank you for the 50th anniversary lecture of the year. 2 00:00:08,610 --> 00:00:12,809 And then, as many of you will know, published widely in the field of Prison Studies, 3 00:00:12,810 --> 00:00:18,330 where his 2009 book, The Prisoner Society, is a classic account of men's imprisonment. 4 00:00:19,020 --> 00:00:21,780 Ben works at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, 5 00:00:22,140 --> 00:00:30,210 where he's deputy director of the Cambridge Prisons Research Centre and the director of the Master Penology Program. 6 00:00:31,320 --> 00:00:35,549 Fans Prisons. Research covers a range of topics from long term imprisonment, 7 00:00:35,550 --> 00:00:41,250 which [INAUDIBLE] be speaking about today to masculinity to a comparison between the public and private sector, 8 00:00:41,610 --> 00:00:45,750 and to investigations of staff, culture and experiences in his work. 9 00:00:45,900 --> 00:00:52,260 Ben combines mixed methods to try to understand in more detail the experiences and the impact of incarceration. 10 00:00:53,430 --> 00:00:58,170 Currently, Ben's working on a five year European Research Council consolidated grant, 11 00:00:59,340 --> 00:01:04,680 which is called Penal Policy Making and the Prisoner Experience A Comparative Analysis. 12 00:01:05,460 --> 00:01:09,660 And that research is a comparison between prisons in England and Wales and prisons in Norway. 13 00:01:12,120 --> 00:01:18,180 According to his website, it will involve studies of penal policymaking and a penal field, the experiences of female prisoners in prison, 14 00:01:18,190 --> 00:01:22,380 sex offenders and prisoners in the most secure part of each jurisdiction's prison system. 15 00:01:23,280 --> 00:01:27,240 That research, as I understand it, has begun, but sort of. 16 00:01:27,300 --> 00:01:31,890 So it's sort of begun. But we're obviously going to have to wait some time for its outcome. 17 00:01:32,160 --> 00:01:39,300 And instead, today, Ben is going to be sharing with us findings from his SAIC funded project on long term imprisonment. 18 00:01:39,960 --> 00:01:48,600 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. 19 00:01:50,310 --> 00:02:00,210 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, 20 00:02:01,290 --> 00:02:06,569 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, 21 00:02:06,570 --> 00:02:10,950 which is a study of prisoners serving very long life sentences. 22 00:02:11,670 --> 00:02:18,360 And so this is Dan, in the early years of a life sentence with a 15 year tariff. 23 00:02:18,360 --> 00:02:25,140 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. 24 00:02:25,590 --> 00:02:31,290 Perhaps the better analogy is of a cocoon. We are trapped in a chrysalis while the outside world rushes on without us. 25 00:02:31,290 --> 00:02:34,800 Yet within the chrysalis, a metamorphosis is taking place. 26 00:02:35,250 --> 00:02:39,330 We change as people. We achieve certain things removed from the real world. 27 00:02:39,870 --> 00:02:47,730 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. 28 00:02:48,330 --> 00:02:52,380 Whatever happens in here, I will be catching up on all those lost years of my youth. 29 00:02:52,830 --> 00:02:54,870 Think of all the things I should be doing now. 30 00:02:55,230 --> 00:03:04,500 Establishing my career, getting married, having a family, settling down and amassing all the various accoutrements of living a home, a car, etc. 31 00:03:05,670 --> 00:03:10,770 And Dan was was not a particularly typical prisoner. 32 00:03:11,940 --> 00:03:17,880 So this is a particularly eloquent quote, but what he expressed was pretty typical. 33 00:03:18,210 --> 00:03:25,950 So a fairly profound reflection on how it feels to exist both within and between two worlds, 34 00:03:25,950 --> 00:03:30,900 the world of the prison and the world outside for such a sustained period. 35 00:03:31,290 --> 00:03:38,669 And my I guess my main argument today is that long term imprisonment is best understood as 36 00:03:38,670 --> 00:03:46,020 a gradual coming to terms with a series of dislocations from the prisoner's sense of self, 37 00:03:46,590 --> 00:03:51,900 from his or her previous life and from the future that he or she imagined. 38 00:03:53,010 --> 00:04:02,100 And my starting point is the 1968 in of its report on the regime for long term prisoners in conditions of maximum security, 39 00:04:02,550 --> 00:04:10,320 and the reports are almost 50 years old. But it's quite useful as a as a kind of contrast to contemporary concerns. 40 00:04:10,320 --> 00:04:15,900 So long term prisoners were defined as those serving a sentence of over four years. 41 00:04:16,110 --> 00:04:20,160 That's actually a fairly standard definition in lots of European research. 42 00:04:20,850 --> 00:04:24,360 Sentences of more than ten years were considered very long, 43 00:04:24,990 --> 00:04:36,090 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. 44 00:04:36,330 --> 00:04:38,549 And they were so common that they hardly register. 45 00:04:38,550 --> 00:04:49,980 So at the end of 2010, which was just before we started this study, there were over 2300 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences with tariffs. 46 00:04:49,980 --> 00:04:54,330 So that's the minimum amount of time that you serve a 15 years or more. 47 00:04:54,870 --> 00:04:59,700 And in the previous decade, the number of offenders who received a tariff of that kind. 48 00:05:00,170 --> 00:05:06,020 Increased by 240%. And just to give you a sense of how sentence lengths have changed, 49 00:05:07,250 --> 00:05:14,240 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. 50 00:05:15,320 --> 00:05:24,350 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. 51 00:05:24,350 --> 00:05:33,589 It excludes whole life tariffs. But you can see a steady but very significant rise over a relatively short period of time. 52 00:05:33,590 --> 00:05:41,180 So all of this means that a growing number of prisoners are serving sentences that a generation ago were not just very rare, 53 00:05:41,600 --> 00:05:44,990 but were also considered fairly survivable. 54 00:05:46,310 --> 00:05:52,280 And this development has generated quite a lot of concern and discussion among practitioners. 55 00:05:52,280 --> 00:06:01,400 So the former chief inspector of prisons warned that high security establishments and young offender institutions were becoming less stable, 56 00:06:01,670 --> 00:06:10,780 more difficult to run, and possibly more unsafe as a result of holding a growing proportion of young men serving very long sentences. 57 00:06:10,880 --> 00:06:13,280 This is a quote who may feel they have little to lose. 58 00:06:13,790 --> 00:06:23,660 And in 2011, Michael Spurr, who's the chief executive of Norms, made very similar observations about the risks of a younger, 59 00:06:23,960 --> 00:06:31,280 longer term population who, as he said, don't buy into the system with the risk that that can lead to concerted disorder. 60 00:06:32,300 --> 00:06:34,880 So these are really concerns about control and order. 61 00:06:35,180 --> 00:06:43,670 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. 62 00:06:44,720 --> 00:06:54,590 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? 63 00:06:55,190 --> 00:07:00,319 And the answer is, we don't really know because although in the 1970s, 64 00:07:00,320 --> 00:07:06,500 there was a this was a kind of heyday period of research on long term imprisonment. 65 00:07:06,860 --> 00:07:10,010 There's relatively little literature since that time. 66 00:07:10,340 --> 00:07:18,790 And as I've explained, that we're now giving out these very long sentences with much more frequency. 67 00:07:19,550 --> 00:07:25,580 So what I want to talk about today is a study that I've been conducting with two colleagues, Susie, 68 00:07:25,580 --> 00:07:32,510 Holly and Serena, right on prisoners serving life sentences with tariffs of 15 years or more. 69 00:07:33,110 --> 00:07:36,320 But who was sentenced when they were aged 25 or under? 70 00:07:38,090 --> 00:07:45,290 And our starting questions were, what are the problems that these prisoners encounter and how do they deal with those problems? 71 00:07:46,070 --> 00:07:54,890 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? 72 00:07:55,310 --> 00:08:00,020 And also, how do these prisoners perceive the legitimacy of their situation, though? 73 00:08:00,020 --> 00:08:03,200 I'm not going to talk about the third matter, a great deal. 74 00:08:04,970 --> 00:08:10,220 And Mary, not very nicely said that I'm a mixed methods researcher. 75 00:08:10,220 --> 00:08:16,910 I'm I'm much more instinctively qualitative, but I'm very much an advocate of mixed methods research. 76 00:08:16,910 --> 00:08:24,410 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 77 00:08:24,410 --> 00:08:32,149 criteria and who were willing in all of the prisons that we went to and for the interviews with the men, 78 00:08:32,150 --> 00:08:38,360 we deliberately selected people for interview who were at particular stages of their sentence. 79 00:08:38,370 --> 00:08:43,730 So either early, which we defined as within the first four years, MIT, 80 00:08:44,240 --> 00:08:49,610 which was kind of putting the tariff in to plus or minus one year and then prisoners 81 00:08:49,610 --> 00:08:55,700 who were near to prisoners who were near to or beyond their tariff point, 82 00:08:56,000 --> 00:09:01,520 though that could mean anything from a year before the tariff to 15 years beyond the tariff, 83 00:09:01,520 --> 00:09:08,690 and that that group was very disparate because there were so few women in the system who met our criteria. 84 00:09:08,690 --> 00:09:13,580 We tried to interview all of them, so we didn't bother with sampling by sentence stage. 85 00:09:14,480 --> 00:09:18,320 And this just gives a basic sense of some relevant numbers. 86 00:09:18,320 --> 00:09:25,280 So when we began the study, there were 803 men and 27 women in the population we were interested in. 87 00:09:25,610 --> 00:09:30,409 We interviewed 125 of the men and 21 of the women, 88 00:09:30,410 --> 00:09:38,090 and we collected surveys from 294 of the men and 19 of the women, and we went to 25 prisons overall. 89 00:09:38,360 --> 00:09:47,150 So across the spectrum, so ranging from high security down to open establishments and every security category in between. 90 00:09:49,130 --> 00:09:59,720 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. 91 00:10:00,100 --> 00:10:06,190 And the survey was then adopted by a handful of North American researchers in the 1980s. 92 00:10:06,790 --> 00:10:13,000 I don't know if you'll be able to see this at the back. Richards devised these 20 problem statements, 93 00:10:13,420 --> 00:10:21,340 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. 94 00:10:21,370 --> 00:10:25,150 So it's a measure of frequency and solubility. 95 00:10:25,480 --> 00:10:30,400 And so we we we took on Richards's questions. 96 00:10:30,400 --> 00:10:39,590 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. 97 00:10:39,610 --> 00:10:49,390 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. 98 00:10:49,600 --> 00:10:54,640 And we did this after spending a few weeks in HMV Dollar Tree, which is a life of prison. 99 00:10:54,880 --> 00:10:59,560 And it became clear to us that the a set of problems that prisoners were 100 00:10:59,560 --> 00:11:04,420 describing to us were much broader than the ones that Richards had looked into. 101 00:11:04,570 --> 00:11:09,129 So some of the things we added reflect changes in the nature of imprisonment, 102 00:11:09,130 --> 00:11:17,200 particularly sort of the increase in the number of indeterminate sentences, the role of prison psychologists and so on. 103 00:11:17,650 --> 00:11:24,520 But you'll see that some of the other problem statements are about issues that almost certainly were relevant in the 1970s, 104 00:11:24,520 --> 00:11:28,690 but just weren't on the radar of researchers or of or of Richards. 105 00:11:28,700 --> 00:11:31,570 So things like thinking about the crime that you committed, 106 00:11:31,870 --> 00:11:35,649 feeling that you're losing contact with family and friends, prison officers, making life harder. 107 00:11:35,650 --> 00:11:44,320 These are these are not new issues. And I'm going to start just by briefly reporting some of the survey findings. 108 00:11:44,770 --> 00:11:54,880 And here you can see the five most severe problems reported in Richards's study that another major study by Flanagan in the US. 109 00:11:55,300 --> 00:12:00,550 And then we've I've split this into the men and the women in our study and problem 110 00:12:00,550 --> 00:12:07,680 severity is calculated by multiplying the scores for the frequency and the solubility of, 111 00:12:07,980 --> 00:12:16,030 of all of these problems. So everything up here, these are all problems that were experienced often and that were hard to resolve. 112 00:12:16,420 --> 00:12:25,990 But what you'll see is that some that there's quite a lot of consistency between these three studies or these four groups. 113 00:12:26,290 --> 00:12:34,989 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. 114 00:12:34,990 --> 00:12:42,129 And that's obviously interesting in itself given the the spans in time and geography between the studies. 115 00:12:42,130 --> 00:12:51,220 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. 116 00:12:51,970 --> 00:13:00,430 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. 117 00:13:00,430 --> 00:13:07,720 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. 118 00:13:08,110 --> 00:13:13,839 But I'm trying to control my audience and I just want to flesh up as well some 119 00:13:13,840 --> 00:13:18,549 of the problems that were rated as relatively severe by our participants. 120 00:13:18,550 --> 00:13:20,710 And I have cherry picked a little bit here. 121 00:13:21,310 --> 00:13:28,930 I'm famously Gresham Sykes in the Society of Captives said the worst thing about prison is having to live with other prisoners. 122 00:13:29,710 --> 00:13:36,040 So I think it's quite striking that getting annoyed or irritated with other prisoners was ranked relatively low. 123 00:13:36,040 --> 00:13:45,760 So this is out of the 36 problems overall and 38 perhaps and. 124 00:13:47,380 --> 00:13:50,800 And it was ranked fairly low by both the men and the women. And similarly, 125 00:13:50,800 --> 00:13:55,900 issues like finding it hard to keep out of trouble feeling worried about your personal safety and 126 00:13:55,900 --> 00:14:02,710 prison officers making life harder were not experienced as highly severe relative to other concerns. 127 00:14:03,220 --> 00:14:10,780 And notably and this is something you should hang on to in your minds, these are largely social and relational issues. 128 00:14:12,950 --> 00:14:20,390 And this graph just shows here we've organised the individual problems into thematic dimensions 129 00:14:21,140 --> 00:14:26,070 just to give a clearer sense of the relative difficulty of particular types of problem. 130 00:14:26,150 --> 00:14:32,370 So if you can't read the fact the one on the far left where the scores are highest is outside relationships. 131 00:14:32,750 --> 00:14:38,180 So that includes items like feeling that you're losing contact with family and friends 132 00:14:38,180 --> 00:14:42,770 and being afraid that someone you love or care about will die before you are released. 133 00:14:43,250 --> 00:14:50,810 Second along is thinking about the crime that you committed. That's a single item, but didn't load statistically onto any others. 134 00:14:51,350 --> 00:14:55,520 I'll come back to that. And then the third along is time, 135 00:14:55,700 --> 00:15:03,490 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. 136 00:15:03,500 --> 00:15:08,450 And I'm going to return to these themes during the duration of the talk. 137 00:15:08,960 --> 00:15:16,070 The thing I want to highlight here is that the the green line is the results for the women. 138 00:15:16,610 --> 00:15:19,160 The red line is the results for the men. 139 00:15:19,170 --> 00:15:26,840 So it's it's very, very clear that the women experienced every set of problems as significantly more severe than the men, 140 00:15:26,840 --> 00:15:34,370 statistically significantly more severe than the men and even the problems that they experienced as the least severe. 141 00:15:34,400 --> 00:15:42,770 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. 142 00:15:42,770 --> 00:15:51,470 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. 143 00:15:53,750 --> 00:15:58,129 Let me move on just to note some of the patterns that we found when we split the 144 00:15:58,130 --> 00:16:02,690 analysis up according to sentence stage will soon be done with the tables and graphs. 145 00:16:02,870 --> 00:16:08,480 But they're important, I think, in just just in setting up the discussion that's going to follow. 146 00:16:08,990 --> 00:16:13,640 And the study was not longitudinal. We are hoping to get some funding to follow people up, 147 00:16:13,940 --> 00:16:19,099 but what we were able to do was explore whether there were any differences between 148 00:16:19,100 --> 00:16:22,640 people's experiences according to the stage of the sentence that they were at. 149 00:16:23,120 --> 00:16:32,150 And we found three clear pattern. So first problem severity was highest among the participants who were in the early sentence phase, 150 00:16:32,780 --> 00:16:38,840 and it was lower for those in the middle or late phases, except for the problems that were specifically to do with release. 151 00:16:39,350 --> 00:16:41,960 And the red may be doesn't show up very well. 152 00:16:42,260 --> 00:16:49,070 I've used colour here just to show up where the differences are statistically significant but try to keep the table fairly clean. 153 00:16:49,370 --> 00:16:55,310 But the pattern, the pattern is quite clear. So even though not all of the differences are significant, 154 00:16:56,930 --> 00:17:01,489 it's telling that with the exception of release anxiety, they all move in the same direction. 155 00:17:01,490 --> 00:17:09,620 So prisoners at later sentence stages reported a lesser degree of problem severity than those in the earlier stage. 156 00:17:11,090 --> 00:17:15,440 Second, we found that prisoners further into their sentences reported higher levels 157 00:17:15,440 --> 00:17:20,120 of emotional and psychological well-being than those in the earlier phases. 158 00:17:20,480 --> 00:17:31,640 So here you can see the percentage of prisoners agreeing or strongly agreeing sorry, agreeing or disagreeing with a selection of statements. 159 00:17:32,210 --> 00:17:34,010 And you can see that by sentence stage, 160 00:17:34,010 --> 00:17:40,999 an increasing proportion agreed or strongly agreed with a range of items about things like emotional intelligence, 161 00:17:41,000 --> 00:17:44,840 maturity, mental health, stability and so on. 162 00:17:44,880 --> 00:17:49,910 And again, the differences are statistically significant, though we haven't shown that the detail here. 163 00:17:50,330 --> 00:17:56,000 So just a couple of examples. So I am learning or have learned to deal with my emotions. 164 00:17:56,780 --> 00:18:00,739 50% agreed. 50% of those at the early stage agreed. 165 00:18:00,740 --> 00:18:04,160 But that goes up to over 80% at later stages. 166 00:18:05,630 --> 00:18:10,940 The percentage agreeing with the statement I am becoming will have become more polite and considerate towards others that 167 00:18:10,940 --> 00:18:19,040 almost doubles as you go up sentence stages and the same for I'm I'm becoming or have become a better person overall. 168 00:18:19,910 --> 00:18:29,810 And then third we find that prisoners further into their sentences were less committed to what prison sociologists often call inmate values. 169 00:18:30,260 --> 00:18:39,200 So again, just to give a couple of examples, while almost a third of prisoners at the early stage agreed with the item, 170 00:18:39,440 --> 00:18:43,430 a prisoner should always be loyal to another prisoner rather than staff. 171 00:18:43,850 --> 00:18:47,840 That that figure is only 7% among late stage prisoners. 172 00:18:48,260 --> 00:18:57,229 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, 173 00:18:57,230 --> 00:19:02,930 that's 25%. So. So what we've got there is is. 174 00:19:05,070 --> 00:19:11,700 So so said among prisoners at later sentence stages, lower problem severity, 175 00:19:12,270 --> 00:19:17,850 higher personal maturity or psychological health, and lower commitments inmate values. 176 00:19:18,030 --> 00:19:24,090 And those findings are quite consistent with other studies that have used these kinds of surveys. 177 00:19:25,380 --> 00:19:29,840 So so that so it's a fairly consistent finding. That problem severity goes down. 178 00:19:30,810 --> 00:19:43,020 And Robert Johnson uses a phrase mature, hoping to convey the idea that prisoners develop ways of learning how to cope, 179 00:19:44,130 --> 00:19:48,390 including things like respect for others and self-sufficiency. 180 00:19:48,570 --> 00:19:56,010 And so all of this has led many scholars to conclude that long term imprisonment is not especially damaging and that many prisoners, 181 00:19:56,010 --> 00:20:01,440 far from becoming prison ized or institutionalised, develop skills that might help them on release. 182 00:20:02,280 --> 00:20:08,570 I'm going to come back to that later, partly because I don't think that's the right interpretation of the findings, 183 00:20:08,580 --> 00:20:12,570 and I think the qualitative data helps explain why in a rather complex way. 184 00:20:12,780 --> 00:20:19,920 So so the point of putting these slides up upfront is that it frames the discussion that's going to follow. 185 00:20:20,220 --> 00:20:25,650 And what's worth hanging on to is first, the sense that prisoners learn to adapt so they find ways of coping. 186 00:20:26,160 --> 00:20:29,820 Second, we get some sense that they feel themselves to be maturing emotionally. 187 00:20:30,090 --> 00:20:33,810 And third, we get a sense that their social commitments are rather loose. 188 00:20:34,590 --> 00:20:40,709 And what I want to do now is use the interview data to to explore in more detail the 189 00:20:40,710 --> 00:20:47,070 transitions that I think prisoners are going through as they go through their sentences. 190 00:20:47,370 --> 00:20:53,850 And I'm going to try by the end to explain, perhaps not fully, some of the trends that I've just described. 191 00:20:54,840 --> 00:20:58,410 The other thing it's worth me saying is that the patterns that I'm going to describe now, 192 00:20:59,820 --> 00:21:03,570 it's not the case that they were universal, but they were remarkably consistent. 193 00:21:04,050 --> 00:21:07,410 So I will talk in fairly general terms from this point on. 194 00:21:10,120 --> 00:21:21,320 So. When they described the initial phase of their sentences, our participants communicated a number of things. 195 00:21:21,340 --> 00:21:25,210 First, the shock of receiving a sentence for murder, 196 00:21:25,720 --> 00:21:31,000 but also the sort of temporal vertigo that resulted from confronting a minimum 197 00:21:31,000 --> 00:21:34,660 sentence that was often longer than the number of years that they had been alive. 198 00:21:35,560 --> 00:21:43,420 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. 199 00:21:43,810 --> 00:21:49,990 So one prisoner said to me, his future flashed before his eyes, which I thought was a very powerful description. 200 00:21:50,980 --> 00:21:56,080 And the third theme here is intrusive recollections. So flashbacks, nightmares, 201 00:21:56,500 --> 00:22:02,770 a constant replaying of the murder event and a kind of repetitive trauma about 202 00:22:02,770 --> 00:22:07,930 the brutality and the enormity of what they had participated in or witnessed. 203 00:22:09,520 --> 00:22:15,100 And then fourth, a kind of a kind of undirected anger, 204 00:22:15,850 --> 00:22:21,790 sometimes anger about being given a sentence that the prisoner didn't feel that he or she deserved. 205 00:22:22,000 --> 00:22:28,690 Lots of our prisoners were convicted under a joint enterprise, which, again, is something I could come back to later. 206 00:22:29,230 --> 00:22:36,800 But just as often, these feelings of anger derived from feelings of underlying feel, feelings of guilt or loss. 207 00:22:36,820 --> 00:22:40,990 So a kind of grief for the life that the prisoner had lost. 208 00:22:41,050 --> 00:22:43,870 So reflecting back on his early months in prison, 209 00:22:43,870 --> 00:22:51,630 Curtis draws our attention to the connection between his sort of outward directed anger and his feelings of unresolved shame. 210 00:22:51,640 --> 00:22:56,110 So he says, I was I was taking my anger out on people with the evidence. 211 00:22:56,110 --> 00:23:00,700 It was clear that I did it, but I didn't really want to admit it to myself at the time. 212 00:23:01,150 --> 00:23:09,670 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, 213 00:23:09,670 --> 00:23:14,020 about seeing the life that he had anticipated sort of evaporates. 214 00:23:14,380 --> 00:23:17,650 So he says, I was angry when I got my sentence. I was really angry. 215 00:23:17,830 --> 00:23:20,590 I was angry with me. I was angry with how my life turned out. 216 00:23:21,250 --> 00:23:27,520 Deep down, I know I had a lot more potentially in my life to do so much more so much good with my life. 217 00:23:27,820 --> 00:23:34,300 And I think these quotes convey the kind of existential emotions of hopelessness and despair 218 00:23:34,720 --> 00:23:38,860 that were present across almost all of the accounts of the early months of the sentences. 219 00:23:40,120 --> 00:23:48,790 The other thing that I think they communicate is the way that these prisoners reacted and adapted to their experiences, 220 00:23:49,360 --> 00:23:53,080 mainly through things like emotional, numbing and dissociation. 221 00:23:53,290 --> 00:23:57,940 So this is returning to the slide I showed a minute ago. Maria says it wasn't real. 222 00:23:58,300 --> 00:24:03,010 Dan talks about the the early monks being an out of body experience. 223 00:24:03,820 --> 00:24:05,800 And I think two things are worth noting here. 224 00:24:06,100 --> 00:24:15,940 The first is that although some of what was described to us can be interpreted using the kind of conventional patterns of imprisonment, 225 00:24:15,940 --> 00:24:26,140 literature, the the emotional content of the interviews went far beyond those the pains that typically feature in the research literature. 226 00:24:26,650 --> 00:24:32,740 And secondly, there's a sort of temporal dimension to these quotes and the sense in various 227 00:24:32,740 --> 00:24:38,260 forms of not being fully in the present or in the case of intrusive recollections, 228 00:24:38,500 --> 00:24:45,580 the sense that the present is being constantly impinged on by memories from the past. 229 00:24:45,820 --> 00:24:53,440 And both of the points that I'm making are significant in our decision to conceptualise 230 00:24:53,440 --> 00:25:00,129 these early adaptations through the use of psychoanalytic concepts of suppression, 231 00:25:00,130 --> 00:25:07,870 denial and sublimation. So these are all sorts of psychic manoeuvres that in some way repudiate the present. 232 00:25:08,920 --> 00:25:15,549 So so one coping technique for prisoners was to try to suppress or block out their predicament, 233 00:25:15,550 --> 00:25:22,490 either just through the kind of power of the mind or through the pursuit of kind of chemical oblivion. 234 00:25:22,510 --> 00:25:29,860 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. 235 00:25:29,860 --> 00:25:32,530 That's what gets you through. That's how you survive. 236 00:25:33,670 --> 00:25:43,240 The second strategy Sublimation involves prisoners channelling their feelings of guilt or despair into positive endeavours. 237 00:25:43,450 --> 00:25:52,359 And sometimes that meant kind of claiming back part of their life that they had hoped to lead by by by 238 00:25:52,360 --> 00:25:58,120 doing the things that they felt they would have done anyway or engaging in sort of pseudo legal activity. 239 00:25:58,120 --> 00:26:04,179 So appealing the sentence. So so here Roger is reflecting back on the early years of his sentence. 240 00:26:04,180 --> 00:26:09,430 And he says, you know, for the first ten years, a painting is another coping mechanism to get you through. 241 00:26:10,540 --> 00:26:13,940 And then the third strategy. Is was denial. 242 00:26:14,540 --> 00:26:20,749 So the refusal to acknowledge the existence of the reality being faced and denial took two forms. 243 00:26:20,750 --> 00:26:30,950 The first was denial of time. So that's a refusal to consider or an inability to consider the sentence in its entirety, 244 00:26:30,950 --> 00:26:38,690 or a kind of blithe optimism about the number of years left to serve or the speed with which time would pass. 245 00:26:39,020 --> 00:26:45,380 So. So when early stage prisoners were asked how they manage time and the prospect of many years in prison, 246 00:26:45,770 --> 00:26:50,600 they would consistently say that that to stop, prevent some form of mental breakdown. 247 00:26:51,080 --> 00:26:54,890 They chose not to think ahead, but they did that time, day by day. 248 00:26:55,310 --> 00:27:01,400 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. 249 00:27:02,240 --> 00:27:12,830 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. 250 00:27:12,840 --> 00:27:17,510 So he says, I'll have another three or four years here. So he was in a high security prison. 251 00:27:17,840 --> 00:27:21,440 Then there'll be close to 20 left, then I'll be in cafe and before you know it, 252 00:27:22,310 --> 00:27:27,410 you're in dark at the second form of denial, with denial of the offence. 253 00:27:27,800 --> 00:27:33,800 So a defence mechanism that I think holds at bay some of the painful realities of being convicted of murder. 254 00:27:34,010 --> 00:27:40,549 And of course, I'm not suggesting that none of our interviewees were not guilty, 255 00:27:40,550 --> 00:27:47,420 only that I think that only that many of them, reflecting back on the early years, talked about the functions of denial. 256 00:27:47,720 --> 00:27:51,860 So John says, I didn't want to accept that I took a human life. 257 00:27:51,860 --> 00:27:53,780 I couldn't believe I could be that person. 258 00:27:54,200 --> 00:28:01,880 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. 259 00:28:02,180 --> 00:28:05,720 If it was, it felt like a part of me died as well. 260 00:28:06,710 --> 00:28:11,210 So I guess the question is, have how are we trying? How do we understand what's going on here? 261 00:28:11,600 --> 00:28:20,080 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. 262 00:28:20,090 --> 00:28:30,370 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. 263 00:28:31,070 --> 00:28:36,740 Shame, whether that's acknowledged or suppressed, about being involved in a serious murder, 264 00:28:36,920 --> 00:28:47,030 and also anger either produced by feelings of unresolved shame or by feelings of illegitimacy about the sentence length or the conviction. 265 00:28:48,500 --> 00:28:52,040 And so to advance the argument, I want to map those emotions onto. 266 00:28:52,130 --> 00:28:55,940 What I'm going to refer to is as a threefold form of dislocation. 267 00:28:56,300 --> 00:28:58,940 So dislocation from the world that the prisoner was in, 268 00:28:59,750 --> 00:29:06,890 a kind of existential dislocation from the prisoner's sense of who they are that's linked to them 269 00:29:07,160 --> 00:29:11,809 having committed a murder or been involved in a murder and then a kind of temporal dislocation. 270 00:29:11,810 --> 00:29:13,430 I'm not sure if that's quite the right term, 271 00:29:13,820 --> 00:29:23,390 but from the future that the prisoner had envisaged and here the work of Margaret Archer has been extremely instructive. 272 00:29:24,020 --> 00:29:28,220 Many of you will know Margaret Archer is a social theorist. She has no interest in prisons at all. 273 00:29:28,640 --> 00:29:37,850 Her work is about structure and agency, and specifically the ways in which agents encounter social structures through modes of reflexivity. 274 00:29:37,850 --> 00:29:46,940 And she defines reflexivity as a kind of capacity to deliberate on our actions in relation to the social circumstances that we encounter. 275 00:29:47,570 --> 00:29:59,690 And Archer says that importantly, the extent to which people are reflexive and the nature of their reflexivity varies as a result, 276 00:29:59,690 --> 00:30:04,309 both of biographical experiences and social context. 277 00:30:04,310 --> 00:30:10,190 So so fundamental to her argument is that social transformation means that there is less 278 00:30:10,190 --> 00:30:16,820 congruence between the world that we grow up in and the situations that we come to encounter. 279 00:30:17,420 --> 00:30:26,090 And she says, in these situations of what she calls contextual discontinuity, traditional guidelines for action are unreliable. 280 00:30:26,090 --> 00:30:31,370 So we can't function just through tacit knowledge or custom or have it. 281 00:30:31,610 --> 00:30:40,580 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. 282 00:30:40,820 --> 00:30:47,330 And Archer calls these internal conversations driven by watched by what she calls ultimate concerns. 283 00:30:47,690 --> 00:30:56,630 So that we think about we're constantly monitoring, reflecting on ways in which we should act with our sort of end goals, 284 00:30:57,020 --> 00:31:00,440 a set of end goals that we define for ourselves in mind. 285 00:31:00,980 --> 00:31:06,620 And empirically, her work draws on interviews with university students, 286 00:31:07,280 --> 00:31:12,550 and she does this to try to understand different modes of reflexivity and the different ways in which people relate. 287 00:31:12,670 --> 00:31:20,320 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. 288 00:31:21,490 --> 00:31:27,990 And the choice of university students is significant because university is that period 289 00:31:28,000 --> 00:31:33,610 of life when individuals often break away from their family life to some extent, 290 00:31:33,610 --> 00:31:42,880 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. 291 00:31:44,200 --> 00:31:56,219 And. The connection with the study that I'm describing is that long term imprisonment represents a very extreme demonstration, 292 00:31:56,220 --> 00:32:00,960 not just of constraint, but also displacement from one lifeworld to another. 293 00:32:01,470 --> 00:32:10,379 And so Archer's vocabulary of structure, agency and these mediating processes, this internal conversation offers, I think, 294 00:32:10,380 --> 00:32:17,520 a very useful way of thinking about how these long term prisoners find ways of acting and adapting to 295 00:32:17,520 --> 00:32:24,390 this rupture in their circumstances and also in their sense of self and their life possibilities. 296 00:32:26,550 --> 00:32:28,650 So I've already suggested that. 297 00:32:29,470 --> 00:32:38,850 But prisoners in their early sentence stage felt completely overwhelmed by time, the amount of time that stretched ahead of them. 298 00:32:39,360 --> 00:32:45,090 And when we asked early stage prisoners how they thought about time or how they manage time, 299 00:32:45,360 --> 00:32:52,650 the phrases that came up very consistently were things like, I just take it as it comes, or I do it day by day. 300 00:32:52,980 --> 00:32:58,050 So this quote from one of our female interviewees captures a typical kind of response. 301 00:32:58,470 --> 00:33:02,400 So we say, How would you think about your time in here? I don't I just don't think about it. 302 00:33:02,640 --> 00:33:06,070 Do you think about day to day, week to week? No. Do you plan at all? 303 00:33:06,090 --> 00:33:09,450 No. I take days as they come. I don't want to do none of that. 304 00:33:10,110 --> 00:33:13,920 And these are people with a lot of days to be taken day by day. 305 00:33:14,340 --> 00:33:16,709 But this was a very common response. 306 00:33:16,710 --> 00:33:23,940 So interviewees say they couldn't imagine the future or it was too painful for them to cast their minds that far ahead. 307 00:33:24,450 --> 00:33:30,960 Even often, they would say even tomorrow. So, you know, even the very short term future felt irrelevant. 308 00:33:31,110 --> 00:33:35,880 The same as today and time in the present also felt meaningless to them. 309 00:33:35,890 --> 00:33:45,900 So the descriptions that were given of time and imprisonment drew on a consistent discourse of states being stuck in time, 310 00:33:46,230 --> 00:33:51,330 treading water, or, as this quote suggests, just, just existing rather than living. 311 00:33:52,740 --> 00:33:59,520 And similarly, early stage prisoners very consistently reported feeling that they had virtually no control over their lives. 312 00:34:00,750 --> 00:34:10,020 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, 313 00:34:10,020 --> 00:34:14,160 the sense that staff held power over them because staff had the keys. 314 00:34:14,370 --> 00:34:20,190 So this this phrase about they've got the keys is there, I think, in the first and the third quotes. 315 00:34:20,490 --> 00:34:28,590 And so ultimately, these prisoners, they couldn't get beyond the fact that their lives were primarily and directly determined by other individuals, 316 00:34:29,730 --> 00:34:33,780 that they ultimately they were just constrained. They were they were in prison. 317 00:34:33,780 --> 00:34:36,870 So they were objects in space as well as time. 318 00:34:39,000 --> 00:34:43,440 And Yvonne Jewkes, in a very good piece of writing about long term imprisonment, 319 00:34:43,440 --> 00:34:50,250 has you talked about liminal to being in a liminal state that this is a useful way of describing long term prisoners? 320 00:34:50,770 --> 00:34:54,690 Liberality, though, implies being in transition between one state and another. 321 00:34:54,990 --> 00:35:00,060 Whereas I think what's being conveyed here is a sense of being stateless, of being nowhere, 322 00:35:02,610 --> 00:35:10,110 and the congruency between the terminology, the metaphors used by all participants. 323 00:35:10,500 --> 00:35:15,420 And Archer's description of fractured reflexivity is extremely striking. 324 00:35:15,430 --> 00:35:18,479 So when I read Archer's description of fractured reflections, 325 00:35:18,480 --> 00:35:24,780 I had one of those quite rare eureka moments and how she describes the fractured 326 00:35:24,780 --> 00:35:29,550 reflexive as a person who is impeded or displaced in their life trajectory. 327 00:35:30,240 --> 00:35:36,389 So she says, it's like someone who this is a quote having learned French then finds myself in an exclusively German 328 00:35:36,390 --> 00:35:43,200 culture and is unable to participate until or unless he begins to master the new language again. 329 00:35:43,200 --> 00:35:48,600 Notably in her 2012 book, The Reflexive Imperative in Light Maternity, 330 00:35:49,080 --> 00:35:57,390 she emphasises the role of traumatic life events in generating a kind of, I guess, a mentality that's about everyday survival. 331 00:35:58,230 --> 00:36:03,030 And Archer says fractured reflexes are engaging in a form of self-talk, 332 00:36:03,030 --> 00:36:08,520 a form of reflexivity, but that inner conversations are predominantly expressive. 333 00:36:08,760 --> 00:36:14,610 So what she means by that is that the inner conversations are emotional and just add to their sense of distress, 334 00:36:15,510 --> 00:36:19,840 rather than providing them with kind of guidance about how to move on in the world. 335 00:36:19,860 --> 00:36:25,440 So she says they are disorientated about their concerns or how best to realise them. 336 00:36:25,650 --> 00:36:28,620 And as a result they are what she calls passive agents. 337 00:36:28,920 --> 00:36:36,540 They are people to whom things happen rather than people who exercise some governance over their lives by making things happen. 338 00:36:38,160 --> 00:36:45,720 And even the terminology that that she uses that her interviewees use are very resonant with the descriptions I've just given. 339 00:36:45,830 --> 00:36:50,600 So being adrift, going with the tide, taking each day as it comes and so on. 340 00:36:50,900 --> 00:36:58,220 And so I think all of this conveys the way that early stage prisoners profoundly disorientated and displaced. 341 00:36:58,640 --> 00:37:04,460 So in a situation where the past no longer seems relevant to the future and the present makes no sense, 342 00:37:04,880 --> 00:37:14,660 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. 343 00:37:16,970 --> 00:37:21,030 But when they described the different phases in their sentences. 344 00:37:21,050 --> 00:37:30,260 Mid and late stage prisoners who we interviewed reflected that shutting out the realities of the situation became progressively harder over time. 345 00:37:30,740 --> 00:37:35,720 So there was general agreement that this took about 3 to 5 years. 346 00:37:36,230 --> 00:37:40,040 Often this was the period during which prisoners were appealing so they could 347 00:37:40,040 --> 00:37:44,180 maintain the hope that they wouldn't have to serve the whole of the sentence. 348 00:37:44,690 --> 00:37:49,700 And others said it was only once they were settling in a prison full of other lifers, 349 00:37:51,080 --> 00:37:58,310 or with a few years of imprisonment under their belt, that they could kind of commit psychologically to the situation that they were in. 350 00:38:00,200 --> 00:38:08,630 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. 351 00:38:09,890 --> 00:38:14,959 And what followed and what I want to spend the rest of my time explaining was a process of transition 352 00:38:14,960 --> 00:38:22,010 in five main areas that more or less correspond to the dislocations that I identified earlier. 353 00:38:22,040 --> 00:38:29,180 So adapting to the sentence, that's adjusting to the fact that your social universe is no longer where it was. 354 00:38:29,810 --> 00:38:33,560 Finding means of managing time, shifting conceptions of control. 355 00:38:33,980 --> 00:38:42,950 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. 356 00:38:43,430 --> 00:38:47,180 And also making the sentence constructive, finding meaning in it. 357 00:38:47,450 --> 00:38:50,930 So these are adjustments that involve some kind of orientation to the future. 358 00:38:51,980 --> 00:38:56,960 And most prisoners reported that after this initial phase of denial and desperation, 359 00:38:57,680 --> 00:39:02,330 accepting the situation was essential for psychological survival that you just have to cope. 360 00:39:02,870 --> 00:39:10,490 And the findings here are quite consistent with what Ian O'Donnell says in his book Prison Solitude and Time, 361 00:39:10,670 --> 00:39:14,540 which is about the essential adaptability of humans. 362 00:39:14,780 --> 00:39:19,390 So our interviewees tended to say, I never thought I'd be able to cope, but you have to cope. 363 00:39:19,400 --> 00:39:25,370 You just find a way of coping. But coming to terms with the sentence meant acknowledging that the prison was 364 00:39:25,370 --> 00:39:31,220 their new home and the only place where their life could meaningfully be lived. 365 00:39:31,280 --> 00:39:37,180 So the key phrase in this first quote is you you just you still you just have to still get on with life. 366 00:39:40,280 --> 00:39:47,990 And it's important to and it's important to know how different this is from what short term prisoners typically say. 367 00:39:48,530 --> 00:39:51,910 The short term prison is generally say prison is not real life. 368 00:39:51,920 --> 00:39:56,030 It's just a temporary world that I'm in when I'm suspending the rest of my existence. 369 00:39:56,040 --> 00:40:02,350 So it it's somewhere inauthentic and it's not worth me investing time in building a life for myself in here. 370 00:40:02,360 --> 00:40:08,480 Whereas what we see in this quotes is prisoners recognising that there is a shift in which that they're sort of 371 00:40:08,570 --> 00:40:14,060 the world that they are actually living in now is the prison on the outside world is no longer their world. 372 00:40:14,420 --> 00:40:18,409 So the first prisoner here says it doesn't matter where you're living, you're still living a life. 373 00:40:18,410 --> 00:40:25,400 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. 374 00:40:25,730 --> 00:40:32,960 Get used to it. And so almost all of our interviewees reflected that after a few years, the reality set in, 375 00:40:33,290 --> 00:40:39,080 to quote Edward Zambo, that they were persons living in prison rather than offenders doing time. 376 00:40:40,150 --> 00:40:47,050 In other words, life just wasn't in suspension perpetually, which is what much of the prison literature suggests. 377 00:40:47,680 --> 00:40:54,880 Life was relocated within the walls of the prison. So there's and there's this palpable sense here, both of resignation and agency. 378 00:40:55,090 --> 00:41:05,170 So accepting, fatalistic, the overall situation, but within that set of rather desperate circumstances, endeavouring to make the most of things. 379 00:41:06,800 --> 00:41:12,550 The second adaptive transition, if that's the right phrase, was about time. 380 00:41:13,030 --> 00:41:19,599 So in contrast to the early stage prisoners, mid and late stage interviewees had found ways of taming. 381 00:41:19,600 --> 00:41:29,020 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. 382 00:41:29,050 --> 00:41:37,090 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. 383 00:41:37,360 --> 00:41:42,189 So that would often be that my target point is getting to a Category C person, 384 00:41:42,190 --> 00:41:46,989 so a lower security prison or getting a certain number of qualifications. 385 00:41:46,990 --> 00:41:49,930 But they had points in time ahead of them that they could reach for. 386 00:41:50,650 --> 00:41:56,590 And they were also much more skilled at managing time in the present or manipulating time in the present. 387 00:41:56,950 --> 00:42:04,450 So often this was through rituals of faith or spiritual practices, which enabled them to almost lift themselves out of the present. 388 00:42:04,450 --> 00:42:07,779 So sort of transcendental is a is the right phrase here. 389 00:42:07,780 --> 00:42:13,300 So you could lift yourself out of clock time through things like meditation or prayer. 390 00:42:14,260 --> 00:42:19,960 And also when they talked about how they pass their time so often through things like reading or use of the gym, 391 00:42:20,860 --> 00:42:26,920 their accounts weren't suffused with the sense of being marooned in the present or overwhelmed by the present. 392 00:42:27,430 --> 00:42:31,480 These routines were self devised rather than imposed upon them, 393 00:42:31,660 --> 00:42:38,620 and that made life tolerable and predictable rather than sort of routinised in a way that was unbearable. 394 00:42:38,950 --> 00:42:41,950 And so certainly when they when they talked about time, 395 00:42:42,520 --> 00:42:48,040 they were much more likely to describe it as something that could be used rather than something that just had to kill off, 396 00:42:48,310 --> 00:42:54,640 that they had to just expand. Their transition was it was in relation to control and self-control. 397 00:42:54,650 --> 00:43:04,150 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, 398 00:43:04,150 --> 00:43:08,770 mainly in relation to whether you were locked up or not, whether you were in prison or not, 399 00:43:09,220 --> 00:43:14,500 whereas those who were further on, certainly they recognised the limits on their autonomy. 400 00:43:15,160 --> 00:43:24,700 But they were. But they had found areas of life over which they felt they did have some control, particularly emotions and interactions. 401 00:43:24,700 --> 00:43:30,790 So Daniel says, I've got control of certain aspects, I've got control in my reactions and how I react to people, 402 00:43:30,790 --> 00:43:35,710 how I interact with people and my plans for the future and getting myself prepared and ready for that. 403 00:43:35,980 --> 00:43:42,760 I've got certain control over my education and I've got certain control over staying healthy and staying fit, staying positive. 404 00:43:44,050 --> 00:43:53,890 So the thoughts about control extended beyond this binary condition of being kind of locked up or not or being free. 405 00:43:54,370 --> 00:44:00,490 And they expressed this much stronger sense that there are some aspects of their life can be self-determined. 406 00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:04,059 And I guess, again, you know, Donald writes about this, 407 00:44:04,060 --> 00:44:12,790 but this is about accepting your general predicament and then focusing on aspects of self control and self management. 408 00:44:13,570 --> 00:44:25,000 The other thing that I want to emphasise here is that this was about cultivating an ethical self through through making decisions about interactions, 409 00:44:25,000 --> 00:44:32,350 emotions and so on. So think I call this moral subjective action and Lambeck describes it as ordinary ethics. 410 00:44:32,350 --> 00:44:39,700 So seeking to live life well and wisely, being good, doing good in one's everyday actions. 411 00:44:40,030 --> 00:44:45,310 So it was important to prisoners to to demonstrate through their routine dealings with others. 412 00:44:45,970 --> 00:44:51,040 So through being courteous and reliable, being someone that could have a good conversation, 413 00:44:51,760 --> 00:44:58,060 these were ways of demonstrating that you were an ethical being in a world that didn't give you many opportunities to do that. 414 00:44:59,720 --> 00:45:04,460 And this partly relates to the importance of resolving feelings of shame. 415 00:45:04,910 --> 00:45:12,230 Shame about what you're done for who you were. Lots of our interviewees continued to maintain innocence, but for others, 416 00:45:12,680 --> 00:45:20,650 a really key part of adapting to the present involves kind of moving on from the period of denial, 417 00:45:21,530 --> 00:45:27,710 psychological denial or legal denial, and coming to terms with what it means to have been involved in someone else's death. 418 00:45:28,280 --> 00:45:37,360 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. 419 00:45:37,370 --> 00:45:43,220 So taking moral responsibility without being so psychologically swamped by what you're done. 420 00:45:43,730 --> 00:45:47,090 So Julius says he shouldn't have died. His comedy shouldn't have felt the grief. 421 00:45:47,360 --> 00:45:52,400 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. 422 00:45:53,150 --> 00:46:02,510 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. 423 00:46:02,840 --> 00:46:05,900 And he says, it was like I were writing in my own pages of my book. 424 00:46:06,620 --> 00:46:11,450 It wasn't someone else writing them for me. From this point on, I was in control of where I went. 425 00:46:13,400 --> 00:46:19,520 And most interviewees who who weren't denying the effects said that this process of 426 00:46:19,520 --> 00:46:24,500 reconciling themselves with what they'd done was a was a fateful moment in their life. 427 00:46:24,890 --> 00:46:29,660 And alongside the murder itself was something that changed them profoundly. 428 00:46:30,170 --> 00:46:39,920 So so sort of dealing psychologically with the offence and with feelings of shame generated quite profound existential reflection about 429 00:46:40,160 --> 00:46:48,230 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. 430 00:46:48,500 --> 00:46:55,130 And so here we're seeing forms of quite deep introspection about life and loss and self. 431 00:46:55,340 --> 00:47:02,120 John Irwin calls this the kind of moral self inventory that's like a kind of moral audit of your self. 432 00:47:02,390 --> 00:47:05,450 You know, who am I? What? What have I done? Why am I here? 433 00:47:05,990 --> 00:47:14,569 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, 434 00:47:14,570 --> 00:47:19,100 to look forwards rather than backwards, and to take control of one's life narrative. 435 00:47:19,640 --> 00:47:27,830 And I think these preoccupations help to explain some of the figures that I showed earlier, which were about prisoners quite loose social ties, 436 00:47:28,670 --> 00:47:33,490 that that why when I've interviewed prisoners in other contexts not serving long sentences, 437 00:47:33,710 --> 00:47:43,190 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. 438 00:47:43,460 --> 00:47:47,690 Whereas these prisoners were were relatively uninterested in those things. 439 00:47:48,080 --> 00:47:54,680 And I think this is because it was much more important to them to be sort of having and resolving these interior 440 00:47:54,860 --> 00:48:01,640 conversations and thinking about their individual moral development and thinking about ways of living a good life. 441 00:48:03,590 --> 00:48:08,720 And the kinds of reflections I've just showed are like one of Archer's other types. 442 00:48:09,260 --> 00:48:16,249 She calls the matter reflexive, and she characterises matter reflexive as people who are slightly disengaged 443 00:48:16,250 --> 00:48:19,670 from their own families and keen to produce lives that are different from the 444 00:48:19,670 --> 00:48:24,620 lives they were or from their own backgrounds and are rather socially isolated 445 00:48:24,620 --> 00:48:28,160 so that they're making life decisions without consultation with other people. 446 00:48:28,820 --> 00:48:34,010 She she says as a result, they are reflexively preoccupied with themselves, 447 00:48:34,010 --> 00:48:39,500 so they're engaged in this constant process of self-examination, self-critique. 448 00:48:39,890 --> 00:48:46,160 So she says the subject is internally conversing about herself and not just about her external actions. 449 00:48:47,020 --> 00:48:51,139 And she describes better reflexive as being interested in self-knowledge and 450 00:48:51,140 --> 00:48:56,900 self-transformation propels by a very idealistic sense of ultimate concerns, 451 00:48:57,170 --> 00:49:02,780 wanting to make a difference in the world rather than just wanting to satisfy individual needs. 452 00:49:04,160 --> 00:49:10,040 And the ultimate concerns for our mid-stage prisoners combines sort of moral 453 00:49:10,040 --> 00:49:14,659 self-development and the desire to make the sentence and life beyond constructive. 454 00:49:14,660 --> 00:49:18,530 So constructive for themselves, but also for wider society. And. 455 00:49:19,650 --> 00:49:24,630 In the early stage, relatively few prisoners could see any meaning in the situation that they were in, 456 00:49:25,890 --> 00:49:31,230 partly because they saw the real world as being outside the prison environment. 457 00:49:31,330 --> 00:49:36,660 So so Martin here says nothing constructive can occur because I'm still within these walls, 458 00:49:37,140 --> 00:49:42,959 whereas prisoners who were further into their sentences generally said, I want to achieve something better with my life. 459 00:49:42,960 --> 00:49:49,140 I want to make the most of this sentence not and they weren't just talking about so they often would talk about education. 460 00:49:49,590 --> 00:49:54,210 But when they did that, they weren't just talking about getting qualifications or learning skills. 461 00:49:54,600 --> 00:49:57,870 They were talking about wholesale personal change. 462 00:49:57,870 --> 00:50:03,090 So making themselves a better person and giving something back to society. 463 00:50:03,300 --> 00:50:11,390 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. 464 00:50:11,410 --> 00:50:20,489 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 465 00:50:20,490 --> 00:50:25,229 wasted and that she wanted me to just make sure that my life turned out with something good and not waste it, 466 00:50:25,230 --> 00:50:28,260 you know, partly in the memory of her son who died that night. 467 00:50:28,260 --> 00:50:34,860 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. 468 00:50:35,160 --> 00:50:40,170 And part of what's really interesting here is this language of rebirth of the past. 469 00:50:40,170 --> 00:50:46,650 You not no longer being relevant and you breathe breathing afresh, being a new person, 470 00:50:48,060 --> 00:50:53,100 and the finding of meaning was enabled by religious faith or spiritual commitment. 471 00:50:53,250 --> 00:51:02,879 So belief systems and the practices that they entailed functioned across the temporal dimensions that I've mentioned past, present and future. 472 00:51:02,880 --> 00:51:06,780 So that helped prisoners atone for what they've done. 473 00:51:07,230 --> 00:51:12,990 They help them find meaning and godliness in this sort of never ending present. 474 00:51:13,830 --> 00:51:19,139 They fortified prisoners to endure their present conditions by giving them some sense that 475 00:51:19,140 --> 00:51:25,710 there was a meaning to their suffering and that there might be a less painful afterlife. 476 00:51:26,610 --> 00:51:35,670 They provided answers to these kinds of questions about the purpose of life, the consequences of taking someone else's life, and so on. 477 00:51:36,600 --> 00:51:39,329 And they also offered a basis for personal transformation. 478 00:51:39,330 --> 00:51:46,229 So some person has talked about it's these things that teach me how to be a normal, decent human being. 479 00:51:46,230 --> 00:51:49,860 That's quite an extreme quote, but a decent example. 480 00:51:51,000 --> 00:51:57,810 Okay. So I want to wrap up now by just discussing some interpretations of the findings and some of the broader implications. 481 00:51:58,650 --> 00:52:00,809 The first thing is that the findings, I think, 482 00:52:00,810 --> 00:52:09,750 call into question the tendency within prison sociology for the offence itself to be considered slightly irrelevant. 483 00:52:10,500 --> 00:52:17,549 So prison sociologists don't tend to discuss what it is that people actually did and what meaning that might have for people. 484 00:52:17,550 --> 00:52:22,250 But we found this to be a really key determinant of the prison experience. 485 00:52:22,260 --> 00:52:31,829 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, 486 00:52:31,830 --> 00:52:36,870 that prior experiences of abuse, these were the driving forces of their adaptations. 487 00:52:37,950 --> 00:52:44,580 And it's also important to say that these things seem to override the significance of almost all other important variables. 488 00:52:44,760 --> 00:52:51,690 We didn't find differences between white and ethnic minority prisoners, for example. 489 00:52:51,690 --> 00:53:00,690 So it's as if the it's as if the sentence length and the offence kind of overrides everything else. 490 00:53:01,440 --> 00:53:09,510 So the enormity of the act and the sort of severity of the sanction flatten other variables, I guess. 491 00:53:10,530 --> 00:53:16,319 Second, I'll try to illustrate that there were sharp differences between the adapted patterns 492 00:53:16,320 --> 00:53:21,150 of prisoners in the early stage and subsequent stages of these very long sentences. 493 00:53:21,360 --> 00:53:27,929 And I think the most useful metaphor here is title. So prisoners in the early stages were, in effect, treading water. 494 00:53:27,930 --> 00:53:29,640 That was a phrase they often used. 495 00:53:30,300 --> 00:53:37,200 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. 496 00:53:37,740 --> 00:53:43,530 So that energy was spent trying to deal with immediate emotions like anger, despair, 497 00:53:44,370 --> 00:53:49,170 and they felt little control over their daily existence or their long term future. 498 00:53:49,440 --> 00:53:57,810 So a bit like our just description of fractured reflexive, they were largely passive in the context of their everyday predicament. 499 00:53:58,020 --> 00:54:04,590 Their form of agency was reactive, backwards looking, whereas those further on had come to accept, 500 00:54:05,220 --> 00:54:09,540 if I can sort of labour the metaphor that they that they were, 501 00:54:09,690 --> 00:54:16,290 that they couldn't escape the water and they deliberately submitted to its flow but tried to use its energy to their advantage. 502 00:54:16,290 --> 00:54:21,950 So tried to use sort of tidal energy as a. And we're calling this productive agency. 503 00:54:22,310 --> 00:54:29,420 So that focus was in the future rather than the past, and their use of the present was constructive rather than depleted. 504 00:54:29,660 --> 00:54:33,440 They were trying to do something with time rather than just get rid of it. 505 00:54:33,860 --> 00:54:41,450 Driven by a new sense of self and a kind of ultimate concern with being good, doing good, living a good life. 506 00:54:43,160 --> 00:54:48,280 And and this brings me to the final point, which is which is about the impact of long term imprisonment. 507 00:54:48,660 --> 00:54:54,709 And I mentioned earlier that problem severity diminished with sentencing stage and 508 00:54:54,710 --> 00:54:59,540 prisoners at later sentence stages reported higher levels of emotional happiness, 509 00:55:00,260 --> 00:55:07,430 maturity and so on. I really want to emphasise the importance of not taking those results at face value. 510 00:55:07,850 --> 00:55:13,190 That's partly because of research on the post-release outcomes of long term prisoners. 511 00:55:13,270 --> 00:55:20,509 So Liam and Committed have recently argued that or demonstrated I guess that the long term 512 00:55:20,510 --> 00:55:25,700 prisoners on release exhibit the characteristics of what they call a post incarceration syndrome, 513 00:55:25,970 --> 00:55:31,940 very similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. And Margaret Shinkle in her book, 514 00:55:31,940 --> 00:55:39,229 Being Imprisoned is just a short passage where she notes that the prisoners who 515 00:55:39,230 --> 00:55:42,830 long term prisoners who'd been released describe themselves as institutionalised. 516 00:55:43,280 --> 00:55:45,050 None of those who were still in prison did. 517 00:55:45,060 --> 00:55:51,800 Because, of course, institutionalisation is something that you're very unlikely to be able to recognise when you're within it. 518 00:55:52,040 --> 00:55:52,489 In other words, 519 00:55:52,490 --> 00:55:59,900 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. 520 00:56:01,010 --> 00:56:06,500 So if we return to the quote that I began with, I think there's a sort of implicit explanatory theory here, 521 00:56:06,950 --> 00:56:12,469 and the reference to metamorphosis is consistent with what many other prisoners said 522 00:56:12,470 --> 00:56:16,440 about the positive ways in which they felt that changed over the course of the sentence. 523 00:56:16,460 --> 00:56:22,450 So some. Describe themselves almost as superhuman. 524 00:56:22,630 --> 00:56:26,590 So Calvin says this place has just been absolutely amazing for me. 525 00:56:27,040 --> 00:56:33,249 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. 526 00:56:33,250 --> 00:56:37,090 On post-traumatic growth, it's sometimes called post adversarial growth. 527 00:56:37,330 --> 00:56:43,510 So the idea that following experiences like abuse or serious illness, 528 00:56:43,510 --> 00:56:49,720 people often report positive change, an enhanced an enhanced sense of meaning in life. 529 00:56:50,560 --> 00:56:57,730 But I want to sound a note of caution, because what many of our accounts implied was a kind of hardening of the self, 530 00:56:58,300 --> 00:57:01,750 so a need to build an emotional wall around themselves. 531 00:57:02,290 --> 00:57:07,600 And as these quotations illustrate, prisoners often distinguish between what they call prison maturity. 532 00:57:08,860 --> 00:57:12,330 That's what I mean by when I used the phrase earlier of mature coping. 533 00:57:12,340 --> 00:57:15,579 So being well adjusted to the prison environment, 534 00:57:15,580 --> 00:57:28,090 these structural features of scarcity and loneliness and insecurity that to distinguish between that and having deficits in terms of social maturity. 535 00:57:29,170 --> 00:57:32,680 So Victor says maturity wise, yeah, I've grown up, I'm more rational now. 536 00:57:32,920 --> 00:57:36,160 I'm more aware of the consequences of my actions. Now I feel more stable. 537 00:57:36,490 --> 00:57:40,720 But you've got one part of me. This feels like I'm still 17, because that's the age of coming in. 538 00:57:40,990 --> 00:57:47,050 And I have no life experience or expectations in life, and I've never had to pay taxes or nothing, really. 539 00:57:47,590 --> 00:57:51,639 And similarly, Nathan says, I'm immature in certain areas, 540 00:57:51,640 --> 00:57:55,540 and I'll always be immature in prison because it's the outside world that would help me mature. 541 00:57:56,260 --> 00:58:02,020 We say, What are the areas where you feel that you're immature, intimate relationships of friendships, stuff like that. 542 00:58:02,590 --> 00:58:07,000 So just to return finally again to the starting, quote, 543 00:58:07,240 --> 00:58:12,220 prisoners worked on and transform their personal identities and their orientations to the world. 544 00:58:12,580 --> 00:58:21,930 They sense the future, but they did that within the chrysalis of the prison with limited resources and outside normal structures and framework. 545 00:58:21,940 --> 00:58:28,030 So so Dan says the outside world rushes on and they they felt that they had 546 00:58:28,030 --> 00:58:32,800 been deprived of normal adult milestones and markers of social achievement, 547 00:58:33,070 --> 00:58:38,460 often family life learning to drive, things like that. 548 00:58:38,470 --> 00:58:40,090 So in terms of their social maturity, 549 00:58:40,090 --> 00:58:46,990 their lives felt on pause because they haven't experienced normal rites of passage or responsibilities or relationships. 550 00:58:47,590 --> 00:58:56,410 So to return to Archer's terminology, they should reflexively engage only within the structures in which they were located, 551 00:58:56,950 --> 00:59:00,490 unlike her description of matter reflexive. And this is important. 552 00:59:00,790 --> 00:59:06,669 They couldn't just move on at the points at which they became disappointed that life didn't meet their ideals. 553 00:59:06,670 --> 00:59:13,629 They couldn't change career or up sticks, or at the point of personal reawakening. 554 00:59:13,630 --> 00:59:15,640 They couldn't move on in their life. 555 00:59:15,760 --> 00:59:23,110 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, 556 00:59:23,710 --> 00:59:32,050 and the vague world of the future for which both their present and their past guidelines for action were irrelevant. 557 00:59:32,320 --> 00:59:36,310 So that is where I think the metaphor doesn't quite work. 558 00:59:36,400 --> 00:59:40,150 I spent a lot of time rereading this letter because where is the. 559 00:59:40,300 --> 00:59:44,680 The butterfly emerges from its chrysalis perfectly adapted to the environment. 560 00:59:45,030 --> 00:59:52,270 I'm much less optimistic that long term prisoners, despite the positive descriptions of their personal development, 561 00:59:52,600 --> 00:59:57,130 emerge back into society, well adjusted to its demands and requirements. 562 00:59:58,060 --> 00:59:59,740 I'll stop there. Thank you very much.