Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood

Adaptation, Identity and Time

Ben Crewe, Susie Hulley, Serena Wright

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781137566003
• eBook ISBN: 9781137566010
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the experiences of prisoners in England & Wales sentenced when relatively young to very long life sentences (with minimum terms of fifteen years or more). Based on a major study, including almost 150 interviews with men and women at various sentence stages and over 300 surveys, it explores the ways in which long-term prisoners respond to their convictions, adapt to the various challenges that they encounter and re-construct their lives within and beyond the prison. Focussing on such matters as personal identity, relationships with family and friends, and the management of time, the book argues that long-term imprisonment entails a profound confrontation with the self. It provides detailed insight into how such prisoners deal with the everyday burdens of their situation, feelings of injustice, anger and shame, and the need to find some sense of hope, control and meaning in their lives. In doing so, it exposes the nature and consequences of the life-changing termsof imprisonment that have become increasingly common in recent years. 

© The Author(s) 2020

B. Crewe et al.Life Imprisonment from Young AdulthoodPalgrave Studies in Prisons and Penologyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56601-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Ben Crewe¹ , Susie Hulley¹ and Serena Wright²

(1)

Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

(2)

Department of Law and Criminology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, UK

Ben Crewe (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Susie Hulley

Email: [email protected]

Serena Wright

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

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. (Dan, 20s, early)¹

In the absence of capital punishment, depriving people of their liberty for extremely long periods is the most extreme sanction of the state. Dan’s description in the quotation above illustrates the elemental profundity of this sanction. When men and women are confined for very significant terms, they encounter the normal pains and burdens of imprisonment, but also confront a range of more acute anxieties about who they are, their place in the world, the kind of life they are able to construct inside prison and what they have lost as a result of their sentence. The aim of this book is to describe and make sense of such experiences. Focusing on the prison system in England and Wales, it seeks to address the questions of how men and women who are given long life sentences at an early age experience sustained imprisonment, how they cope with its burdens, how they deal with issues of selfhood and meaning, and how they establish a social lifeworld within a carceral environment.

The Abolition of Capital Punishment and the Growth of the Long Life Sentence

When the Advisory Committee on the Penal System reported in 1968 on the prison regime for long-term prisoners in conditions of maximum security, 168 individuals were serving custodial terms of longer than 10 years and 489 serving life sentences or their equivalent (Radzinowicz 1968). At the time, only two ‘lifers’ had served more than 15 years of continuous custody, while only six had served over 12 years. Of the individuals released from prison between 1959 and 1963 who had committed murder, the period spent in prison ranged from four to 14 years (House of Commons 1964, c. 612).

Today, however, very long sentences are comparatively commonplace. In 2003, the average minimum period (or ‘tariff’—see below for further explanation) to be served for mandatory life sentences (excluding whole-life tariffs) was 12.5 years; by 2013, this had reached 21.1 years (see Table 1.1). Indeed, over recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of people serving long sentences, in average tariff lengths and in the overall amount of time spent in custody by prisoners serving life sentences.

Table 1.1

Average tariff length for murder in England and Wales (2003–2013)

Year of sentence	Average tariff (years)
2003	12.5
2004	14.5
2005	15.9
2006	17.1
2007	15.6
2008	17.8
2009	17.5
2010	18.9
2011	18.8
2012	20.4
2013	21.1

Source Ministry of Justice (JSAS/FOI 89346) (Thanks to Jonathan Bild for granting us permission to cite the data from his Freedom of Information request. A more recent Freedom of Information request (170904015) produced different figures, based on the same question, suggesting that the average tariff for prisoners serving mandatory life sentences went from 15.3 years in 2003 to 21.3 years in 2016, an increase of almost 40%)

It was the abolition of capital punishment as the mandatory punishment for murder—a result of changing penal sensibilities alongside a series of high-profile miscarriages of justice—that effectively created the long life sentence as a widespread penal phenomenon. The Homicide Act 1957 had already introduced partial defences to murder (provocation and diminished responsibility), reducing such offences to ‘manslaughter’, and had abolished the use of capital punishment for murder except in certain circumstances, for example: any murder by shooting; any murder of a police officer acting in the execution of his duty; or any murder committed in the course or furtherance of theft. The abolitionist goal of eliminating the mandatory death penalty for the remaining ‘capital murder’ offences in England and Wales was advanced in 1965, when Royal Assent was granted to the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act, suspending—though not abolishing entirely—capital punishment for all forms of murder.²

In the eight years between the enactment of the Homicide Act and the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act, the question of what imprisonment for ‘life’ meant was, in political circles, a cause of ‘grave disquiet’ (House of Commons 1964, c.612). Following the 1965 Act, all individuals convicted of murder were to be given sentences of mandatory life imprisonment. However, as the number of life-sentenced prisoners rose rapidly, the unintended consequence was to place a significant burden on the prison system. In a House of Lords debate in 1980, the Earl of Longford brought to the House’s attention the ‘dramatic increase’ in ‘long-sentence prisoners’. In 1957, he noted, there had been 133 prisoners serving life imprisonment. By the late 1960s, the number had risen to almost 600 (House of Lords 1971, c.623) and, by 1979 to 1322, representing a tenfold increase in 22 years (House of Lords 1982, c.870). As the Earl went on to argue, the ‘miserable conditions’ created by overcrowding in English prisons compounded the ‘mental torture which we inflict on long-term prisoners, to whom we hold out no prospect of human happiness as one dreary year passes slowly into another’ (House of Lords 1982, c.870). Moving forward, he suggested, penal policy should be focused on one matter alone: to achieve a ‘substantial reduction in the prison population’, an act which would require both limiting the number of ‘long-term’ prisoners and reducing the length of such terms.

This reduction has not materialised; indeed, the ‘rapid’ rise of indeterminate sentences in the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a 75% increase in mandatory life sentences handed down per year—the ‘largest proportionate increase’ in the prison population of England and Wales (Ministry of Justice 2009: 2). The number of individuals within the prison system serving life sentences increased from 1322 in 1979 to almost 2000 by the end of the 1980s, a decade after the Earl of Longford’s plea. By the end of 2019, this figure stood at 7046 (Ministry of Justice 2019a).

Within these general increases, there has been a rise in the number of prisoners with lengthy tariffs. As Table 1.2 shows, the number of people aged 18 or over given minimum sentences of 15 years or more increased from fewer than 100 individuals per year between 2000 and 2003 to as high as 249 in 2008 (Freedom of Information, ref: 68520). At the end of 2010, out of 8309 prisoners in custody serving a life sentence, 2309 had minimum terms of 15 years or more (Freedom of Information, ref: 68152); of these, 319 had been sentenced when aged between 18 and 20 inclusive (Freedom of Information, ref: 68520).

By the end of September 2019, there were 3555 individuals in custody serving life sentences with tariffs of between 10 and 20 years and 1827 with tariffs of greater than 20 years (Ministry of Justice 2019a). 880 individuals had a tariff of more than 25 years, 291 of more than 30 years and 264 of more than 32 years (Freedom of Information, ref: 191009017). These numbers were substantially higher than at the start of 2014, when 543 individuals were serving life sentence with a tariff of more than 25 years, 179 of more than 30 years and 137 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Methods
• 3. Life Histories
• 4. The Early Years
• 5. Coping and Adaptation
• 6. Social Relations
• 7. Identity and Selfhood
• 8. Time and Place
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter