New publication: ‘A poor prospect indeed’

Things have been quiet on here for the last month or two while I’ve been working on admin to do with the PhD – ethics forms, risk assessments, and so on – and while I’ve been preparing some past work for publication in an academic journal. This post is just a quick one to publicise […]

Rehabilitation and the aims of prisons (part 3)

This is the last of three posts in a series looking at rehabilitation as an aim of punishment. Click the links to access the first and second posts in the series. How relevant is Struggle for Justice today? In England and Wales today, our criminal justice system (measured purely on the basis of imprisonment rates […]

Rehabilitation and the aims of prisons (part 2)

This is the second of three posts in a series looking at rehabilitation as an aim of punishment. You can find the first post in the series here. Arguing for an end to rehabilitation As a consequence of the arguments I summarised in the first post in this series, the AFSC report’s authors argued for […]

Rehabilitation and the aims of prisons (part 1)

This is the first of a series of three posts. It’s been prompted by reading Struggle for Justice, a report published by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC – a Quaker body) in the 1970s. Published at time when the accepted wisdom of the post-war period — which favoured rehabilitation as the proper aim for […]

Notes: how lifers adapt to imprisonment (part 2)

This is the second of two posts noting my thoughts about a recent study on life imprisonment. The first post can be found here. Questions raised by this research Institutionalisation? In my experience, one of the common-sense ideas people refer to when talking about imprisonment is that prisoners come out ‘institutionalised’. The term goes back […]

Notes: how lifers adapt to imprisonment (part 1)

Another post on my reading, this time on a set of articles I’ve re-read recently while revisiting the Masters research I carried out in 2017. I’m writing up the latter for ‘proper’ publication in a peer-reviewed journal, as a means of revisiting my findings and thinking through exactly what it is that I am trying […]