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 […]

Notes: an agenda for research on long-term prisoners

After a quiet period on the blog while I’ve been working on other things, this will be the first in a series of posts which are essentially notes on the reading I’ve been doing. Other posts will specifically be written for the blog, but these notes posts are a way of trying to force myself […]

Lifers and the ‘right to hope’

A new campaign This post comes in the context of a meeting I attended in London earlier this week, convened by Penal Reform International. Attendees from a range of countries in both the global North and South all had some interest in the issue of life imprisonment. The aim was to explore how a global […]