This is the second of two posts thinking about how lifers (and others) might compare what it means to have different lengths of sentence. In the last post I published, a lifer I called Richard mused about what it meant to him to have the same tariff as other men in his prison workplace, whose […]
Comparing sentences, comparing offences (part 1)
This is the first of two posts thinking about how lifers (and others) might compare what it means to have different lengths of sentence. Selecting participants on tariff length One thing that has been on my mind lately is how to select a sample of people to interview. I’ll be working in two different prisons, […]
Not just a piece of cake
On why hospitality in prison can mean rather more than it does elsewhere, and why a piece of cake isn’t just a piece of cake.
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 […]