Category: Penal theory
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“I’ve been perfectly happy in prison”
A post reflecting on an interview with an elderly life-sentenced prisoner, who said he had enjoyed his prison sentence, and didn’t feel as though he had been punished at all.
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Comparing sentences, comparing offences (part 2)
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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Changing Inside 