The Impact of Release on Mandatory Life-Sentenced Prisoners’ Identities

Abstract

This thesis explores the impact of release on mandatory life-sentenced prisoners’ identities and their experiences of returning to the community after serving a lengthy period of imprisonment. In 2023, there were over 7,000 individuals serving life sentences in England and Wales, most of whom will eventually be released from custody and returned to the community. However, we currently know strikingly little about the process of release for long-term and life-sentenced prisoners through-the-gate. Instead, studies that have examined ‘life after life imprisonment’ have almost all been cross-sectional, providing insights into the experience of release at a particular period in time post-release. In this thesis, I redress this imbalance by exploring the release experiences of life-sentenced prisoners longitudinally, and in doing so generate some theoretical insights which will be of wider relevance to studies of imprisonment and release. The thesis is based on a short-longitudinal study conducted in England and Wales over a 13 month period. It involved 36 in-depth semi-structured interviews with 20 male mandatory lifers who were interviewed both before and after their release from prison. These men were first interviewed within prison following a positive Parole Board hearing which issued their release, before being re-interviewed in the community five months after their release. The thesis focuses on three areas which were of particular salience to these men’s release experiences, none of which have been explored in detail in previous studies of people released from a life sentence: first, participants’ experiences of release on temporary licence (ROTL) and how such experiences prepared them for release and re/settlement; second, the interaction between the ‘moral weight’ of murder and release trajectories, including what these men thought they deserved, their ability to move on, and their capacity to repair a morally injurious identity; and third, the function of social relations upon release and the power they hold in the re/integration process. All three of these areas – ROTL, moral weight, and relational re/integration – were centred around the fact that these men were serving a mandatory life sentence for the specific offence of murder. Committing this particular offence changed the ways in which my research participants were seen by other people and how they saw themselves, whilst the length of time they had spent as a result of their conviction limited their understanding of how to function in the fast-paced, technology-driven world of the 21st century. Through conducting a longitudinal study, I show how these issues were reflected upon over time and in different spatial contexts. In doing so, I argue that to fully understand the impact of release from a life sentence, we must first acknowledge that release is a deep and lengthy process, rather than a single event.