58. Ben Crewe, Susie Hulley and Serena Wright. What’s it like to serve a Life sentence in the UK?

Ben Crewe, Susie Hulley and Serena Wright discuss their research on the implications of life imprisonment for young men and women. Their powerful experiences convey the deep and lasting sadness for all arising from such tragic events and the richness of their descriptions help us grasp the basic humanity of all those involved. This is quite a long podcast and may need two sittings. It is worth the listen and we found that the creative process, clearly evident in their work, was rekindled in the conversation itself.

Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood

Adaptation, Identity and Time

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-56601-0

When the Advisory Committee on the Penal System reported on the prison regime for long-term prisoners in conditions of maximum security in 1968, only 168 individuals were serving sentences of longer than 10 years. Today, such sentences are bordering on commonplace. England and Wales have the highest number of life-sentenced prisoners within Europe, while increasing average sentence lengths mean that more men and women are serving longer periods in custody than ever before.Such considerations are located within relevant shifts in the penal system of England and Wales, in particular, the legacy of the minimum tariffs contained within the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, the ‘up-tariffing’ of ‘knife homicides’ and the increasing use of joint enterprise sentencing.