Abstract
This article takes a life-course perspective to the meaning of persistent short-term imprisonment and introduces the significance of ‘penal careers’. Examining a total of 62 interviews with men and women in Scotland with long careers of (progression through) criminal punishment, it uses to the concept of belonging as a lens to interpret their experiences. While some participants already felt early on in their career that they belonged in prison because of their shared characteristics with other prisoners, the repetition of imprisonment meant that they increasingly felt displaced from life outside and saw life in prison as ‘easier’ and ‘safer’. Nevertheless, looking back on their many sentences, they felt their cumulative meaning was ‘a waste of life’. The article concludes by considering steps towards tackling the conditions that create this sense of belonging in a place of punishment.
Highlights
This article takes a life-course perspective to the meaning of persistent short-term imprisonment and introduces the significance of ‘penal careers’
This article focuses on the meaning of repeated short-term imprisonment1 imposed on people usually labelled as ‘persistent offenders’
Participants described a ‘catalogues of losses’ (Vaswani, 2015) including disrupted home lives, whether through family moves, violence within the home, divorce, moving between different caregivers or being taken into formal care. Such frequent moves tend to undermine any sense of belonging (Wilson and Milne, 2013) and stability (Vaswani, 2015). This often went along with school exclusion, which can both be seen as an outcome of a lack of belonging at school and a further disruption of a sense of belonging with their peers (Lee and Breen, 2007)
Summary
This article takes a life-course perspective to the meaning of persistent short-term imprisonment and introduces the significance of ‘penal careers’. The Lives Sentenced research reported here applies a life-course perspective to the study of penal careers, rather than ‘criminal careers’, for the first time For those who are repeatedly imprisoned for short periods, it is the accumulation of sentences that is meaningful, rather than the impact of individual sentences. Little was known about the meaning of sentences for those upon whom they are imposed This was a peculiar oversight, as criminal punishment is at least in part aimed at changing behaviour, both in the short term (incapacitation in the case of prison and electronic monitoring) and the long term (rehabilitation and deterrence). This article integrates the study of accumulating experiences of punishment within a life-course perspective, thereby explaining why repeated short-term sentences are experienced differently from the same amount of time spent in prison on one long sentence
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