Book review: Life after Life Imprisonment

Date01 February 2013
DOI10.1177/1748895812468660
AuthorBen Crewe
Published date01 February 2013
Subject MatterBook reviews
CRJ468660.indd 468660CRJ13110.1177/1748895812468660Criminology & Criminal JusticeBook Reviews
2012
Criminology & Criminal Justice
13(1) 117 –129
Book reviews
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895812468660
crj.sagepub.com
Catherine Appleton
Life after Life Imprisonment, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2010; 260 pp.:
9780199582716, £65.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Ben Crewe, University of Cambridge, UK
Research monographs based on PhD dissertations are sometimes easy to identify: the
tone can be rather insecure, the quality of analysis somewhat light, and references to the
research literature excessive and slightly deferential. In Life after Life Imprisonment,
Catherine Appleton has avoided virtually all of the standard pitfalls, producing a thor-
ough, professional and hugely insightful piece of work which explores the supervision
and post-release experiences of a cohort of discretionary life sentence prisoners released
on life licence between 1992 and 1997. In the book’s foreword, Shadd Maruna – upon
whose work Appleton draws – notes the correspondence between the ‘profound decency
and empathy of its author’, and the form of scholarship that she has produced: a ‘classic
in humanistic scholarship around issues of reintegration’. I echo these sentiments, while
adding that one reason why the book is so convincing and compelling is that Appleton’s
humanism sits within an unusually confident handling of the research literature – in par-
ticular, work on the ‘new penology’, and the now burgeoning field of desistance – and an
approach to research methods that recognizes the need to be at the same time robust and
creative, both ‘sound’ and pragmatic. As an example of how to undertake and write up a
complex study, Life after Life Imprisonment could be given to doctoral researchers who
have gorged themselves on research methods text books but are still unsure what they
will actually do when faced with real people and real...

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