Book Review: Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood: Adaption, Identity and Time

DOI10.1177/0964663920979739
Published date01 August 2021
Date01 August 2021
AuthorMalcolm Macqueen
Subject MatterBook Reviews
MICHAEL ADLER
University of Edinburgh, UK
ORCID iD
Michael Adler https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3107-4750
References
Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council (AJTC) (2011) Right First Time. London: AJTC.
Diamandouros N (2007) Strengthe ning the independence, effective ness and accountability of
ombudsmen and NHRIs. Speech by the European Ombudsman. Available at: www.ombuds
man.europa.eu>export-pdf (accessed 18 November 2020).
Galanter M (1983) The radiating effect of courts. In: Boyum KO and Mather LM (eds) Empirical
Theories About Courts. New York, NY: Longmans, pp. 117–142.
Gallie WB (1955–1956) Essentially contested concepts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
56: 167–198.
Marshall TH (1950) Citizenship and Social Class , and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
O’Cinneide C (2019) The social security (Scotland) act 2018– a rights-based approach to social
security? Edinburgh Law Review 23(1): 117–123.
B. CREWE, S. HULLEY and S. WRIGHT, Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood: Adaption, Identity
and Time. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, ISBN 978-1-137-56600-3, £39.99 (hbk).
The abolitionof ca pital punishmen t in Britain was fin alised in 1969. In th e remaining
decades of the 20th century, long prison sentences took over from execution as the
justice system’s principal mode of punishment for the most serious offences. Socio-
logies of prison life of course pre-date this development. One of the major changes
in prison life, however, since Clemmer’s (1950) analysis of the process of ‘prison-
ization’ and Sykes’ (1958) study highlighting the ‘pains’ of imprisonment has been
the rise in the number of prisoners serving long sentences. In 1979, there were 10
times as many long-sentence prisoners than there were 22 years previously (House
of Lords, 1982: 870).
Irwin categorised the men who fell into this growing group of long-term prisoners as
having discrete modes of adapting to prison life, basing his account on prisoners’ dif-
ferent pre-prison ‘careers’ (Irwin, 1970: 7). Cohen and Taylor (1972) proposed prison-
ers’ pre-prison relationships to authority as the ‘ideological’ structures determining
prisoners’ adaption to prison life. Harder to generalise about, however, are ‘situational’
prisoners, those who ‘got caught up’ in events which lead them to serving long sentences,
with little recognisable shared structure to their pre-prison lives (Cohen and Taylor,
1972: 178).
As the authors of Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood explain, the contemporary
demographics of prisoners with long sentences are quite different to those in the mid- to
Book Reviews 673

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