Doing Time with Lifers: A Reflective Study of Life Sentence Prisoners
| Author | David Honeywell |
Introduction
Between 1996 and 1998, while serving a five year prison sentence I spent two years and six months integrated within the lifer community. Although I was not a lifer myself, I had requested to be moved from the chaotic landings - where hordes of short term prisoners created havoc on a daily basis - to a more stabilising environment where the bulk of the population was serving long term sentences. As I became more acquainted and accepted by the lifer fraternity, I began to learn of their individual stories. Also during this time and in no small part influenced by several of the lifers, I enrolled on an Open University social sciences programme. I immediately embraced my new student identity (Meek et al., 2012; Bilby, 2013; Pike, 2013) and began to use my current surroundings as a platform to practice my new research skills on my fellow prisoners. Because of my predicament, it was not possible for any formal ethical approval but still I felt that the oral histories of these men should be shared. I did however try to follow some formal research protocol that I had learned through being a social sciences student. I explained to them from the outset that if I got the opportunity to publish their stories I would use pseudonyms and also change the names of places they talked about and the prisons we were in so as not to allow their stories to be easily identifiable but at the same time keeping it accurate and truthful. Therefore, the names of prisoners, places - such as where offences were committed - and the prisons have all been hanged. I did not have the luxury of a quiet room to conduct my interviews except occasionally we had use of the Chapel meeting room where we could talk in private - with the blessing of the prison Chaplain – without any intrusion from staff members and other prisoners.
I also took advantage of quieter moments during exercise and association periods either in mine or one of the lifer’s cells or on the exercise yard where we were able to talk in depth. Because during exercise period, prisoners tend to walk around in groups, I was able to use this opportunity to converse with several at one time. Bonding with the lifer community was a slow process and it was not possible to bond with all of them. It was a very careful selectiveness. I had to be sure I was choosing the right group of people who I felt could be open and honest with me but also emotionally stable enough to share intimate memories of their life stories. As well as this there had to be mutual trust between myself and the men in order for them to feel comfortable. Once I had achieved this and had gained the trust of a selected few, there were few aspects to their personal lives and crimes that they would not share. It was not a relationship of researcher and participant. We were friends and fellow prisoners. As former prisoner turned professor, John Irwin had done for his study on lifers in 2009, I did not select my participants using any kind of sampling method. I just interviewed those I had got to know over time and it was because of this I was allowed to gain a unique insight into their lives. However, the difference between my study and that of John Irwin’s is that I conducted my study while I was still a serving prisoner (Irwin, 2009). During this time, while I was collating prisoner narratives with the aim of sharing firsthand accounts of the lifer experience, a group of ex-prisoners turned academics in the USA with similar ideas of writing from an insider perspective was emerging called the Convict Criminology Organisation (see Newbold et al., 2014). They organised workshops, participated in academic conferences, and published scholarly work to build a perspective they called “The New School of Convict Criminology” (Richards & Ross, 2003). Fourteen years later I became acquainted with the Convict Criminology Organisation when I was invited by Professor Stephen Richards from the University of Wisconsin (an ex-convict himself) to submit a reworked chapter (Honeywell, 2015), from my autobiography, Never Ending Circles (Honeywell, 2012).
This gave me a framework from where to publish my work and by then the British Convict Criminology Organisation had also been formed (Aresti et al., 2012). At the time of writing this, the academic world seems to now be embracing auto-ethnographical writing. As Earle (2011) observes, prison ethnographers in the United Kingdom have offered rich and diverse accounts of prison life and prisoners’ views and experiences have been for the most part, reported with sensitivity, creativity and insight. However, the actual voices of prisoners, and of ex-prisoners who are now prison researchers, have been relatively subdued. This is echoed by Bennett and Crewe (2012), who claim: “Little of what we know about prison comes from the mouths of prisoners, and very few academic accounts of prison life manage to convey some of its most profound and important features - its daily pressures and frustrations, the culture of the wings and landings, and the relationships which shape the everyday experience of being imprisoned.” (Bennett & Crewe, 2012: ii, cited in Earle, 2011:32).
For reasons I outlined earlier, it was not possible to produce official field notes or recorded discussions, however I did make notes using Teeline shorthand which I had taught myself from a textbook over the first six months of my time in prison. I used shorthand to prevent scrutiny from prison officers during cell searches. I also made regular diary entries. All of the lifers were very supportive, giving their full consent with a shared view that the public needed to be made aware about the truth of their predicament of being a lifer. None of the men made excuses for their crimes or were claiming any injustice by the courts.
The participants' demographic details
MIKE – had almost served 13 years of his sentence when I first met him. He projected a lot of self-confidence yet appeared somewhat aloof. His whole persona made me think he was a member of staff. Several months later we were to become cellmates when I revealed this to him. He gave me a broad grin. He took it as a compliment. His offence had been murder though he could have been sentenced to a lesser charge of manslaughter had he not been overheard threatening to kill his victim three weeks before shooting him in the arm with a double barrel shotgun. He said it was in fact his intention to just wound him. He did exactly that but later his victim died from his injuries. I felt that his example certainly puts things into perspective for those who publicly say things in the heat of the moment. He was so unlike most of the other prisoners that he was outcast by some of them and accused of being a ‘grass’ (informant). He had a certain rapport with staff members which is frowned upon by the general prisoner community – seen as fraternising with the enemy.
BEN - was very quiet but very approachable once you gained his trust. He had a wife who since his incarceration had started co-habiting with his now former best friend. He was loyal and trustworthy but his personal life and prison experience had embittered him over the years. He had explained how his so-called best friend had been the cause of this. Added to this, many years of long term imprisonment had added to his cynicism. He had become melancholy where he was so quiet and withdrawn, and at times, it was difficult to get him to open up. Ben found comfort from his faith as a Catholic and though I had no religious connotations myself, I found the Chapel community an excellent place to bond with several of the lifers. There seemed to be more lifers involved with the Chaplaincy than fixed termers and though many prisoners who turn to religion are accused of using it to try and get early release on parole...
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