Radical hope and processes of becoming: Examining short-term prisoners’ imagined futures in England & Wales and Norway
| Author | Julie Laursen |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211069545 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Radical hope and processes
of becoming: Examining
short-term prisoners’imagined
futures in England & Wales
and Norway
Julie Laursen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
Prisoners’hopes for a life without suffering—without causing and experiencing harm—
are embedded in practices of ethical becoming and ideas of transcendence. These hopes
are somehow both more banal and complex than the literature on hope generally sug-
gests; they emerge because of lack and are signs of despair, rather than realistic pro-
spects or opportunities. Based on longitudinal interview data (N=452) with shor t-
term prisoners in Norway and England & Wales, this article shows how hope functions
as an orientation through different phases of a prison sentence as well as post-release
regardless of whether it materializes. With inspiration from Lear’s idea of ‘radical
hope’, I describe prisoners’hopes as a mode of living with more emphasis on where
hope comes from rather than what it leads to, thus following recent prompts to distin-
guish between hopes derived from opportunities from deeper hopes grounded in des-
pair. I outline prisoners’pain upon entry into custody and show how their ‘ground
projects’—the things without which they would not care to go on with their lives—
become clear when they are taken away. In this conceptualization, short-term prisoners’
hopes are in many ways a manifestation of despair fused with ethical deliberations on
what kind of person one wishes to become and to whom one owes something.
Corresponding author:
Julie Laursen, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 76, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark.
Email: Julie.laursen@jur.ku.dk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(1) 48–65
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806211069545
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Keywords
comparative penology, everyday ethics, ground projects, hope, imprisonment, post-release
Introduction
There is no hope without anxiety and no anxiety without hope.
(Ernest Bloch in Garcia, 2017: 111)
Deep hope is not an outcome achieved through the process: it is the process itself, the process of
making the path.
(Seeds, 2021: 14)
Prior to her imprisonment, Molly
1
led a meaningful and full life as a mother, and
a committed partner. She had a job which gave her much joy and fulfilment. However,
Molly’s world unravelled when she was raped as an adult whereafter she developed
serious mental health issues. I met her on the female side of a prison soon after the begin-
ning of her sentence, where she told me that her imprisonment had ‘stripped away’every-
thing that ‘makesme me’except longing to play with her son, bake and cook,walk the dog
and spend time with her family. By the time of our second interviewbefore she was due to
leave prison, she shared that she would have to participate in a ‘phased return home’upon
her release,due to concerns that her mental healthissues might impact on the welfareof her
youngest child. The authorities repeatedly told her that she needed to be hopeful and posi-
tive about her situation, but from Molly’s point of view, the phased return home was a
serious obstacle to all the things that had kept her hopeful. The third time I interviewed
Molly, three months after her release, she was still not allowed to live at home, nor was
she allowed to see her son without being supervised by a professional. This meant that
she had ‘not settled yet’. Despite this, she continued to speak about yearning to do
‘normal things’with the same clarity and urgency as she had done whenshe was confined
in her prison cell:
I want to walk to the shops, I want to, you know, walk the dog, I want to go to the field with my
son with a football or a bat and ball or something, I want to do these things, I’ve got to do these
…[…] I just want to be a family person; I just want to do the house and make dinner and do
family things.
Molly’s story serves to illustrate three key themes in this article: (1) prisoners’hopes
grow out of despair rather than opportunity; (2) prisoners’hopes are connected with
search for meaning; and (3) hope flows through ideas of transcendence, relationships
and normality. I draw on interview data from a large, comparative project on penal pol-
icymaking and prisoners’experiences
2
where we conducted 452 in-depth interviews in
three different stages of a prison sentence in 13 different prisons in England & Wales
and Norway, as part of a longitudinal study of men and women’s experiences of entry
into and release from prison. Prisoners were interviewed on three occasions: within the
Laursen 49
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