A Voice Within: An Autoethnographic Account of Moving from Closed to Open Prison Conditions by a Life‐Sentenced Prisoner
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | DANIEL MICKLETHWAITE,ROD EARLE |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12430 |
The Howard Journal Vol60 No 4. December 2021 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12430
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 529–545
A Voice Within: An Autoethnographic
Account of Moving from Closed to
Open Prison Conditions by a
Life-Sentenced Prisoner
DANIEL MICKLETHWAITE and ROD EARLE
Daniel Micklethwaite is Researcher, Centre for Crime, Offending, Prevention
and Engagement (COPE), School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent
University; Rod Earle is Senior Lecturer, School of Health, Wellbeing and
Social Care, The Open University
Abstract: This article explores the lived experience of transitioning from closed to
open prison conditions by a mandatory life-sentenced prisoner. Using autoethnographic
methodology the lead author’s experience of this significant life-sentence event forms the
basis of a wider discussion. Research around this process is lacking. This article examines
the phenomena around prisoner identity, prison culture and prisoner adaptation; it ex-
plores what impact of years spent in the closed prison estate can have on how open prison
conditions are experienced. The authors identify important social and ontological obsta-
cles to successful transition to open conditions and reflect on how it exposes the enduring
harms resultant from serving a life sentence.
Keywords: adaptation; autoethnography; lived experience; open prison;
prison
This article employs a first-person perspective in which the lead author
draws from his experience as a long-term prisoner transitioning from
closed to open conditions in 2017. It is autoethnographic in the sense that
his (Micklethwaite’s) experience and subjectivity are foregrounded as an
appropriate mechanism for developing understandings of both a signifi-
cant personal life event and UK penal conditions more generally. In draw-
ing directly from this personal experience of imprisonment, the authors
develop autoethnographic techniques that rarely feature in penological
research. Adopting a reflective approach they are guided by the advice
of C. Wright Mills (1951), who long ago urged sociologists to locate them-
selves and their own experiences in their work and the ‘trends of their
epoch’ (p.xx). Imprisonment and more specifically the enormous growth
in the numbers of life-sentenced prisoners in UK prisons is, unfortu-
nately,just such a trend (Prison Reform Trust 2019). The ‘private troubles’
529
C
2021 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League
and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
The Howard Journal Vol60 No 4. December 2021
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 529–545
referred to in this article, despite the peculiarities of their penal context,
surely qualify as ‘public issues’ in that they offer valuable insights into a
pivotal feature of a prison sentence.
The experience of transitioning from closed to open prison conditions
has been neglected in the research literature even though for life-sentenced
prisoners this is a major life event. It features in a significant cohort of pris-
oners who face a substantial challenge to the self-management and equilib-
rium they have established in closed conditions (Crewe, Hulley and Wright
2020; Honeywell 2015). This article will illustrate how some of the chal-
lenges are negotiated in both prisoner culture and administrative proce-
dures.
Autoethnography is not just appropriate but important here in the pro-
vision of a distinctive perspective on the way in which a prison sentence is
experienced and managed by a prisoner. Such accounts ‘from the inside’
are rare because, in general, prisoners or ex-prisoners are not expected to
be able to fashion their own accounts of imprisonment that satisfy the cri-
teria of conventional, positivistic social science. Jewkes (2012, p.64) argues
that prison research can do more to recognise the way in which the experi-
ence of incarceration can be ‘flattened by the overarching dominance and
disproportionate power of quantitative methods’ and their epistemological
assumptions, asserting: ‘bald statistics conceal complex lives and important
stories’. In this article, we seek to foreground something of that complexity
and assert its importance.
In the UK, conventional ethnographic and other forms of qualitative re-
search have generated accounts of prison life that are richly detailed and
sensitively drawn (Crewe 2009; Jewkes 2002; Leibling with Arnold 2004;
Phillips 2012). Autoethnography involves looking back on personal expe-
rience in specific temporal and geographical contexts to provide rich and
detailed insight into lived experience. It offers new ways of understand-
ing what and how prisoners experience, understand, reflect and respond
to the prison environment. Its use of personal, first-person accounts are
often intended to be more emotionally evocative of various sociological
or anthropological themes than conventional social scientific writing. Ellis,
Adams and Bochner (2011) describe how its component elements combine
as ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systemat-
ically analyse (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand
cultural experience (ethno)’ (p.1). It is a process of structured reflection
and reviewing of lived experience which seeks to bring past experience into
the present for a variety of analytical, heuristic or hermeneutic purposes.
Autoethnography is increasingly a feature of service-user and expert-
by-experience research (Robertson, Carpenter and Donovan-Hall 2017).
Both have developed from mental health practice or therapies that ask ser-
vice users to ‘tell their stories’ as an aspect of clinical interventions so that a
suitable diagnosis can be completed and an appropriate treatment can be
formulated for them. In mental health services, alternative possibilities for
overcoming trauma and recovering a life have developed techniques that
allow individuals to provide accounts of themselves and for themselves so
that they acquire the power to tell their stories and frame their ‘narrative
530
C
2021 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League
and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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