Following today’s conviction of Paul Quinn of the appalling crimes for which Andrew Malkinson was wrongly convicted I’m circulating a piece I wrote about representing him in his long battle for justice: open.substack.com/pub/counselo...
I now realise I should have tagged my co-authors @aliceievins.bsky.social and @bencrewe.bsky.social properly - whoops!
The article had a long gestation: our earliest conversations were during the first Covid lockdowns in 2020. Other contributions to the same themed issue will appear soon; it's entitled 'New Directions in Theorizing ‘The Prison’ as an Institution' and edited by Alex Kinney and Mike Gibson-Light.
We propose recentring the offence in prison research, examining: what prisons are like (subjective experience), what they do (moral communication), and what they are for (normative purposes).
Prisons operate as sites of moral communication, but this communication is often inconsistent and incomplete. They initiate moral processes they cannot finish, leaving people grappling with responsibility and remorse, and the incomplete work of censure.
Using three case studies, we show how the offence shapes daily prison life in profound ways. For some people in prison, the primary struggle isn't social survival—it's an internal battle with shame, moral complexity, and the challenge of accountability.
THREAD: New article out in Incarceration, with Alice Ievins and Ben Crewe: "What are you in for?"
We argue that prison researchers have mostly neglected to ask what people in prison think about their convictions. This produces a significant blind spot in understanding of imprisonment.
These are arguments I'm trying to develop at the moment so feedback is welcome.
The central argument: the law currently obstructs accountability in several ways, and contains no mechanism to respond when people held accountable for so serious an offence as murder actually try to engage with that responsibility.
Average minimum terms for murder have risen 80% since 2003. When people must numb themselves just to endure these sentences, they suppress the very capacity for moral engagement that punishment supposedly fosters.
1) Extreme sentences requiring emotional numbing to survive (this point drawing on forthcoming work with @bencrewe.bsky.social); 2) joint enterprise murder convictions people can't square with what they actually did; and 3) invisible vulnerabilities that only emerge years into a sentence.
Drawing on interviews with 66 men serving life for murder, the submission shows three ways current law frustrates the accountability it supposedly requires:
What if 'tougher' prison sentences make accountability *less* likely? My new submission to the Law Commission's review of the law of homicide argues that's exactly what's happening. 🧵
Further details: benjarman.uk/news/law-com...
The report received substantial media attention but as some coverage noted, it fell short of survivors' calls for a full public inquiry. An imperfect but important step toward accountability, and still a piece of work I'm proud of.
We contributed via a submission to the call for evidence based on our earlier research. Our contribution focused on helping investigators read historical documents "against the grain"—understanding what official records conceal as much as what they reveal about institutional abuse.
The Prisons & Propation Ombudsman published an investigation last week into historical abuses at Medomsley Detention Centre. Caroline Lanskey and I were acknowledged in the report for our support to the investigation.
I've written a brief reflection on my blog: benjarman.uk/publications...
The aim of all this is to develop themes and refresh my thinking in preparation for a larger mixed-methods study on parole.
Further details + links to the paper available at the link above.
Themes identified in the interviews included temporal disruption, procedural expectations, and performativity. The paper highlights tensions between the system's risk assessment focus and some participants' expectations of a broader moral evaluation.
I re-examined some of my PhD interviews, thinking about the parole decision as some of my participants saw it: not as the product of a discrete decision-making event (the oral hearing) but of a longer administrative process, in which the sediment of past assessments and reports shape outcomes.
I presented exploratory findings on life-sentenced prisoners' experiences of the parole process at the British Society of Criminology conference last week.
benjarman.uk/news/parole-...
My PhD thesis is now open access: "Moral messages, ethical responses" - research on how men serving life sentences navigate the moral dimensions of their punishment. Interview-based study completed at Cambridge last year. Links at benjarman.uk/news/phd-ava...
If this situation concerns you too, then please do the same. There are some resources linked from this page, if you would like to use your voice in solidarity with us:
www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...
I feel compelled to use my voice to defend their (our, my) rights, which are under threat, and have written to my MP opposing the further expansion of the police's powers to suppress political activism.
A small number of Friends from the meeting, and more from other meetings around the country, have spent time in prison in connection with their exercise of the right to protest.
As Caroline's letter points out, this raid was part of a wider suppression of the right to peaceful protest. It threatens many groups more vulnerable than Quakers, but came to our home because we support and shelter those who act in sympathy with our principles.
Screenshot of a letter (truncated to meet character limits): Dear Rachel Blake, I am sure that you will have heard in the press about the forcible entry by police into Westminster Quaker Meeting House on the evening of Thursday 27 March. This is the first time that there has been forcible entry into a Meeting House since the early days of Quakers during the persecution of the late seventeenth century, and it has profoundly disturbed those who worship at our Meeting House as well as other community groups that hire rooms there. We hope that you will take this matter up with the Home Secretary. What has happened at Westminster Meeting House is a – probably unintended - consequence of how the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 have criminalised many forms of protest. Quakers are well known for speaking truth to power over many centuries, and this violation of our place of worship is an example of the erosion of our rights and those of many people far more vulnerable than us. Westminster Quakers have worked hard to create a place of peace and calm in the centre of the City of Westminster. More than twenty police officers forced entry into the building although there were Quakers and staff on site who would have opened the door if they had rung the bell. They damaged the door of our Grade 2 listed building and entered every room, disturbing our hirers including a therapy session and a life drawing class. The police arrested six women who had hired a room for a Youth Demand social event. They were eating humous and bread sticks when the police arrived. We are making a formal complaint to the police, and will be asking for compensation to cover the cost of repairing the door and entry system (although police attending said that compensation was unlikely because arrests were made). We have been heartened by messages of support from Quakers around the world, and from people of faith and no faith across London and beyond.
A letter from the Clerk of my Quaker meeting to the Meeting's MP, about the police raid at our Meeting House in Covent Garden last Thursday. It's a space I've used and treasured, since my first visit 20 years ago next month. Reading about the raid felt like learning that my home had been violated.
Wood anemones!
Fairly safe to say, I'd think, that it's usually clear the measures don't capture all the harms.
