In Search of Hope in Criminal Justice: the case of elderly life-sentenced prisoners

In 2013, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered a judgment in the case of Vinter and others v the United Kingdom that introduced for the first time the notion of 'hope' to determine the acceptability of life sentences. Hope, in its legal form, can only be met by ensuring prisoners a real possibility of release.

Since Vinter, hope has become a topic of international political interest and propelled some academic attention in law and prison sociology. Yet the role of hope at national and local level remains elusive. As a result, a most urgent issue has been overlooked: the case of elderly life-sentenced prisoners who are the least likely to be released during their natural life. In brief, hope, when applied to the particular case of elderly life-sentenced prisoners, questions the very legitimacy of life imprisonment.

This project addresses a timely societal challenge: life sentences are dramatically increasing across the world and the global prison population is ageing at an unprecedented pace. The UK exemplifies both concerning upward trends. There are more people life sentences in England and Wales than in Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia combined, and nearly a third of the life-sentenced prison population are men who are aged 60 and above.

Based on research on older male prisoners sentenced to life held across three prison sites in England & Wales (phase 1), then Scotland (phase 2), the project addresses the three following research questions: (RQ1) What does hope mean in national legal discourse ? (RQ2) In the prison world, how do elderly life-sentenced men maintain or re-define hope as they progress through the prison system? (RQ3) How do prison staff give hope in practice to those most likely to be without hope?

This projects has two main goals: 1) to contribute new knowledge on the meaning and importance of hope in criminal justice as a metric for designing 'acceptable' punishment by charting the relationship between hope as law, as experiences, and as it is practised in prison; 2) to drive forward a criminological human rights agenda that reconciles abstract theory with concrete discussions of prison experiences and practices. These goals will be achieved through:

- The development a conceptual framework for hope drawing on gerontology, theology and philosophy that will inform the legal and empirical prison research (focus 1);

- The study of hope under legal discourse comprising in-depth legal documentary analysis of laws, legislative debates and court judgments (focus 2);

- An exploration of elderly life-sentenced prisoners lived experiences of hope and of prison practices aimed at giving hope through face-to-face interviews and empirical fieldwork in prison (focus 3).

The fieldwork will be conducted across three prison sites in England and Wales to best explore how experiences and practices of hope evolve at different stages of the sentence. Full support has been confirmed from senior prison management at Her Majesty's Prison Service (HMPS).

Overall, the project offers a number of ground-breaking dimensions:
- it will challenge assumptions about the legitimacy of life imprisonment with respect to the overlooked elderly life-sentenced prisoners' subgroup;

- it will bring humanitarian legal concepts into the sociology of imprisonment and insert lived realities of human rights to law studies;

- it will develop both a new conceptual frame of analysis and develop an innovative methodological roadmap for bridging law and prison sociology that will reshape and drive forward a human rights research agenda in criminology;

- it will provide a multi-level analysis of the trajectories of human rights in the criminal justice system from legal discourse to the prison world, evaluating the workings of hope in different places and phases of the sentence, and linking legal issues to the lived realities of the prison landings.