The Contradictions of Prisoner Life and Rehabilitation: An Auto-ethnographic Life Sentence Experience

With the current Conservative government employing, once again, punitive tough on crime, tough on sentencing rhetoric, the U.K. criminal justice system may well be embarking on another voyage into ineff ective attempts at crime prevention and prisoner rehabilitation. Since 2008, I have been a life sentenced prisoner. This refl ective auto-ethnographic study draws on lived experience, informal observations, and personal communications to help unpack some of the many factors that play a role in prisoner rehabilitation and its continued failure. A core part of this study is the role of masculinity within the prisoner experience. Within the prisoner experience is the continued impact of powerlessness, disenfranchisement, and social exclusion that operates to reinforce negative masculine pressures. There is a need for radical change in the way prisons are conceptualized in media and political spheres. Prisons may be part of a solution to social problems, but not in their enduring vogue. live with the atmosphere here. Hopefully it won’t be for too much longer (Personal in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectation to which it gives rise, and tends to take on a meaning and stability apart from the specifi c tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. The front becomes a “collective representation” and an act in its own right.