BRIT. J.

CRIMINOL

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BOOK REVIEW

Life Imprisonment From Young Adulthood: Adaptation, Identity and Time. By

Ben Crewe, Susie Hulley and Serena Wright (Palgrave, 2020, 340pp, €93.59)

Life imprisonment from young adulthood is the latest offering from the Palgrave series
on studies in prisons and penology. The research fulfils an important gap in knowledge
about the experience of ‘the most extreme sanction of the state’ (p. 1): life imprison-
ment (sentences of 15  years or more) from a young age, with a fifth of participants
being sentenced prior to their 18th birthday. The research originated from discussions
with senior figures and personnel from the National Offender Management Service
(now Her Majesty’s Prisons and Probation Service) about the changing nature of the
long-term prisoner population. Using a mixed-methods approach of 313 surveys and
147 in-depth interviews across 24 sites in England and Wales, the research is the largest
ever sociological study of long-term imprisonment conducted in Europe.
The introductory chapter outlines how sentencing has evolved as part of a growing
trend of penal populism, resulting in increasingly younger prisoners serving increas-
ingly longer sentences. The book is comprehensively researched, with Crewe, Hulley
and Wright presenting a detailed account of the pains of, particularly long-term, im-
prisonment to set the scene for the arguments that follow. They build on a solid lit-
erature review through discussion of themes including maturity and identity within
long-term imprisonment, thus positioning the justification for the research focus on
young adulthood.
The context of the book is established in the following two chapters. Chapter 2 pre-
sents a detailed account and justification for the methods used. The authors consider
the logistical and emotional challenges associated with research of this nature, which is
notoriously difficult to obtain and navigate, and are frank about their personal experi-
ences and influences upon the process. Crewe, Hulley and Wright convey how previ-
ously established relationships with institutions facilitated access to participants. Whilst
within the environment, however, they were keenly aware of the emotional challenges
they faced interacting with prisoners (from how much personal insight to share to how
to manage themselves when participants talked of challenging experiences that aligned
somewhat with their personal circumstances). They note that they found the team ap-
proach to research mostly beneficial. It is poignant that they also reflect on unintended
consequences of research beyond ethics, as such, this chapter is useful to both early and
established researchers navigating the field. Within the methods, the authors outline
their approach to participants and justify the inclusion and exclusion criteria subject to
access and practitioner concerns. Early-stage prisoners were deliberately over-sampled
for these purposes and because there are intentions to conduct follow-up research with
this group—a promising objective.
Chapter 3 then offers six contextual ‘pen portraits’ of select participants to reflect
the experiences of the cohort. The accounts humanize their prior experiences and
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 BOOK REVIEW

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make the reader consider how the backgrounds of the people in question have im-
pacted upon their sentencing and imprisonment. Many of the themes identified here
are revisited in subsequent chapters. Moreover, this context is particularly useful as the
number of participants in the study means that the data is not often otherwise framed
through specific trajectories of individuals.
As the book moves into data analysis, it splits into five chapters: The Early Years; Coping
and Adaptation; Social Relations; Identity and Selfhood and Time and Place. The qualitative
accounts contained within each chapter are supported with quantitative survey data.
The comprehensive quantitative data includes problems scored on frequency and solu-
bility on a Likert scale to produce a severity score illustrated within tables, statistics or
ranking detailed in the commentary (i.e. ‘feeling worried about your personal safety’
was rated as the 37th (out of 39) most severe problem overall by the male participants
and as the 36th most severe by the female participants). The quantitative data is useful
for the reader to position the subjective qualitative insights within the much larger
cohort.
Chapter 4: The Early Years highlights the anger and frustration that prisoners experi-
ence when embarking on their lengthy sentence and guides the reader through these
emotions at this crucial stage. It introduces maturation through the sentence, linking
to ideas of identity, which are further discussed within Chapter 7. The book is dom-
inated by Chapter 5: Coping and Adaptation, which is more focused on the qualitative
accounts drawn from interview data. It flows through the stages of adaptation prisoners
experience, outlining what strategies they use in coming to terms with their sentence,
how they articulated the significance of their environment and the discourses they use
to reconcile their situation. The authors document not only the setbacks, frustrations
and distresses inherent in the above but also notions of hope and personal growth.
A range of voices are at the forefront of this chapter, responded to with considered and
detailed analysis of the negotiation of ‘life inside’, set in the context of a considered loss
of life on the outside. Therefore, it provides a journey through the complexities and
varied experiences of males and females at different points in their sentences.
Within Chapter 6, the mostly detrimental consequences of lengthy sentences upon
social relationships as parents, children and spouses are explored and the reader sees
how some interviewees chose to withdraw from these roles as they felt they could no
longer fulfil them. Crewe, Hulley and Wright communicate the prisoners’ significant
sense of struggle and loss of identity in certain roles by capturing how the physical dis-
tance from the outside social world permeates emotionally through their life course
and that of others affected by the sentences. There are important reflections also within
this chapter about the gender differences, such as the female participants’ acute sense
of loss of the role of primary caregiver to their children, exacerbated with the practical
difficulties of being held further from home than males. As outside relationships feel
deeply ruptured, the chapter details how those interviewed reported building a new
smaller social world within the institution based on relationships over time with those
they value. Although prisons are considered to present little opportunity for trusting
relationships, participants accounts show how relationships with peers in prison are
crucial for some as a means of coping during their sentences.
The theme of identity is continued in Chapters 7 and 8, which have a sharper focus
on age, development and maturity through the sentence in what the authors term
the ‘offence-time nexus’. In Chapter 7, the authors reflect on interviewees’ fractured
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sense of self and regulation of emotion, documenting how, over time, prisoners seek to
re-negotiate their identity away from themselves pre-prison to one that assumes their
sentence and status. Chapter 8 then demonstrates how prisoners conceptualize time
and place. As some early-stage prisoners have limited reference points for time due to
the fact that their sentence is longer than they have been alive, it draws on the perspec-
tives of later-stage prisoners who articulated how they rationalize time. Importantly
here, due to the scale of this research and the selection of participants at differing
points within their sentence, this is where the book makes a significant contribution
to prisons’ literature concerned with ‘doing time’ by presenting progression through
such a lengthy sentence. It offers an insight into how time, which initially feels endless
and unquantifiable, is rationalized and controlled in a temporal rhythm and routine.
The authors show how prisoners construct their life within the institution to achieve
this, furthering the book’s themes of maturation through the sentence and adaptation
to imprisonment. This focus is important to understand the impact of long-term im-
prisonment on a distinct proportion of the population within English prisons and is
particularly pertinent given the changing nature of sentencing in the United Kingdom.
In the concluding chapter, the authors reflect on the original aims of the research
and intentions of the book: how they have sought to humanize the participants and
offer their perspectives as agentic subjects within their adaptation and survival. This
is achieved and the book offers a valuable and important contribution to sociological
literature on long-term and life imprisonment. Crewe, Hulley and Wright guide the
reader through the psychological pains of long-term imprisonment across various
aspects of day-to-day prison life. Through detailed analysis, the reader gains an insight
into how prisoners negotiate the physical and emotional demands of their sentence
during young adulthood. It examines the varying aspects of disrupted identity experi-
enced at this crucial stage in the life course and how interviewees articulated strategies
to cope and attain a sense of personal growth. Maturation through the life course and
maturation into the sentence run concurrently throughout the book. The book pre-
sents honest and authentic accounts to reconsider the challenging implications of the
topics explored. It contributes to social, criminological and geographical studies of
incarceration and life course literature and will be of great interest to readers across
these fields.
Jayne Price
University of Chester
10.1093/bjc/azaa027

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