Abstract
This book provides an overview of the empirical and theoretical findings and arguments. A socio-political analysis of criminal justice in New South Wales (NSW) and an analysis of sentencing law and practice situates and contextualises the interviews with 30 long-term prisoners in NSW prisons between 2011 and 2013.
The idea that the subjective understanding of sentenced people is important leads to a recognition that their experience of the sentence is quite at odds with the dominant positivistic legal analysis of sentencing. The symbolic and highly ritualistic court phase of sentencing engenders certain obligations, the most challenging of which is to undertake some kind of personal transformation and demonstrate or perform it.
It is the central argument of this book that the self-referential legal analysis of sentencing denies the reality of the ongoing nature of sentencing and the existence of obligations for sentenced people to internally transform themselves. Evidence from the interviews indicates that the managerial processes and procedures of modern correctionalism interfere significantly with the ability of the prisoner to fulfil these obligations. Further, denial of the importance of the relational aspects of prisoners’ experience of sentencing, highlighted by them in the interviews which ground this book, is another barrier to the types of rehabilitative ideas to which they aspire.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not to deny the punitive effects of other forms of punishment such as fines and probation.
- 2.
Although for the visitor, it is often difficult to tell the difference as medium-security prisons in NSW still have a high-security wall and similar restrictions on access.
- 3.
The pronoun ‘he’ is used throughout for this reason.
- 4.
Outside of a small number of life sentence prisoners under s18 Crimes Act 1900.
- 5.
Characterised by Nutley and Davies (in Nutley 2000, p. 108) as possessing an “evangelical like zeal”.
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Hall, M. (2016). Introduction. In: The Lived Sentence. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45038-4_1
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