Life Imprisonment
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Life imprisonment - Why is it that such sentences were almost unheard of a generation ago and what is their impact on prisoners, as well as society? Ben Crewe, Deputy Director of the Prison Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, talks to Laurie Taylor about the largest ever sociological study of long term imprisonment conducted in Europe. Focusing on prisoners convicted of murder & serving life sentences of 15 years or more from young adulthood, it asks how they manage time, think about the future, and deal with existential issues of identity and the meaning of their lives. They’re joined by Elaine Player, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Kings College, London, who discusses the different needs and experiences of the much smaller number of female ‘lifers’, many of whom are victims of multiple trauma & male violence, drawing on research conducted in a democratic therapeutic community in a women’s prison. Thinking Allowed is produced in partnership with the Open University.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:36.0 | This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC and for more details and much, much more about |
| 0:42.2 | thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co. UK |
| 0:47.6 | hello how interesting that the term lockdown has now entered our almost everyday vocabulary. It's become the |
| 0:56.0 | subject of so many masked conversations. How did you cope during lockdown? Did you |
| 1:01.8 | lose touch with friends and family during lockdown? How did you lose touch with friends and family during lockdown? |
| 1:04.6 | How did you fill all those lockdown hours? |
| 1:07.1 | Did you begin to forget what life was like before lockdown? |
| 1:10.2 | Did you occasionally wonder about your grasp on reality? |
| 1:15.0 | Or did you somehow somehow manage to remain positive? |
| 1:19.0 | Well, as those dull lockdown days began to seem never ending, I thought more and more about the stark differences |
| 1:26.4 | between this relatively short-lived period of domestic incarceration and the long-term almost limitless lockdown that my fellow |
| 1:35.6 | sociologist Stanley Cohen and myself has studied way back in the late 1960s. |
| 1:41.0 | It all began when we were invited by Durham University's extramural department to give a short |
| 1:46.4 | series of weekly sociology classes to the long-term prisoners housed in Ewing, |
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