One of the most intrusive questions faced by combatants who have came through prolonged periods of political violence is why they managed to survive the conflict while other comrades did not. As the temporal distance from the conflict itself grows, the pursuit of an answer to this question can see ex-combatants reflect in later years on how life courses were immeasurably altered by, how lives became inextricably linked during, and how lives were tragically lost in violent conflict. Locating itself within the narrative strand of criminological scholarship and the growing literature on the criminology of war, this paper will critically examine how former members of Irish republican armed groups juxtapose the deaths of their comrades with their own survival. Using the rapidly increasing volume of memoirs published by ex-combatants in the North of Ireland as empirical data, this paper will interrogate how ex-combatants frame the act of surviving armed conflict and how they seek to make sense of it. Building from here, the paper will critically examine how ex-combatants reflect on the loss of their comrades and seek to attribute meaning to this loss. Reflecting broader competing narratives within contemporary post-conflict Irish republicanism, this meaning-making process maps the deaths of comrades onto a narrative of the futility of life lost in pursuit of the political ambitious of a ruthless and unprincipled political leadership or conversely onto a narrative of past sacrifice politically empowering Irish republicans and saving the post-GFA generation from the horrors of political violence.

In England and Wales Women with convictions (WwC) account for 14 per cent of deaths during post-release supervision, 35 per cent of which are self-inflicted despite making up less than five per cent of the prison population. This highlights the extent of WwC’s marginalisation, the complexity of their needs, and the urgency with which their (re)integration and (re)engagement within communities must be addressed. It ls also known that WwC’s stories and experiences of discrimination and marginalisation are often intersectional, shaped by race, gender and social class in particular.

This paper draws upon emerging findings from an ongoing study, being undertaken in Stoke-on-Trent, UK which is underpinned by a Transformative Justice approach and which is delivered via arts based workshops. The project aims to build a network of community support for women with lived experience of the criminal justice system. The paper will outline some of our key ideas and findings to date and consider implications for wider community building, support, action and engagement.

This presentation explores the release of men serving mandatory life sentences in England and Wales through an empirical short-longitudinal study. Building upon Susie Hulley’s analysis of ‘the moral weight of murder’, this presentation examines the role that moral weight plays as life-sentenced prisoners approach, and are subsequently returned to, the outside world. In particular, it considers how moral weight interacts with individuals’ release trajectories both prior to and post-release from prison. In doing so, I assert that moral weight and moral emotions impact on an individual’s assessment of release as being deserved, their ability to move on, and the extent to which release acted to lighten their moral load.

In greater detail, this presentation explores how those who held the moral weight of their offence lightly framed release and re-entry as being deserved, moving on as being centred around external validation, and the moral load of the offence as being lightened through generativity and community acceptance. For these men, release provided opportunities for redemption and to demonstrate a reformed narrative of selfhood. By contrast, those who held the moral weight of their offence more heavily considered release to be undeserved (at least initially), moving on as centred around the internal resolution of complex emotions, and that the moral load of the offence could be lightened through deep introspection rather than through relationships with others. For these men, release complicated the process of ‘moving on’, and could instead regenerate feelings of shamefulness that they had sought to resolve.

The findings presented provide a textured account of how forms of moral self-work and the emotional labour required to manage difficult moral feelings are not confined to the prison, and instead play a constant, and at times persistent, role in the community as lifers remain reflexively engaged in thinking about their offence post-release.

Gangs have been described as a feature of prison life for at least the last 50 years, yet it is only in the last decade that prison gangs have attracted more sustained scholarly attention. The most notable studies have been conducted in North America and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, but there has been little research on prison gangs in England, Australia and New Zealand. This paucity of research is significant. Whilst prison gangs may share common features, they differ between jurisdictions, emerge within specific cultural milieus, and produce different forms of social order and disorder. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with prisoners and prison staff in England, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper analyses the differences between the three jurisdictions regarding the nature, extent, and function of gang activity within the prisons. In so doing, the paper evaluates how differences in criminal collaborations influenced how prisoner society was structured, how the illicit economy functioned, and the logic, culture and dynamics of prison violence.