A Long Stretch: The Challenge of Maintaining Relationships for People Serving Long Prison Sentences

By Marie Hutton and Rachel O’Brien

This report forms part of PRT’s National Lottery Community Fund-funded Building Futures programme that, since 2020, has been exploring the experiences of people serving long-term prison sentences. The programme has defined its long-term cohort to include those men that will spend 10 or more years in prison and eight years or more for women. It is based on a consultation with 133 men and women between the age of 18 and 75, serving their sentences in 38 prisons in the UK. This report aims to: • Understand more about the impact that a range of relationships (and their absence) have on the lives of people serving long sentences. • Explore how a range of factors support or hinder people’s ability to maintain, rebuild and develop supportive relationships. • Develop insights and ideas that inform policy and practice in line with PRT’s vision of a just, humane and effective penal system. This report and its context This report explores the shifting landscape within which this work takes place and that shapes the nature of prison life, including people’s ability to maintain supportive relationships. Alongside increases in the overall prison population, this includes a long-term rise in the number of people serving custodial sentences over 10 years (a trend that looks set to continue). These trends compound pressures on a system that has been overcrowded every year since 1994, and in which staff shortages are endemic. These pressures present significant challenges to those living and working inside, to government, to the prison system and to organisations providing services in prison. The justice system has a duty to treat people with respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings, ensuring they are not discriminated against on a range of grounds including ethnicity, sex and age. The contributions of participants included in this report raise significant questions about the extent to which the system is fulfilling these obligations. These issues become more pressing in the context of an aging prison population, where racial disproportionality continues to increase, and where neurodiversity and disability are becoming more prevalent. This report underlines how the prison system - behind the curve, under-resourced and emotionally charged in the public imagination - needs to be enabled to contend with disparate current and future needs. It underlines the importance of ensuring the prison system not only better meets current needs, but is also fit for the future, treating people with dignity (including when dying) and enabling them to live meaningful lives in the constrained circumstances of prison. The contribution that supportive relationships play to this end has been highlighted by  the Farmer reviews of 2017 and 2019 and the measures that have flowed from this. Although long overdue, the government has also acknowledged the need for a strategy for older people in prison. Our conclusions aim to build on these changes. Findings.  Participants provided insights about how prisons operate day-to-day, revealing gaps between policy and practice on the ground, inconsistencies and systemic pressures that undermine good practice. Having no, limited or disrupted relationships outside impacted participants’ progress and motivation and can impact Parole Board decisions about their future, including release. This speaks to evidence around pro-social relationships and the protective factors these can bring. This includes desistance from crime. However, participants emphasised the extent to which the presence of supportive relationships makes prison ‘survivable’ and how these are shaped by age and sentence length. Many described how close bonds help them feel ‘human’, ‘cared for’, giving them ‘hope’. This speaks to arguments about the legitimacy and moral justification of systems of punishment needing to be compatible with reasonable expectations of hope during and after that punishment.6 Participants also spoke about alternate lives continuing outside, with families and friends moving on without them. Many shared their fears for the future as their relationships were stretched to breaking point, they became more detached, as visits dwindled, families changed, loved ones died and children grew up. Some anticipated leaving prison with no friends or family to return to. Others faced the prospect of death in prison, with a lack of family contact in their final years. A consistent theme raised was the prevalence of people who did not have anyone on the outside, received no visits or external support. Many participants expressed empathy for those worse off than them, were supporting others and suggested ideas that could benefit current and future peers. This included changes that would increase availability of ‘partners in progress’ to support frontline staff.   

London: Prison Reform Trust, 2024. 72p.