We were standing by a large white board in one of the prison’s educational areas, debriefing how our study on hope had gone when the man slipped into the room without a sound. Like the other participants he was over 60, and serving a life sentence. He had grey hair, and was very tall and slim.
He slowly picked up a chair before slamming it down. I invited him to join us, but he stayed still while the others watched. Then he dragged the chair across the floor with a piercing scrape. I could hear my own pulse.
As I began to speak I noticed he was crying. At first, it sounded like a whisper of sobs, but then it got louder. He rose abruptly, and came up close to me. I wrote in my fieldwork notes from that day:
My heart is racing. He asks, towering over me: ‘How dare you ask us about hope.’ The alarm blares. Guards escort him out. The others sit in stunned silence, eyes locked on us, waiting for a reaction.
In the months that followed, I would meet many other men for whom hope was not necessarily a lifeline as is so commonly assumed, but a burden that they had to carry, sometimes painfully.
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Hope is not a soft word in prison. It shapes how people cope with their sentence and it determines whether – and how – they engage with staff and other prisoners. It shapes whether they commit to vocational and educational activities, and it sustains connections with people on the outside.
For older life-sentenced prisoners specifically, hope becomes interlinked with accelerated ageing, with bullying from younger prisoners, and with the fear of release into an unknown world.
Some people may think these men do not deserve hope. But the places that extinguish it do not produce safer prisons. Instead, they produce people who are damaged, isolated, and less capable of reintegrating into society.
The hope project
My project (In search of Hope: the case of elderly life-sentenced prisoners) began in August 2022. We were investigating how the “right to hope” – as defined by Judge Ann Power-Forde in her concurring opinion to the European Court of Human Rights judgment Vinter and others v the UK (2013)– translates behind prison walls for older people serving life sentences, many of whom face slim prospects of release due to their advanced age and the length of their prison sentence.
The research was carried out across three English prisons over 12 months by myself and research associate, Helen Gair, with a small team of research assistants. We conducted fieldwork in a Category A prison (reserved for people presenting the highest levels of risk), a Category C (mid-security level prison, often aimed at training and resettlement), and a Category D (open prison or the last stage before release).
Each facility had its own smell and sound. The spatial layout and daily rhythm varied too. For instance, the high security site was an old red brick Victorian building, and the wings were arranged in a half panopticon (circular) design. Outside the main block, guard dogs were walked on a strip of green that ran along a ten-metre-high wall. Inside it was loud; lockdowns were frequent, and it smelled of sweat and mould.
shutterstock/CeltStudio
In the open prison, the smell of cannabis drifted through the grounds. Men greeted us in grey tracksuits, often carrying disposable cups of tea. There were ducks and a pond and a RAF plane on display.
In the Category C prison, we often got lost. The alphabetical alignment of buildings made little sense to us. We had our own set of keys which meant we could move around independently. However, rusty locks slowed us down often, and every gate and door had to be opened and closed behind us.
Men aged 50 and above and serving life sentences were invited to participate. We collected diaries, completed ethnographic prison observations, and ran one-to-one interviews with each participant.
Additionally, interviews were conducted with prison staff, both working in frontline and office-based roles, to get a sense of how those who work closest to ageing life-sentenced prisoners perceived hope and whether prison practices preserved or restrained it. Overall, we wanted to find out how hope was experienced by prisoners and how it was handled as a prison practice.
Idealised hope v prison reality
In the 2010s, a case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights by Jeremy Bamber, Douglas Vinter and Peter Moor. They had each been convicted of murder in the UK and been given whole-life orders – the most severe form of life sentence.
This means that by law, they were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison with no minimum term set for parole or release. Only a small percentage of people get such severe sentences: Myra Hindley and the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe being two examples.
On July 9, 2013, the human rights court ruled that whole-life orders which do not include any prospect of release or review would amount to inhuman or degrading treatment, contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The notion of a “right to hope” was first mentioned by Judge Ann Power-Forde’s concurring judgment:
… Even those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts … nevertheless retain their essential humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change. Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retain the right to hope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed. They ought not to be deprived entirely of such hope. To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and to do that would be degrading.
The right to hope is thus vested in a possibility of release and review. What this means is that there must be a realistic possibility that any prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment be considered, at some point in time, for release or that the justification for their continued detention needs to be reviewed.
But how does the right to hope account for the fact of ageing in prison?
The rapid and global “greying” of the prison population indeed complicates the human rights jurisprudencial understanding of a right to hope. As of March 2025, there were 87,919 people in prison in England and Wales, with nearly one in five (18%) aged 50 or older, according to the Ministry of Justice.
Compounding matters, life-sentenced prisoners now make up around 10% of the sentenced population, and this group is ageing rapidly. Almost a third of “lifers” are over 50. As a result, old, life-sentenced prisoners are the fastest-growing subgroup in the system.
This phenomenon combined with the current overcrowding crisis produces a range of managerial and ethical challenges: bed spaces are tied up for decades, healthcare and social care demands are on a steep rise, and the pressures on ill-equipped prison staff increase.
The myth of prison release
One important finding from our project is that parole and the possibility of release during a prisoner’s life span becomes somewhat of a myth for those serving life sentences at an advanced age. Usually, life-sentenced prisoners are given a minimum tariff, which is a period when they are not eligible for parole. This legal principle does not account for age however. Dean, 62 , was a life-sentenced prisoner at the Category A prison who had served six years. He told us how unrealistic parole felt in light of his age:
I will be 80 years old before my first parole hearing and in all honesty I don’t know if I will reach that milestone. Although my health is reasonable, I’m on all kinds of medication to keep me going but incarceration has a way of dragging you down so I am not optimistic.
Trevor was 73 when we interviewed him in the Category C prison and had been inside for 27 years. He was sat in a wheelchair and had an elastic band wrapped around his middle finger and thumb. He explained to us that it helped him hold a pen.
He described years of postponed parole hearings, medical delays, and transfers to lower security prisons being denied because his health needs could not be met in open prison conditions. He asked us simply:
If you were in my situation would you live in hope or would you resign yourself to your future?
The experience of no longer believing in release is supported by official data that shows that few prisoners sentenced to life get released during their lifetime.
One in five lifers are now beyond their tariff, often by several years with age-related barriers to parole contributing to prolonged incarceration. What we noticed during fieldwork was that older prisoners often struggled to access or complete accredited programmes because of mobility issues and cognitive impairment, but also due to managerial prioritisation of younger prisoners or those convicted of shorter sentences.
Rising deaths in England and Wales among older prisoners further underscores the illusory prospect of release.
Nearly nine in ten of the 192 deaths from natural causes in the year 2025 involved older prisoners and the number of people in prison requiring palliative care continues to grow.
From 2016 to 2020, hospitals recorded 190 admissions of older male prisoners with a palliative care diagnosis. In roughly 40% of those cases, cancer was the main condition on entry. The charity, Inquest, reported in 2020 that many of the deaths in prison were neither inevitable nor unforeseeable, pointing instead to systemic failings in healthcare provision, communication, emergency intervention, and medication management.
shutterstock/fran_kie
Building on this, academic scholars Philippa Tomczak and Ròisìn Mulgrew argued that classifying deaths in custody as “natural” obscure the ways in which prison environments contribute to deaths that might otherwise have been avoided.
Additionally, research has repeatedly linked self-harm and suicide patterns to experiences of hopelessness and social isolation. The participants in our study similarly tied the removal of hope to suicides, citing examples they had witnessed in prison.
In his prison diary, a participant with thick rectangular glasses called Ian, 65, who had served 33 years of his life sentence and was now held in a Category C prison, wrote:
With the absent (sic) of hope you have despair. I have known prisoners who have committed suicide, they had no hope or expectations only misery and despair.
So there appears to be a contradiction between the legal possibility of release and its practical improbability in the context of old and ageing, life-sentenced prisoners.
The fear of release
Beyond the practical improbability of release, many participants described how much they feared the world they would hypothetically re-enter one day. Several participants in their 60s and 70s reflected on how they no longer recognised the world outside.
For them, the time spent in prison combined with their physical and cognitive decline has institutionalised them. They felt they could not fare alone outside prison rules and environments. One man named Roy, who had spent decades in various Category A prisons wrote in his diary:
I have no hope of, or real wish to leave prison, where I am now completely institutionalised, I have no responsibilities other than abiding by prison rules, and few expenses.
Another frail-looking man named Russell, 68, described in his diary (which he completed from his Category C cell) how the very idea of a future had become hollow: “It’s difficult really because like I say, I haven’t got any hope of getting out of prison as far as I’m concerned. That is it. I’m in prison and that’s as far as it will go.”
Practical matters such as technological advances and housing also made the very thought of release overwhelming. Gary, 63, who had served 24 years, wrote poignantly about his fears of release, saying: “Release frightens me because of the label that has been firmly given to me and that brings its own problems. Where will I live? How will I live?”
A 73-year-old participant named Kevin, who was transferred during the project from a Category C to an open prison, spoke about how, after 21 years in prison, things will have changed too much on the outside for him to deal with. As he stood on the doorstep of freedom, he worried about getting his head around new technology and accessing simple things like his pension. He said: “Technology has moved on at a phenomenal pace, seems very scary to me … I should stay here in prison where everything is regulated and structured rather than going out to something that is quite alien to me.”
These feelings are exacerbated by the erosion of social networks, the death of family and friends, and the disappearance of any meaningful horizon. Social isolation means that the world they would be reintegrating into has become alien and they will have to navigate it mostly alone. Kevin added:
People that I used to call friends no longer want to know me or have died. One thing for sure that I can [say] is true, you certainly find out who your true friends are … when you come to prison and especially if you come to prison for a long time.
This sense of destroyed horizons, where release holds no promise and the outside world has become even more terrifying than the cell, has been dramatised in popular culture.
In The Shawshank Redemption (1994) the character Brooks, released after 50 years inside, finds himself unable to cope with the pace and impersonality of the modern world. His suicide becomes a haunting metaphor for the crushing effect of institutionalisation that hollows out the self and the possibility of meaningful social reintegration.
When hoping becomes harmful
Other prisoners we spoke to seemingly decided it was more beneficial for them to give up on hope altogether. Some – like Barry -– wondered if giving up on hope of release would be less torturous.
Barry was 65 when we spoke to him and has spent over four decades in prison on a life sentence. He’s tall and slim. When he walked in, we noticed he had a limp and used a cane. The first time we met, he sat with his hands clasped, speaking in a measured voice that occasionally broke into a laugh, not from humour but more from what I felt like was exhaustion. Though parole is technically available to him, he has come to see the pursuit of release not as hopeful but as harmful.
Over years of disappointments, Barry wondered if living with no hope would be less painful and felt it had become “pointless” to hope. He wrote in his diary:
Hope is when I want something to happen or something to be true … I often ask myself would it be kinder to live with no hope and just live with a ‘wait and see’ kind of attitude.
Indeed, every parole hearing postponed, every dashed expectation had eroded the value of hoping. Ultimately, giving up on hope is captured as something that eventually preserves mental health. As Barry added:
An empty case of hope is healthy, I say that because of the amount of men I have seen become ill; disappointment becomes despair, becomes depression, becomes mental ill health … then when you stop hoping, you start to recover and you no longer feel hopeless, as you are not hoping for anything. So hope is a paradox, it can disappoint or make you feel there is a real possibility of things to come.
He recalled reading about an American woman sentenced to life without parole who had begged for the death penalty instead. Her explanation (“I don’t just want to be alive, I want to be able to live”) resonated with him so powerfully that he said it, “almost knocked me off my chair”. He recognised in her plea the same cruel paradox he faced: that to prolong his existence in hopeless conditions was no life at all. His conclusion was irrevocable:
I understand more than most the need for hope, but all the years that I have been in prison and all the hopes I have had destroyed, I see hope as an enemy.
But then Barry equally admitted that he still hoped, no matter what. His hope was like a human natural reflex, over which he had no control, it just happened. He said: “We all hope … I hope I’ll get out on my next parole.”
What then, is hope in prison? Is it cruel and torturous or is it a human feature that brings relief and drive?
Recalibrating hope
We found hope meant different things to different people. It is not just about release. Some needed detailed plans, others focused on the day to day. Sometimes hope shifted towards modest goals that are tied to imagined places outside prison: a quiet retirement, a chance to study, to garden.
Terry was 65 and had served 38 years in category A prison. He told us that all he hoped for was “a quiet life in retirement”, while Russell, who was about the same age but had served over 12 years and was in a Category C when he wrote his diary, said that he hoped to, “… someday be released and to live the remaining years I have left in a small bungalow with a small garden in a village miles away from my old area of England. Have a pet cat.”
shutterstock/GetmanecInna
Others cast their hopes in more detailed and concrete plans about what the future would look like. Carl, 60, who enjoyed cooking and working out, for example, said he hoped to move in with his daughter and grandchildren for a while in an area where his ambition is to build his own house. He added: “I designed and roughly costed the development plan that helped to reinforce the hope that these plans were achievable.”
In the moment
But other participants recalibrated hope to more immediate aspirations set in the present, and in day-to-day encounters.
Barry said: “My hope is that I continue to live in the moment … You know, cause right now I’m in this office with you two guys, it’s calm. It’s nice. It’s peaceful. It’s a nice moment. But I’m not gonna think about what it’s gonna be like at 4pm because I might walk out that door and straight into a prison riot.”
Russell agreed, adding: “Looking for the future, I just go from one day to the next. It’s no good planning too far ahead.”
This shift of hope raises questions about how prisons shape and even limit the ways people can access and imagine their futures.
Another participant, Craig, who was 66 and had only served just over five years in the Category A prison when we met him wrote: “… you personalise hope to suit the circumstances.”
For the institution and those working in prison, these attitudes towards hope could be perceived as successful because prisoners sentenced to the longest sentences demonstrated a commitment to live a crime-free life, set in the present moment, focused on small menial things that will not raise any risk for management.
But when hope becomes so short-termist and bland, we are able to capture a shift in the very logic of imprisonment – one which is less about nourishing transformation aimed at resocialisation, and more about the life-long containment of decaying and dying bodies.
Hope matters
This article opened with a man telling my colleagues and I: “How dare you ask us about hope?” That moment has echoed throughout this study, both as an outburst that shows how prison research can be fraught with complexity but can also propel further and deeper reflection on humanitarian ideals such as hope.
When people in prison speak of the cruelty and fallacy of hope, you begin to wonder how much beauty and promise hope really holds in spaces of high control and constraint.
When transposed to prisons, hope no longer seems to be attached to an open horizon, evocative of lightness and liberty found anew. Instead, it represents dissociation from the outside world, and the cause of frustration, mistrust and a sense of abandonment.
Hope in prison exposes a disconnect between abstract legal humanitarian ideals and the empirical realities of ageing while incarcerated for long periods of time. And this claim could probably be extended to other settings of heightened regulation and tight monitoring, such as care homes, immigration detention centres, or even youth justice facilities.
The decision to depart from hope’s conventional, perhaps slightly romanticised meaning, and to recalibrate it towards real, daily conditions could nonetheless illustrate new ways for how older life-sentenced prisoners (and others under constraint) regain agency and keep going.
Ultimately, hope matters – not only for the people I met and interviewed – but also for broader society.
Imprisonment marked by hopelessness is linked to deteriorating mental and physical health, increasing pressure on prison healthcare and, upon release, on community health and social care services.
This is exacerbated for older prisoners released after decades inside. Hope is not a sentimental indulgence, but a condition that shapes whether imprisonment prepares people to live safely beyond prison or releases them with profound unmet needs. Regimes that erode hope risk merely displacing, rather than resolving, social harm.
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Marion Vannier, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Manchester
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
